The "I Told You So" Impulse

 A friend sent me a video yesterday that, I admit, captures a recurrent theme in my thoughts about the awfulness:

 

 It's from the Lincoln Project's co-founder Rick Wilson. The title says it all: "If You Voted for Trump, You're Not Allowed to Act SURPRISED!" As the thumbnail says: "Welcome to the FIND OUT phase."

It's an angry cri du coeur directed at Trump voters. Like me, Wilson has already started to detect elements of backfire in Trump's wrecking-ball attack on federal institutions and norms. People are dying due to USAID monies being frozen. People are shocked and scared at their jobs being ripped away from them for no reason other than a group of early twentysomethings (and Elon Musk) decided (how? using what criteria?) that their job was not important. (Take, for example, the hastily retracted firings of nuclear weapons experts.) And people are livid upon finding out that Trump's long-stated brilliant plan of "tariffs on everything" is leading to--as everyone else predicted--higher prices.  

Fuck Around and Find Out currently wins out for "phrase of the year." Or, in its G-rated version: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. We're all finding out, winning stupid prizes.

And some I frickin' TOLD YOU SO is understandable. I certainly feel it. I've created many a mental monologue just like Wilson's here. 

Lefty-libs like me enjoy such righteous reversals. It's the stuff of The West Wing--people being put in their place with a well-crafted, well-delivered speech. Such speeches fueled that show, gave us a romanticized view of how disagreements resolve: someone is forcefully and irrefutably corrected. And oh my stars do I ever want some folk in this country to be forcefully and irrefutably corrected (for the record: corrected with words/results, not with, you know, actual force or violence).

But West Wing style putdowns. . . aren't how things work in real life. That TV show is a fiction. As I tell my students, even the most slice-of-life, naturalistic play is edited reality, life distilled into entertaining chunks. 

In real life, interpersonal arguments seldom resolve cleanly before a commercial break. They rarely conclude with one person getting a pristine last word and the other person simply surrendering. Usually there's hot words and high volumes, and both parties stalk away feeling like they're in the right.

Few people who voted for Trump are going to respond well to a rant like Wilson's. I mean, would you? It takes a special kind of person to be able to absorb an acid-soaked jeremiad like this with equanimity, let alone contrition. I am not that special kind of person, especially when the acid is coming from my political opponents. I don't trust their view of reality most of the time. Why would I trust their evaluation of who's to blame when the economy crashes, our global reputation tanks, and more people start suffering and dying?

I'm hardly the first to say it: we on the left would rather denounce a heretic than win a convert. Our recruitment sucks. We make it worse when we assume that "reality itself" or "the obviously bad results of Trump's policies" will do our recruiting for us. We also make it worse when we expect contrition, silence, or loud repentance from apostates of from the Church of Trump. People are attracted to Trump--just like people are attracted to the left--because he gives them a story that makes them feel seen, important, and cared about. I think Trump's story is a con, a promise offered in bad faith. But just because people might come to recognize Trump's story as repellent doesn't mean they'll find the left's story appealing. 

Dare I say, we need to be better evangelists--winsome witnesses to a better way. And part of that evangelism must involve suppressing or moderating our frustration with the bad results of the majority's choices. 

Make no mistake: I'm often furious at those who voted for Trump. I'm incensed at those who chose not to vote at all or who decided that both sides were equally bad. There's part of me that cheers along with Wilson. But not everything we feel is a good guide to how we should act. 

 Right now, we need more people who feel like we do about Trump's policies. We need them to make common cause with those of us who have been fed up for a long time. For that to happen, we long-term-anti-Trumpers have to swallow the urge to chide or lecture newcomers about why it's taken them as long as it has to come to our conclusions.

Satisfying as Wilson's rant is, then, I'm hopeful that we can generate some better evangelists--and soon. Because when the "find out" phase really hits, Trump et al. are going to spin some wicked lies about who's to blame (spoilers: it'll be the usual suspects: immigrants, people of color, queer/trans folk, university folk, women, etc.). We need a better--not just truer but more appealing--counter-narrative. 

