Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
“In 1933, people were not fooled by propaganda. They elected a leader who openly disclosed his plans with great clarity. The Germans elected me… ordinary people who chose to elect an extraordinary man, and entrust the fate of the country to him.
“What do you want to do, Sawatzki? Ban elections?”
—Adolph Hitler, “Er Ist Wieder Da” (2015)
Pete Townshend’s prayer has gone unanswered.
The US Dollar is “surging” even as I type, along with shares in Bitcoin and Tesla. Wall Street opened at an all-time high. The world’s leaders, scared shitless, scramble over each other to fall in line and congratulate the new/old boss on his resurrection. The world’s tyrants and shitstains—Orban, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro— were of course at the front of the line[1], but even vacuous ineffectual bobbleheads like Canada’s own PM jump up and down like eager puppies, reminding Dear Leader of a friendship “united by a shared history, common values and steadfast ties between our peoples”. (And, as the BUG astutely remarked, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the alternate statements all these folks had doubtless prepared in the event that the merely mediocre candidate had triumphed over the apocalyptically bad one?)
Trump may not have spoken with the “great clarity” that Hitler commanded, but it’s not as if he hid his agenda. He won anyway, handily. I guess you really do get the government you deserve.
And yet, for all Trump’s hateful narcissistic idiocy, he’s not really the problem. Trump is merely a symptom. The problem is a political system that rewards the world’s Trumps with massive power and influence, instead of marginalizing them. A number of left-leaning ‘Murricans—most, I’d wager—seem to regard their homeland as a great nation, a shining experiment in liberty and democracy, that somehow lost its way. I tend to be less charitable. The US is a nation literally founded on invasion, slavery, and germ warfare—which is to say, it was born in the universal reality of human beings fucking each other over for a percentage. It is a global case-in-point of Homo so-called sapiens belying its own self-aggrandizing myths and behaving exactly like the social mammals we are: short-sighted apes, prioritizing the approval of the tribe over long-term consequences our intellects grasp dimly at best, and our guts reject outright. Facts don’t matter. Truth is not the survival trait. Conformity is: defense of the tribe, hatred of The Other.
U S A. U S A.
Is there hope? Perhaps a little: ironically, in the crushing of hope. Because despite what the hopepunks have been wittering on about all these years—despite the bromides about how we should stop writing dystopias and never say 1.5° is ‘unachievable’ because to do so would give in to paralyzing narratives of hopelessness and despair—we have evidence that the exact opposite is true. Ballew et al over at Nature report that “Climate change psychological distress is associated with increased collective climate action”. People who are bummed out and distressed about the state of the environment are more likely to get off their asses and do something than are all those cozy optimists who tell us to put on a happy face because We Live In The Greatest Nation On Earth and Things Will Work Out Somehow. Ballew et al show, at high levels of significance, that the Hope Police have have their heads up their asses.
This study, admittedly, did not explicitly deal with Gileads-in-the-making, with the unchecked power of demagogues or the stripping away of Human rights. It deals with our reaction to environmental havoc—and even if that’s all it applies to, I’m cool with it. I personally am more concerned about ecocide than Human rights. Treating each other like shit at least keeps our sins in the family—and frankly, given the contempt with which we treat the rest of the biosphere, I’m skeptical that Humans even deserve “rights” (we certainly don’t confer them unto anything else). Certainly, Trump’s victory has pretty much incinerated whatever faint hope we might still have had of turning things around environmentally. The world was already circling the toilet bowl on that front (and would doubtless have continued in that grim decaying orbit even if Harris had prevailed); Trump’s victory flushes it down for good.
I’d be very surprised, though, if activism was catalyzed only by distress of the environmental kind. Almost certainly, it also maps onto the social distress currently being experienced even by all those Democrats who, according to polls and campaign priorities, really don’t give a shit about climate change (at least, not relative to “the economy” or “the border”—remember how Harris flip-flopped on the whole fracking thing to appeal to her tribe?) Hell, how may pundits have already attributed Trump’s victory to the distress-induced activism of Magats who found themselves paying too much for groceries?
So maybe this will be the impetus for something. Maybe “the resistance” will be more than an ineffectual Star Wars call-out this time around.
Maybe. But I’m gonna start pitching in on building this Wall anyway.
And on the plus side, all those environmental dystopias I wrote back in the day are looking increasingly prophetic. Should give my street cred a bit of a boost, until the book banners burn through all that gender smut and start looking further afield…
Except for Putin, curiously. Putin seems to be staying relatively quiet. Almost as if he doesn’t need to kowtow, because he knows he’ll get what he wants without any embarrassing displays of self-abasement… ↑
Well, Dr. Watts, it is about to get very interesting here in Europe for sure in the next few years. All bets are off now, i wouldnt even put it beyond Trump to supply the russians with arms, or at the very least every single military secret he can carry to the kremlin in his grubby little hands.
Hell in my darker minutes i fear he might offer Vlad to join up in conquering Europe. “Musk-Lavrov-Pact”, sounds great, doesnt it?
As for Putin, why would he kowtow before his stooge, vassal and patsy? He has comrade Trump exactly where he wants him to be. If only Krushchev had known that all the soviets really needed to win the cold war was social media.
In some sick way this election even proved cathartic for me. I can finally give up the last dregs of hope for our biosphere, or that democracy actually works in the 21st century. And hey, my stock portfolio rose into the stratosphere, so i guess i can afford that bunker for the wife and the cat after all!
Hey, just as i was writing this our government dissolved and there will be new elections soonish in all probability. Perfect timing!
Well, the biosphere was fucked anyway. No one took all those climate pledges seriously, least of all the people making them. Can’t have higher gas prices impact folks’ Constitution-given right to die of cheap Doritos and Mountain Dew, after all. Or of stupidity, illness, and general misery.
If there’s a thread of light in it all, it’s the thought that General Fentanyl and General ‘Beetus will soon, ahem, “trim their numbers” anyway.
Seconded on the stock portfolio numbers! If OGH is right, and we only have 30 years or so before the Great Human Die-Off, the fam and I are definitely going out in style.
The US hasn’t hit rock bottom yet. We’ll have to suffer quite a bit before we bounce back. Maybe we can be an example to world in a different way.