This blog turns 17 on Friday, which means I have officially chronicled the last third of my life on here. And the sad thing is, the more I think about it, it’s hard not to think of the early days of this blog as a high-water mark. I was 34, everyone around us was alive and in reasonably good health. A lot of bad things hadn’t happened yet. I wasn’t years removed from DC, the 4Ps was still open and alive, we had plenty of local friends, we were moved into our new house. I was still happy to be at Apple (and with an office of my own!), and while the government was still a Republican trifecta, it was obvious to everyone that it was taking on water and the pleasant surprise of flipping both houses in November would mean a spike in hope for the future.
Sure, 2007 would be a bad one, made worse by bad decisions, and then…well, time would happen. It’s not that it’s been unending misery since 2006, because it hasn’t, and I’ve achieved things and found things that would have been inconceivable back then (iPhones? The MCU? An electric car parked in the driveway of our house with a yard that’s walking distance to the local beer-and-burger spot? Three weeks in London and adding two new continents to my resume?) – but we are also hitting the age where life starts taking away things it gave you. And when one of those things is democracy…that’s unsettling.
I can’t really think about this post for next year. I think there’s a real chance I will be on meds, curled into a ball and unable to function for the last two months of the campaign, unless Biden is healthy and sitting on about a 10 point lead. I need a 1996-style “outcome never in doubt” situation, and I don’t even know if that’s possible any more. As soon as Trump won at all, even with fewer votes and a loophole, the minute it was possible for him to lose fewer than 49 states is the moment at which you could stop pretending things would ever be OK again without constant vigilance.
Because the Adversary is so big, so amorphous. There’s all the traditional backbone of private-business-owners who want to be lords of the manor in their podunk Midwestern towns, all the realtors and car dealers who managed not to be arrested on January 6. There’s all the Wallace voters who swear they vote for the man (always a man), not the party – but always the same party somehow. There’s the libertarian tech-holes of Silly Con Valley, the bros who don’t think the government should be able to do anything that interferes with their self-actualization or ability to remain fourteen years old forever. And of course there’s the stochastic terrorists, the message board warriors who go out with an AR-15 to shoot up the gays and the colored and anyone who committed the horrific indecency of being different from them.
My biggest fear is that Biden will drop dead, because there’s no way America will put itself behind a woman of color at the top of the ticket when there’s a white man on the other side. My second biggest fear is that Trump will drop dead, and be elevated as a martyr while someone just as bad takes his spot and the media falls about themselves to say “Trump is dead, why you bringing up old shit” while someone with the identical positions coasts to victory. I know worry means you suffer twice, and fear is just another way of dying before your time, but we live on the edge of a cliff, and it is very difficult to go about your business with a blithe whistle while the cliff crumbles a little every day out of the corner of your eye.
There are fixes, and reasonable ones. We have gotten so hung up on how things used to be and the idea that our ways are set in stone that we won’t even adjust to other people. Are they breaking the unwritten rules that the President should be the person who gets the most votes? How about we expand the House of Representatives for the first time in a century? There’s no reason we couldn’t have an elected legislative body of 3600 Representatives, each one representing only 100,000 people and thus closer to the people they represent. Gerrymandering becomes impractical, the prospect of multi-ethnic representation goes way up, we have the technology to make it work in ways we didn’t in the First World Way era, and it would basically destroy any possibility of the Electoral College being an issue again once the population advantage of small states was shattered. Hell, start allocating EC votes by individual district like Nebraska or Maine, and you’ve probably guaranteed it.
The old ways are broken. You can’t go back. You have to make the best of what you have in front of you, and make the changes necessary to continue to survive and thrive going forward rather than being tethered and drowning under the weight of trying to keep things the way they used to be.
Year 18. Onward.