Inside: Late Capitalist Weltschmerz

The day after I discover Weltschmerz (world-weariness, depressed resignation about the state of things), here comes Jason Pargin writing about the most recent species of it on the left. Specifically, Pargin published a substack post about Bo Burnham's 2021 Netflix special Inside. 

The special (which I have not watched, save for the "Welcome to the Internet" song) features an increasingly unkempt, shaggy-haired Burnham seemingly creating a one-man musical performance piece about (and over the course of) the pandemic. Burnham has proven himself a talented artist. I find the internet song clever, funny, catchy, and thoughtful. I imagine the special's other pieces are equally so.

Pargin starts with a long peon-disclaimer attesting Burnham being "a treasure" and "better than I am at absolutely everything." He then unpacks the fiction of Burnham's special persona--I'm so isolated and depressed making this special about how isolated and depressed I am that I'm becoming dangerously isolated and depressed--noting that (1) it's a curated falsehood (Burnham was living with his girlfriend in a multi-million-dollar house and doing interviews about his latest Hollywood projects during the making of the special), and (2) nothing about this fiction is wrong or dishonest. Burnham is a performer. He plays parts. That he stages his show is no more a strike against than noting that Bonnie Raitt still sings "I Can't Make You Love Me if You Don't" with first-time pathos even after all these years. That's craft, not dishonesty. (Pargin does suggest that many of Burnham's fans mistook the special as a documentary--He's really that isolated and depressed. Depressed he may be, but the portrait of that suffering, unkempt artist was, Pargin maintains, a performance.)

Pargin focuses his annoyance on the tone and target of Burnham's show: "misery" as Pargin puts it. Weltschmerz. Despite all his talent, wealth, fame, and good fortune, Burnham is still (at least the "Burnham" in Inside is still) suicidally depressed. And this, Pargin argues, is a flex, a kind of extended, virtue-signalling boast whose cachet is unique to a particular phase of Web 3.0 (2012-). It's a flex that communicates, I'm a good person because I am miserable. 

Pargin:

Somewhere, right now, a teenage girl just recorded herself crying for a TikTok video but, when she went to edit it, realized her mic wasn’t plugged in and so now she’s making herself cry a second time to get another take. Next door is some dude with a great job, healthy body, a loving partner and lots of friends who, after a long day of fairly easy work and an evening watching Netflix, will tweet, “Another wretched day enduring the horrors, my thoughts are with all of you who know that just surviving this absolute hellscape is an accomplishment all its own.”

They all exist within an online subculture in which earnest attempts at positive sincerity and wellness are to be mocked as vapid (as they are in Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram”). The practice of not just broadcasting your lowest moments, but intentionally playing up the angst for maximum engagement has to be the world’s worst possible coping mechanism, a form of self-harm with an added layer of performance anxiety (I’m not sure science even has a word for the gut-punch sensation of recording your sobs of despair, only to see the post get zero likes and a single comment from a spambot).

But they do it because that subculture says this is what a good person does, they demonstrate how they constantly feel the terrible weight of the world on their shoulders. That means the despair portrayed in Inside is also a flex, Burnham proving that his misery is bigger, deeper and more watchable than yours.

Though he doesn't say so explicitly, Pargin tracks the impetus for this subcultural misery-mania to online left-progressive woke politics. I don't mean he's a right-winger. He seems to endorse the broad--and, as he mentions, actually very popular--range of social/political positions that make up the US left (pro-reproductive rights, pro-affordable healthcare, pro-environment). But, he contends, this collection of beliefs got conventionally repackaged with a coating of performative hatred of everything enjoyable: 

They insisted that everything was better in the past but has steadily gotten worse due to capitalism, and thus our misery won’t end until that system is violently overthrown. They always portrayed themselves as in poor mental health but said it was simply a rational response to modern life (again, due to capitalism). In general, everything about the subculture was designed to repel the normies on both side of the aisle, asserting that everything loved by Middle America (religion, cops, the military, nice cars, big houses, hamburgers) is, if you think about it, a form of literal genocide. 

