The Gist: Mourning in America

Thanks to scheduled surgery to remove a non-vital organ, I spent much of the week under the influence of heavy opiates. In a way, this was the ideal state to learn of Donald Trump's re-election to the post of president. However, as I continued to experience a period of medically mandated sub-par intelligence and judgment, I confess I did start to wonder if I wasn't the only one so afflicted.

This is an attempt to help us understand what happened and also to understand what is going to happen next. It comes from a person sitting propped up in bed in a country on the far western edge of Europe. As such, it is the result of specific circumstances. The outcome of my thoughts since my dum-dum pills ran out may not chime with much of what you may have read or been told since the election. All I can say is that these are my guesses. You may have yours.

What just happened?

Lots of people voted for Donald Trump to be president. But more significantly, lots of people didn't vote at all. In 2020, when he lost the election to Biden, he collected up 74,223,975 votes. This year, when he won, he received 74,708,855 votes.

In effect he received only a marginal absolute increase in his support. In the first election he was trounced. In the second, the same number of supporters resulted in a blowout victory. The deciding factor in the outcome was not Trump. It was the level of support his opponent could muster. In 2020, Biden received 81,283,501 votes. And in 2024, Harris received 70,980,347.

Mind the Gap.

That 10,303,103 is the hole US democracy fell into.

It's too early to say which of the many available reasons for Biden's voters declining to turn up for Harris proved decisive. It may well be, because the world is really annoying like this, that it turns out that it was a little bit of a lot of different reasons. A few million examples of misogyny. Some millions of racists. A few million people unhappy about inflation and the price of dinner ingredients. A few million people angry about all the dead Palestinian children they had spent the year scrolling past on their social feeds.

A million here, a million there. Pretty soon, you're talking real money.

What I am comfortable saying is that if you're reading someone who's telling you this week that they know the One Weird Trick that Harris could have done differently to change the outcome, that is a person willing to just say things irrespective of how true they might be.

Which, in the years to come, is going to be something everyone is going to have their fill of.

What happens next?

Dark days, I am afraid. Also, dark days. I am afraid.

US power is now consolidated around the worst people, and there are no checks on them. The Supreme Court is morally and legally bankrupt. It can't be relied upon to uphold any Constitutional principle as it has shown itself to be without any principles at all.

It is the judicial branch, not the legislative one, which is the real check on executive power in the US system. And that check is now simply gone. The US is about to experience just how hollow the promise of laws are without any institutional power behind them.

The US Senate and, it appears, the House of Representatives, will compete for this Trump electorate in a way they only did on the fringes before.

This will be the Imperial Presidency that Nixon could only dream of.

And sitting atop of this pyramid of putrefaction will be a moral homunculus. A sort of a perversion of the idea of the golem- an empty man, animated, not to protect the weak as the legend would have it, but by the need to harm them.

He will be cheered on from every power and money-seeking corner. Billionaires to abusers (and all points overlapping) will loudly tell everyone (including you) that he is right and just even as he acts out his hollow, soulless cruelties to harm anyone and everyone he can.

He is a man who will die, like all men. But the harms he leaves behind will be scars carried by us all for the rest of our lives. A burning world. Dictators given succour. Fascism triumphant and emboldened everywhere.

I am starting to regret running all those Butterfly-Stamping Time Travel Tours.

What can we do?

All, though it may seem strange to say now and stranger in the next few months, is not lost.

The thing to remember is that we have seen these guys before. There aren't any surprises here. They are going to unleash a tidal wave of baloney and bullshit and hope to just wear down everyone until they go numb.

So far this week they said they'd cancel birthright citizenship, Constitution be damned and that they might just pull out of NATO if the EU regulates Elon Musk's partisan lie machine. Will they do either of these very stupid things? Maybe. Is it worth paying attention to them right now? Absolutely not.

Owning the machinery and institutions of Imperial government and media means there is no end of Really Stupid Stuff that will be cycled in front of the US and global public's eyeballs. But you don't have to react. You don't have to participate in whatever the drama of the day or hour is. Choose trustworthy people and institutions to get your information. Get used to the wearing habit of assessing sources and working out whose interests they act in. It's so tiresome.

For those of you in the US, please accept my condolences and a suggestion that you protect yourself by picking something you can directly effect and just minding that little patch. Maybe you can help a library or school or particularly endangered group. I bet you could. I bet you would. And, if I know you, I bet you will.

For the rest of us, here in the bits of the world who don't vote for the US imperium, but live within its penumbra, we should immediately get off Xwitter. Then we need to look around and see what we can shore up now. The polluted tide will rise, but it can be held back. We need to choose our local battles too.

When the waters fall back (not automatically in four years, this isn't that kind of presidency, I fear) we will have to take stock. We will lose a lot of value. That is the nature of a deluge.

But we can still try to build our barriers to carry us through.

But, for now, grieve. Mourn. A particular set of futures are gone now. Millions of our potential selves have winked out. It's painful.

But I really want to meet you on the other side of the times that are coming instead.

We'll need you there.