The exit polling stat from 2016 that has stuck with me since is something like 20% of the people who said that Trump was unqualified and didn't have the temperament to be President voted for him anyway. They opted into the carnival because - at least in part - they had no solid concept of what a POTUS should be or why it matters who is President. I don't think that attitude has shifted at all in the intervening years.
Thanks for this. It helps me articulate why I am having a hard time getting my students to think about "the mainstream" or non-deviant groups in a course on social deviance. With no shared culture, there are only subcultures, and thus no norm from which to map distance and/or deviance. The center isn't holding because there is no center.
However, I have a feeling it is not as close as the polls suggest and Harris will emerge as a victor on Nov 5. I have this feeling most of the time at least.
I think the polls especially Times/Sienna are over sampling Republicans because of 2016 and 2020. I don’t think they know how to change their projected voter polls midstream to reflect the large numbers of women especially young women animated by abortion as an issue.
The polling for the most part has actually been moving strongly in Harris’ favor.
What I think is happening is a trauma reaction is causing people to preemptively discount good news for Harris and bad news for Trump because they don’t want to be shocked again.
We are in the month when Republicans begin flooding the zone with shitty polls. Don’t be taken in
This describes quite precisely why I am having trouble sleeping at night. It feels different than 2020––less because of the Dem candidate than the larger quotient of bizarre fixations and feelings in the electorate.
I have watched an old friend from high school transform from a hippie-ish Californian who loathed Trump to someone so enamored of RFK Jr. that she has now talked herself into voting for Trump to oppose the evil plotting of Dems and global elites. I just finished Matthew Taylor's book about the charismatic non-denominal Christian networks as they have fused with far-right politics in the last 4 years. A *lot* of people live in a universe of one or another kind of "spiritual warfare," and the domain of politics per se has been completely absorbed into an apocalyptic eschatology for them.
Happy F*cking Tuesday. My emotional journey over the trump years has gone from a feeling of almost vertigo when I realized that the politico-cultural landscape of America is very different from what I thought it was for most of my life to, now, profound disappointment in Americans and America. Even if Harris wins, it shouldn't be this close.
I think your 'weird' hypothesis is right on the money. A personal anecdote/data point. I was at a party over the weekend, and the subject of the SS came up (don't ask). A woman was not familiar with the subject, so I said, imagine if there were a parallel FBI, CIA, and army, all run by one unelected man who reports directly to the President, completely outside of and parallel to the US Government. When I said that we don't have anything like that in the US, she said, with complete certainty, oh, yes, we definitely have that, no question. This woman is not a Trumper, and in general she has in the past been enjoyable to hang out with. She just has some very weird beliefs, and evidently she's not alone.
Thanks once again for a great piece. I don't think it's heebie-jeebies. More like lucidity. I left the US over 20 years ago & have given up trying to explain to curious Europeans how genuinely psychotic American society is. And always was. When Mitt Romney was running people would ask me about Mormonism. You tell them about the angel Moroni and they think you're making a joke. You tell them about the murders, the 19th century Mormon wars and that Mormons own the land Las Vegas is built on as well as large parts of the southwest and they go blank. Sometimes I will say "You know the Reformation? The wars of religion here? Well, everyone who was too extreme then either went or got shipped off to North America." Then there's all that stuff about race, Catholic and Masonic conspiracies, guns, money...
fwiw i think if trumps wins the decisive factor will be longstanding gop structural advantages like the electoral college plus conservative institutional capture like the supreme court ie the us's anti-majoritarian constitutional order
but i strongly agree the ecumenical, metapolitical insurgence of freaks, buffoons, bastards and pseuds is not going away
2. The Barstool Conservative/Groyper world is revealed to be not just enormously unpopular and alienating coalition partners, but badly unreliable voters to boot.
I share the feeling that 1. seems more likely. But I'm a Democrat, of course I think young people are going to show up. We shall see.
Harris has a lot of head winds (as I say in excess). Winning the popular vote isn't one.
