I think it is important for me to try to get down in words as much as possible what I think about all that is going on. Other people clearly know what they think, and in case you have not noticed, their patience with people who either aren't paying as close attention or are not having similar visceral reactions has long worn thin. Since I think about these things somewhat more clearly in the daytime, when unfortunately I am usually not able to sit down and write, I jotted down some notes on my phone. These are rather like tweets I suppose, but I am not quite ready to publish them as tweets, because they are impressions and works in progress, and not meant to be arguments, or the starting points of arguments. They are meant, mostly, to help me figure out why I do not feel the horror and shame and anger at what is going on with the same intensity as everyone else.
My interest in the upcoming election from the point of view of faction is not high--I am often annoyed that I have as I suppose no choice but to vote for the Democrats, who don't deserve it. However as around half of my actual real life acquaintance is so hysterical about Trump being in office and convinced that anyone who is not committed to getting him out with every fiber of their being is a party to world historical crimes against humanity, I feel obligated to see that he is removed even though I don't really believe that a Democratic administration is going to be any kind of real improvement. Obviously I am unable to truly foresee whatever unspeakably horrible thing it is that people are worried about, a Trump-inspired and orchestrated genocide, or apartheid-like oppression or whatever; however, as many seem to regard this as a possibility, I obviously don't want it on my conscience.
What are people on the left so afraid of/hysterical about with regard to Trump specifically? I have never understood this. George W. Bush seems to me to have been at least as bad in many ways, as well as probably dumber, and people were never unhinged like this. Even if Trump does lose, then what? The euphoria I think is going to be short lived. There are a lot of expectations to be managed, and the work that needs to be undertaken to make this any kind of a functioning society again I am still not persuaded has been accurately identified by the people who are going to be in charge.
Much of what is going on is not real to me, partly because of my age, partly because I have lived in an isolated and pretty well-functioning corner of the country for so many years that the crazier aspects of national politics and movements are like a show that takes place far away and never really infringes upon my life.
I believe election chicanery is much more likely to come from the left than the right, because the anti-Trump faction is desperate in a way that I have never seen before. As I have stated before, I was surprised that he was "allowed" to win the last time since the entire narrative was that it would be the end of country and a disaster to end all disasters if he did, so surely any all-powerful interest such as we are led to believe is tirelessly active behind all the scenes that direct our national life would have wanted to prevent that from happening, wouldn't it?
What good do people imagine is going to happen once Trump is gone? The country is in a state of complete social and organizational disarray, and nothing I have seen proposed is going to change that. Is punishing Trump voters (and such as might be identified as such) going to be enough?
While I have come across Trump supporters, or at least anti-Democrats, online that I kind of like and think are smart and perceptive and at least as well educated as most of the proudly educated anti Trump people (I think anybody who is truly educated would be too disgusted to express enthusiasm for either side--if you have to reluctantly support the Democrats because the Trump party is that unspeakably evil, sure, but are they really anything to write home about themselves?), I don't know anyone even moderately sharp or educated who I trust among my actual acquaintance who supports Trump, which does carry a lot of influence with me. I do know some business type people who I suspect are holding their nose and voting for Trump because they think it is protecting their interests and they hate what they perceive will be the Democratic agenda if they get in. But I am not going to throw my lot in with them.
People who spend all day rattling on about the various terrible things Trump does, recounting all of his lies, his undermining of supposedly treasured institutions, as if that day's new outrage is finally going to be the one that breaks the Republicans in their feed and forces them to confess how misguided they had been and how humble and contrite they are going to be for the rest of their lives going forward, are missing the point in a way that I have rarely seen in modern history, and this includes many people, top writers and Ivy League professors and so on, who are supposed to be smart and possessed of insight. The overwhelming spur to Trump's support, it is obvious to me, is not pro-Trump, it is anti-the Left. And Trump, unlike other Republicans, provides enough of a contrast to this despised group, which is especially emphasized by the enemies' over-the-top revulsion towards him, that his voters rally around him.
Sick of everyone being enraged. Why should I care if you are enraged? People who actually have reasonable ideas don't carry on in such a manner.
The insistence that Trump and his voters are fascists or white supremacists, or at least effectively sympathetic with the vile aims of such people, has become tiresome, and serves no serious purpose other than to demonize people you know nothing about and consider yourself to be above engaging with. Everybody wants to put the burden of racism, at least in its really sinister manifestations, on somebody else, preferably someone they already don't like. Yes, of course, NPR and Harvard University and the Starbucks corporation and educated northeastern liberals will concede that racism is so pervasive that even they themselves must be doing something wrong though of course they aren't doing it on purpose and they are sparing no effort in rooting it out, or at least trying to identify how it keeps creeping back into their lives and organizations, since a lot of these entities have been against racism for quite a long time now. To the extent that there is a fascist or authoritarian right, they seem a lot less adept at actually getting what they want than the authoritarian left (and they complain about this online, that none of the things they want are ever delivered or even given a hearing, all the time). "White supremacists" (as distinct from downtrodden garden variety simple racists) are beyond a joke, they can't even get any girls to like them, which girls would if they were as dangerous and powerful as the media seemingly would have them be. They barely exist .
People profess to be worried about Trump refusing to leave or setting up a dictatorship or something. How is he going to do that? None of these multitudes of powerful people who hate him would be able to prevent that from happening? He personally would be able to liquidate the constitution over the objection of literally almost everyone in the respectable classes and declare that his term of office was not over on January 20, 2021? This is not plausible to me.
I need to study up more on the business with the children in the cages, since people are really upset about that, and I have neglected looking into it--as a bureaucrat myself I have tended to assume that there is some reason for this policy other than just the fulfillment of sadistic urges which no one has felt the need to try to explain to the public, but it is my fault for not being more diligent about discovering what that might be. Can the families being held not, upon being informed at the border that they will not be admitted and will be detained, leave and go back to their native country, or some other place upon finding the U.S. so inhospitable? My general sense is that decent people want to allow everybody from anywhere who wants to come into the country to come in and, if not stay forever unconditionally, more or less be able to do so in the absence of really egregious crimes, if even then. But I need to study the cage situation more thoroughly.
What I wanted to happen in the 2016 election was for Hillary Clinton to win, but by such a narrow margin that it would frighten and perhaps chasten her supporters, who had become so obnoxious by the last days of the race that I couldn't even log on to the internet the night of the election to endure their bleating and gloating and man-bashing and whatever else they were planning to do, into maybe toning it down a little and governing the country like the serious adults they all claimed they were. But I see now that there was no way that would have happened anyway.
I had a question about the 190,000 (thus far) people that have died, some say been killed, by Trump's particular mishandling of the virus, and wondering how many of those would be alive and thriving if Hillary Clinton were president. Perhaps there wouldn't have even been a virus if Hillary Clinton had been president, or it would have been contained and nipped in the bud due to better international coordination and openness. I have to say that in spite of all the deaths, the virus does not feel, especially now, like it is the real problem, and that I feel like there would not be a crisis going on without either Donald Trump or the pandemic, but that something else would have come up because the society as whole is not well...Now though I have hit my limit for the week and I've got to put this up...
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