No one learning anything
It falls apart we all got work to do
It was hot and humid in the bedroom when M. woke me up around 12:30 to say that it wasn't looking hopeful. Our effort to save democracy. I had determined earlier in the night that it wasn't going to do anyone any good for me to watch the results trickle in slowly at first then all of a sudden and so I took a little something to help me sleep that my adrenaline was now in heated competition with. I rolled over and opened the laptop and said the only thing I can ever really think of to say about anything that ever happens which is goddamnit. Then I lied and said everything is going to be alright.
I slept a few more hours the rest of the night but none of them consecutively. Topped myself off with another pill and regretted it all day swimming in a daze through the record breaking 80 degree November 6 Massachusetts weather. It felt fitting to be uncomfortable in another unnatural way. This too?
This too.
I saw the look in M.'s eyes in the morning and I felt a wave of guilt wash over me that I still haven't shaken. As if I were personally responsible for all of this. I suppose I am in the way we all are. Having failed to stop this. We couldn't even maintain the already shitty status quo. Not even that?
Not even that.
I raked the leaves for an hour to have something tangible to do and when I was done and admiring my handiwork the wind trickled in slowly at first then all of a sudden and erased all of my labor.
I was surprised at how surprised I was. How surprised I still am.
I'm the guy whose job it is to tell everyone how bad things are. How they do not have to be this bad but nonetheless how bad they currently are. And even I had no idea that things were this bad. It's not just the Trump win it's the scope of it.
I feel a kind of embarrassment. Personally and nationally speaking.
That was a common refrain in my group chats in the immediate aftermath. I feel so naive a few friends said.
The town I grew up in and all four towns that comprised my high school and almost every other town in the area went for Trump.
Yes I knew this was a possibility but I also did not know it this thoroughly if that makes sense.
Where am I even from?
On top of all that the fundraising texts didn't even stop coming!
My first indication that something was off was when a cop at my polling place made a friendly joke to me about my t-shirt and I responded in a jovial manner. I should not have done that. I am sorry for throwing the vibes off.
I thought I would give you all a little treat by not sending out a newsletter earlier this week haranguing everyone about how bad the campaign was fucking up by courting Republicans and then I certainly did not want to intrude on your assumed grief the morning after in part because I am sick of the idea of my own letters being read off the screen and the sounds of my own brain putting them onto the screen. What was any of that going to do for anyone?
It has become painfully apparent to me that my efforts to pull Democrats at least some small degree further left have been a colossal failure. I already knew that years ago but one still has to go through the motions.
I feel an empty loss for words right now similar to when there's a shooting big enough we all have to talk about it. Everyone doing their material. No one learning anything. No point trying. Just a blanket of sadness.
I'm not supposed to say that kind of thing though. I'm supposed to talk about finding community and solidarity locally and building from there and yes I believe that is vital but I do not right now today believe that it is important enough to matter in anything but the long bending arc of the moral universe as the saying goes.
How much further can this thing bend?
Who cares about my feelings obviously. I didn't even like the candidate and I'm distraught!
I will crawl out of it. We will.
I do not want to point the finger at anyone I do not want to scold anyone I do not want to be scolded nor have a finger pointed back at me. But this was a team effort top to bottom to bring us here. Every player on the roster. The Harris campaign and the Trump voters and the non-voters and me and you.
I would love to have been proven wrong! I would love to be eating shit today!
I know my common refrain in here is that despite how terrible things are we have to maintain our faith in humanity. That we are better than this. And I do think that about humanity. That's something different than American voters though. You cannot underestimate our capacity for violence and hatred to the point of self-sabotage enough. Someone must always be punished even if its also ourselves.
A different kind of shit that is.
Maybe more than the presidential election a bigger sign of How Things Are is famously liberal California having a proposition to ban slavery and it's fucking losing.
Tough-on-crime advocates scored some expected victories in Tuesday’s California elections, increasing prison sentences with passage of Proposition 36 and unseating District Attorneys George Gascón in Los Angeles County and likely Pamela Price in Alameda County. One victory that hadn’t been predicted was the voters’ apparent rejection of Proposition 6, which would have ended 175 years of unpaid, forced labor in California jails and prisons.
Prop 6 had no organized opposition, no money was spent against it and the official voter guide mailed by Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office to voters’ homes said no arguments against the measure had been submitted. But with more than half the vote counted Wednesday, Prop 6 was trailing by more than 900,000 votes, with 54.9% of the voters opposing it.
Of course a big part of that is because they need inmates to fight all of the wild fires.
Where are any of us even from?
Just give me a day or two and I'll be back. We'll all be back.
It falls apart. We all got work to do as the song goes.
It gets dark. We all got work to do.
Read an interview with Mike Davis from 2022:
You’ve been organizing for social change your whole life. How do you deal with a future that feels so bleak?
For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless.
I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages?
What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.
I have a few new pieces that went up on Flaming Hydra on Monday night. Great timing. Here's one. Seems even more fitting now.