But I'm so old that I remember 2016 when winning the popular vote didn't do the job. The Electoral College elected the loser.
I remember, too, when winning the popular vote by ~7-10% resulted in a close EC win. Which was then followed by flooding the system with bullshit about (non-existent) electoral fraud and the J6 attempted putsch.
So.
Assuming Harris wins the popular vote, there's the question of the EC. Polling is such crap for the most part that I'm not sure anyone has any clear idea how that will go; that said, I'm not hopeful.
Trump, despite the establishment having done their best for over fifty years to cover it up, is a subhuman monster, so narcissistic that he will literally do anything to wipe out the stain of the loss of 2020. The post-election lies in 2020 and J6 are a taste of what we'll be getting this November. Some sort of fool or worse under estimates what he can do.
And since the last election, we've gotten more Republican electoral fuckery and gerrymandering. And SCOTGOP that contrary to earlier indications, is all in with their party's leader.
Mandatory reminder: a lot, maybe none of this, would have happened or be happening or be possible had Clinton and the DLC not moved the party to becoming an alternative to the GOP as opposed to an actual opposition party. On all the big issues, the post-Clinton party is nearly completely in sync with the GOP.
Hoping for the best, of course, but reality is what it is, not what the establishment reports it to be, sorry.
My MAGA relatives will tell you the democrats or "the left" are the weird ones and 1000% believe it.
They will bring up items (mostly trans related) like advocating for transgenders in girls' athletics, Harris allegedly supporting the use of taxpayer money to perform sex change operations for illegal migrants in detention centers, the replacement of "breast feeding" with "chest feeding" and "mothers" with "birthing persons" in some official HHS documentation, the supposed understanding that all white males are inherently bad, treating George Floyd as Saint Floyd and all cops as bastards, valuing diversity over effectiveness in our military personnel, etc.
Sure, most of them are based on wild mischaracterizations or outright falsehoods regarding the median democrat's actual beliefs, but not all of them.
That said, for all the various cranks and grifters prominent in MAGA culture and leadership, let's not lose sight of the fact that the majority of people who will vote for Trump are not "weird". They are normal people with relatively reasonable, normal beliefs on most matters. That is the truly scary and bewildering part to me, not the number of people who hold bizarre and verifiably false beliefs.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was in high school, my mother used to tell me that I should be "slightly less eccentric." She said I was weird. She was never very specific about what was weird about me, but maybe it was that I studied a lot and made very good grades; I wore a dollar watch around my neck on a leather string; and I ran a mile every day after school. Would you tell your daughter she was too weird because of any of those things? Almost certainly not. I was not weird. My mother was weird: she was an envious narcissist who liked tearing her children down to make herself feel better.
Now John Ganz thinks I'm weird because I homeschooled my son. But I am not weird: my local school system was weird. Some teachers could not speak standard English or spell, in 1985. I toured the local school and found signs on the doors of classrooms, written by teachers, that had misspelled words on them. Red flag #1. Red flag #2 was when another mother told me that a teacher had slammed her son's head into a table so hard that it knocked a tooth out, because he was talking...in the lunch room. Do you need more evidence? The superintendent's wife shot her daughter and was never charged with a crime.
Later, after my son was grown, I was a substitute teacher in the same county school system. It had only gotten weirder: the high school allowed student preachers to come into the special ed class where I worked and terrify the mentally disabled students with talk of Satan and how he is always sneaking around you to do something bad to you. Adult preachers also preach to the student body, in defiance of the First Amendment mandating separation of church and state. (Parents who have complained about this have been disregarded.) Teachers can still paddle kids with a wooden paddle, unless their parent signs a form forbidding these beatings on their child. You can't take math every semester. Sometimes you have to take Wildlife Management instead. Like all schools in America, there are constant drills to practice how to survive if a fellow student comes to school with an AR-15 and tries to murder everybody. Recently the school had several credible threats of a mass shooting in the offing. The few Jewish students in the school system have been called anti-Semitic names by young neo-Nazis.