Add to this drumbeat of guilt a reflexive ridicule and dismissal of any expression of joy or happiness, Pargin continues, and you get--well, a whole younger demographic of men (not women, tho? and probably he means white men?) rejecting what the left has to offer:

Politics is always just a backlash to a backlash and when young men surged to the right in 2024, you only needed about five minutes on social media to realize the online left’s pitch to those men had become absolute dogshit. Regardless of what any actual candidate was saying, what young men heard/perceived was:

“Come join the Left and be miserable! Listen to us talk endlessly about how awful your demographic is and how you should keep your mouth shut unless it’s to apologize! Abandon any hope for the future, as you either need to become poorer to protect the environment, or endure the horrors of climate disaster! Relentlessly police your own language according to rules that change hourly and be prepared to be totally ejected from your personal and professional network the second anyone even accuses you of stepping out of line! If you criticize any aspect of the above, that means you’re a literal Nazi! And don’t worry about the crushing malaise, that’s just a sign that you’re a Good Person Who Cares!”

Now, there's lots of this criticism that strikes me as partial to completely off base. 

First, briefly: clinical depression is real, and it isn't always or necessarily simply a reaction made of Weltschmerz. Moreover, there were plenty of no-fooling, actually traumatic triggers for depression in the late 2010s and early 2020s. (COVID, anyone?)

On another level, I'm weary of 2024 election postmortems that participate in the left-blaming chorus of Well, what could independents and right-leaning people do? The left was so horrible that they had no choice but to support someone like Trump. That's Murc's Law in action: "Only Democrats have agency or causal influence in US politics." Conservatives and independents are hopelessly reactive, like animals, goes this line of thinking. Holding them to the same standard of self-reflection and critical thinking as we do the left is foolish. We should know better, but we can't expect them to. I do not excuse Trump voters (or even "I just don't like either side" folk) of responsibility for supporting the leopard currently ripping off all our collective faces. (I'm deeply--alarmingly--furious at them, but that's a post for another time.)

Finally: hyperbole aside, our capitalist system really is lethal for vast swathes of people, especially folk outside of the protections of US citizenship. There are literal genocides--or near enough--going on right now, directly supported by US arms and monies. Future generations will curse us mightily for our collective capitulation to global warming. Even in the US, we countenance--even praise!--a great deal of suffering for groups we deem ignorable (unhoused people, the elderly, disabled folk, those who live in vulnerable places) and/or hate-worthy (the poor, the incarcerated, non-citizens). I don't think the existence of those less well off justifies constant self-flagellation. But neither am I good with passive acceptance of mass immiseration in the here and now.

That said. . .

Pargin scores some palpable hits when he notes how performative misery at one's lot in life (late capitalist Weltschmerz) seems like the only viable position for anyone who lands on the "privileged" side of the room after a "privilege walk" exercise. (And there's no one living in the US who isn't privileged in at least one dimension.) Even as books like White Women's Tears castigate the white women having tears for their misery and solipsistic guilt, there's just no other or better affective position for activists on offer in the social justice space. 

This is a problem some scholars spotted early on in with privilege discourse: what exactly are privileged folk supposed to do with the knowledge of their privilege? Systemic inequities are systemic. Most of the time individuals aren't able to snap their fingers and magically become unprivileged. Nor is that always the desired outcome. The point is to spread the goods of liberal democracy to everyone. The point is to make privileges like access to healthcare or livable wages rights that everyone enjoys, not get rid of them altogether. The danger is that privilege discourse--especially the corporate-workshop-for-sale style that became so popular around 2020--does nothing but encourage repeated, empty gestures of "confessing" one's privilege. Gestures of confession--and miserable guilt.

Sure, aside from guilt/misery/Weltschmerz there's righteous anger now and then (for those who are not privileged). But (A) righteous anger is a fuel that burns hot and quick but doesn't last long, and (B) righteous anger gets in the way of signalling solidarity with those groups who aren't more privileged than yours.

I agree with Pargin, in other words, that, if the left is to regain power, it needs something more appealing than misery and guilt and Weltschmerz.

Resisting the Urge to Retreat

 I'm pausing my Monday class preparations/administrative tasks in order to write a message to my senators and representatives. I imagine I'll be doing a lot of that for the foreseeable future. 

