Goodbye to All That?

Is this the last few days of the American Republic?

As I write this a few days before the election, I am oscillating between fear and cautious optimism about what’s coming. I see encouraging signs that Harris and the Democrats may win by a surprisingly large margin, perhaps even a bit of a landslide. Women are turning out in huge numbers in early voting. I appreciate this stream of testimonials from Harris voters, many in red states and many teary-eyed, as they explain why they chose her. I love many of these testimonies, including this one:

@hippie_elephant_designsWomen are showing up! #missouri #voteblue2024💙 #kamalaharris2024🇺🇸💙 #women

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I am noting a sudden, pronounced change in the tenor around the election that bodes well for preserving our flawed, fragile democracy. Yesterday, a poll in Iowa, considered a “gold standard,” shows Harris ahead of Trump in a state that has gone Republican for many years. On the other hand, The New York Times today is incredibly dour. It feels like they are getting ready to capitulate to a Fascist takeover. I am disgusted.

The underlying problem with The Times is secular materialism and a meaning vacuum. This leads to craven self-preservation and retractive cowardice. The New York Times, unsurprisingly, can’t help but remind its readers of their cosmic insignificance, today of all days. In “The Gift of the Cosmic Voids,” Paul Sutter, a theological cosmologist, writes:

By strict accounting of cosmic abundances, our planet and the life we find here amount to essentially zero. Insignificant. A small speck of blue and green suspended in an ocean of night, a tiny bit of rock and water orbiting just another star. The great forces that shape our universe have grown the voids over billions of years, and their present-day monstrousness puts cosmic insignificance into stark relief. Forget planets and stars; at these scales, even mighty galaxies are reduced to mere dots of light.

When I left the cathedral of hyper-materialism after publishing 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2007), I was banished from The New York Times and other mainstream outlets. At this point, they really should invite me back. Monistic idealism is the antidote to existential ennui!

I can’t say I know which way the election will go. I look forward to the end of this and a return to calmness, if Harris wins. If Trump/Vance “win,” there will be no end to it. We will be plunged into turmoil, threat, danger, and horror here for the foreseeable future. I suspect I will feel compelled to leave the US at some point. But the choices of where one can go will keep shrinking in an age of rising Right Wing populism.

Predictably, Republicans already claim election interference while it is clear that they are the ones who intend to ratfuck the election in myriad ways. As someone noted aptly: Every Right Wing accusation is actually a confession.

The Democrats need to win by a sizable margin to prevent social chaos, widespread violence, and various underhanded tactics. Trump, of course, intends to bring in the Supreme Court as a decider, if he can. Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer’s projections, here, seem logical and deeply alarming. She thinks we are in a 1930s Germany situation, and, if Trump wins, we will see deportation camps, criminalization of dissent, and so on. If Trump loses, the U.S. may end up stronger and more self-aware.

It seems bizarre that the U.S. is on the verge of voluntarily giving up its Constitutional protections and choosing Fascism. Conditions here are not so terrible, by historical standards. On the surface, unemployment is low. Beneath the surface, however, ordinary people feel deeply betrayed by the system. Working people can no longer afford to buy homes or escape from mountainous burdens of debt. Drug addictions and mental illness proliferate. There is no sense of collective meaning or purpose, as the “religion of progress” has dissolved.

The structural inequalities of our system have reached insane levels. The obscene level of oligarch wealth is breaking democracy, as Elon Musk’s criminal antics reveal. For decades, the Democrats have failed to protect working people against oligarchy and financial predation and to rein in the billionaire class through progressive taxation and antitrust laws. The people — vast numbers of them — want revenge. On Tuesday, they may bite off their collective nose to spite their collective face.

University of Chicago professor Robert Pape proposes, here, that the underlying condition leading to this crisis of American Democracy is demographic: The US is shifting from a country with a white majority to a nonwhite majority. According to the US Census Bureau: In 2020, approximately 42.2% of the population identified as nonwhite, meaning they reported a race or ethnicity other than non-Hispanic White. Here is the trend:

• 1920: The nonwhite population was around 10.7%.

• 1970: Nonwhite individuals constituted approximately 16.5% of the population.

• 2010: The nonwhite population was about 36.3%.

• 2020: The nonwhite population was about 42.2%

  Projections

• 2030: The nonwhite population is projected to increase to about 45.3%.

• 2040: Projections suggest that nonwhite individuals will make up approximately 48.3% of the population.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act caused this radical shift in the population, to expand the workforce. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. experienced rapid economic growth and industrial expansion. We had a massive demand for labor in sectors like manufacturing, construction, and agriculture. We needed to attract workers with a range of skills to meet the demands of our industries.

In fact, according to neoliberal economists like Steven Rattner, an adviser to Obama, the U.S. still needs to expand its population and laborer base. We need one million immigrant laborers annually just to replace our aging workforce and avoid economic decline. In a NY Times Op-Ed, Rattner writes: “With unemployment having been at or below 4.1 percent for 30 months, we have a shortage of workers, not an excess. The number of employed native-born Americans has not grown meaningfully since 2019, but that’s largely because of retirements, not competition from immigrants.”

Rattner goes more deeply into his argument here. I am not saying I necessarily agree with him, but I do think it is interesting that from a mainstream neoliberal perspective, we actually need more immigration to drive economic growth (I am more of a degrowth-er at this point, but that won’t win elections).

Rattner writes:

In the long run, we need to come to a national consensus on how many immigrants we want to accept and the bases for determining who is chosen… Without immigration, our population would begin to decline in 2037, according to United Nations projections. Even continuing to admit a million legal immigrants a year would leave our population flatlining within half a century. Maintaining our historical population growth rate of 1 percent would suggest admitting nearly four million individuals a year.

While that may be more than today’s politics can withstand, we should care about keeping the number of Americans growing at a reasonable rate. Immigration is our defense against the challenges of an aging society. Fewer workers supporting more retirees makes it harder to adequately fund Social Security and Medicare.

The demographic shift to a nonwhite majority lies behind the rise of Fascism/Trumpism in the US. This election is many things, but above all it is an inchoate political argument about how we deal with it. Personally, I don’t see any need to maintain white hegemony: We’ve done enough damage. Trump and Harris perfectly represent the opposing archetypes at play.

The Media and the Meaning Crisis

Whatever happens with the election — including the chaos and civil unrest that may ensure — perhaps everyone can agree, now, that America and the Anglo-European world has spiraled into a devastating crisis of meaning and values? I figured this out a few decades ago. I have been warning people ever since, while also investigating what we can do about it in my books.

This weekend, Trump went full gangster on Liz Cheney, a Republican opponent: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.” (Probably she wouldn’t feel good about it!).

Trump has not just moved the “Overton Window” of our political discourse — he has shattered the glass. It seems impossible that something like this can be said openly, without immediate disqualification and legal reprisal. We just accept it. But it is still unfathomable. How did this happen? How do we return to some form of civil discourse after this?

In “Trump Wants You to Accept All of This as Normal: The former president is psychologically preparing Americans for an assault on the electoral system,” Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic, looks at the psychological mechanisms of intimidation and overwhelm Trump has used to bring us to this dangerous precipice:

The natural human instinct is to dismiss, ignore, or downplay these kinds of threats. But that’s the point: You are meant to accept this language and behavior, to consider this kind of rhetoric “baked in” to any Trump campaign. You are supposed to just get used to the idea that Trump wishes he had “Hitler’s generals” or that he uses the Stalinist phrase “enemies of the people” to describe his opponents. Because once you think that’s normal, then you’ll accept the next step. Even when that next step is an assault on democracy and the rule of law.

Long ago, in a country far away, President Obama was attacked by Republicans because he wore a tan suit. Congressman Peter King was one of many who expressed disbelief and outrage over the tan suit: “There’s no way, I don’t think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday.” The tan suit scandal went on for weeks, if not months. I don’t think any Democrats made as strong a statement about the veiled execution threat against Liz Cheney as Republicans made, ten years ago, about Obama’s sartorial flair.

Then there was the infamous 2014 “latte salute” when Obama saluted two Marines while holding a coffee cup. Republicans were outraged, saying he had disrespected the military. Fox News devoted substantial airtime to condemning the latte salute, calling it “disgraceful” and “embarrassing.” For Sean Hannity, this was “a slap in the face” to service members.

And then there’s Trump. Trump called American soldiers who died in World War I, "suckers" and "losers" when he went to France in 2018. Trump called the generals he worked with in the Pentagon, “dopes and babies,” according to The Washington Post. According to The New Yorker, he told White House staff: “I wouldn’t go to war with them.”

We can now see those earlier, absurd Republican/Fox News attacks were warm-ups for Trumpism, leading to the collapse of any form of meaningful civic discourse in endless noise, whataboutism, and infantile finger pointing.

In the event of societal breakdown and widespread civil unrest following the election, I find myself putting my last, admittedly less-than-robust hopes in the military. History tells us that, indeed, sometimes the military has to step in to save the Republic.

A year ago, Trump casually proposed executing General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brian Klaas wrote about this in The Atlantic, noting that Americans were too distracted, too numb, to respond:

“The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election,” Klaas wrote. “It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.”

A political scientist who has studied political violence across the world, Klaas sees every signal flashing “red alert” in the US today:

Heading toward one of the most consequential, divisive elections in American history, every ingredient in the deadly recipe for political violence is already in the mix: high-stakes, winner-take-all politics; widespread conspiratorial delusions that detach followers from objective realities; a suggestion that one’s political opponents aren’t “real Americans”; a large supply of violent extremists with easy access to deadly weaponry; and a movement whose leader takes every opportunity to praise those who have already participated in a deadly attack on the government.

Eventually, all luck runs out. Political violence is notoriously difficult to forecast with precision, but would anyone really be surprised if Trump’s violent rhetoric led to real-world attacks in the run-up to the 2024 election—or in its aftermath, if he loses?

…

The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.

It feels like we are all looking around nervously, waiting for the adults to finally show up and do something about this nightmare.

But who are the adults in this day and age?

Where are they hiding?

When will they show up?

Are we them?