Who is weird in this case? The parent who looks around, sees no private school in her county except even weirder Christian schools, and thinks, "Maybe homeschooling is not a terrible option," or the parent who says, "Nope, kid, I don't care how bad it is, I need a babysitter and you're going to school. Just suck it up." The kids complain about the bullying; the mainstream, "normal" parents just tell a kid who has been beaten up every day to "ignore" the bullies.
America has gotten so irrational that sane people seem weird and eccentric. Maybe instead of "weird" we should use the phrase "not based in reality." Those of us who are more grounded in reality--for example, those who don't accept mass shootings as normal, and who believe we should do something to stop climate catastrophe--are outside the mainstream, precisely because we are in touch with reality. We may not be the majority, but when there is mass psychosis and mass denial of reality, the eccentrics are the truly sane ones.
In the 1980s I knew almost all the homeschoolers in my area. About half were secular homeschoolers like me. The other half were the Christian homeschoolers. We did stuff together back then. Sure, sometimes they said that dinosaurs never existed. But for the most part we got along fine. The parents were nice and the kids were nice.
Now in my county, there are hundreds of Christian homeschoolers and a handful of hippie homeschoolers. The Christian homeschoolers are the most vocal and visible group, but the secular "inclusive" homeschoolers (as they call themselves) are still there. I am guessing that the secular homeschoolers are homeschoolers for some of the same reasons we were, but with the added incentive of avoiding mass shootings, which was not an issue in the 80s.
Also, the truth is that now public schools are becoming Christian schools in our area, with books banned because of "Christian" concerns; preachers coming to preach at school; and a hostile attitude towards kids that for whatever reason are not mainstream, especially if they seem gender queer. The teachers are under increasing pressure to stop making school a safe place for those kids.
I went to a dance at a space for homeschoolers on Saturday. This space hosts music lessons and other events for anybody really, but it is used mainly by homeschoolers. The dance was attended mostly by kids and a few parents, and me. The parents and kids were very sweet. Some were students at a Christian school in town. I try to relate to these people as individuals rather than as members of an ideological group. Some may harbor hateful beliefs about queer people, and probably a great many are Trump voters, but some may just be wanting to escape the prison-like conditions of our local public schools, which are overcrowded and depressing institutions.
I think a lot of people are unaware of how grim public schools can really be. I know that many public schools in large cities are quite good, and you are lucky if your kids can attend those schools. My sister's kids have gone to wonderful private schools. But a lot of families don't have access to great schools, or even pretty good schools. This is a scandal in the richest country in the world. It sends the message to kids that the adults don't really care about them.
What does it say about us when we force kids to spend 40 hours a week in dilapidated, over-crowded and dangerous places? Millions of kids now are survivors of mass shootings. Millions more expect to be. I can't imagine sending a kid to school under those conditions, even a private school. A private Christian school is where our most recent mass shooting happened, at the Covenant School in Nashville. This school was a few miles from where I went to high school. Afterwards, the Tennessee legislature not only failed to pass meaningful gun control laws; it expanded access to guns and passed a law allowing teachers to secretly carry guns. Another reason to stay away from school in TN.
School was not like this when I was a child. There were around 20 students in my classes, and usually a kind teacher. All the teachers knew my name in my smallish school. I never worried that somebody would shoot me at school. It was a safer place emotionally than my home was. This is no longer true for most kids.
You're not alone in worrying. In the course of breaking up and disposing of my library, I ran across Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Way back in 1965, he wrote (and I apologize for the length of these excerpts: "[Historically] there was a sort of automatic built-in status elevator in the American social edifice. Today that elevator no longer operates ... in the same way. ... [The use of mass media in politics has] made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. ... [It has become] an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. ... Changes in our social, economic, and administrative life have intensified the sense of powerlessness and victimization among the opponents of these changes and have widened the area of social issues over which they feel discontent. ... Ours has been a period of continued crisis, from which the future offers no relief. ... It is hard for a certain type of American, who does not think much about the world outside and does not want to have to do so, to understand why we must become involved in ... an unremitting struggle [to respond to these crises]."