Today's ask is for some kind of oversight/check on Elon Musk and his (unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent) "DOGE" operation, which appears to be taking over key avenues of funding, appropriation, and HR in the federal government.

Dear [person]--

I write to express my alarm about the actions of Elon Musk's "DOGE" initiative. Access to sensitive personnel and administrative data and communication channels has traditionally been restricted to people who have been thoroughly vetted, regularly reviewed, and transparently accountable. I see no such safeguards or oversight for DOGE thus far.

Think how the GOP would feel if the situation were reversed. What if a Democratic president brought in a team of billionaire "experts" (who also happen to be some of the president's biggest funders) and their staff to restructure government to the extent we've seen DOGE attempting? What if that president granted this team free reign to access, take over, and reshape huge swathes of government--all without the slightest hint of security clearance, transparent mission parameters, or congressional accountability? What if any employee objecting to granting access/authority to such unknowns were summarily dismissed? Surely the floor of both houses overflow with denunciations, protective legislation, and investigative committees.

A decade ago, former Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton came under heavy fire--rightfully so--for using a private email server. How are DOGE's actions thus far not orders of magnitude more reckless and foolhardy?

Musk and his associates are accustomed to private enterprises in which they are unquestioned bosses. They get to move fast and break things at their whim--in their own companies. But in the USA, we elect representatives to a government that divides the power of the sword and the strings of the purse between different branches. It is the job of the legislative branch to act as a check on executive actions. 

In that spirit, then, I ask that you assert such oversight over DOGE. No one elected Musk. No Congressional body approved his team's operational protocol and limitations. And as far as I can tell, no Congressional committee has asserted its right to review, question, or overrule his decisions. 

This is unacceptable. Musk and DOGE must make themselves open to review, approval, modification, and challenge by Congress and the people that body represents. I ask you to act as the mechanism for that check.

Thank you,

[my name]

I don't expect this to have any immediate effect beyond putting me on the fundraising mailing lists (and perhaps other kinds of lists) for my overwhelmingly MAGA-red representatives. I'm doing this mainly for me, to force myself into some kind of action when my impulse is to curl up into a despair-ball.

That'll have to be enough for today.

Moving Fast and Breaking Everything

 I'll say this for the Trump II Administration: they're living up to their promise to do a lot of things all at once. 

Trump declared today that his long-rumored Tariffs Against Everyone (Canada, Mexico, China) start tomorrow. Folk on  excitable (but not necessarily wrong) left websites. Musk has apparently taken over HR servers at the Office of Personnel Management, reinforcing "go on your dream vacation by resigning now" emails to government employees. Federal websites are being purged of information about HIV, trans care, climate change, and other Trump-no-like-them topics. Trump is doubling down--without a shred of proof or justification--on the notion that DEI is to blame for the air disaster on Wednesday night. NSF grant processes still seem frozen. The CDC is prevented from communicating about HIV/AIDS, and CDC employees were frantically archiving data from its webpages before they're purged. We seem on the brink of voting in anti-vax, anti-medical-research Robert F. Kennedy as HSS Secretary (threatening iffy GOP Senators like Bill Cassidy if they don't confirm him). The DOJ fired dozens of employees involved in prior Trump-focused investigations, and the FBI is readying a purge of all FBI folk involved in investigating Trump's multiple crimes. The ICE raids continue, now with talk of deporting those arrested to Guantanamo.

I'm not even mentioning everything. Not two weeks in, and Trump shoves down our collective throats a multiple-constitutional-crises-at-once shot with a ruin-the-economy-as-quickly-as-possible chaser.

My guess is that they're betting on a combination of reliable propaganda dissembling (from Fox News et al.) and just plain exhaustion to make this all seem normal. But I have trouble seeing how, for example, driving out 70% of federal workers will do anything but cause basic governmental collapse. Nothing will work. Trump will have broken the government. 

I get that's what some of his supporters want--or at least what many of them think they want. The right since Reagan at least has ginned up deep hatred of government while at the same time fomenting ignorance about just what the government is and what it does. Will people like it when (for example) their tax returns take longer to come in right as prices are skyrocketing, interstates degrade, air traffic control disappears, medicare and social security admin grinds to a halt, etc., etc.?

