Election night is almost here. The text messages will stop. The canvassers will have no more doors to knock. For those who care enough to know, they will be glued to their televisions, drowning in an avalanche of county level data and the bravado of political talking heads. All the noise will be sucked up into a nervous void of fear giving way to hope and hope edging on nervousness, then giving way to mild sickness and impending doom, then back again to the beginning, and over again in a matter of just a few hours. We’re in for a whirlwind.
For a long time I had trouble understanding how the race could be so close. In a rational world, where people have a solid grasp of the core issues and their consequences, Harris would win in a landslide, carrying all fifty states. I’m not naive. I know we don’t live in that world. I used to think the reason a clownish figure like Trump could be popular was because our electorate was politically dim. The guy that looks, talks, and acts like a grifter is obviously a grifter. There’s no mystery there. Playing a role on television isn’t the same thing as being that thing. Even if a person is successful in one role, in this case the role of a successful business person, it doesn’t translate to matters of state. Only in late empire would a the admixture of a reality show character and mostly private business failure be seen and accepted as the ideal resume to lead a nation. The job is like no other in the world and the reason that every other president has worked their way through a series of formative policy related jobs of escalating responsibilities is because it requires nuanced understanding of myriad issues and the skills to navigate a complex world of competing ideas and desires. I don’t think enough people appreciate what it requires. Our culture, the constant beam of imagery that reinforces our pretensions, trains us to think everything is simple or anyone can be an expert with the right platform. But that’s only a part of the story.
The reason I think the election is so close is this is the first post-reality election. An election where one political party is living in a world divorced from the real world and promulgated by an alternate, mostly personalized media ecosystem that simultaneously feeds and gets nourishment from the crazy train of conspiracies and invented reality. In 2016 and 2020 we had post-truth elections. Trump would lie with almost every breath and a series of fact checkers would publish a detailed accounting of every utterance. We maintained a sense that the lies were very real and refutable, but also normalized as standard political discourse of the right. We could agree on a shared reality even if one party refused to engage within the political arena on the merits of their cause or using language tethered to that shared reality. That was when journalism had a very specific meaning. Trained citizens collected facts, verified them, and reported them out through various channels. It was boring and necessary. It was the first draft of history and imperfect. New facts would be collected and we, as citizens, became smarter, if we cared to be, about a shared reality we didn’t have to experience to understand as being true. That doesn’t exist anymore. There is no one shared narrative about core facts.
Instead we have multiple narratives, some bearing no relation to objective reality. There are three issues in the election that everyone is talking about: bodily autonomy or personal rights, the economy, and immigration. We didn’t land on these issues because people magically woke up one day and realized these were the biggest issues in our society and had to be the dividing line of our election. Political campaigns always try to make elections about things they see as being in their favor. This isn’t that. Each of these three issues illustrates how there is an objective fact based world of real life circumstances and other extraneous, post-reality battle lines that we are forced to discuss even though they aren’t real. Our discourse treats the real and post-real issues the same way. It has permeated the most staid of establishment news operations. In their zeal to be neutral they’ve moved the debate to a center that is unrecognizable to any objective, rational person.
Bodily autonomy is a real existential issue. It’s a right we’ve enjoyed in this country for fifty years until a right-wing judiciary, one-third appointed by Trump, delivered on a reactionary project they were hellbent on seeing to completion since at least the nineteen eighties. Everyone is subject to this new reality and it’s a major political issue as a result. What rose in the place of Roe is a hodgepodge of state laws, many of which are so draconian that women lack any agency over their own bodies. There has been a natural wave of women forcing back the creeping repression, but it hasn’t been enough. The right-wing project doesn’t stop at state-level solutions. It steamrolls rights on the way to federal legislative or, if needed, judicial bans on all abortions, no matter the circumstance. This isn’t some fiction contrived as an election year cudgel. It’s laid out in clear terms by prominent “conservative intellectuals” as the end goal. People understand that and are actively fighting against the imposition of a minority view.