MAGA's response to the crises of our times is to simply look backward and promise that the problems are not real and will simply go away if you don't look at them squarely. Harris says that we can look forward and successfully address the contemporary crises if we do not bind ourselves to the past.
My only hope is that enough people who are dissatisfied with the choice on offer will borrow Claes Oldenburg's clothespin from outside City Hall in Philadelphia and turn out to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket. To refrain from voting because you are (justifiably) unhappy with certain decisions by the Biden State Department and the Harris/Walz ticket — I think it's obvious what the dinosaur in the room is — is to return MAGA to power. And how does that improve life for the people you care about? Performative protest is not an option.
Unfortunately, I share your feeling that Trump might win. Trump, for all his insanity, comes across as authentic. Harris, my values have not changed, comes across as instrumental. She has become a symbol of raw, power hungry ambition.
Thanks for writing this, John, it certainly feels like it bullseyes things.
Around the time the Walz/weird discourse popped off I happened to be reading Erik Davis’s Techgnosis after having read his more recent High Weirdness last year.
Davis approaches “the weird” in a number of ways but mostly I found his even handed approach to the subject can be summed up as “yeah a lot of this stuff is absolutely crank stuff but that element is in the groundwater of American culture and religion and pretending it is below us to pay attention to it is to be willfully blind to the very atmosphere we breathe.”
I believe you have noted that is one of the pragmatic takeaways of your book as well.
P.S. If you haven’t read it, Techgnosis also has the benefit of scratching some of the cyberpunk/90s utopian/Hackers itch that I know you’ve mentioned on the podcast with Jamelle as well.
The exit polling stat from 2016 that has stuck with me since is something like 20% of the people who said that Trump was unqualified and didn't have the temperament to be President voted for him anyway. They opted into the carnival because - at least in part - they had no solid concept of what a POTUS should be or why it matters who is President. I don't think that attitude has shifted at all in the intervening years.
People like us here tend to forget that the supermajority of voters aren't engaged like we are and are misinformed or uninformed.
Negative partisanship played a huge part. Lots of “I don’t like Trump but I really hate Hillary / Democrats.”
Thanks for this. It helps me articulate why I am having a hard time getting my students to think about "the mainstream" or non-deviant groups in a course on social deviance. With no shared culture, there are only subcultures, and thus no norm from which to map distance and/or deviance. The center isn't holding because there is no center.
Trump can still get a 2016 victory. This is true.
However, I have a feeling it is not as close as the polls suggest and Harris will emerge as a victor on Nov 5. I have this feeling most of the time at least.
I think the polls especially Times/Sienna are over sampling Republicans because of 2016 and 2020. I don’t think they know how to change their projected voter polls midstream to reflect the large numbers of women especially young women animated by abortion as an issue.
The polling for the most part has actually been moving strongly in Harris’ favor.
What I think is happening is a trauma reaction is causing people to preemptively discount good news for Harris and bad news for Trump because they don’t want to be shocked again.
We are in the month when Republicans begin flooding the zone with shitty polls. Don’t be taken in
This describes quite precisely why I am having trouble sleeping at night. It feels different than 2020––less because of the Dem candidate than the larger quotient of bizarre fixations and feelings in the electorate.
I have watched an old friend from high school transform from a hippie-ish Californian who loathed Trump to someone so enamored of RFK Jr. that she has now talked herself into voting for Trump to oppose the evil plotting of Dems and global elites. I just finished Matthew Taylor's book about the charismatic non-denominal Christian networks as they have fused with far-right politics in the last 4 years. A *lot* of people live in a universe of one or another kind of "spiritual warfare," and the domain of politics per se has been completely absorbed into an apocalyptic eschatology for them.
Happy F*cking Tuesday. My emotional journey over the trump years has gone from a feeling of almost vertigo when I realized that the politico-cultural landscape of America is very different from what I thought it was for most of my life to, now, profound disappointment in Americans and America. Even if Harris wins, it shouldn't be this close.
