perspective

Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don’t think that I can take it

‘Cause it took so long to bake it

And I’ll never have that recipe again

Oh, no…. Jimmy Webb, “MacArthur Park”

[i]We have survived the election of 2024 (so far). Some are fleeing the country and heading to more stable society – like France or Somalia. Some are pledging to shun and have no contact with family, friends and neighbors who voted for the winner (which does not bode well for some marriages, block parties, and Thanksgiving dinners). Some are joining the “4B” movement[ii] of women who are shaving their heads and pledging no men, no dating, no sex, no marriage, and no children.

This seems counterproductive to long-term societal health in a nation nearly 25% below the replacement rate necessary to sustain the population and programs like Social Security and Medicare. Not to mention sustaining a trend to run out of consumers in a country that is centered on consumerism. Creating together in solidarity a joyful future full of hope. Makes sense to me.

And so it goes.

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed and the next place, oblige it to control itself.” James Madison, Federalist Papers

The campaigns of both parties, never a bloodless affair, were dispiritedly acrimonious. Opponents were not merely variously fascist, racist, murderous, communist, or tyrannical; they were evil instruments of the devil, irredeemable and odious. We all lived through the recent campaigns in which the Harris campaign raised and spent over a billion dollars in direct funds and around six hundred and fifty in outside PAC spending. The Trump campaign raised about three hundred and eighty million in direct campaign funds and another seven hundred and eleven million in outside PAC spending.[iii] That’s an astonishing jackpot and a lot of ads we sat through. And been polled about. And identifying which voters were likely to support the candidates, then trying to turn them out. Vitriol ruled. Accusations flew. Lies abounded. I was very happy to see the backside of that.

We hate politicians. We want principled leaders who are courageous, articulate, calm, and not noisy faultfinders. We want statesmen, but they are scarce. What we have are opportunistic candidates who tell us what we think we want to hear depending upon the audience that day. Not a recent phenomenon, but seemingly endemic in our system of governance; this sorry state is – in the end – the nature of representative democracy.

“With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular—not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately.” Walter Lippmann, “The Decline of Western Democracy”, Atlantic Magazine, February 1955.

An alternative to despair (or elation) after the election might be to take a deep breath, look at the results and learn, maybe change course. With a cursory look, the Red Wave seems to have been decisive, a trifecta, Executive Office, Senate, and House. There is some evidence to support triumphalist gloating. In the electoral college, President Trump captured 312 out of a possible 538 and Kamala Harris a distant 226, a remarkable gain of 80 delegates since his loss in 2020 and a percentage gain of nearly fifteen percent. Tsunami scale.

However, once we look at the detail, it gets a little murky. The margin of total voters was slim, under two percent, and after the multiple third party candidates are factored in, he didn’t have a true majority over fifty percent. The Red Wave means something, but it is more a pronounced ripple. Except for four states, the left – right split is not hard to decipher. Two percent of voters make the difference; of course, there was a whole lot more than that in geography.[iv] Mostly the coastal elites v the ‘basket of deplorables’ in flyover country.

There is something else going on, and an election of a disruptive and off-putting real estate developer and game show host is not going to solve all our problems and cure all our ills.

Two thirds of the voters in the country think we are headed in the wrong direction. Our leaders seem not to recognize the struggles of those who don’t go to wine tastings in enclaves like Georgetown. Despite all reassurances of a recovered economy, most of us are aware that accumulated twenty one percent inflation since 2020 is painful. We get nervous every time we go to the grocery store. Paying the credit card bills and keeping nutritious food on the table for our kids and taking them to the doctor when they need it seems to be ever more at risk.

I won’t reiterate what people better informed and smarter than I have covered with well-reasoned insight.[v] See the footnotes below for links to some good sources with which you may not be familiar.

