“There is another point when things slipped in a starker way: November 8, 2016, when everyone in America realized they were living in the South. The perversity of realizing that the worst parts of where you’re from — the racism, the galling inequality, the fictionalized victimhood, an illusion of power, the reliance on a bankrupt concept of loyalty disguised as faith, the disgust for learning and fatal aversion to uncomfortable truths, the willingness to protect a deranged sense of identity at the cost of what might literally be the entire world — were all there, everywhere, all along.“
-Spencer Hall, 1 Sept 2017
We lost, 57-43. We had the 57, and we lost. Because the Enemy – that amorphous blob of racism and Objectivism and silver-drinking conspiracy thinking that wandered from the Democrats to the Republicans throughout the 50s and 60s and then metastasized to take over the party for the last 25 years – the Enemy has figured out how to win without the most votes. Whether it’s employing the arcane system of the Electoral College or optimizing itself to prevail with acreage rather than voters in the Senate or taking advantage of a media in thrall to the idea that there are two equal sides of identical veracity, volume and significance for every issue – the country is now rigged for a sane and sensible majority to always be at the mercy of lunatics.
Not even winning the White House and control of the Congress is enough to overcome it. All we have now is containment and hoping it might turn on itself and burn out. But make no mistake: this is what the Republican Party is now. This is the Trump QOP. If you stay, you are complicit. There’s no going back from this. To remain now is to say that all of this – the insanity, the denial of majority rule, the use of violence to derail the electoral process – all of this is all right.
It isn’t. And we have to devote every day to making those who believe it pay for the error of their ways.