I think your 'weird' hypothesis is right on the money. A personal anecdote/data point. I was at a party over the weekend, and the subject of the SS came up (don't ask). A woman was not familiar with the subject, so I said, imagine if there were a parallel FBI, CIA, and army, all run by one unelected man who reports directly to the President, completely outside of and parallel to the US Government. When I said that we don't have anything like that in the US, she said, with complete certainty, oh, yes, we definitely have that, no question. This woman is not a Trumper, and in general she has in the past been enjoyable to hang out with. She just has some very weird beliefs, and evidently she's not alone.
Thanks once again for a great piece. I don't think it's heebie-jeebies. More like lucidity. I left the US over 20 years ago & have given up trying to explain to curious Europeans how genuinely psychotic American society is. And always was. When Mitt Romney was running people would ask me about Mormonism. You tell them about the angel Moroni and they think you're making a joke. You tell them about the murders, the 19th century Mormon wars and that Mormons own the land Las Vegas is built on as well as large parts of the southwest and they go blank. Sometimes I will say "You know the Reformation? The wars of religion here? Well, everyone who was too extreme then either went or got shipped off to North America." Then there's all that stuff about race, Catholic and Masonic conspiracies, guns, money...
fwiw i think if trumps wins the decisive factor will be longstanding gop structural advantages like the electoral college plus conservative institutional capture like the supreme court ie the us's anti-majoritarian constitutional order
but i strongly agree the ecumenical, metapolitical insurgence of freaks, buffoons, bastards and pseuds is not going away
It seems like one of two things will happen
1. Trump wins
2. The Barstool Conservative/Groyper world is revealed to be not just enormously unpopular and alienating coalition partners, but badly unreliable voters to boot.
I share the feeling that 1. seems more likely. But I'm a Democrat, of course I think young people are going to show up. We shall see.
Harris has a lot of head winds (as I say in excess). Winning the popular vote isn't one.
But I'm so old that I remember 2016 when winning the popular vote didn't do the job. The Electoral College elected the loser.
I remember, too, when winning the popular vote by ~7-10% resulted in a close EC win. Which was then followed by flooding the system with bullshit about (non-existent) electoral fraud and the J6 attempted putsch.
So.
Assuming Harris wins the popular vote, there's the question of the EC. Polling is such crap for the most part that I'm not sure anyone has any clear idea how that will go; that said, I'm not hopeful.
Trump, despite the establishment having done their best for over fifty years to cover it up, is a subhuman monster, so narcissistic that he will literally do anything to wipe out the stain of the loss of 2020. The post-election lies in 2020 and J6 are a taste of what we'll be getting this November. Some sort of fool or worse under estimates what he can do.
And since the last election, we've gotten more Republican electoral fuckery and gerrymandering. And SCOTGOP that contrary to earlier indications, is all in with their party's leader.
Mandatory reminder: a lot, maybe none of this, would have happened or be happening or be possible had Clinton and the DLC not moved the party to becoming an alternative to the GOP as opposed to an actual opposition party. On all the big issues, the post-Clinton party is nearly completely in sync with the GOP.
Hoping for the best, of course, but reality is what it is, not what the establishment reports it to be, sorry.
My MAGA relatives will tell you the democrats or "the left" are the weird ones and 1000% believe it.
They will bring up items (mostly trans related) like advocating for transgenders in girls' athletics, Harris allegedly supporting the use of taxpayer money to perform sex change operations for illegal migrants in detention centers, the replacement of "breast feeding" with "chest feeding" and "mothers" with "birthing persons" in some official HHS documentation, the supposed understanding that all white males are inherently bad, treating George Floyd as Saint Floyd and all cops as bastards, valuing diversity over effectiveness in our military personnel, etc.
Sure, most of them are based on wild mischaracterizations or outright falsehoods regarding the median democrat's actual beliefs, but not all of them.
