Doom, Joy, and Reality: On the Moods of the 2024 Election

This fight is no longer between Democrats and Republicans. This is a fight between communism and freedom. It’s very serious fight.

* Donald Trump, August 27th

An America where we care for one another, look out for one another, and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed. And that, in unity, there is strength.

* Kamala Harris, August 22nd (DNC Speech)

In the whirlwind few weeks of the surprising Harris candidacy, a stark gulf hs emerged between the two campaigns. Trump, as usual, and as pre-figured in his 2016 campaign, has pushed all-in on the doom and gloom. Everything is a disaster: wars in countries we don’t care about, a migrant crime wave, out-of-control inflation, DEI run amok, wokeism rampant, and electric boat motors unleashing an unstoppable wave of brutal shark attacks. And to bolster this national bummer-ism, JD Vance was brought on board, to make sure that childless cat owners understand how pathetic and worthless they are, and to drive home the important lesson that working in a donut shop can be truly horrible.

In contrast, Harris seems relentlessly determined to smile, laugh, and actually enjoy the process of running for President. By selecting Tim Walz as a running mate, she doubled down on the jovial warm fuzzies, picking up a political partner reminiscent of the animated Friar Tuck bear from Disney’s Robin Hood.

Now, I’ll be honest. I did not watch any of the GOP convention live. But I would imagine that it wasn’t a complete downer, especially considering that, at the time, the Republicans essentially had things sewn up against Sleepy Joe. And after all, if Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock show up, things can’t be all bad, right? But the sound bites that came out of the convention were all standard, polarizing stuff: Dems are out to destroy America; libs want to groom, rape, and then possibly eat your children; all children that are too young for eating (i.e., embryos) are on the evil abortionists’ hit list, slated to be extinguished and then replaced with illegals getting free health care, free college, full voting rights, and other government-funded goodies.

Also in full transparency, I didn’t watch a ton of the DNC convention either. But I did tune in periodically each night, to check out what was going on. And what I did see was a building filled with joyful noises, genuine laughter, and an overriding sense of promise and hope, driven by the new reality of having a non-white woman under 60 finally on the ballot. And a thousand apologies to Joe Biden (who did his job admirably, and should be in the Dem hall-of-fame simply for extricating Trump from White House), but the happiness over simply NOT having him as the candidate was palpable. And with Harris delivering a masterful speech, which I did watch live in its entirety, a sigh of relief from all corners of the Lib-verse was heard, quickly followed by millions of smiles and fist-clenches. Finally, the Dems have something to be excited about.

Needless to say, Trump is not down with this new focus on joy and genuine optimism. He was completely geared up to be the lively-by-comparison, less cadaverous guy in the race. But that strategy is now in smoking ruins, and Trump is still trying to find traction against a younger, smarter, fiercer, and, yes, more-attractive opponent.

[ A quick aside here: Trump’s comment about being more attractive than Kamala Harris is truly one of the most telling and disturbing things he has ever uttered; and of course, he’s uttered BS in biblical proportions over the last decade. But when you watch him speak these words, he’s not just joking around, winking on the side at the obvious gag about a wrinkled old prune being hotter than a very attractive woman of color, two decades his junior. No, he really thinks, and this after looking at himself in the mirror without makeup every day, that he is a better-looking person than Harris. The level of delusion, narcissism, and sheer stupidity that would allow him to say this is breathtaking, and should be immediately disqualifying for any office in the land, let alone the highest one. In a more conspiratorial interpretation, you could also make the case that Trump is not really talking about himself and his appearance per se, but is dog-whistling, reinforcing his base’s view that white people are better than non-white people, are more attractive than the subhumans invading and infesting America’s heartland.]

So with the exuberance over a likely crushing of Brandon being itself squashed by the ascendence of an opponent born after the Buddy Holly plane crash, all that’s left for the Trump campaign is,,, wait for it…. doom.

