Nobody Trusts Anybody Now, And We’re All Very Tired

9PM. That was when I first dared to look. I had seen the New York Times election forecaster recommended to me by someone whose judgment in these matters I trusted (never again), and saw Clinton given an 80% chance of victory on the probability scale, constantly oscillating with nervous energy, like the outward manifestation of my own trembling fear. I thought going into the night that I would commit my undivided attention to every moment of the night, that I would process every bit of information coming down the chute on arrival. But even then, when I still had every reason to believe in a Clinton victory, I turned away. My heart was pounding in its chest, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take the strain all night. I decided I wouldn’t check back in until 11 o’clock, reminded of all the times I had purposely missed basketball games because I knew the stress would be more than it was worth to watch. At the time, those two hours seemed interminable, unbearable, like I was living out my own version of Cléo from 5 to 7. In retrospect, they were my last moments of a life that still held a shred of belief, of optimism, of innocence. They were the calm before the storm, only it was an existential calm rather than a physical one. Not the true existential calm of thinking everything was OK, but the relative calm of thinking that something was. I still didn’t believe it could happen.

Then 11 hit. 10:56, actually, I just couldn’t wait any longer. I refreshed the election page, I saw that probability scale, that stupid fucking irrelevant graphic that will haunt me for the next four years, and time stopped. It was an out-of-body experience. A horror-movie, oh-shit-I-just-slept-through-my-final-exam, the-wings-are-on-fire-we’re-gonna-die five-alarm panic. 94%, Trump wins. Over 200 electoral votes. In that moment, all injustices, angers and absurdities past and future converged in my brain, like the horrifying climax to a nightmare that doesn’t wake you up.

A past of 18 months of campaigning, punditry and cultural obsession, each more soul-crushing than the last. A past in which a clown car of incompetent, hateful fearmongers turned the race for a presidential nomination by one of America’s major political parties into a game of competitive embarrassment, except for the one that was incompetent at everything but hate and fearmongering. A past like an extended Ludovico technique session, only we wouldn’t have wanted to look away even if we could. The memories are too many to count- Jeb!’s ever-increasing misery and Oedipal desperation, Scott Walker’s Koch-funded humiliation, Ben Carson’s constant half-dormancy of both mind and body. When Jindal told his kids he was running and they looked at him like he was an idiot (which he is). That time Lindsey Graham smashed his cell phone with a baseball bat. As impossible as it sounds, we’re viewing these through rose-colored glasses now, trying to look at them without seeing the overwhelming shadow enveloping them. Because eventually it stopped being funny. It never should have been, but the again it always will be. Eventually, the election was less like watching a Christopher Guest film and more like when a sex scene comes on in a movie you’re watching with your parents. Everyone says that the election was a reality show, because Trump is a reality star. Every election is a reality show. This was a fucking John Waters and Paul Verhoeven collaboration with hundreds of millions of lives at stake.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Trump is really anything special. Hillary, eternal misunderstander of national attitudes that she is, tried to convince us otherwise. She painted normal, non-endorsing Republicans as upstanding, honest public servants with whom she shared almost arbitrary political differences. She ignored the decades of nativism and anti-black sentiments the party has sowed, the near-genocidal extent to which they destroyed young black men through economic abandonment and the creation of a carceral state, the demonization of the LGBT community, the climate change denial, the willing destruction of the economy in the name of pleasing the wealthy, the cynical exploitation of post-9/11 fears to wage a racist, corporate, illegal war. She ignored the fact that the ideology of Trump is the subtextual ideology of Reagan and Bush made text.