That said, for all the various cranks and grifters prominent in MAGA culture and leadership, let's not lose sight of the fact that the majority of people who will vote for Trump are not "weird". They are normal people with relatively reasonable, normal beliefs on most matters. That is the truly scary and bewildering part to me, not the number of people who hold bizarre and verifiably false beliefs.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was in high school, my mother used to tell me that I should be "slightly less eccentric." She said I was weird. She was never very specific about what was weird about me, but maybe it was that I studied a lot and made very good grades; I wore a dollar watch around my neck on a leather string; and I ran a mile every day after school. Would you tell your daughter she was too weird because of any of those things? Almost certainly not. I was not weird. My mother was weird: she was an envious narcissist who liked tearing her children down to make herself feel better.
Now John Ganz thinks I'm weird because I homeschooled my son. But I am not weird: my local school system was weird. Some teachers could not speak standard English or spell, in 1985. I toured the local school and found signs on the doors of classrooms, written by teachers, that had misspelled words on them. Red flag #1. Red flag #2 was when another mother told me that a teacher had slammed her son's head into a table so hard that it knocked a tooth out, because he was talking...in the lunch room. Do you need more evidence? The superintendent's wife shot her daughter and was never charged with a crime.
Later, after my son was grown, I was a substitute teacher in the same county school system. It had only gotten weirder: the high school allowed student preachers to come into the special ed class where I worked and terrify the mentally disabled students with talk of Satan and how he is always sneaking around you to do something bad to you. Adult preachers also preach to the student body, in defiance of the First Amendment mandating separation of church and state. (Parents who have complained about this have been disregarded.) Teachers can still paddle kids with a wooden paddle, unless their parent signs a form forbidding these beatings on their child. You can't take math every semester. Sometimes you have to take Wildlife Management instead. Like all schools in America, there are constant drills to practice how to survive if a fellow student comes to school with an AR-15 and tries to murder everybody. Recently the school had several credible threats of a mass shooting in the offing. The few Jewish students in the school system have been called anti-Semitic names by young neo-Nazis.
Who is weird in this case? The parent who looks around, sees no private school in her county except even weirder Christian schools, and thinks, "Maybe homeschooling is not a terrible option," or the parent who says, "Nope, kid, I don't care how bad it is, I need a babysitter and you're going to school. Just suck it up." The kids complain about the bullying; the mainstream, "normal" parents just tell a kid who has been beaten up every day to "ignore" the bullies.
America has gotten so irrational that sane people seem weird and eccentric. Maybe instead of "weird" we should use the phrase "not based in reality." Those of us who are more grounded in reality--for example, those who don't accept mass shootings as normal, and who believe we should do something to stop climate catastrophe--are outside the mainstream, precisely because we are in touch with reality. We may not be the majority, but when there is mass psychosis and mass denial of reality, the eccentrics are the truly sane ones.
Do you think that maybe you might not be the most representative example of a homeschooling parent
In the 1980s I knew almost all the homeschoolers in my area. About half were secular homeschoolers like me. The other half were the Christian homeschoolers. We did stuff together back then. Sure, sometimes they said that dinosaurs never existed. But for the most part we got along fine. The parents were nice and the kids were nice.
Now in my county, there are hundreds of Christian homeschoolers and a handful of hippie homeschoolers. The Christian homeschoolers are the most vocal and visible group, but the secular "inclusive" homeschoolers (as they call themselves) are still there. I am guessing that the secular homeschoolers are homeschoolers for some of the same reasons we were, but with the added incentive of avoiding mass shootings, which was not an issue in the 80s.
Also, the truth is that now public schools are becoming Christian schools in our area, with books banned because of "Christian" concerns; preachers coming to preach at school; and a hostile attitude towards kids that for whatever reason are not mainstream, especially if they seem gender queer. The teachers are under increasing pressure to stop making school a safe place for those kids.
