Politics: Trump and Harris: Nine Days Left
How Both Sides Fail
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The problem with the left right now is that they’re too enmeshed in how they think things “should be” and not grounded enough in reality and where most Americans actually are. Much as they want things to be A, they’re never going to be A; they’re Z and they’re going to continue being Z. Either learn how to understand and persuade Z, or you’re out of the game.
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It’s nine days until election day and I honestly still don’t care. I know I’m supposed to but I just don’t. Both candidates bore me, and both seem awful in different (and sometimes similar) ways. Kamala clearly wasn’t ready for prime-time. She repeats the same canned answers every time someone asks her, or else she evades, or else she lapses like an alcoholic into exhortations of either a) loving America or b) being from the middle-class. I’m still angry at the lies about Biden’s fitness and the automatic, unfair and totally undemocratic coronation of Queen Kamala when we could have chosen a much stronger, more articulate, more experienced and more polished candidate.
Trump, on the other hand, lies so often I can’t get anywhere near keeping up. He claims he’s going to end both wars but has no evident plan of how to do so. He says he’s going to annihilate pretty much all taxes for almost everything—perhaps do away with income tax altogether—and obviously does not grasp that things like Medicare and Social Security cannot survive without being taxed. (We have a limited trust which is going to run out very soon.) The big fear with Trump, from the left, is that, because he’s learned his lessons from 2020 (where he tried to blackmail the Georgia governor to “find” him 11,000 votes) he’s been installing loyalists in key places of power ever since. He has the leverage to do this even when not actually operating in politics because he now essentially runs the Republican Party. (Which is sad.) So the idea is that, if he wins the 2024 election, he’ll become the autocratic fascist dictator everyone always knew he was from the start.
Democrats are confusing on Trump: On one hand they call him a driveling narcissistic imbecilic buffoon who can’t understand basic history and has a 3rd grade reading and speaking level…but on the other hand he’s a mastermind who pulled off Jan 6, has used white identity politics to obfuscate his real goals, and has a dark, evil plan to become the new Hitler in America, never relinquishing his throne of power.
I just don’t buy it. Trump’s not intellectual. Never has been. He’s a very simple man. He cares about one thing over all else: Himself. He’s not a planner. When he says he “wants to be dictator for a day,” he is obviously doing an exercise in verbal vomit. The guy lies so much he himself can’t keep up; he constantly contradicts himself. He says nothing is more sacred than Social Security and he’d never touch it…then in the next breath says he wants to do away with taxes on Social Security…which would destroy the trust. Trump doesn’t think, he vomits and acts.
As Ezra Klein said recently on the NYT Daily, Trump’s “genius” is his disinhibition. Social and cultural taboos are not hurdles for him. They are for the vast majority of us. He’s a clown. A buffoon. A circus freak. A malignant narcissist. Whatever you want to call him. I agree. But. He is savvy in his way, he’s often funny, he has his finger on the pulse of the American blue-collar disaffected classes, he is a master entertainer, and doesn’t give a shit about social decorum. Do you realize how badly so many Americans wish THEY could be like that? Trump’s disinhibition—his willingness to flip the system The Bird—garners mass respect. Fair or not, ethical or not, right or wrong, Trump has his finger on something fundamental and profound.
This must be reckoned with.
Both candidates lie, evade and distort. Neither candidate gives one shit about the budget or the national deficit, which has skyrocketed from actions of both sides over the past decade. (Trump’s 2017 tax cuts didn’t help. Nor has Biden’s incredible government spending.) Trump may or may not be a criminal (I think he is), but he’s definitely an asshole. Kamala may or may not be a decent person (she probably is) but she’s definitely not the “change” candidate we need. (When asked about how she’s different from Biden in a recent interview she remarked that “nothing comes to mind.)
The cold hard truth: Young Black men and Hispanics have swung violently towards Trump and the Right. Democrats have been hemorrhaging support from the working class ever since NAFTA in the early 1990s, but especially since 2016, ever since choosing the elite establishment Hillary Clinton who didn’t even visit many of the battleground states who voted Obama twice and swept Trump into power. Wokeism, elite media, identity politics, hardcore progressivism: These are unpopular, weak, naïve, confused ideas engendered by 8% of the voting bloc of Democrats, overwhelmingly white, young and female. This is NOT representative of most Black Americans, most adults over 35, Hispanics, Asians, etc. It’s a tiny fraction of the nation who control the media and have been gaslighting insecure Americans who, it turns out, struggle to utilize independent critical thinking skills.
