"If Only She Listened to Me, She Would've Won."
Yes, your hot take is valid. But also, respectfully, shut up and zoom out.
Look. We’re sick of it already. All of us. We’re tired.
But unfortunately we are members of towns and cities and communities and society and THE WORLD and in my opinion, no matter how exhausting, it pays dividends to pay attention.1
Also, outlets. We the people need outlets. It pays to get it all out and about, on repeat. We need to scribble and scribe, gab, cry, punch couch cushions, have a drink, don’t have a drink, have a smoke, have several.
Speaking of several: I’m here to announce that, unfortunately, I’m no longer taking most “this is what went wrong!” hot takes seriously.
So if you’re currently needing neat scapegoating and one-sentence scoldilocksing, this will not be for you.
And that’s okay! Scapegoat and scoldilocks away in, truly. I don’t care. It’s your grief. It’s your human need, and you’ll find plenty of spaces for it across whatever your picked social poison.
But here we’re gonna get tangly twisted messy goopy poopy instead. Okay?
She lost. He won. I don’t know which of these is more important to focus on at this moment.
Yet the past 10+ days have devolved into one big social game of pin-the-tail-on-your-existing-grievance donkey. I can’t even count the conversations and articles that have gone down this swirly slide, face first yet ass chafed. Everyone keeps assigning blame for what happened onto pre-existing ill-wills and core discontents. That is your right. It’s probably even natural. I’m kind of doing it here.
And yet…
Please allow yourself to nod your head for the next four minutes. Please allow yourself to sit, hands unclenched. Please relax your jaw.
Please begin to see the forest from the trees.
Where to begin?
Financial worries cloud everything. Everything. At the jumpstart of 2020, the average home price in America was $384k USD. Hi four years, now it’s $501k. An identical grocery haul of identical items in identical quantities from identical brands which averaged $100 in 2020 is now $126. Nine out of ten Americans say financial stability is more important to them than upward mobility.2
[And]
Capitalism doesn’t explain racism, sexism, tribalism, othering — not fully. And it certainly doesn’t justify them.
[And]
Biden and Harris are not responsible for these surging home prices. Or much about groceries. Or the Jenga tumble of people craving the base tier of Maslow’s hierarchy. But people feel they are responsible. And many, many bold-faced lied — for their own gain — to stoke that feeling.
[And]
Liberalism can’t beat populism.
[And]
Telling someone they’re being lied to when the lie itself is validating will never defeat the lie. Or the liar. In fact, it often backfires.
[And]
The electoral college is tired crusty poopoo. But everyone knows this by now. Everyone’s heard this. When you hear something so regularly, and from so many mouths, it no longer registers. It kinda goes in one ear and out the other.
[And]
Democracy, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is an imperfect institution. More and more people feel this way. That is a story. A good story, one with teeth. And lots of people vote according to 1-2 specific stories that feels most affirming to sink their teeth into.
[And]
We’ve also sorta lost the story.
[And]
The modern information ecosystem is a mess. I don’t know if there’s a right way to get the right information to people anymore. We can’t even agree on what “right” is — which, be fucking for real — has always been the case. It has. Humans are whackadoodle. We are cucumbers with anxiety and arguments and favorite sex toys. Yet cue our current information environment. Cue our tech. Cue fragile egos with our current information environment and our current tech holding on for dear life. Hoh baby.
[And]
People — desperately — need to learn to punch up. There was $215 million spent this election cycle on anti-trans ads. $215 fucking million spent on scarlet lettering ~1.5% of the population. That is gross. That is not rational behavior, and conservatives and conservative apologies love touting common sense. That is insane. That is actual insanity.3 If you think that is normal, respectfully, you should lose access to the internet.
[And]
The vibes are bad. Like, really, really bad. For many, many people.
[And]
White men continue, and continue, and continue, ad fucking nauseum, to miss the fact they practice identity politics. Read that again.
[And]
Historically, whoever’s in government left holding the bag when the music stops and inflation strikes is typically in for a very, very bad time.
[And]
We don’t have a lot of trust right now, for good and bad reasons. But we sure do have a lot of narratives.
[And]
One party’s winning obsession with the fringe and one party’s losing obsession with centralism proves emotionality in narratives works.4
[And]
Liberalism’s narrative can’t beat populism’s. I said this already but it’s worth repeating. Very few among us (myself included) are ideologically pure enough AND financially secure enough AND socially rewarded enough to vote to uphold “democracy” (again, already a flawed institution) when you’ve had to yet again slash your family’s grocery budget and will probably skip that doctor’s visit even though you’re in ongoing pain. Period. You’re narrative is asking something of people we all collectively love to see heralded in movie plots, in children’s books, in Star Wars’ 18,000th spin-off — selfless virtue — but rarely can be exercised in dailygrittypractical real life.
[And]
Still fucking talk about democracy vs. authoritarianism and care about voting and work through your value and live by them.
[And]
Still just be a fucking decent person.
[And]
Someone’s irrational but real devotion towards leaders who put words to their frustrations can’t be beat by saying they’re acting stupid or immoral. Even though they are. So if you say this, if you go this route, understand you’re doing this more for yourself.
[And]
The strongman’s solution(s) — if anywhere near coherent, which they’re often not — are often worse than the problems their rhetoric validates. But they’ve got the good narrative. They’ve got the hook.
[And]
We will always have clickbait, attention-grabbing, emotionally avalanching hooks polluting our social connective tissue. These will be shoved down your throat. It will not stop. Because people latch onto these big stories. We can’t help ourselves. They provide big feelings. And all of us, every single one, has lots of big feelings. (Yay, you’re humaning!)
[And]
We’re in a space recognizing “good” information has to in some ways account for these emotional narratives, even egos. It has to acknowledge them to scale and work for broad attention.
[And]
That directly flies in the face of what “good” information has typically relied upon.
[And]
Some bad actors realized this faster than others.
[And]
We all need to improve on this question when reading anything online, when engaging in any political conversation, when integrating really any new presented story: Is this being told to hold attention, or is this story being told for a specific, clear, actionable goal? These are not the same.
[And]
We have a word problem. People don’t agree to understand each others’ words. Oligarch. Socialist. Marxist. Nationalist. Theocracy. Ruling class. Coastal elites. Diversity, equity, inclusion. Based. Woke. These words don’t mean anything cohesively to people anymore. For some it’s a shield. For others, it’s the weapon.
[And]
Who uses these words is almost more important than the words themselves. We are trusting the messenger more than the message.
[And]
Privileged groups will continue picking and choosing their realities in order to retain emotional validation to support their status.
[And]
Underprivileged groups will continue picking and choosing their realities in order to retain some semblance of dignity within a wider clusterfuck world that genuinely hurts their hearts.
[And]
I’m sorry. It’s fucking confusing and baffling and incredibly painful, and it has terrible consequences — especially when you have no idea what the fuck certain folks are about, how the fuck could they even believe what they believe. But they do. And you probably can’t change their minds alone through conversation.
[And]
People continue to pick and choose the version of him they think is real. They pick and choose whatever thoughts to believe as they come oozing from his banana mush brain. They pick and choose which tweets5 of his are apparently moving and serious. They pick and choose what concepts of a plan are laudable even as others have pitched pretty damn similar things and they’ve cried foul. They pick and choose which scandals have merit, even if they wouldn’t ever accept that same scandal, not even a whiff of it, from anyone else in their direct actual dailygrittypractical life. This is, for a lot of people, maddening. Because this is not Old Country Buffet. You don’t get to leave off your political plate what doesn’t make you personally salivate and then get mad you’re called out. People are made up of their tallies. Character is the jar filled with a hundred thousand marbles. That man has made appallingly clear what kind of cracked, moldy, misshapen faux marbles he’s stuffed inside that tanned pickled perversion of a self. Yet people will continue to look past it, to make excuse after excuse after excuse.
[And]
You will drive yourself mad trying to reason how people can do this.
[And]
You will have to reconcile how you feel about people who can do this.
[And]
How you feel about people who can do this will likely change, and change again. Sometimes by the day.
[And]
There’s such a fucking mess out there. No one has the heart for it all.
[And]
Don’t measure yourself by your suffering. In the next four days, four weeks, four months, four years, you are allowed moments of bliss. You’re allowed nonsense. Frivolity. Childlike states of wonder, whimsy, stupidity. See and celebrate when they arrive. Fuck guilt. Fuck shame. Fuck the ugliness, however you can come up for air.
[And]
Fuck the easy answers.
[And]
I think I’m all done. For now.
[And]
[And]
[And]
[And.…]
Though I would like to give a shoutout to the special form of exhaustion for international folks on Substack (and on all socials) this past week+. The American presidential election is a migraine that won’t abate without quite literally knocking yourself out. But it’s also a symptom of something shifting globally, and you can blame it on inflation or billionaires or big tech or feminism or immigrants or the moon, idc, but it’s happening here and it’s happening where you likely are too, buster.
Someone call Shark Tank, the American Dream has gone woke!!
That is — in bear-with-me layman’s terms — equivalent to the subjective annoyance of needing a new electric toothbrush head and therefore filing a lawsuit, opening a GoFund me, crowdsourcing thousands of dollars from shady anonymous donors, quitting your job, creating dedicated anti-toothbrush social media pages, self-publishing sixteen fluoride conspiracy books, banning flossing ads, distributing flyers with local dentists’ faces in devil’s horns, starting a bristles-are-dangerous think tank, losing all your friends, losing your family, losing your house, losing your mind.…all because of one tiny, subjective, bonkers aggrievement. (Someone call RFK.)
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice….
Are we even calling them tweets anymore??
I think it’s also very normal for everyone to feel the need to talk through their feelings about this with everyone else… like a lot of people are saying ‘enough with the election takes’ but we can’t stop reading them. I can’t.
One thing that keeps spinning around my head is someone who was saying the reason liberalism will always, always, always lose is because it tries to hold on to two opposite values at the same time - being in complete support of capital and capitalism, while also genuinely caring about people’s rights and liberties. And the issue is that these two are irreconcilable, and when they butt up against each other, liberals will always side with capital.
This is why the democrats’ messaging is always coming off as wishy washy, inconsistent, incoherent, duplicitous, and tepid. Even when they bring in some perfectly reasonable policies. Even when they’re clearly the lesser of two evils. The fact is that one unified message will always draw a stronger support base than two conflicting messages together.
Thank you. I needed to read exactly this today