I woke up on the couch at Tom Weisert’s. Amazingly I hadn’t thrown up, despite all the garbage poured down my throat after the polls closed in Tennessee at 6 PM and they called both Senate and the gubernatorial race all for Republicans at 6:20. There was some sort of raspberry daiquiri stuff. I know this because I drove back to my apartment, turned on the TV, and saw Richard Shelby changing parties from the Democrats who had helped re-elect him two years earlier to the newly-majority GOP. And that’s when I saw all the raspberry daiquiri again.
Two decades and change on, all I drank last night was one bottle of porter. I got in bed between 10 and 11, almost dozed off, received a text message at 2 AM that spiked my heart rate to 122 according to the Apple Watch, finally fell asleep about 4:30 and was awake at 6:20. And when I woke up, the nightmare was still happening.
What started in 1994 ended last night: the GOP, completely Southernized and fully in control of the American system of government. In a way it’s worse than 2000 or even 2004; despite the fact that George W. Bush was the matador for a Southernized GOP Congress, back then the racism and bigotry was at least subtext rather than an explicit selling point. Anti-Semites and KKK weren’t openly celebrating then. More to the point, while there had been the usual amount of dissembling and media incompetence, there wasn’t the complete abject failure of this year. We still haven’t seen Donald Trump’s tax returns. We have no idea what his policy positions are on half a dozen issues, and the ones we do know are horrifyingly comic. We can probably assume that anything and everything the GOP has ever wanted – pipelines, tax cuts, drilling for oil in Yosemite and mandatory cavity search of brown people by TSA – will go through like shit through a goose, including the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice whose seat was held open nine months in absolutely unprecedented fashion for just this opportunity.
John Rogers nailed it: our system is not built to cope with shamelessness. The GOP has no shame about shattering the norms that have kept American politics on the rails for decades – if not centuries – whether it’s the Supreme Court hole, or the unprecedented misuse of the filibuster since 2006, or the notion that a candidate’s finances should be publicly visible. Republicans have culminated two decades of “what are you gonna do about it?” by electing a manifestly unqualified and incapable political novice to the White House, and the only guideline to what he might do is what he has said he will do – which is so far beyond the pale of what has heretofore been American politics that I may as well feed my degrees into a chipper-shredder.
We are through the looking glass. We may not survive this, and if we do, we may not like what we look like at the end. And the worst part, just as it was in 2000, is that on present form, it looks like victory will go to the candidate with fewer total popular votes – and the experienced professional will be cast aside for a rodeo clown yet again. We didn’t patch the hole, and now matters are worse.
We have the government we deserved. We do well to weep for what we couldn’t defend. I didn’t think this was possible five years ago. I don’t know why not. Stupidity and ignorance are infinitely renewable resources, mass-producable with unskilled labor.
I don’t want to know what happens next. I just want to be numb for as long as I can.