“What people want to be governed by a ruling class that holds it in contempt? What historical precedent is there for a lasting culture whose story-makers are embarrassed by their own ancestors? How can any culture continue into the future if it is teaching its children a deeply disturbing form of racialised self-loathing?” Paul Kingsnorth, “The Abbey of Misrule” Substack, “The Faustian Fire,” April 28, 2021

The seemingly irreconcilable divisions of polity and principles have not abated. If anything, the passions of the election have widened the chasm. For politicians, the political process, the legacy media that once served as a de facto fourth branch of government to keep legislators honest and voters informed, and in the immense Federal bureaucracy scornfully referred to as the ‘deep state,’ trust is at an all time low point. Approval ratings of the current administration were in the thirties. So, an unlikable and unlikely challenger who himself has approval ratings just better than small plastic bags full of dog excrement left on the side of a hiking trail made an historic comeback. His disapproval ratings approach ‘fear and loathing’ among his many detractors. The election has been resolved; the divide that separates us has deepened.

Seventy five plus million voters chose a problematic candidate, a blustering disruptor with baggage. Why would they do so? The obvious answer is in the previous citation that just under seventy percent of us think the country is headed in the wrong direction. We want a disruptor who promises to shake the foundations and to fix us. We’re unhappy with a paycheck to paycheck wallet and not sure we can pay for groceries if we make our car payments. We’re unhappy with a national debt that exceeds our mortgage per household[vi]. We’re unhappy with our credit card balances growing so rapidly to keep ourselves temporality afloat – currently all together at $1.17 trillion, a daunting high water mark. We’re unhappy with Federal agencies holding enormous power seemingly targeting political enemies. We’re unhappy with incessant, ideological ‘wokeism’ incoherence, which is increasingly detached from what most see as reality. We’re unhappy reading about and experiencing that agenda being forced upon the institutions of our society: our schools, our government, and even private businesses. Out of our control to deter – so much seems out of our control and beyond our power to affect. Desperate measures – we elect as savior a serial liar and (possibly) reformed exploitive womanizer who calls people ugly names. What the hell is wrong with us?

We’re unhappy with the government we’re living under, and the politicians hold their own subjects outside the Beltway in transparent contempt. That we would willingly choose such a flawed and self-absorbed candidate, one so laden with hubris and flamboyant braggadocio, insulated by surrounding himself with sycophants,  cries out that we are in trouble and see no easy path out.

But choose these people we do. We don’t trust them, and they don’t trust us.

We ask our representatives to accomplish the impossible with effortless grace while looking telegenic, then we disdain them and call them evil. Who would apply for such a job?

“The third and most significant source of pressures which discourage political courage in the conscientious Senator or Congressman… is the pressure of his constituency, the interest groups, the organized letter writers, the economic blocs and even the average voter. To cope with such pressures, to defy them or even to satisfy them is a formidable task. All of us occasionally have the urge to follow the example of Congressman John Steven McGroarty of California, who wrote a constituent in 1934: One of the countless drawbacks of being in Congress is that I am compelled to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you in which you say I promised to have the Sierra Madre mountains reforested and I have been in Congress two months and haven’t done it. Will you please take two running jumps and go to hell.” From “Profiles in Courage” by John F Kennedy, 1955, Harper

No, something else far deeper is going on, trust is broken, the culture is broken, and one election is not going to fix it. Maybe no election can fix it. More to follow next time. The often quoted lines from Yeats’ “The Second Coming”[vii] seem more instantiated every passing year:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

[i] Open source image. The big rock and the photo are not retouched or Photoshopped. Turn upside down if you want a different perspective.

[ii] 4B Movement of fear, misandry, and suicidal bitterness.

[iii] Tracking political spending and sources of funds: https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race

[iv] Election map – Associated Press

[v] From the Tangle news website: https://www.readtangle.com/final-2024-election-post-mortem/ or here from James Heaney at De Civitate: https://decivitate.substack.com/p/some-impromptu-post-election-thoughts

[vi] The average mortgage balance per household is around $146,000. The Federal debt exceeds $35 trillion and growing rapidly. Expressed as a per household debt, each household is on the hook for over $266,000. No business or home could support such a load.

[vii] Poetry Foundation. W.B. Yeats. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming