it’s taken me a while to process what happened with the presidential election. My default position on almost anything is pessimistic. I look at the world and see indifference to the unfortunate, celebration of belligerence, intermediated communities, religious reverence for celebrity, and every other manifestation of late empire society. It’s the only lens which I think makes sense to observe and critique this moment in history. But I was still convinced that enough of our country, even with all its flaws and divisions, would choose the only ethical, moral, and qualified candidate on the ballot. I assumed there was a quiet majority of rational people spread across the country that could save us from the brink of fascism. I thought we were France or Germany, other global leaders, who’ve seen similar far-right political movements beaten back by pragmatic popular movements. We take our exceptionalism very seriously. For many Americans exceptionalism is a birthright, a license to be dim and confident. It’s the crutch we all carry to justify how far many of us are from the ideals we idolize as school children and immediately forget when convenient.
The piece I wrote before the election was about post-reality, and its very clear influence on the election. The more I’ve had time to back away from most political news and look at things with clear eyes the more I’m convinced that I was right, but only up to a point. I thought we were in a post-reality political moment. Now I’m convinced it’s more pervasive than that. We live in a country where most people don’t know the difference between an authoritative source and a random person’s opinion. Where years of study in arcane subjects is sacrificed at the altar of lowbrow entertainment and derivative clicks/scrolls/engagements. Where feelings carry the weight of facts. Where atomized existence and our narrow windows into the larger worlds create narratives, ideologies, and entrenched beliefs unmoored from objective reality. This is where late empire culture has led us headfirst into a hall of mirrors. Reality isn’t something we share. It’s a story, invented, amplified and wielded.
I find a lot of the myopic “analysis” and “learning” coming from pundits unnerving. It’s as if we have two political parties and a media ecosystem that hasn’t changed in four, eight, or even twenty or thirty years. The same tropes from the people behind the scenes of campaigns are recycled constantly. Eight years ago Hilary Clinton allegedly didn’t visit swing states enough. Before that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton benefitted from triangulation, a moderates favorite term, which in practice means adopting hard right position on specific issues. Now we’re supposed to believe that Harris could have benefited from going on this or that right-wing podcast or she needed to distance herself from specific ideas or she didn’t get the benefit of a drawn out primary or she wasn’t the right candidate, whatever that means. These aren’t normal times and we didn’t have two normal candidates. Trump has served one wildly unsuccessful term as president and been agitating for the job ever since, but has yet to bother with learning very basic economic and political concepts. He wasn’t even trying to compete on real world problems and solutions. That’s why he chose not to debate Harris more than once and the Republican Party had no formal agenda. Grievance and scapegoating immigrants are more talking points than political platform.
What really happened over the last ten years is right wing media stopped engaging in losing debates and instead went off and developed their own reality, bound only by Trump and Trump acolyte approved discourse; a dumbing down of politics into a weird form of narrative theater. They decided they could have the debate they wanted only with themselves, and block out a wide swath of fact-based voices and important stories. People talk about media bubbles and this is the moment where one particular bubble became a perceived reality driving the outcome of elections. Why waste any time talking about the relative health of the American economy and comparing it to other developed countries? Instead you can run endless stories about the daily price of eggs, milk, whatever. None of it has to be accurate, it just has to “feel” that way. You can heighten every urban crime story, especially if immigrants are involved, at the expense of people gaining a more balanced understanding of the social fabric in pluralist parts of the country. Why spend any time pushing anything but draconian solutions to those made up problems to accentuate the immensity of them? Instead of debating the moral and ethical challenges to foreign policy, it can all be boiled down to an indictment of a single party, regardless of the facts on the ground. You can completely ignore every way Trump has broken the law or acted improperly with foreign and domestic leaders. Reality is whatever gets beamed into people’s homes and shows up on the social media algorithms.
Democrats have yet to learn that lesson. I’m not even sure it’s a good lesson to learn. Democrats and pundits generally aligned to the left could abandon all sense of reality and just invent lines of attack related to jobs, the economy, the treatment of women, equality of opportunity, social programs, and everything else where Republicans have very dark plans. They wouldn’t have to even try hard to do this. I’m sure the next administration will make it very easy. The key difference in a post-truth media world is they could stop looking for evidence of every accusation. The party tends to think and act rationally in an irrational world. They could just make it up like Republicans do. Of course it just exacerbates the larger late empire moment we find ourselves in, but it’s hard to imagine the alternative. Our collective investment in education has failed to keep pace with a post-truth runaway train that is never coming back to the station. We’re kind of stuck with this new world – the made-up phase of late empire.
This may seem a little far fetched or even alarmist, though I’m sure you can sense that a least some of what I’m saying is true. The best test is the one we get all the time. It’s the call and response of the right. They will make something up. Let’s use the election four years ago as the example. There was no credible evidence of election fraud or abnormalities anywhere in America. That is a verifiable fact. In right wing media, people were flooded with wild accusations and bizarre narratives that questioned the validity of the empirical results. After that onslaught of information you would see elected officials say things like “the people are very concerned about election security.” They put out the call, concocting a specific narrative then use people’s belief as validation to respond to that call with affirmation that the made up story means something to people. That rhetorical cycle has been used for inflation, covid, foreign policy, the overall state of the economy, and every other issue that was on the ballot in this last election.
The problem it presents is when there is no agreed upon objective reality then any response to a manufactured call is justified. And that’s where this all gets very scary very quickly. So what do I do? Or you? I do what I’ve always done – take solace in the arts, literature, and blow oxygen on the dying embers of real journalism wherever it still exists.
GLAZ 