New American Dark Age

In just a few days, Donald Trump will be re-inaugurated as president. After everything, we’ve been through as a nation since his emergence a decade ago, which has gotten to be quite a long list, it is an epic defeat to be here witnessing this. He even won the popular vote! I can’t think of any public figure who less deserves to lead us, and it’s hard to keep a straight face as our nation accepts this as normal and finds itself firmly within his clutches. With this, a new dark age has arrived. For the sake of my sanity, I have to write at least a little bit about it and let my rage out.

My main, lingering urge in the moments after the election was to reduce my exposure and investment in politics. Throw in the towel, if you will. Myself and many others were utterly deflated by the results, and the settling mood has only seemed to deepen over the last months. It’s hard to go on tying my personal wellness to things that increasingly seem totally out of my control. Of course, the end result is our collapse into an authoritarian state, persecution for some of our less desirable friends, and ecological collapse. Maybe people will wake up once the bad stuff starts happening. Perhaps the most lurid suggestions, like warring for territorial expansion or mass deportations, wind up remaining in fantasy, and we get by this with just more tax cuts.

It does feel different this time in a dangerous way though, as the system’s guardrails and resistance we put up in his first term have almost completely eroded. Perhaps that’s why tech companies and billionaires have swiftly bent the knee and pledged fealty. These post-election million dollar donations are not the historical norm. As for guardrails, Trump owns the Supreme Court and the Republican establishment. It’s still slightly possible, thanks to the narrow margins in congress that things there could be frustrated and dysfunctional, but I’m skeptical. Only true loyalists are getting in the cabinet this time, most in congress have been cowed, and a real effort is afoot to destroy the federal agencies from within. Honestly, the actions may not even need to be legal to happen, and a scenario with martial law is not impossible, especially if people wake up to some sort of intolerable action en masse a la the George Floyd protests of summer of 2020.

It’s interesting to contrast our dire situation with the current political turmoil in South Korea. Their right-wing president declared martial law in a coup attempt after frustration with an opposition legislature, but was barely thwarted by the quick action of said legislature to cancel it that very night before the military could stop its vote. The public’s rapid street protests successfully slowed his forces. On a second vote, enough of his allies were browbeat into supporting his impeachment, and a criminal conviction process is underway, which recently resulted in his arrest. I just finished reading recent Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s Human Acts, which is a troubling novel of SK’s recent authoritarian past and one of its most violent moments of civilian suppression in Gwangju, 1980, and it’s not hard at all to imagine something akin to that here. The conclusion for their former president is yet to be written, but meanwhile four years ago, here, our failure in the aftermath of January 6th to impeach Trump is clearly looking like a fulcrum point to me of where our political body so bluntly failed us and how we are here today.

Of course we can blame the politicians, but what about the voters? Incumbent governments all around the world have been losing power, probably from the aftershocks of COVID and worldwide inflation. That may be true, but damn am I disappointed in my country, and I personally am going to blame every one of us responsible. Do you all have the memory of goldfish? Our voters have to be some of the dumbest and misinformed bodies politic in this world to put Trump back in charge. My default perception of you if I’ve learned you’re a Republican voter in this era is some combination of stupidity, selfishness or cruelty. I’d ascribe that last label to those especially voting based on culture war issues like Christian supremacy, white nationalism or LGBTQ suppression. We have a long history of brutality in this nation, from the slave trade, through native genocide, segregation, Japanese internment and to the neglect of the AIDS crisis. To think we will ever be cured of it is now clear to me as naivety on my part.

I know, I know, it’s not productive to think this way, when that’s a third of the nation, and yet another third are apathetic non-voters. I’m tired of putting up with it though, even if it might be the rest of my life. Watching things go on as normal and knowing it’s not going to be, it’s just maddening. By putting Trump back in power, we have allowed a conman and villain, who already once tried to stay in power illegally, legitimately back in control.

I’m not arguing for the contrapositive of this. You’re not a good person just by voting for Kamala Harris either. Simply, I’m saying that it was a base moral test to not put Trump back in power, and that she was our option, for better or worse, and we collectively failed. I hate our two party system, and can write an even longer treatise about its severe flaws, but that’s what we’re working with at present. Whether our failure here was due to the mendacity of the average American voter or successful disinformation campaigns deterring people, it doesn’t matter. I’ve no qualms calling you out if I know you’re responsible for this.

So, yes, I’m enraged about the unfairness of a criminal candidate winning our presidential popularity contest, enough to spend hours writing this rage-piece. I’m not sure if it’s really productive to write out a screed like this, but I’m deeply cynical and afraid about the future. Climate change is certain to be unaddressed with re-electing someone who calls it a Chinese hoax, our only hope now there is that some miracle invention staves it off. Its more likely we’ll just be passing the tipping point and figuring out our adaptation to a ruined world in the coming decades.

With this election comes a higher likelihood of conflict. I cannot fathom why people who support Trump think he is anti-war. He’s a thin-skinned, dictator wannabe. He’s already made noise for troubling considerations of military force against Panama or Greenland in the name of territorial expansion. I’m pretty worried, even if he winds up just blustering and not starting anything himself, that this second term will be a ‘Franz Ferdinand’ moment and the coming void of American leadership in the world winds up sparking a conflict that quickly expands and draws us in.

And honestly, with all the guns in this country, I wouldn’t be surprised to witness more vigilantism as the government moves forward on unpopular policy. We already saw Luigi Mangione’s assassination of the United Health CEO result in his becoming a folk hero of sorts due to the universal hatred of our healthcare system, but such actions represent a double edged sword. Every public figure here is pretty much a target these days, as seen by the backlash against COVID health administrators. It will be scary if emboldened militias start acting with the tacit blessing of the president.

So, what’s the resolution going forward? In the end, I’m probably not going to be able to just ‘turn off’ my political awareness and throw my head in the sand. I’m also probably not likely to flee America, yet. For now, I’m just going to see what happens, continue searching for meaningful work and adventuring in lieu of progress on that front. The palace intrigue and nonsense will be off the charts. At least there’ll be entertainment while the world burns, bless the journalists that will be covering it. Nothing will improve here regarding the economy or affordability in this coming era, and we’ll be lucky if we escape in four years as a country that continues with democratic elections. I hope we will wake up from this nightmare, live prosperously and peacefully, but right now I expect that the darkness settling upon us is here to stay. In fact, it never left.