Luke O’Neil
For you
On your timeline it’s still the second inning of a game your favorite team lost last night.
Activists are protesting the coming execution of a dead man the governor declined to pardon.
On your timeline it’s still Halloween and all the skeletons and princesses are giddy with childish gluttony.
There’s a beautiful beach town unbothered by a looming storm.
No cars stacked atop of one another like felled dominoes.
Nothing has happened anywhere.
On your timeline a friend still has last week’s smile on in a selfie she felt insecure about.
A movie no one went to see is about to premiere.
A party you weren’t invited to is in full swing.
On your timeline an exhausted journalist in a bright blue vest is wandering amidst rubble that isn’t smaller rubble under a sky clear of drones that haven’t arrived and have moved on to the next target.
A mother has yet to turn against God.
Do you remember how it felt when we still thought we were going to win?
On your timeline I am complaining about a delayed flight that has long since taken off and left me somewhere I’m not coming back from.
I was sharing this piece around again on election night back when I still had a little hope. Two years gone now. Read it if you want to feel sad in a different kind of way.
Luke O’Neil
Three inches above the floor
Man in a box wants to burn my soul
And I'm tired, and I'm tired
Is that the truth he says
The pain is easy
Too many words, too many words
And I can hear 'em
A little ray of hope from 2013:
The Onion Staff
Some other colleagues you might read on the election if you aren't already disassociating.
Even this morning's bleary eyes can't not see it clearly: This was a mandate for a nasty, venal person to keep being his nasty, venal self. You can't blame third-party voters, or hesitant lefties, or anyone but the many, many people who voted for him. He ran on a platform of punishing his enemies, and his voters' imagined enemies, and they turned out in droves to give him that power even at the expense of making their own lives worse. One cannot say broadly of Americans We're better than this, because we're not. A plurality of Americans hate women or people of color or immigrants or trans people enough for this to be the result. There's no Russian bogeyman this time, no Jill Stein stripping votes, to help concoct a different and more comforting narrative, one of a single fixable thing. There is no panacea for this. There is only President-Elect Donald Trump, and the scores of millions of people who wanted him in office again, but also the scores of millions for whom this is a nightmare brought back to life. If you are in the latter group, there will be future opportunities to organize, to vote in local elections, to mitigate some of the harm. But for the moment there's little to do, and no illusions left, just the struggle of figuring out how to live in this country, with these people.
Traditional political analysis dies upon the mountain of Donald Trump. Facts? There are no facts here. He has been lying steadily for a decade and the media has been steadily publishing stories explaining that he is lying and yet he is winning the popular vote. Everyone knows and nobody cares. We in the press have been proven less influential than we had even imagined. Why am I writing this? What does it matter? On Inauguration Day, we can all think back to the quaint little arguments that we had among one another about whether or not this or that New York Times story was honest in its framing of Trump’s latest outrage, and chuckle ruefully. What a worthless and self-indulgent pastime that turned out to be.
Newspaper endorsements? Op-ed columns? Television pundits making their most persuasive case that Trump Endangers Democracy? The idea that all would be well if we could only get this stuff right has been laid bare as an illusion treasured by the minority of us who care what the press has to say. Out in the world at large, that is not what most voters give a damn about. The combined investigative and explanatory powers of all of the journalists in America turned out to be less than the power of a bloated, sneering celebrity pointing a short finger at immigrants and saying “They are stealing your country.”
The American people want Donald Trump. And now they will get him.
For years I was bellowing at anyone who would listen: No, we are not immune. Yes, it can happen here. There were many off-ramps we could have taken. I wanted to believe, even still, at this late date, that somehow a loud enough series of warnings — from the former president’s former staffers, from the former president on the campaign trail himself — would spur enough people in enough states into action.
What I did not know, and what I should have known, is that these warnings wouldn’t be enough. We will know soon enough if the critical margin who meandered into his camp, and those who did not go to the polls, understood what they voted for and will like it once they see it in action. But for now, it was not a dealbreaker, and that was enough. What I truly don’t know is what happens now. Some are turning to quotes and poets for solace. Others are already organizing, preparing, making community. It is far too soon to say what it all means, even what the full picture of the electorate looks like — if for instance, he will, as it appears he might, win the popular vote. The main thing I’m keeping in mind is that this is the same country it was yesterday. We are just now seeing it in a new light. Tens of millions invited this future in, yes, but ten of millions more tried to choose a different path. We may be more constrained in making them now. But there will still be many more choices to come.
For all the work being poured into combating hate and extremism, nothing has shaken the tide of authoritarianism creeping over the American psyche. No amount of fact-checking, counter-messaging, or prevention programming has dented this decades-long national trend, even if it has managed to slow some of its most-violent outbursts. While the symptoms are receiving care, the underlaying sickness still ravages our body politic.
All the while, the work has been undermined by hyper-partisans and capitalists who are supportive or indifferent to the suffering that authoritarians seek to impose on their constituents. Political interests have bullied researchers into silence and self-censorship, news outlets have struggled to improve their coverage of extremist movements, and many legacy anti-hate nonprofits are not meeting the moment. Hell, one of the oldest and largest “anti-hate” organizations congratulated Trump on his victory this morning.