But why wouldn’t she do that? Ignore the fact that those are many of the exact frustrations that caused her the election, because she either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the real motivating factors of the American people. Why wouldn’t she? Her and her husband came to power on the back of neoliberal politics, on the idea that they could slide through on vagaries like “economic growth” without offering any substantive change or distributive justice to the American masses (back then, it worked). Her and Bill were as complicit in the War on Drugs as anyone, as the infamous 1994 crime bill has made clear. She didn’t support same-sex marriage until it was fashionable. She voted for the fucking Iraq War, something which her liberal advocates are willing to easily forgive despite the fact that I knew it was wrong at 6 years old and that she hasn’t shown any signs of losing her taste for eternal war. Trump was perfect because it allowed her to write off policy; to separate character from political record. When a new racist or sexist indignation arrives every few days, all she had to do was coat her own shortcomings with dignity.

And that’s the other part of the past that came rushing back to me, the one that stung even more. I knew what to expect from Republicans, but the betrayal of the Democratic Party hurts on a personal level. I had to sit by and watch as the most progressive candidate in generations, the first one to expose the true moral and even practical simplicity of American social injustice, was condemned as a hopeless dreamer. Saying that we should maybe operate like the rest of the developed world made him just another crackpot commie. The subtext, of course, was that things can’t be perfect, so we shouldn’t try to make them meaningfully better. It didn’t even matter to the Democratic establishment that their undermining of Bernie Sanders was a wrong practically as well as ethically, divorcing themselves from one of the most popular candidates with youth in history, who had far better numbers against Trump than Hillary. It was limousine liberalism in its fullest form- not even concerned with winning elections anymore, just with keeping their status unchallenged.

And so Hillary won. And so did Trump. And thus began a historically incompetent campaign from the candidate we had heard all along was the better choice because of her unerring political savvy. Her team responded to Trump’s suggestions that Hillary was Satan, that she should be in jail, and that her and Obama singlehandedly created ISIS with pithy, punch-pulling denunciations of his bigotry. I don’t think she ever actually called him a racist, actually. Liberalism in 2016 is placing sticking to the dignified rules of political discourse above defeating fascism.

So instead, she flaunted her Lin-Manuel Miranda and Lena Dunham endorsements, she asked me how I felt about my student debt in 3 fucking emojis. She took the baffling attack angle of painting Trump as a Russian stooge, as if anyone in the country actually believes or cares about that. There is no shortage of people to blame for what’s happened, and I certainly don’t absolve myself, but anyone not identifying Clinton and the Democratic establishment as chief offenders won’t be much help in the future.

Oh right, the future. Such as it is. I get that I haven’t said much about Trump much yet, partly because there isn’t much left to say, but partly because I’m afraid to say it. He is so deeply broken inside, so fiercely mentally ill, so sociopathic in his need not only to win but to humiliate those he defeats, so Jeb-like in his daddy issues, so truly and unabashedly and purely evil. He operates like a Neo-Nazi abattoir, with the real concerns and frustrations of the American people coming in and being hacked, sliced, and ground into racist, misogynistic, fascistic viscera. Sinclair Lewis said that fascism would come to America wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross; he got the flag right, but the cross is burning. If Vladimir Putin wasn’t the hyper-masculine, hyper-competent, universally respected and feared ideal self that lodges itself somewhere in the Freudian recesses of his toxic mind we would be one the brink of a nuclear holocaust at any moment. The reality of life under Trump hasn’t come close to setting in, the idea of being represented by and subject to the guy who both denied black people housing because of the color of their skin and who tweeted that Kristen Stewart would cheat on Robert Pattinson. The only way to try to imagine it, painful as it may be, is through concrete policy effects, which now have to take into account the fact that Paul Ryan may actually be the most dangerous person in the world.

Essentially: goodbye to Obamacare (a mess, but a huge step in the right direction) and any momentum towards universal healthcare, hello Martin Shkrelis past, present and future. Goodbye to Planned Parenthood, hello to a conservative Supreme Court inclined to overturning Roe v. Wade. On that note, goodbye same-sex marriage, hello Citizens United. Goodbye climate change action, hello increased deportations of families and children. Goodbye legitimate progressive taxation, hello corporate tax cuts. Goodbye stable infrastructure and social programs, hello austerity. Goodbye police reform, hello Trump-endorsing Fraternal Order of Police. Goodbye effective unions, hello right to work laws. Goodbye education reform and college affordability, hello torture. Goodbye Voting Rights Act (what’s left of it), hello Republican-led redistricting. Goodbye refugees, hello war crimes.