I’ve been shocked watching Democrats obsess about January 6th, Trump’s indictments, trans issues and race essentialism, topics which polling shows the vast amount of Americans do not give a shit about. Rather, Americans care about being lied to. They care about rising crime and/or the perception of rising crime a la mass homelessness, fentanyl on the streets, and car-jackings. They care about the economy, about jobs, about inflation, about the fact that boys and young men are falling behind in education, the fact that Gen Z is committing suicide more than any other generation, and the fact that racial segregation and a bizarre, divisive DEI industrial complex has latched onto our once sacred public education system.
Democrats: Wake the fuck up and smell the coffee.
I’ve always been on the left; when I was in my twenties I was fairly far left (though never interested in identity politics) and for the past decade I’ve been pretty much right in the center. The older I get the more interested I’ve become in divided government, civil disagreement, trying to empathetically understand the POV of someone with very different politics than me, say a Republican who is against abortion. (I am totally pro-choice.) It’s less and less interesting to me to remain angry and tribal. It’s boring. It takes zero courage—actually it’s the very opposite of courage—and it only affirms your own inherent biases. What’s much more enjoyable, to me, is gritting my teeth and listening to both—or more accurately all—sides.
Democrats talk about how conservative the supreme court has become, and how this is a prime example of Trump’s “fascist” tendencies. (Read my piece comparing Hitler to Trump here. Don’t worry: It’s a very nuanced argument.) Look, these Democrats scream, what Trump did to Roe V Wade.
But what these people fail to understand—somehow—is that this is called democracy. If the Democrats had the opportunity—or if Ruth Bader Ginsberg had been less concerned with her legacy and more concerned with the common good—they’d do exactly the same thing: Appoint as many left, centrist and/or progressive justices as possible. Of course they would. (And have when they had the chance.) And in that case the court would generally follow the Democratic line on things which arrived at the feet of the justices.
But in the current case it isn’t Democrats that run the court, it’s Conservatives. I disagree with a lot of their rulings—although Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have crossed the aisle quite a few times in surprising ways—but this is how our democratic system works. Those in executive power, if given the chance of a slot to fill, do so. That’s not “fascism” and it’s not a broken system. That is classical liberalism and it’s how our free system works. (Yes, I fiercely disagree with the destruction of Roe.)
We didn’t elect Kamala Harris. Biden picked her (because she was a Black woman; he literally said this.) Trump is a symbol, a reaction to the far-left takeover (at least in perception a la the media) of the Democratic party. Dems have lost their way. The working-class of all races is slipping. Black and Hispanic men are slipping. Voters under 30 without a college degree are slipping. The far-left progressive values of cities across America since 2020 have failed and been walked back and replaced. Everyone agrees that racial segregation, the dissolution of free speech, covertly or overtly banning books (by both sides), knee-jerk tribalism, revisionist history (both sides again) defunding police, not prosecuting crime, and gaslighting the American people is BAD.
What should scare many people is that for the past decade we’ve said, One day a smarter, more intellectual, more articulate Trump clone will descend upon us.
Well, my friends, I think he’s here. His name is J.D. Vance. I predict in 2028 we’ll see him running for president. And he’s going to make a much more compelling, nuanced case. My advice for Democrats is: Follow Kamala’s lead but go farther: Ditch the radical left (we don’t need them), keep tacking back to the center, where the vast majority of Democrats and Americans in general are, try to finally understand WHY Black men, Hispanic men and the working-class are voting in startling numbers for Trump, the man you keep trying to convince people is a billionaire crook who’s racist and is a fascist. People aren’t buying it. They never really did.
Americans can smell bullshit from 20 miles away. Don’t tell us our eyes don’t see what they see. (NPR, MSNBC, I’m looking at you!) Don’t tell us that it’s “obvious” who the “right” candidate is. Don’t gaslight and condescend and tell people that Trump is racist and therefore if anyone votes for Trump they, by default, are racist. (Also confusing be cause 20% of Black men are voting for Trump.)
Sad truth: A lot of Americans—including some independents in battleground states who could literally decide this election in nine days—don’t care as much as you feel they should about Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election. (For the record I DO care about that and find it abhorrent.) They don’t care as much as you want them to about Jan 6. (And they compare it to the much bigger, much more violent BLM riots.) They don’t believe that Trump is racist because so much of his lines have been taken gracelessly out of context (“fine people on both sides”) and because record numbers of non-white Americans love the man. They see the trials as a Democratic hit-job, totally partisan, just like the Russian stuff.
The problem with the left right now is that they’re too enmeshed in how they think things “should be” and not grounded enough in reality and where most Americans actually are. Much as they want things to be A, they’re never going to be A; they’re Z and they’re going to continue being Z. Either learn how to understand and persuade Z, or you’re out of the game.
If I were forced to choose a candidate by gunpoint?
I’d pick Kamala. But I don’t want that terrible Manichean choice. I want real options between two smart, young candidates who have moved beyond identity, knee-jerk tribalism and culture war bullshit.
I want change. Real change.