[November 8, 2016 8pm]

I can’t wait to sit back and drink the tears of misogynists when we elect our first woman president. 

[November 9, 2016 2am]

[Heavy drinking]

Hello, SJWs. Things have not gone well. 

[Wrestlemania]

For the last week, all 7 Billion of the Earth’s inhabitants have been responding to the 2016 Presidential election through articles, think-pieces, blog posts, Facebook rants, podcasts, Twitter threads, YouTube videos, YouTube comments, satirical comedy shows, speeches, protests, counter-protests, vandalism, violence, intimidation, bullying, crying, community organizing, conspiracy theories, meetings, Anita Sarkeesian, Klan parades, shitting, suicide, and heavy drinking. 

Man, so much has already been said about this fucking election that it’s hard to even start making sense of it. There’s part of me that would rather just spend the next four years in a numbly ignorant bubble of drugs and white privilege. But I don’t really have a job, so I have to make noises with my mouth until mysterious benefactors on the Internet give me money. And I don’t want to just make some generic “liberal reacts to Trump” kind of video. So, this is my attempt to synthesize, in my own special way, a lot of the things other commentators have said over the past week. Let’s begin.

Part uno: What the Fuck Happened?—also—How Fucked Are We?

Well, pretty fucked.

One week out, it’s clear that the first victims of Trump’s election are the ethnic minorities, maligned religious groups, immigrants, women and LGBT people who have been betrayed by an electorate that just affirmed the sovereignty of a man whose main political strategy has been to inflame resentment against them. And if you’re, you know, a white man and you find yourself already getting really angry and defensive about my implying that Trump is racist, and you think that politically correct anti-white bigots like me are the reason you’re glad you voted for Trump in the first place, well, I hope you’ll suspend judgment just for a little while, because that is exactly one of the things I want to talk about.

And, the truth is, Trump’s open misogyny and appeals to racial hostility may not even be his worst attributes. For the last 18 months he’s demonstrated that his petty, cruel, capricious, vindictive, impulsive and thesaurian—I mean authoritarian statements and actions are not aberrations but habitual expressions of the inner core of his personality and everything he stands for.

No matter the constraints more conventional Republicans place on Trump, the truth remains that the U.S. military, nuclear and surveillance apparatus will soon be managed by a man who regards science with disdain, who barges into the dressing rooms of his underage female employees, who’s promised to imprison his political rivals and silence hostile journalists, who’s cavalier about threatening to use torture and nuclear weapons, and who’s apparently unable to repress his admiration for dictators and tyrants.

Even if we take the most optimistic view of what his presidency will be like—and the most optimistic view is that he’ll do none of the things he’s said he’ll do—there’s just no escaping that this is the personality that will be talking to foreign leaders and setting the tone of national politics for as long as this new hell persists.

Now, I’m not saying that this is the apocalypse, or that it’s literally the Third Reich. But it is a catastrophe that we can only really begin to get our heads around. 

So the question that everyone’s asking now is how the fuck did this happen? 

Parte due: How the Fuck Did This Happen?

Before we try to answer that, let’s get clear about what happened. 

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by around 700,000 votes at the time of writing, and possibly by as many as 1 or 2 million votes. So even though Hillary was a pretty unpopular candidate, she still proved more popular than Trump. And voter turnout was low enough that only around a quarter of eligible voters actually voted for Trump. So we don’t need to explain a Trump landslide, merely a narrow victory that hinged on low turnout and the United States’ bizarre electoral college system. And if you’re not American, I’d tell you to Google it, but honestly it’s one of those things you’ll never understand unless you were born here. It’s like our, I dunno, Marmite? Either you love it or you hate it, but pretty much we just hate it.

Trump’s victory took me and a lot of other people by complete surprise, because it wasn’t predicted by the polls. Some people have suggested this means the polls were wrong, but that isn’t necessarily true. On election day, 538 gave Trump a 28% chance of winning, and 28% is not zero. It’s more than 1 in 4, the odds of two flipped coins landing on heads. And you know, sometimes you flip two coins and get two heads, and that’s not a failure of statistical prediction.