Now, if you’ve read this blog before, you know that I am generally a doom and dread kind of guy myself. But my pessimism is overwhelmingly ecological, based on the reality of every natural support system on the planet being in decline, most of it steep. I am decidedly NOT in the Trump style of dread. I have no problem with immigrants, legal or otherwise. Migration, globally, is driven by labor demand, which is obvious and unavoidable for a country in demographic transition like the US (and a reminder that ‘demographic transition’ is not about racial and ethnic change, but is a global economic phenomenon, occurring wherever levels of wealth and education are sufficiently high, resulting in an aging population as younger people don’t hit replacement rates of reproduction. It’s not a unique feature of the US, but is visible everywhere in the industrialized world). Further, unlike Trump-style doom, I don’t see economic slowdown as a threat, but rather as something to be actively pursued. I don’t view LGBTQ rights as some kind of indicator of social decline, but rather as a long-overdue corrective to centuries of injustice and abuse.

But despite all the positive projects and moods that come out of progressivism, my overall stance is one of ecological pessimism. Collapse is already here, and will accelerate over the next couple decades, regardless of any political progress we might achieve in the short term. It won’t be enough.

But as a macro-doomster, what advice would I give to Harris, as the summer ends and her joy-centric campaign runs up against closer scrutiny on substance and policy? Well, I wouldn’t go all-in on touting the Biden-Harris achievements, of which there are many, and some very substantial. Yes, there has been good progress in some areas: inflation coming down of late, massive infrastructure spending and employment, robust job creation, and a mostly-buoyant stock market, etc.

But the mood of country is still overwhelmingly wary, if not outright down. A kind of macro-exhaustion has crept into the American psyche, the result of several serial shocks to the system: the 2008 GFC; the rise of Trump and hyper-polarization; the long tail of Covid, which completely obliterated older models of institutional social formation; the continued reign of a plutocratic elite with unimaginable wealth and power, juxtaposed against the 2/3 of households who report living paycheck-to-paycheck; and underneath it all, the growing recognition that we have broken the underpinnings of our planet’s natural processes, systems that we need to actually, like, you know… live. All these disorienting events have left Americans tired, stressed-out, listless, and ornery, but clutching tighter each season to the hard comfort of our polarized culture wars, lashing out at our domestic enemies with far-more passion than any external entity could rouse.

How, then, can Harris and Walz run a campaign that takes this dread, exhaustion, and prickliness seriously, without falling into the dualistic, polarized script of the GOP, where everything bad is the other side’s fault?

Excluding the cadre of true Trump fanatics (which I think is fairly small, compared to the much larger group of moderate conservatives who hold their nose and vote for Trump), I do believe that most Americans have become tired of the ‘always-blame-the-other-guys-for-everything-bad’ thing. I doubt that even many Trump supporters put much stock into his claims about fixing a lot of stuff on DAY 1. [ And why, by the way, are journalists so obsessed with what happens on the first day? How much shit did you get done on your first day at a new job? Right, exactly. Chill the F out with the DAY 1 crap.]

So people are ready for something different, and are ready to be optimistic about anything that might work. But still, I don’t think a laundry-list of the usual Democratic promises will move the needle much. While people are ready to be hopeful and move beyond polarization, there is too much about the liberal picture of the future that doesn’t make sense any more, and people are not going to be swayed by the usual promises of better health care, free day care, free college, and reproductive freedom. These are all important issues and policies, and an agenda with these talking points sounds great. But the deeper reality of our cascading series of ecological collapses demands a more serious level of truth-telling. It’s time that people hear the broader facts about our macro-crises, and it’s also time for a vision of the future that could actually work in the degraded natural environment that we are currently creating.

In other words, Harris should lean into the free-floating dread that is the animating substance of the MAGA clans, but then re-purpose it for a different policy platform altogether (and not a traditional Democratic one, which is heavy-laden with neoliberalism and the impossibility of ‘sustainable growth’), I have made the case for this platform throughout this blog: Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory. While these are fairly foreign to the current Democratic party, they are really the only way out of our predicament.

We have been so hyper-saturated with the false narratives of neoliberalism, the resulting plutocracy, and the plutocrats’ propaganda machine, the Polarization Industrial Complex, that the real truth about a potential way out of our current ecological nightmare sounds more like a conspiracy theory than the half-truths and outright lies we have been fed for the last few decades.

Nest time, we’ll flesh out what zombie ideas need killing, and the silver bullet that can do it.

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on September 6, 2024.