Make no mistake: the inability of the Democratic Party to stave off a second Trump term is one of the worst, most damning political failures in American history. It is a catastrophic, thoroughly discredited entity, more concerned with maintaining its position at the heart of the system than in changing that system in any meaningful way. The current leaders of the party will be remembered, above all else, as handmaidens for fascism. May they never know a day’s peace.
And here's a piece by Kevin Devine shared with permission from his Patreon which you should all check out along with his great catalogue of music.
Solidarity Forever
by Kevin Devine
I woke up today, I confirmed the results, I read one article (the New York Times editorial board’s response), and decided to sit down at the far end of my couch, nearest my living room window, and engage in the spiritual practice I try and go to most mornings.
I wrote an inventory, and then I emailed a gratitude list I’m on, which felt like the next right thing and a useful challenge given the context:
“Grateful: I’m alive, I’m healthy, I’m sober, I’m present, I can be useful; for this practice that reminds me to steer clear of self-bondage (self-pity, self-importance, self-justification, self-condemnation, jealousy, envy, resentment, insincerity, impatience, dishonesty, false pride, procrastination, negative thinking, criticizing) and towards god of better nature (self-forgetting, humility, self-valuation, love, trust, action, patience, honesty, simplicity, forgiveness, directness, promptness, action, positive thinking, looking to the good).”
I read some stuff, I meditated, I texted a few friends - “Solidarity forever, no frames, no editorial, let’s just keep connected, community and people, that’s what we’ve got, and you’re my people” - and I walked over to meet my daughter and her mom and head to school.
We had coffee after drop off and sat together for a while, and I tried to just listen, and I probably talked more than I meant to, but there we were, moving through.
A few stray back-and-forths with similarly worried members of school parent community.
Walked home, spent some time with my partner, more listening, more processing.
Had an hour-long conversation with a friend and member of my professional infrastructure in the UK, ostensibly about work stuff, but mostly dueling banjos about the state of things, looking for patterns, sense in the senselessness.
And then it’s been errands, work, running, listening to a little bit of coverage.
Texting, voice notes, a call with a bandmate.
Sparing browser interaction with social media, apps deleted from the phone.
(Seemed like the move.)
The plants still need watering, the DMV appointment still needs scheduling, the green beans still need to be cleaned, the dishes put back in the kitchen cabinet.
Edie still needs to be picked up from school.
I am hesitant to add to the woodpile, because who needs it.
I remember before Donald Trump was a political figure or a convicted felon or sex offender or catastrophic, cancerous nightmare proxy - when he was just a spoiled clown New Yorkers were aware of, but didn’t take especially seriously - my dad and I were watching TV, and there he was, disingenuous and repulsive, and my father said, “That unctuous son of a bitch wouldn’t condescend to piss on you if you were on fire in the middle of the street.”
I believe that remains true for the more than 70 million people who voted for him yesterday.
Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and all manner of other crippling, malignant, animating fears are very real, and very powerful - that is evident.
So is class war, and the reality that most peoples’ lives feel measurably harder all the time, materially more precarious, especially when laid against the track of the mythical American dream they were promised, that they internalized as their birthright, or thought they might access via some assimilationist Horatio Alger fantasy of upward mobility & exceptionalism.
It feels cruel and we have short memories, and we look around, and we blame who is closest, who is most recently holding the gun, or the bag, even if it’s a baton, or a hot potato.
And if you are afraid of being targeted, you might decide it’s best to join the throng, see if that keeps you safe.
It is possible to speak with great conviction about terrible things.
And if you do that, and you promise desperate people easy answers and neat solutions - especially people increasingly poisoned by bad media propagating disinformation alongside an overmatched and crumbling education system - you can get pretty far.
This is even more true when your opposition speaks with no conviction about much of anything, seemingly addicted to selling out its core values and constituencies, emptily clutching to sanctimonious platitudes while over and over again choosing to remain beholden to the same corporate and imperial interests they gesture in performance towards curtailing.
Shock and Awe,
Hope and Change,
Fear and Loathing.
And on and on, the pendulum dangles, the hole deeper, the stakes higher.
I don’t know what happens next.
I suspect we will have ample, nearly constant opportunities to stick up for the most vulnerable and marginalized among us.
In a way, that’s always true. And I hope we do.
My wildest dream is that we are witnessing a kind of hysterical bottoming out for a neutered, out-of-touch, ridiculous, hypocritical brand of useless liberalism in favor of a real and mobilized left coalition that speaks to people’s actual needs, organizes to meet them, and presents a legitimate alternative to fascist scaremongering.
It’s an understatement beyond articulation to call that necessary and urgent.
Every feeling is valid.
Thank you for letting me share mine.
Let’s keep connected,
Community and people,
That’s what we got.
Solidarity Forever,
Kevin