So the question is why did so many people vote for Trump, at least enough to give him the edge over Hillary? Well, people will probably be arguing about the answer to that question for decades. I’ve read maybe a hundred articles on this in the past week, and I’ve encountered so many different explanations that I’ve lost my faith in the basic unity of reality and in the human ability to discover truth within it.

We’ve got people saying Trump won because of third party candidates, because the Democrats nominated Hillary instead of Bernie Sanders, because of working-class voters in the Midwest, because of white racism, because of James Comey’s letter about Hillary’s emails, because of misogyny, because of white women, because of social media, because of low voter turnout, because Trump is a celebrity with brand recognition, because of collusion with the Ruskies, because small-town Americans live in a bubble, because cosmopolitan liberals live in a bubble, because Obama refused to say the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” because politically correct liberals made white men really angry, emails, because the coastal elites didn’t listen to the concerns of the people, because Americans don’t trust the establishment, because people voted for Jill Stein instead of Hillary, because people believe the system is corrupt, because Democrats lost touch with the working class, emails, because the DNC rigged the primary, because smug college assholes are out of touch with the common man, because people on the Internet are angry at SJWs, emails, because liberals used the word Islamophobia, because SJWs are annoying, because Pepe the Frog carried an army of trolls to victory…

StAhhhhhhp

We could spend the rest of our lives discussing these different theories, but I want to focus on one idea that seems to get floated in the liberal press again and again and again. That’s the idea that the core of Trump’s support and the reason he won the election are a group of people called the white working class.

Parte tre: The White Working Class

Who are the white working class? Well, most commentators seem to focus on underemployed people in rural towns where manufacturing jobs have been vanishing for decades, leaving behind a population that feels left behind and hopeless. Often these articles are accompanied by pictures of bearded men drinking beer out of rusty cans. The reader is then told not to malign Trump voters in these towns as racist, and that instead we should empathize with their economic anxiety.

Now there’s some validity to this basic idea, but these commentators sometimes make it sound like the people focusing on the racist aspect of Trump’s appeal are just a bunch of smug liberal coastal elitist college professor academic eggheads who are just out of touch with white working class angst. And then you see other liberals respond to that saying, “well what about the angst of the black and Hispanic working class motherfucker, who by all measures are economically even worse off, and who now have to deal with a borderline white nationalist plutocrat steering the ship?”

I think what’s happening here is an old rift within the Left is becoming really pronounced. I’m talking about the divide between what’s called the Old Left—the Marx-influenced progressives who focus primarily on economic injustice and the working class, and the New Left—the progressives primarily focused on what is derided as “identity politics,” namely race, gender, and sexuality. 

Now, it’s just obvious to me that any progressivism that doesn’t include both these considerations is totally lopsided and inadequate. But bringing it all together is no easy task, and one of the reasons is that it’s pretty difficult to get people to care about the struggles of other groups, especially when they’re absorbed by the struggles of their own.

In the right-wing media, one of the most popular explanations of Trump’s victory has it that “political correctness” is to blame. The idea is that white men got fed up with people calling them sexist and racist, and they responded by throwing a tantrum and electing a proto-fascist as a kind of brick through the window of all the moralizing liberals who made them feel like bad people.

Personally, I’m inclined to blame the tantrum rather than political correctness, but the longer I’m involved with these issues, the more I realize that a lot of people basically lose their shit if you imply that they might have some kind of bias or privilege. And it’s not just middle-class white men either. I’ve seen black men who are very incisive on the topic of race go on to lash out at feminists and LGBT activists, I’ve seen feminists act like the word “cis” is some kind of slur against them, and we’ve all seen a working class hero tell a feminist, “I’m sorry princess, but I can’t listen to your whining right now because I got the black lung and lost three fingers so I could make alimony payments to my whore of an ex-wife.”

What a fucking mess. And of course while these people are all squabbling in the gutter, a couple of rich white pricks are always riding a gold-plated elevator to the top of the tower. 