I went to a dance at a space for homeschoolers on Saturday. This space hosts music lessons and other events for anybody really, but it is used mainly by homeschoolers. The dance was attended mostly by kids and a few parents, and me. The parents and kids were very sweet. Some were students at a Christian school in town. I try to relate to these people as individuals rather than as members of an ideological group. Some may harbor hateful beliefs about queer people, and probably a great many are Trump voters, but some may just be wanting to escape the prison-like conditions of our local public schools, which are overcrowded and depressing institutions.
I think a lot of people are unaware of how grim public schools can really be. I know that many public schools in large cities are quite good, and you are lucky if your kids can attend those schools. My sister's kids have gone to wonderful private schools. But a lot of families don't have access to great schools, or even pretty good schools. This is a scandal in the richest country in the world. It sends the message to kids that the adults don't really care about them.
What does it say about us when we force kids to spend 40 hours a week in dilapidated, over-crowded and dangerous places? Millions of kids now are survivors of mass shootings. Millions more expect to be. I can't imagine sending a kid to school under those conditions, even a private school. A private Christian school is where our most recent mass shooting happened, at the Covenant School in Nashville. This school was a few miles from where I went to high school. Afterwards, the Tennessee legislature not only failed to pass meaningful gun control laws; it expanded access to guns and passed a law allowing teachers to secretly carry guns. Another reason to stay away from school in TN.
School was not like this when I was a child. There were around 20 students in my classes, and usually a kind teacher. All the teachers knew my name in my smallish school. I never worried that somebody would shoot me at school. It was a safer place emotionally than my home was. This is no longer true for most kids.
You're not alone in worrying. In the course of breaking up and disposing of my library, I ran across Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Way back in 1965, he wrote (and I apologize for the length of these excerpts: "[Historically] there was a sort of automatic built-in status elevator in the American social edifice. Today that elevator no longer operates ... in the same way. ... [The use of mass media in politics has] made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. ... [It has become] an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. ... Changes in our social, economic, and administrative life have intensified the sense of powerlessness and victimization among the opponents of these changes and have widened the area of social issues over which they feel discontent. ... Ours has been a period of continued crisis, from which the future offers no relief. ... It is hard for a certain type of American, who does not think much about the world outside and does not want to have to do so, to understand why we must become involved in ... an unremitting struggle [to respond to these crises]."
MAGA's response to the crises of our times is to simply look backward and promise that the problems are not real and will simply go away if you don't look at them squarely. Harris says that we can look forward and successfully address the contemporary crises if we do not bind ourselves to the past.
My only hope is that enough people who are dissatisfied with the choice on offer will borrow Claes Oldenburg's clothespin from outside City Hall in Philadelphia and turn out to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket. To refrain from voting because you are (justifiably) unhappy with certain decisions by the Biden State Department and the Harris/Walz ticket — I think it's obvious what the dinosaur in the room is — is to return MAGA to power. And how does that improve life for the people you care about? Performative protest is not an option.
Jesus this was prescient.
Unfortunately, I share your feeling that Trump might win. Trump, for all his insanity, comes across as authentic. Harris, my values have not changed, comes across as instrumental. She has become a symbol of raw, power hungry ambition.
Thank you for ruining my day 🫡
Think of it this way: lowered expectations will make victory sweeter and defeat... well, slightly less awful?
Thanks for writing this, John, it certainly feels like it bullseyes things.
Around the time the Walz/weird discourse popped off I happened to be reading Erik Davis’s Techgnosis after having read his more recent High Weirdness last year.
Davis approaches “the weird” in a number of ways but mostly I found his even handed approach to the subject can be summed up as “yeah a lot of this stuff is absolutely crank stuff but that element is in the groundwater of American culture and religion and pretending it is below us to pay attention to it is to be willfully blind to the very atmosphere we breathe.”
I believe you have noted that is one of the pragmatic takeaways of your book as well.
P.S. If you haven’t read it, Techgnosis also has the benefit of scratching some of the cyberpunk/90s utopian/Hackers itch that I know you’ve mentioned on the podcast with Jamelle as well.