I know what you’re thinking. He can’t do all this himself. And, despite the constant expansion of executive power over the last few decades (and the last 8 years in particular), you’re right. Maybe you’re even thinking that his GOP-controlled Congress will resist some of the more heinous measures. That’s where you’re wrong. These people don’t have principles. They’ll all bend the knee soon enough, it’s who they are. The only reason they didn’t is because they thought he would lose and wanted the same moral high ground as Clinton once the dust had settled. One can only hope the moral arc of their universe bends toward justice, a swift and merciless justice that never dulls the edges of what they’ve done, what they’re going to do.

And so here we are, turning inwards while we still can, trying to find what virulent pathogen embedded this sickness so deeply inside of us. Ever since the reality of Trump became apparent, coastal media elites have made a hobby out of trying to diagnose what it was that brought us to (now, past) the brink of the unthinkable. We’ve heard it all before, like a song that gets stuck in your head precisely because of how much you hate it: How much empathy can we afford Trump voters? Is it economic anxiety or racism driving them? If it’s the former, why are Trump voters mostly concentrated in higher income brackets? If it’s the latter, why did Trump win by swaying two-time Obama voters?

The answer, of course, is because neither of these can be understood without the other, that racism shouldn’t be spoken of as individual value, rather as a structural feature of our neoliberal capitalist society. Voting for Obama doesn’t make someone completely not racist, just as voting for Trump doesn’t make someone completely racist. Surely most Trump voters are what we should consider “racists,” and surely racism was a (probably the) primary agent of his support. But it was also the widespread, cross-demographic hatred of Hillary and the establishment she represents to an even greater degree than Obama, rejected by voters for many of the right reasons and just as many of the wrong ones. Maybe we’ll have to find a way to sway some of these voters without acquiescing to xenophobic scapegoating, maybe we’ll just have to motivate enough non-voters to cancel them out. Hillary seems to have won the popular vote by at least a million votes, and it’s hard to imagine a worse candidate than her. But a solution is necessary, and it’s clear that that solution lies in true, organized, anti-establishment leftism, the only type of movement that can provide an energized and populist rebuff of Trump’s fascism.

And make no mistake, he is a fascist. It’s not a buzzword, it’s not hyperbole, it’s what he is. From his policies to his methods to his psychology, fascism is the clear and objective historical precedent for his brand of leadership. But Trump’s fascism is different from our traditional conception of it- it’s not driven by his racial hatred (present in spades, but not what gets him out of bed), his anger at the government, or his nationalistic fervor. Rather, it’s borne solely out of a constant need to achieve the ever-higher levels of prestige and glorification that possesses his every waking moment. It’s his need to prove himself to his father, to have the last laugh against the elites who have never taken him seriously, to convince himself that people like him, that he likes himself. It’s fascism for its own sake, authoritarianism seeking nothing but authority. And it’s not limited to the United States. As the failures of late capitalism and the pressures of the migrant crisis intensify around the globe, the Donald Trumps and Marine Le Pens of the world will continue to present ever-increasing dangers to global democracy and international stability.

I don’t presume to know how to fight it. I don’t even know why I wrote this. I feel like Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, trying to do something about the hunk of concrete in my stomach. I can only hope that we never fall into complacency, that we never allow this overwhelming feeling of hopelessness to bludgeon us into a dull, normalizing submission. There will be dark days ahead- some of the darkest in our history. The only thing I can do is look to that “if only millennials had voted” map, to hope that we’ll be vigilant enough to oppose this man and this movement as fiercely every day for the next 4 years as we do today. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the promise of a revitalized left unbeholden to the strictures of contemporary liberalism. It’s not even a political dream anymore, it’s a humanist one. Maybe it’s a lie, but it’s all I’ve got.