It’s been a hell of a year this week and it’s only Tuesday. The worst forces of the last decade all seem to be coming together at once. In the UK, Dominic Cummings actually has the British prime minister running interference for a political advisor, in a complete inversion of the natural order. In New York City, another middle-aged white woman with a Scarlett O’Hara complex attempted to use the police to call in a hit on a black man, while the police in Minneapolis proceeded to show why she thought it was a viable threat. And today it turns out Facebook has known all along that they’re exploiting hate and disinformation for the sake of profitable engagement and fear of the right, while Twitter tries to sack up and take some modicum of responsibility for what they repeat to the world.
All this hit me in one big pile today as I dug through my old browser bookmarks and tried to clean house. The last ten years show pretty abjectly that we all should have known this was coming. Birtherism, dumb-worship, open appeals to the worst in people – and, foolishly, a belief that 2012 was the last time that a flagrant appeal to white solidarity would be a viable path to the White House. In fact, the bigger lesson should have been not that whiteness as a platform was past its sell-by date, but that for better or worse, candidates who get nominated because it’s their turn tend to lose – even if they get more votes than their opponent. Which makes me worry, because we can’t afford to lose this election – and a good chunk of the people who need to be on board aren’t. The dirtbag left actually hates Democrats worse than anything, and will accept any support from anyone in their eternal quest for righteous purity. This is how Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald end up on the same side as Putin (the fact that Fast Eddie Snowden received asylum in Russia is less a sign that he was complicit than that Putin found him useful). The Russian goal is just to weaken and confuse for its own sake, to stir the shit and devalue any sort of truth, and the Extremely Online Left is very good at contributing to that without ever achieving their own notional goals. And that’s how we get to the cheap and easy social media misery, which fueled the Teabaggers and the rise of Tr*mp and toxic performative masculinity and…Brexit.
Dominic Cummings is just the latest in a long line of hustlers like Atwater, Rove and Bannon – people who think they split the atom by discovering you can apply a patina of intellectualism to the reification of the status quo. The point of their act is to put a candy coating on racism and sociopathy, where it turns out that they have amazingly found that reason, science and logic prove that the way things used to be is actually the best of all possible worlds. It’s the same sort of “dark enlightenment” bullshit that propels everything from Silly Con Valley assholes to Gamergaters to shitposting podcasters to Brexit and Tr*mpism. And worse, it’s the above-referenced sort of self-sustaining internal stupid that foreign powers can easily whip up and agitate for their own purposes to undermine us, through the cheap and easy medium of social media. The right in this country has no problems profiting by that, because the GOP believes in one thing: unlimited power to get what they want, propelled by stupidity and enabled by the flaws in the system – and by the fact that their enemy cares. The Democrats always try to save everyone, and the Republicans use that. That’s why government shutdowns, debt limit showdowns, and Supreme Court stonewalling happened – because the Democrats will always try to wrench the car back away from the cliff. They try to govern, whereas the Republicans have spent a decade demonstrating that they care for nothing less than actually doing the work. Losing the House meant nothing as long as they kept the Senate, which they will keep as long as they want at this point. Even with full control of all three branches of government, they couldn’t actually do a damn thing, which in some ways might have been a blessing.
The only solution is to capture the Senate – somehow – and break the filibuster, and then if necessary don’t shirk from using the judiciary to un-rig the work of an illegitimate regime. And it’s going to be a lot to un-rig. Getting rid of Dolt 45 is not going to be enough, because we’ve known for ten years that this is where the GOP has been going. It began with “the troops” as the answer to any question of the Bush regime, then spread to the conflation of “the troops” and “the police”, and has basically escalated to “we are the cops”. The old gag about how white people think 911 is customer service was never truer than when Amy Cooper basically tried to use the NYPD as her personal armed response to being asked to abide by the rules – proof, if any were needed, that the Boomer generation thinks rules are for other, poorer, browner people. And they aren’t dying off fast enough to be pushed out of their leverage – it’s going to take a full mass mobilization of everyone under 40, this November and every November afterward. It’s the only way to achieve containment.
We empowered the worst in America. It’s got to be undone, and it will be slow and it will hurt and we won’t all make it. But it’s the only way forward.