Contrasting that real issue with the economy we get a different perspective on the race. By any objective measure we are living through a thriving economy. Job growth has been strong. The stock market is setting records. Wages are up. Inflation is lower in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world. But that’s not the where most of the right lives. They have “alternate” facts. Which is to say they live in a parallel reality. Their preferred entertainment outlets and social media algorithms provide a steady stream of negative economic news, mostly related to inflation, that they can’t discern fact from fiction. At least once a week I see someone complain how much things cost today versus their all-time pandemic low like prices exist in a vacuum and the pandemic didn’t bring the economy to screeching halt. They never offer context for how their pay has changed as well or their overall well-being has improved in this economy. Now, is everyone thriving? Of course not. I’m not sure it ever has. I do know some working class people could be doing better, but the information world they live in, forces them to blame the wrong people. Unions and collective bargaining make all workers stronger. The ultra-rich spend tens of millions supporting campaigns and balk at marginal increases to their tax rates. Instead of advocating for collective action and taxing the ultra-wealthy as just two simple solutions, people rally around populist rhetoric that manifests as nothing more than resentment for marginalized races and groups.
Which brings us to the third issue: immigration. Anyone that lives in a pluralistic city knows that immigrants are key part of the social and economic fabric of the modern America. Even honest brokers in rural areas know how important their labor is to industry. Immigration is a net positive for the economy and our country in general terms. The reason we can’t get to comprehensive immigration reform is because the right needs immigrants to be the boogeyman lurking around the suburban corner of the conservative mind. Immigration isn’t about the value of the immigrants themselves. It’s about ginning up false crime narratives and instilling fear. It’s about naked racism and nativism. The rightwing ecosystem is all coded language and euphemisms. People get fed a steady diet of immigrant caravans that somehow materialize every election season and anomalous violent crimes committed by random immigrants. The reality is that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crime and more likely to positively contribute to the communities in which they live. It’s a made up issue we’re forced to talk about constantly because the inherent fear embedded in the crime and race argument motivates some voters. Sometimes I wonder if the most ardent anti-immigration Trump supporters have ever met an immigrant. I think it’s very possible in the states where Trump is most popular. If that’s the case they are just scared of an “other” that was manufactured for them.
The post-reality theory I think explains Trump’s support among the rank and file of the Republican Party. They are on the train because their tribe put them there without their knowledge. Some will wake up one day and wonder why they were zombies for so long. Others will be comfortable not knowing any better. But why do the others play the game? I mean the people that can see the bullshit for what it is and still decide to fall in line. I don’t think it’s fear. Maybe it is for politicians, but not for corporate leaders and right wing media personalities (not elites, or intellectuals, but personalities). It’s something I’ve thought about a lot when I read justifications for their tepid support or vacillation from anti-Trumper to pro-Trumper or vice versa. For the corporate leaders I think it’s driven by a severe lack of empathy and drive to attain more power and money at all costs. There is no elaborate calculation. It’s all impulse and craven pursuit of lucre above everything else. For the media personalities – the writers, podcasters, tv talking heads – there is a different set of justifications. They are committed to their own relevance over the merit of any ideology or position. It’s a game of winning and “owning the libs” on any issue they could be on both sides of in the same breath as long as the most incendiary and detestable person is leading the chorus. Conservatism doesn’t really mean all that much to them. They much prefer imposing their narrow and draconian views on people rather than earning it. These two groups, more than any other, is the cadre of retrograde thinkers forever pining to implement their bizarre and unpopular views on late empire America. They hate you, which is to say just about everyone, and by the luck of a late empire culture that hates facts and anyone that has mastered them, they have convinced a wide swath of people to join them in their sad crusade to eat the host country whose dreams they exalt for themselves and will fight to deny everyone else.
Take that to the ballot box and send the budding fascists back to their caves and basements never to be heard from again!