The hopes I see on the left right now involve faith in the millions of brave/industrious government workers doing . . . things?  . . . to preserve vital pieces of government informational infrastructure, like scientists storing seeds underground to replant after the apocalypse passes. There's some thought, also, that swift legal challenges can freeze or slow a lot of Trump's plans. And then there's the grim, leopards-eating-faces schadenfreude hope vested in the inevitable "find out" phase that's coming (perhaps as early as next week!) after all this f-ing around. 

Surely, this line of hopeful thinking goes, Trump won't be able to deflect blame for the immediate and painful consequences of choices made by his move-fast-and-break-everything crew. Surely popular backlash will come for him. The cost of doing so many things all at once--loudly and publicly--is that you burn away any scrap of plausible deniability. You can't claim that it's not your fault when you boasted about doing all the things.

Surely.

I don't know. As long as Trump can convince his base that he's doing this most to the groups that deserve it (marginalized folk, brown folk, immigrants, queer folk, poor folk), I think his base will swallow it. As long as the billionaires he's surrounded himself with perceive continued profit for themselves, I think his funders will support it. As long as the politicians he's wrapped around his fingers see their careers as reliant on him, I think they'll allow it.

And schadenfreude? I don't anticipate much of that. The leopards dine on everyone's faces, not just those of the ones who voted them into power. Hard to say "I told you so" when you're shrieking through the jagged hole where your lips used to be.

Rough times ahead.

The Fragility of Outrage and the Necessity of Attention and Joy

 It's the day before the presidential inauguration. The left-progressive sites and thinkers I follow brim today with advice for those of us dreading the next four years. Most of it boils down to "don't give in to despair" and "make a joyful practice part of your daily life." 

The Guardian featured advice from various folk. Ece Temelkuran (a veteran of Erdogan's takeover in Turkey) urges vigilance: This time around, she writes,

you’ll notice that the new morality created in the White House trickles down to the people. The fundamental moral values you assumed were non-negotiable will be debated shamelessly. They will not right away cancel women’s rights, but they will begin to float questions about those rights. They will not destroy the rule of law tomorrow afternoon, but you’ll hear Trump’s pundits say how courts are slowing down the process of “making America great again”. Trump will not walk into the White House with military boots, but here and there, you’ll see more police violence on campuses and hear people saying, “Well, the protesters were crossing the line anyway.” The political debate will be turned into such a mess that you’ll forget that in the 21st century, fascism comes to power not with goose steps but through elaborate dance moves.

This echoes counsel from the last round in 2017: Keep insisting, This is not normal. One of the hard lessons I learned from the last four years relates to the fragility of moral shock and outrage. So many of us thought that January 6, 2021, signaled the End of Trump as a serious player in US politics. The white supremacist fascist undercurrents so many of us saw in his MAGA populism finally breached the surface, breaking windows, beating up security personnel, and claiming the rotunda for themselves. He can't come back from that, surely. 

Oh, but he could. Oh, but he did. The Orwellian rewrite of Jan 6 and of Trump/MAGA demonstrates how weak even the hottest outrage is given time. Trump will be sworn in in the same rotunda that the Q-Anon Shaman occupied four years ago. 

And I get that we have to balance This is not normal! with a serenity-prayer awareness of those things that are not in our control. I don't say we should accept this shift, but we at least must endure it, adapt to it.

Temelkuran again:

Meanwhile, in about one or two years, you will have shouted “No” so often and against so many things that you will be exhausted. Many will ask again, “So, where is hope?” However, you’ll realise that this time, it is not hope but something more essential that is lost: faith – in politics and your people. And that is the loss that will turn you into a neutral element, a zero in the political equation.

So, this is a friendly warning to stop the emotional spiralling in its early stages. Try to put self-sabotaging emotions in the freezer for four years. Your job is not to have quarrels with Trump supporters now or get pissed off with your side. If I may, your job is to replace your anger with attention. Trump surely will drive you crazy every day with new outlandish stuff, but that is only showmanship. The dangerous bit happens through the change in the institutions. Keep your eye on the institutions.