Parte quattro: The Gold-Plated Elevator

One problem I have with liberal commentators’ sudden obsession with white working class voters is that it actually misrepresents the typical Trump voter. According to 538, the median annual income for Trump supporters is around $70,000, higher than the national average. So, so much for the pensionless Appalachian opioid-addict theory. The majority of white men with college degrees supported Trump. If support for Trump were best understood in terms of the economic anxiety of the white working class, then we’d expect to see a big divide along class lines. And there is a bit of a class divide. But it’s nowhere near the racial divide.

Now, I don’t think it’s overly Marxist to suggest that one of the problems with capitalism is that there is some risk of class conflict. Capitalism more than any other economic system creates vast amounts of wealth, but it tends to concentrate it in the hands of a small percentage of the total population. This is why savvy capitalists—capitalists who want to stabilize and preserve capitalism—are liberals. They know that without regulations, a little wealth redistribution, and a reliable safety net, the people excluded from wealth will eventually revolt against the system, leading to the replacement of capitalist leadership by either socialism (if the revolution is unified by class) or fascism (if the revolution is unified by race).

Now, in the U.S., this has traditionally been prevented from happening by a pretty robust welfare state, epitomized by F.D.R.’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. When the welfare state began to be dismantled by Reagan in the 1980s, capitalism was still ideologically propped up by a little thing you may have forgotten about called The American Dream. The idea was basically that anyone can be wealthy and successful, as long as they work hard enough. 

Now, black people have never really believed this, but for white people it’s been a compelling fantasy, and a fantasy that is supplemented by political rhetoric that wards off liberal and socialist ideas with sinister racial implications. To a lot of white Americans, even and especially extremely poor ones, phrases like “welfare” and “wealth redistribution” kind of imply that money will be taken from hard-working whites and given to lazy blacks. Years of racist propaganda have supported this idea, and, in the eyes of some working-class whites, it’s confirmed by the fact that a lot of liberals spend more time talking about racism then about the economic hardships of working whites.

Now for the last few decades, this state of affairs has started to crack. American companies discovered they could get much cheaper labor overseas, or that factory jobs could be automated. This has led to the decline of American manufacturing jobs and a class of people who are basically permanently underemployed, and feeling the economy has left them behind. Then, in the 2000s, a lot of Americans were issued subprime mortgages, which led to the housing bubble, and that, along with the deregulation of finance and several other factors, brought on the Great Recession in 2008. 

Plus, a whole generation has now come of age amid rapidly escalating college tuition costs and consequent shitloads of student debt. 

The upshot of all this is that millions of people, many of them white, are now sitting around waiting with increasing despair for manufacturing to come back, or are graduating from college only to realize they’re crippled by debt and without reliable employment. With unaffordable healthcare and little in the way of a safety net, things are looking pretty bleak. To many of these people, the American Dream is dead. They know that they’re never going to be millionaires, and are well aware they’ve been deeply and perhaps permanently fucked.

Ayn Rand-type ideology is no longer going to appeal to these people. The poor have to identify with the rich in order to worship them, and it’s hard to identify with someone once you realized they’ve burned you. That big banks and corporations were bailed out by the government while millions of Americans were foreclosed on or buried in student debt has not helped the situation.

All of this has led to the now prevailing anti-establishment mood.

And suddenly, after decades of unquestioned corporate capitalist dominance, other systems are beginning to look attractive.

This, I think, is why Bernie Sanders was more successful than any other American socialist in decades. For a lot of young people, it seems intolerable to struggle with no end in sight under the weight of massive student debt, which their whole life system encouraged them to incur when they were teenagers who didn’t know what they were getting into. Without much hope of home ownership, retirement, or other comforts their parents took for granted, a lot of Millennials are burning with frustration and resentment of the financial elite that reaps most of the wealth of the global economy. Bernie Sanders became the champion of that frustration. But he failed to win the Democratic nomination, partly because he was never able to successfully appeal to black and Hispanic voters.

