We're F*ed Either Way

Tomorrow is the election. I have nothing more to say about it, but I have to write just to understand my own mind and do something to ease my own anxiety. Actually, let me modify that last statement. I’m not trying to ease my anxiety so much as express it because I think the nation is fucked either way.

Consider the last few several cycles of American politics, going back to Clinton. Something changed after Clinton’s first victory in 1992. Politics suddenly took on a nastier, more personal tone. A number of factors contributed. First, Clinton’s rise coincided with the ascendency of Newt Gingrich, who pioneered the politics of personal destruction, the dominant weapon in modern American political life.  

There was also a certain resentment from the Republican establishment with Clinton’s young age and the fact that he beat Bush the ultimate establishment Republican. For Republicans of that era, Clinton represented the worst of Boomer excesses: he had a feminist wife, a checkered sexual history, and that annoying lip bite when he wanted to convey earnestness. To them, it was as if Timothy Leary had won the presidency. Concurrent with Clinton’s presidency was the rise of the new 24/7 news landscape, which quickly recognized that rage was the surest way to get viewers and, later, clicks.

This fucker right here.

Things devolved from there. First there was the contested 2000 election, which, put George W. Bush’s into the White House despite losing the popular vote and only securing victory after a narrowly defined and split Supreme Court decision. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” lasted until 9/11, when W. allowed himself to steered into a Middle Eastern quagmire for, literally, no reason. The repercussions of that decision are now playing out across the region with various wars and proxy wars ranging from Israel, Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

Bush’s disastrous presidency ended with the election of Barack Obama, whose single word message – “Hope” – illustrated the despair so many Americans felt after the previous administration fumbled us into war and a horrendous housing crisis and recession.

Again, a political upstart had wrested control from the mainline Republican establishment and, again, they reacted with fury. The Tea Party formed. An ostensibly “grass roots movement” that “spontaneously sprung up” to combat Obama’s economic policies including his healthcare plan, the Tea Party’s critics claimed that it was also a protest movement rooted in racial resentment. That claim seems to have been correct.

These fuckers right here.

Donald Trump seized on those racial resentments to further a bullshit conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace. The rest of it is too familiar to all of you to bother recounting. It’s left us here, with an exhausted and suspicious nation. One of our political parties has been seized by a broken, delusional narcissist with an axe to grind. The other seems incapable of commanding a governing majority, despite the fact that everybody knows the Republicans are being led by a maniac.

Congresses of both parties across multiple presidencies have failed to keep the Executive branch in check, so that now we’ve seen Bill Barr’s vision of a “unitary presidency” close to full realization, with the Supreme Court’s (again, divided) decision regarding presidential immunity. The nation is exhausted, dysfunctional, and polarized. We have significant political challenges ahead of us regarding inequality, immigration, foreign policy, the climate, and a long-brewing – and increasingly violent - culture war. In other words, as I said at the top of the piece, we’re fucked.

If Trump wins, we can expect the pace of our national disintegration to accelerate. I don’t know what that looks like exactly, although I would imagine it takes the shape of increased domestic violence, isolation, and instability. I don’t know what we look like at the end of those four years, but I doubt it looks great.

If Harris wins, she will hopefully be able to arrest the nation’s slide, but without a strong political mandate, I don’t see how she slows our national inertia. What’s likely to happen is a narrow victory with either a tiny majority in the House or a huge minority coupled with the same in the Senate. Anything she tries to do will be stymied by Republican leadership, the same way any Trump proposals would be held up by Democrats.

This fucker right here.

Government by stalemate is not a great way to help the nation, but we’re probably heading that way regardless of who prevails. That lack of progress will frustrate voters, leading to greater resentment, leading to more scapegoats, leading to more anger, more culture war bullshit, more instability. The next few years do not look promising.

A Harris presidency is infinitely preferable to a second Trump one, but I have no illusions about what she’ll be able to accomplish. I’m worried she’ll be forced to expend whatever political capital she has on the immigration problem instead of what I believe to be more pressing issues around the economy, shoring up healthcare, doing something about higher education, and continuing to work to resolve the war in Israel while attempting to keep Putin and Xi in check. It’s a lot for any administration, let alone one that will be facing an opposition that will do everything in its power to make Harris a one-term president, just as McConnell vowed to do with Obama.

I don’t know what gets us out of this. I really don’t. Historically, we’ve relied on wars to bring the nation together in moments of peril. Must we sacrifice another generation of young Americans to pay off the debt accrued by those of us who couldn’t figure out how to live peaceably among each other? There must be better pressure valves than that one. Some project of American renewal. I don’t know what would be, but I know that it cannot happen under a second Trump presidency, and I doubt it can happen under a first Harris one. I don’t know what it’s going to take for the nation to pull its head out of its ass. But I do know that tomorrow isn’t the end of our problems, only their next iteration. I expect things to get worse, possibly much worse, before they get better. Happy Election Day!