Loss of faith, she says, is somehow worse even than loss of hope. It reminds me of my psychotherapist sister's distinction between burnout (you're working to hard/doing too much) and demoralization (you no longer believe in the worth or goodness of the thing/institution you work for). Demoralization strikes harder, deeper, she says, because we can't self-care our way out of this loss of faith. 

"Replace anger with attention." I think of my favorite quote from Dorothy Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity." Brady Whitton (pastor at First UMC in Baton Rouge) calls curiosity--focused, open attention--one of the few things that can get us out of the armadillo-ball defensive curl caused by fear, hate, anomie, and acedia.

Attention taxes energy reserves, though. I can't keep my sensors fully open all the time, not when a proven tactic of Trump, Inc. involves broadcasting polluted messaging. By design, the firehose of falsehoods where truth gets mixed up with nonsense chaff and toxicity, attempts to burn out our capacity for attention and curiosity. The defense here involves cultivating protective respite. We require joy-causing (non-useful! non-productive!) practices not as some kind of luxurious self care but as essential spiritual nutrition. 

I'm gonna try to get some of that in today and tomorrow, letting myself think on better things (MLK's legacy, for instance) than the coming freeze.

Dear Representative

Dear Representative Graves:

I'm JF, a constituent of yours here in Baton Rouge. I write to register my support for the articles of impeachment currently moving through the House Judiciary Committee.

A quick perusal of your website does not yield any information about your stance about impeachment. I assume, however, that like most Republicans you lean toward voting down the articles.

I don't know the extent to which your eventual vote on this issue will stem from a personal conviction (you sincerely oppose impeachment) versus a political calculation (it would be political suicide for you to vote for impeachment). Thus, I'm not sure what kind of argument, if any, you or your staff would find persuasive.

To be frank, I don't have a lot of hope in writing this note.

Polarization around this issue, as around so many others, makes rational discussion of this issue seem impossible. The question seems instead to boil down to pure tribalism: whose side are you on? Reds or blues? This fundamental question, this basic animosity, seems to determine all other political actions and interactions. Blues like me in districts with red-leaning politicians wonder whether our representatives truly represent us, just as I know reds who live in blue districts do. I don't know how a democracy functions with such mutual distrust.

It seems plain that the President has at least attempted to use the power of his office to benefit his personal political interests. It likewise seems incontestable that he has flatly refused to cooperate with House inquiries into this attempt by ignoring subpoenas and using lawsuits as delaying tactics.

I would like to think that, were the President a Democrat, I would support the House taking steps to hold him accountable for these same actions.

I don't know, though. That's a high ethical bar to hurdle, to move against the political fortunes of my own party. It might be that in such a hypothetical reality I would fall back on rationales that preserve my sense of integrity while letting my President's unethical acts slide. I'm only human, as motivated by tribalism as anyone.

Challenged to hold a Democratic President accountable, I might complain about the process, pointing to longstanding and vocal anti-President sentiment by many in the opposing party. I might insist that we must wait until the next election. I could equivocate about whether the President can be held accountable for a manipulation attempt that did not succeed. Perhaps I would argue against all evidence that the President was merely interested in combating Ukrainian corruption generally rather than targeting his primary opponent specifically. Most cynically, I could just declare that using the Presidency to advance personal interests over national interests is something everyone does now. "Just get over it."

Or if all else fails, I might concede that, yeah, the President's attempt was problematic, but it doesn't justify impeachment.

In that hypothetical scenario, though, I would be stuck with an uncomfortable question: would I be OK if the other team's President did exactly what my own did? I would not. I am not.

The only hope I have in writing you, Representative Graves, lies your own basic answer to that ethical question: would you be perfectly OK with the President's actions if they had been committed by a President Clinton or a President Obama? Failing to hold the President accountable now all but guarantees that the next administration--Republican, Democrat, or otherwise--will have carte blanche to maneuver against their personal opponents in whatever way they wish while simply ignoring Congressional checks and balances.

I hope you will vote to support impeachment. But beyond hope, I recognize my duty to communicate my convictions to you. President Trump has committed impeachable offenses. It is Congress's job to function as a check and balance. I hope you will do so.

Sincerely,

JF