So Clinton became the nominee, but she was unable to gain traction outside the base of the Democratic Party. She was particularly bad at responding effectively to the new white disaffection, and her image as a scandal-laden career politician with corporate ties made her seem like the avatar of everything wrong with the Washington establishment.

Now, whenever the working and middle classes get into a deep enough funk, there’s two things that usually happen: either they go socialist and turn against the corporate goons that burned them, or they lose their fucking minds pursuing some racial minority scapegoat. 

So, summer 2016 rolls around, and the major parties nominate their candidates. Exit Bernie Sanders, enter Donald Trump.

Trump is a demagogue the likes of which American presidential politics hasn’t seen in more than a century. He makes absurd promises to bring back the jobs, great jobs, the best jobs, it’s gonna be terrific, it’s gonna be yuge. Oh, and he also coyly points the finger at blacks, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, and the politically correct culture that keeps white America from saying what it’s really thinking. 

Once that ball starts rolling, the media can’t look away. Hillary’s comparatively few misdeeds are easy for people to stay focused on. Meanwhile, Trump advocates that we commit war crimes, claims that Mexicans immigrants are rapists, brags about grabbing women by the pussy, and generally behaves so badly so frequently that the media can’t even really make time to digest any given scandal.

And in fact, people who are sick of having to keep their ugly prejudices to themselves feel liberated by Trump’s disdain for common decency. If there’s any truth to the tantrum-against-political-correctness hypothesis, it might even be the case that some people supported Trump because of his open contempt for women and popularity with racist hate groups.

Now I know that some people had other reasons for supporting Trump, you know, they believe he’ll shake things up or something, but you still chose to vote for him knowing full well the kind of rhetoric he was using, and I think you have to take responsibility for that.

Whatever the reason, one in four eligible voters cast their ballot for him, and that was enough to get him to the White House.

So the question now is what to do with Mr. Trump.

Parte cinque: What to do with Mr. Trump?

Well, that’s a question we’re going to have to keep answering for the next four years.

For the time being, I strongly support non-violent protests and demonstrations against Trump. It’s important that we let all the people who Trump has disparaged and blamed and abused know that we have their backs, and that we’re willing to put up an active resistance to Trump and everything he represents.

The Democrats are a minority in both the House and Senate, but they could pursue the same obstructionism that the Republicans have used against Obama for the last eight years. Of course, this’ll continue the degradation and sabotage of the legislative branch that the Republicans began, but it might be worth it to prevent, for instance, the repeal of Obamacare.

For the most part, we have to place our hope in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Merely waiting for time to pass will help, since Trump is not going to be able to make good on his promises. Well-paying manufacturing jobs are not going to come back. Muslims and immigrants are not going away. And I dare him to try to build that fucking wall. 

Public opinion can change very quickly. Nixon won by a landslide in 1972, and then resigned in disgrace a few years later. Trump is highly prone to scandals. He’s going to fuck things up, and now that he is the political establishment, people will blame him for everything that goes wrong, and his stupid antics will lose their insurrectional charm.

I also have a couple suggestions for things not to do.

Number one, don’t riot. I enjoy smashing and burning shit as much as the next guy but it helps nothing and it will be used as an excuse for more brutal policing and incarceration, along with all the racial disparities that that entails.

Number two, do not kill yourself.

There’s no time for that now. There are people who need your help. 

Now, losing an election to a villainous prick can be genuinely traumatic, I understand, especially if you belong to a group that feels suddenly unwelcome in this country. Hunter S. Thompson described the scene in Washington after the progressive McGovern lost to Nixon in ’72 as “complete weeping chaos. People you’d never expect to break down stumbled off the plane in tears, and it was like a funeral after a mass murder or something.”

I lost my composure too, I admit. I drank myself into a stupor, and Tweeted some dumb things. But it’s time to regroup. In times of grave defeat, I like to remember the words of a little man you may have forgotten about called Satan, who, awaking in the pit of hell after being cast from heaven, injoined his comrades to Consult how we may most offend…

[Consult… despair]

Down with Trump. Hail Satan.