As we continue to ruminate over how and why this country sodomized itself with a jackhammer this last election, I think it all comes down to an old saying: “Everything happens for a reason. And sometimes, the reason is that you’re stupid and make bad decisions.”
When I say here, ‘stupid’ I define stupidity versus intelligence and I define intelligence as being able to gather data, acknowledge it and act on it, including changing one’s actions if that is warranted by new information. Stupidity therefore is refusing to do what the facts are telling you is right. I don’t necessarily mean voters are stupid in that they’re uneducated. There are a lot of educated Trump voters. And I don’t mean you’re stupid just because you disagree with me. Look: It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what I think about abortion, or Ukraine or some other hot political issue, you have a right to your opinion, you have a right to your vote, and if you elect a guy that I think is reprehensible, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
Except:
When Trump sent a mob to the Capitol to “fight like hell”, stop the Electoral College certification and kill his own Vice President and Republican congressmen with a hanging scaffold that just happened to be there at a “peaceful protest”, that should have automatically disqualified him from any federal office. It did not because you wanted him there, and because the writers of the Constitution did not specify “No person shall be eligible for the office of President if he is both a raging hammerhead and an overgrown child with an emotional age somewhere between a sugared-up toddler and a 12-year old girl on her first period” because they thought it went without saying.
And then you said that the Biden-Harris economy sucks, and the Trump economy was so much better, so you voted for Trump despite everyone and his Mom – including conservative economists – repeatedly telling you that Trump has gone whole hog on broad-based tariffs, which major retailers have predicted will require them to raise prices.
That is not just disagreeable, that is playing Russian roulette with a machinegun.
One example of where I speak: New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to her credit, had a video conference event where talked to her own voters and supporters after the election to ask what happened and why. And at one point she asked, how many of the people who voted for her also voted for Trump, and why. And one of the responses she got was to the effect of “I think that both of you are outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment’.”
So you’re saying that ‘establishment’ is necessarily bad and ‘outsider’ is necessarily good? Because that’s what you’re telling me when you vote for both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump, two people who are certainly outsiders to their respective party establishments but who come from radically different perspectives and have nothing else in common. How would you expect two such people in the same government to negotiate and which would you want to prevail? Those are questions you need to answer instead of choosing labels over policies.
You cannot have it both ways, any more than you can vote for Trump on one hand and then vote for state initatives protecting abortion rights on the other. Because I think we all know in his artery-clogged heart that Trump really doesn’t care one way or another about stopping abortion, but if there is anyone he is still beholden to (outside of Russia) it’s the Evangelical community that now treats him like God on Earth. After all, with all the setbacks he’s had, he still won. (Thanks to you voters.) The Evangelicals are now just as drunk with power as Trump is, and they’re going to expect him to enact that national abortion ban. You could have stopped that. But no, you thought you could keep watching The Trump Show while still keeping abortion rights in your state, never mind all the red states you damned to Hell cause people voted in Trump the last time.
Here’s your sign.
Then here’s another example I’ve previously referred to, Bill Barr. Bill Barr actually has a brain. And earlier this year he was doing the tour of TV shows and interviews to hawk his new memoir, and he went into extensive detail about how as Trump’s Attorney General he saw how unqualified and erratic he is. And reporters would always ask Barr, who are you voting for? And he would always confirm that he was voting Republican, even if the nominee was Trump. Why? Because Biden would be worse.
Again: That is not morality. That is not even ideology. That is programming. That’s “I cannot vote for any non-Republican, no matter how much my intellect tells me that the current Republican candidate is wrong.”
Apparently to some people the prospect of another Biden term or a Harris presidency is so horrible that it’s worth having Dr. Oz running our health services. At this rate why not hire Dr. Phil as Surgeon General? His first name is “Dr.”!
People in this country don’t think, they react. They react to labels. They react to their programming.
They don’t actually go over the reasons why they believe what they believe, they just let other people define their terms for them, and then they act on those other people’s definitions.
Meanwhile, how is the “left” (which the woke Right describes as ‘anybody who disagrees with me and my Lord and Savior Trump’) going to respond to this? If you’re a Democratic Party official or member of the mainstream media (same thing), you probably have no idea. So I’ve seen a lot of people giving their hot takes as to how this happened and interviewing various people after the fact to find out why they voted the way they did, and what their motivations are. I say to those liberals:
No. Stop. Stop that.
You’re Trump whispering again.
Remember the last time this happened, you kept getting reporters to come out to Trump-voting neighborhoods and ask why they voted the way they did? Remember you did all those studies and articles, thinking, oh, if we only could get insight into the minds of Trump voters then we could appeal to them and correct course? No. Not happening. Joe Biden was the most pro-organized labor president we’ve had in decades, and organized labor pissed in his face.
What it is is that you good little liberals assume that because you have reasons for doing what you do, however flawed they may be, that you assume that other people are acting on reasons for what they do, which seem valid to them even if you disagree with them. No. The problem is that THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT ACTING ON REASONS. They are operating on feelings. Or what Stephen Colbert in his previous career presciently called truthiness – that is, believing in a thing not because it is actually true, but because it feels true – which is to say, I believe it because I want it to be true. Which feels better to me than fishing through the minutiae of context and facts.
Or as John Fugelsang put it recently, “the media doesn’t get that Donald Trump is the closest some red states will ever get to being able to vote for Boss Hogg.”
You cannot reason with such people any more than you can reason with the Joker. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
If you want to do some real soul searching and re-assessment, liberals, consider again that Trump did not actually increase his vote count from 2020, Kamala Harris only lost because she got at least 11 million votes less than Joe Biden did. Don’t try to Trump whisper the people who were never going to vote for you anyway. Consider why so many people who could have voted for you didn’t.
That is important insofar as you actually plan to be running things once you get elected, whereas Republicans are really good at selling themselves to get elected but always fall down on the ‘running things’ part.
But at the same time, while you actually want to have substantial policies if you win office, you need to sell yourselves to win, and you should admit by now that you can’t sell yourselves with substantial policies. Why? Because again: Americans, as a collective, are stupid.
The good news, sorta, is that Americans’ critical superficiality can work in your favor, and in fact has. Remember when Bill Clinton played sax on the Arsenio Hall show? Remember when Barack Obama won two terms? Nobody cared that the purchasing power of American workers was declining under Democrats, just as voters didn’t care that we’ve had a better post-COVID recovery than any other Western nation. Voters just care what looks good and feels good to them. And it’s pretty clear, again given the anemic vote for Trump and the fact that he won because Democratic voting was even more anemic, that Republicans are just running on the basis of a celebrity figurehead to get their way back in power, because no one cares about their substantial policies any more than people care about those of the Democrats. Which is why Republicans don’t have them.
All you need is another striking figure whom everybody loves and who is capable of competing with Trump on that celebrity level.
Taylor Swift IS 35 now, isn’t she?