I'm still left to wonder why the Harris turnout was so bad - according to CNN she did worse than Biden did in every district in the country.

who is surprised to discover I have thoughts

- My paycheck is higher because I rule; grocery prices are higher because the president sucks. Psychologically, every setback has seven times the impact of every advance because we are fundamentally risk-averse. RESULT: if your wages didn't go up seven times as fast as inflation, your psychological experience is as a loss. EXAMPLE: I had lunch with a buddy once. He was mad because we spent $30 on a pair of sandwiches when it would have been maybe $18 in high school. That he made $180k a year working part time did not factor into the equation.

- What does fascism even mean. If you turned 18 on December 7 1941 and immediately enlisted to fight Tojo, you are turning 101 next month. More likely, you are dead. Trump called Kamala Harris a "communist fascist" on the reg. The Democrats can say "no but like, an actual fascist" to which the normies go "you mean like Mussolini" and you say "exactly" and they say "I heard he made the trains run on time" and you say "yeah but like Hitler" and they go "Trump's not Hitler" and let's be honest - we fucking tried that for four years last time and it didn't fucking work so why is it going to work this time.

- The purity police are fucking annoying. There's a whole lotta wypepo who are all about "advocacy" and "being an ally" and other wine-mom bullshit that any minority sees right through as white discomfort but a willingness to engage. That engagement, speaking from experience, includes at least an interlude of Airing of Grievances because fucking hell it sucks being a minority and if you're going to have to put up with this white asshole the least he can do is feel a little uncomfortable about being white. Most white people never even get that far, though, because white people primarily hang out with white people, which means policing your friends and casual acquaintances about pronouns and stereotypes and being dragged through the difference between Latino, Chicano and Hispanic despite the fact that everyone in the room is of German-Irish descent. It's super-valuable in the spaces where actual minorities are? But most wypepo are afraid to go there so they just score purity points off each other by playing woker-than-thou.

- My people will be fine. If you experienced no material harm from the last Trump administration why would you experience any material harm from this one? COVID? Well that happened to everyone. Skyrocketing healthcare costs? That probably wasn't Trump's fault. What was the statistic George Will pulled out? The RNC spent $100 in advertising for every transgender person in America to scare everyone about transgender people. I think if you live in a blue state you encounter transgender people on the reg. I think if you don't, you don't (so why would we give a fuck about pronouns, see above). They aren't coming for my library! People forget - the Holocaust started in Poland. By the time bombs were falling in Germany Hitler had been in power six years.

- The leopard will eat your face last if you're behind it. Lindsay Graham is queer as a three dollar bill and he's done four terms in the house and four in the senate. Did you see how much bullshit the Republicans put up with before they finally shitcanned George Santos? Briscoe Cain is the former cheerleader who booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping - hey, what's he up to lately. But ohhhh shit watch your wide stance. And ohhhhhh fuck never call attention to the leopards.

There's this real desire to go "Americans are stupid" and fuck off, man, people are stupid. Demagogues get votes by leaning into the stupid; this time 'round the Democrats kept going "vibe-cession" as if pointing out that the economic figures meant the electorate wasn't entitled to their feelings rather than remembering what happened to Carter. And, to paraphrase the Durants, human history is largely full of unremarkable people leading happy, unremarkable lives. Sometimes they don't. But I made it half-way through Secondhand Time and the through-line in that book is how much Muscovites miss Communism because at least they were all suffering together (when they weren't ratting each other out for a slightly better apartment).

I'm relatively sanguine about it now, after a long, dark night of the soul. (1) they want this. (2) Billions were spent convincing them otherwise, they still want this. (3) They've seen it before, and they still want this.

The hackneyed liberal angst aphorism is "if you want to know what you would have done during (catastrophe du jour), you're doing it now." Well you know what? There's abso-fucking-lutely nothing any of us could have done to make this turn out any different. People make much of Apted's Up series but almost nobody knows about Bill Moyers' version. Not even Frontline links to the first couple - probably because Apted's is basically "look how posh these posh assholes got, while look how poor these poor assholes got" but Moyers' is basically "let's check in on two families utterly fucked by NAFTA every now and then so we can see how generationally fucked they are."

The Democrats gave up on labor in 1981 and gave up pretending to care about labor in 1994. The Republicans, meanwhile, have been "fear the darkies" for so long that their original darkies now see themselves as Republicans.

The Democrats have gotten my time, my energy, my support and my money across sixteen fucking elections. But I understand the criticisms. And when people are scared, and people are tired, and people are worried, they choose simplicity.