I hadn’t planned on writing anything. I had a really busy October, I have been traveling, and yesterday and today I’m a bit thrown by a pesky head cold. But in light of said cold, and the fact that I’m takin’ it easy at work today, and the caffeine in the several pots of tea I’ve drunk so far, and Last Night’s Events, I figured now is as good a time as any to put down some of my scattered thoughts about the political moment. In short: it was a better night than I had anticipated. I did vote yesterday, to retain the PA Supreme Court judges, mostly because I’ve been getting annoying mailers telling me to vote the opposite way because of woke or some shit like that. I guessed that it was likely to be a low-turnout election, and therefore the rare off-year election that could matter. All the judges were retained. Zohran won, of course, as well as various Dem candidates and progressive ballot measures in several states. Permission to lib out has been granted in all corners, but at the risk of sounding glib, I want to interrogate just why permission to lib out is something we feel like we need.
Our years in the political wilderness have turned us idiotic. Take, for example, the asinine discoursing around the recent No Kings protests. My own community of Perfect Leftists, politics as uncontaminated by contact with reality as the interior of a chicken egg, ridiculed the protests as an always-already-aborted failed revolutionary moment. Which, I mean, it so clearly wasn’t. In actuality, in my opinion, the massive mobilizations were something like a union organizing “stress test.” If people were willing to show up to a rally – actually get out of the house, make a sign, find parking, and go to a march – what else might they be willing to do? But to see these protests as an opportunity for the left rather than a lib-cringe eye roll demands something of us that feels too expensive in the meager emotional environment we’ve all come up in: hope. Sincere optimism of the will. Belief that better things are possible and attainable.
Hope is in short supply. We forget that it’s not just the right wing and Facebook boomers, that we too are inundated with slop and rotting our brains out with mindless consumption of memes. When you’re getting the majority or the entirety of your news from social media (which most of us are), you’re consuming an algorithmically curated feed of pictures with captions. You are not, to put it mildly, being invited to think. The Trump people are running his second administration like a reality show, and you, yes you, are falling for it. You’re not seeing all the defeats he’s being dealt because the producers of that show don’t want you to see them. And the result is that you’re feeling exactly how they want you to feel: depressed, defeated, fatalistic, and without hope; left-melancholic, in Benjamin’s terms (“precisely the attitude to which there is no longer in general any corresponding political action”). We’re serving the illusion of their power with our self-indulgent internecine competition to be teacher’s pet in Hell. This melancholy excuses us from having to actually think about the world as it actually is, something the platforms are all too eager to encourage.
I don’t want anybody to miss the strong current of self-criticism here. I have been extremely wrong in how I personally have approached politics for the last ten years. Maybe that was fine in 2016 and 2017, when Trump was still fairly constrained by institutional and bureaucratic power, norms of governance, and even a Republican party that hadn’t been completely captured by his own people, but it sure feels foolish now. It’s important to own that feeling of foolishness, the real failures there, and my own sanctimonious leftier-than-thou refusal to engage the world on its own terms – what was it that leftist neckbeard dudebro said about not making history as we please? And speaking of those institutions and norms, another reliable source of eye-rolls, I want to mention something that has been little remarked-upon. The second Trump administration has been demolishing those institutions and norms as quickly and carelessly as the East Wing. That’s part of what makes the administration so scary, and it’s also part of what is causing the administration, and the party that is completely in thrall to Trump, to destroy themselves from within. There’s a sense, if we can squint at it right, that the Republican party has destroyed a lot of the norms and institutions that leftists wanted to overhaul through years of protracted and laborious reform struggle, and are destroying themselves in the process. (Seriously, Trump is going to die one day, and where do they go after that? Absolutely one hundred percent of the already small number of serious people are gone. Marjorie Taylor Green’s rebrand might be cynical, but it’s smart, she has a finger in the wind and can feel the massive and fractious backlash that is coming.) We again, if we can be smart, and flexible, and tuned in to what is rather than clinging to our wounded sense of what ought to be in a perfect world, might see an opportunity here, to rebuild from scratch what has been broken. Given the choice, wouldn’t we want to have “nothing changes and things get worse” as the worst-case, rather than the best-case scenario?
Zohran Mamdani started his acceptance speech last night with a quotation from Eugene Debs. (Indeed, an addled Maoist once wrote a huge passive-aggressive Facebook screed about me for doing exactly the same thing, quoting Eugene Debs, like eight years ago.) The quotation is taken from the end of Debs’s statement to the court upon being convicted of violating the Sedition Act in September 1918. Following his conviction, Debs was in prison for three years of a ten-year sentence, until 1921 when he was pardoned by President Harding. Mamdani, of course, only excerpted one line from the end of the speech; I will reproduce the last part in full here.
Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.
I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.