THE ELECTION
WHAT WENT WRONG AND THE (UGH) BRAT BELLWETHER
I don’t style myself a particularly impassioned or even insightful interpreter of politics. But I guess there are some things I know.
It’s without any great pleasure that I write that my boyfriend and I were the only two people in our generally liberal orbit who predicted the outcome we saw in the early hours of November 6th. I was dismayed, but I was not surprised by this result. Now, with a Kamala Harris victory, I would have gladly embraced the revelation of a different world than the one I thought we were living in in this country. Oh, to think that I could be spending the last two days in a very different thought-world. In this alternate reality, I would be bracing myself not for the disorder, division, and fear of an administration past, but the utter banality and misguided policymaking of a world where some fundamental rights were without contest or debate. In this alternate reality, I would not be reminded of the split consciousness I used to have from 2016-2020: where for so many days one eye was trained on my life in my city and the other was turned toward Washington in watchful dread. In both timelines, I would be hopelessly depressed about the Middle East and angered by the delusions of the Democratic Party.
I think many pundits and, frankly, everyday people, knew Trump’s victory was the only possible endgame. Maybe you knew it deep down, too. Because even our culture of keyboard warriors and hot takes cannot fully explain the almost instantaneous flurry of cogent and plausible post-mortems for Why It All Ended As It Did. Indeed, the writing on the wall was all over our visual culture—looking back, how could Brat summer have been anything other than a harbinger of Trump’s return? Brat, quoting the decadent and nihilistic fashion of the Bush years and elevating all that is frivolous, self-interested, and unprofessional, was thoroughly Trump Tower-coded, despite CharliXCX’s one epochal tweet which attached Kamala Harris to this puke green fantasia. Looking back, was there any connection between Brat and Kamala’s joyful lawyer (I can’t say I have a grasp on who she is or what she is about, even now) beyond their shared commitment to “a good time” and their penchant for a kind of looseness—Brat vis a vis morality laxity, the slouch of its clothes, the-fuck-the-consequences-I’m-doing-me, and Kamala in the way she always seemed to wander through her long run-on sentences, meandering over one dependent clause after another after another in a way which suggested something fatal and fundamental about the way she processes the world?
Over the past several months, we witnessed denialism on a mass scale, a compunction to joy and optimism that wallpapered over what was an extremely tenuous grasp on power. The left desperately sought full-bodied, 100% grade-A organic joy but as the hours passed Tuesday night and the stage lights flickered on, I wonder if they realized they were all like Pinocchio, thinking they were real when in actuality they had been animatronic dolls dancing in a poor, glitching simulation of Obama’s 2008 campaign all along.
Our current President billed himself as a stopgap, a transition figure to new leadership. The fear and pride that led to his failure to cede power and the failure of the Democrats to have a real primary will haunt his legacy and our conscience. There are other failures. The administration has repeatedly gaslit Americans—when people voiced economic distress, the administration defensively offered positive economic figures which had no real correlation to the reality of inflation on the ground. The Democrats gaslit Americans on the disorder, the lack of equity, and the inhumanity of the situation on the border and of immigration more broadly in the country. The Democrats proved themselves utterly untrustworthy as they defended Biden’s fitness to lead. They repeatedly told Americans not to believe their eyes (wasn’t that supposed to be Trump’s thing?). The Israel of it all has only lent credence to an increasing sense that America has not two major parties but one. The poor leadership on the defense of reproductive rights is another. Even liberal America, in private, is growing tired of identity-politics bullying, of the open, oozing sores of hypocrisy that puncture the extremely online liberal consensus. The rightward tilt of all men should be a reminder in pre-school level etiquette: it turns out that making scapegoating straight men’s ill-defined “masculinity” a widely sanctioned meme-aesthetic of your coalition and a defensible feature of polite conversation can backfire. And, as Bernie Sanders succinctly put it in his first official post-election statement: “it should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” For all of the condescension toward science-doubting, gravity-denying figures on the right, Democrats and the online left have been living on their own Earth 2.
I have already referenced the titular essay of this newsletter before—Susan Sontag’s The Image World—but it really is a fount of wisdom that finds application even to this election. Writing from the 1970s, Sontag once diagnosed a strange shift in our politics: in the image world, “social change is replaced by a change in images.”
The results of this election do not spell the end of our era of simulations, of our addiction to and valorization of the visible world, of representations and aesthetics of liberation to their real and material implementation, but they do point to the limits of Sontag’s diagnosis for the establishment left. No matter how well you style it, and no matter the morally compensatory representation of the person leading the charge, there are some realities you cannot sell the public, no matter how they are (metaphorically and literally) cast, styled, lit, and framed within a photograph. The image of the country which the Democrats offered Americans was too distant from what people saw and what they endured in their own lives. But it also did not present another world which people wanted to inhabit or to direct their desires into. And yet, in a sense, Sontag is still correct: Americans wanted a change in images, and Harris only offered copies of the same.
None of us know exactly where this is headed, though we know more than we think. In the meantime, we must be patient through pain. This is not a prescription for surrender, but it is a suggestion to stay close to an awareness of what is within our control and what is without, to find peace in the knowing that to suffer is to be human. And that, in most matters, the pain passes like a cloud in the sky. Soon birds and breezes fill its place. In the space of this sentence, the sky has already changed. Your mileage will vary with this idea, and that’s fine. It’s what I’ve got and what I hold to. But don’t forget that history is long, history is not linear, and America’s very darkest hours have already passed.
Speaking for myself, on the morning of the 6th, I awoke to find a kind of peaceful clarity within me. Reading the headline—it was over—I found my politics were suddenly clear and visible, distinguished and distinct, their contours and shapes as ordinary and present as a glass on the bedside table next to me. I felt, without words, sitting in my chest, my belief in what America is supposed to be about. And with that ordinary clarity, I felt the possibility of a worthy fight. Lying in bed, I felt this new world shape me into a person I would be proud to be.
We’ll see how well this “clarity” endures as shit starts spinning out again—indeed, I find it already effaced by the particularities of future policy debates which have entered my mind in the last two days. But this may be the best we can hope for this week: allow the world to present itself to you as it is. And tomorrow, wipe your tears, open your eyes, and let yourself be moved into a dignified posture by the new world you see.
