I said to some friends recently that the thing I have been looking for this month is a non-annoying way to say, essentially, to everyone left of Attila the Hun, is “Chin up.” Unfortunately, I am seeing and hearing a lot of demoralization among people I love, so I will have to hurry up and say it annoyingly. And sentimentally. Them’s the breaks.
Trump is a weak and miserable man. Trumpism is a big and hollow object. Whether it stays that way depends on how many of us decide to rush in and fill it up. Those executive orders that we find — rightly — upsetting and frightening are also partly written by Chat-GPT and so incoherent that even courts sympathetic to him will have to spend some time sorting out their theories of what he means. The members of his inner circle hate each other — of course they do, they hate themselves and life. He seems not to have been kidding about the tariffs, which are the part of his agenda that have always had the best chance of making him broadly unpopular very fast. The alt-rightists and would-be mass murderers that he has pardoned from prison are so brain-poisoned that they’re about as likely to take a shot at him as they are you and me.1
It is scary how much the Times and Post and NBC News and the rest seem to want to curry favor with him,2 that the ADL is defending Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, that the cool center-right kids are talking about Vibe Shifts and the poetry of racial slurs rather than trying to be above it all or staking out Rightish-but-principled-anti-Trumpist positions like last time. It is enraging that both my Democratic senators voted for the Laken Riley Act, which is sort of the PATRIOT Act but for hurting the country’s Latinate peoples.3 I will be trying to figure out which of their big donors is reachable on this issue and might lobby them about it, since obviously you can only get so far talking directly to such human kudzu as Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin (although you should absolutely do so). Alternatively, if anyone wants to primary either of them, I will write you all the free propaganda you want. Serious offer.
“You’re still thinking in electoral terms, Phil? How quaint.” I’m still living in this society, where these are the existing power structures. And I have a head for these kinds of details, so it makes sense to me to pay attention to them, since pronouncing them “irrelevant” unfortunately doesn’t make them so. If you’re instead learning how to grow survival vegetables or how to hack small drones, that’s good. Any line you choose to pull on, there’s slack. So pull, and let other people pull as their lives best position them to pull. But don’t give up. Right now is the very definition of “too soon.”
I think everything I’ve just said is fairly obvious — and that’s Psychological Obstacle Number One to saying it, for a lot of us. Psychological Obstacle Number Two is that nobody wants to sound blithe. After the 2016 election, liberals and leftists spent a lot of mental effort on figuring out whether one belonged to the most suffering categories, whether it would come off as privileged to say things that are true, such as “You’re probably not actually going to die,” or “This is probably not the end of the world, though it could be, thanks to climate change, and it is the beginning of a long and painful diminishment, through which the species will probably survive, God willing.”
Any instinct on my part to do that, at least, is gone, this time around. (That’s the only vibe that has shifted around here.) And that’s because I feel as though there’s enough danger to go around. I say things inside and outside of the classroom every day that a deranged donor-parent could use against me, and I do not have tenure. I cannot live on a trust fund or investment income, because I do not have those things. I am not a capital owner except in the sense that you “own capital” through your employer’s pension fund or whatever. So my life could get pretty ruined. I have survived being working class before, so I know I could survive it again, but I can also look at my parents and see what kind of an old age just “surviving” will bring you to. And we can generalize from my situation. Anyone who a) has any convictions whatsoever and b) isn’t insulated against the need to work for a living is extremely vulnerable right now. It turns out that concentrated money and power joined to unbelievable stupidity and sadism threaten everybody. Last time elements of the Identity Left and the Anti-Identity, Materialism-First Left joined hands to agree that white-collar liberals would be fine under Trump and that it was somehow gauche for them to be upset that he was President. I used to feel a great sympathy with this “position”! I must have been out of my mind. Now I feel sympathy and warmth for anyone who has enough sense to be angered, saddened, “triggered” by an executive order permitting the government to discriminate against black-owned firms, or a freeze on disease research, or a withdrawal of funds from organizations where the employees usually state pronouns at the beginning of a meeting, or a directive to spy on and anonymously report coworkers who might be “doing” DEI somehow. To such people I say, “God bless you.” And also, “Put a limit on your news reading. Pace yourself. Your headspace is still yours. Don’t let him have all of it.”
I think that a Trump resistance led by normal people, all across the political spectrum, Maoists and resist-moms — an initially necessarily uncoordinated popular front, uncoordinated because the institutions that coordinated it all last time are licking his boots now — is good, actually, because it has the potential to change America way more than a top-down resistance led by the Democratic Party: which is to say it has the potential to change the Democratic Party, to sweep it along.4 And this is still a very rich country. If your life is such that you even have time to be reading some guy’s Substack, the means for you are probably there. Find them, use them, and don’t despair.
Those assassination attempts that he thinks God saved him from — if God did it, it was a judgment, not of Trump but of us — were all done by guys with the same sorts of cooked brains.
It is also perverse yet deeply gratifying that The Bulwark, a publication founded mostly by W. Bush-era “national greatness conservatives” i.e. Iraq War boosters, and that I contributed to mostly because they weren’t asking me to attack the left and because I am personally attached to the fellows who run its arts section — they aren’t having any of this. They have been, indeed, kind of a bulwark. The policy over there seems to be “if you hate Trump as much as I do, there are no enemies to the left.” It’s probably good for my character to be forced to acknowledge that William Kristol, the very thought of whom used to make me ill, is showing more of a spine than either of my Democratic senators.
You know who didn’t vote for it? Bernie Sanders.
In a two-party system, that’s what it would mean, sorry. If it’s doing any of the other things you’re imagining it doing, it’s doing that one too.
Thank you for this. Just what I needed to read today.