The fascists have won
Democrats so obviously never wanted to win anyway
See updates through November 18, 2024, at end of post.
First, it was the working class, sacrificed on the altar of environmentalism. Because we never really cared about workers anyway.
Then, it was the working class again and now environmentalists and the poor, sacrificed on the altar of neoliberalism. Because we had to make the rich richer and because environmentalism somehow sounds like ‘communism.’
Then, it was people of color, sacrificed on the altar of the filibuster. Because we couldn't upset the Republicans.
Then it was the Palestinians, sacrificed on the altar of Israel. Because we couldn't lose the Jewish vote.
And then there was no one left to vote for the Democrats. Because they really didn't want to win anyway; it is so much easier to sit in opposition and not to be expected to actually accomplish a single thing.
In the end, it didn’t take nearly as long as nearly everyone thought. Donald Trump triumphed over Kamala Harris as votes were counted in the wee hours of November 6, 2024 on an agenda replete with retribution[1]and tantamount to fascism. In addition, Republicans have won control of the Senate, though there are enough races for seats in the House of Representatives that have yet to be called that control remains uncertain.[2] That said, for most of the day, Republicans have appeared somewhat closer to control of the House than have Democrats.[3]
Update, November 7, 2024: So-called “centrist” Democrats, more properly referred to as neoconservatives, will of course spin their defeat another way, referring to racism and misogyny, and undoubtedly there was some of that, but also—it’s not like the Democrats weren’t warned, nearly twenty years ago, in fact[4]—it’s increasingly clear that a lot of people, especially including the working class, and including me, were fed up with being gaslighted about the state of the economy, and enough people, again including me, simply could not bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden’s material and financial support for genocide.[5]
Democrats are blaming Biden for his determination to run for re-election, despite doubts about his age, and his failure to recognize inflation’s impact on ordinary people.[6] There is certainly truth to that. I was reluctant to fault his age because I perceived ageism—until he seemed to confirm those doubts in his disastrous debate with Donald Trump.
The usual pattern for Democrats, even as they run neoconservative candidates on neoconservative platforms, is to blame progressives for their losses. I’m ultimately expecting more of the same: Neoconservatives will never admit that their policies are 1) a disaster, and 2) disastrously unpopular.
I wrote in 2016 that the Democrats needed to own Trump because they had inexcusably run a weak neoconservative and neoliberal Hillary Clinton against him. Kamala Harris ran as a neoconservative, when there are vanishingly few neoconservative votes outside the Washington, D.C., beltway, and therefore, because neoliberalism is a moral imperative for neoconservatives, as a neoliberal.[7] This is what ever more clearly what explains her support for Israel’s genocide and the absence of a convincing economic policy. Democrats still need to own Trump.
And so the question of the day is, will Democrats learn the lessons they should have learned in 2016? I can’t say I’m optimistic.
Update, November 8, 2024: As the election results became clear, something in the back of my mind was that Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ victory is in accord with an illiberal movement around the world, where institutionalists have been losing ground globally. Some blame here accrues to post-pandemic inflation, but migrants are also being scapegoated. I should have anticipated that Ishaan Tharoor, one of the more persistent voices on this issue, would draw the connection and he has.[8]
We are seeing what I have hoped to diminish but can no longer: Inescapably, racism and sexism are not dealbreakers for a great many people. This takes on an apparent legitimacy in a backlash against so-called “illegal immigrants,” but refuses to address the problems that drive so many people from home in the first place—all too often, extreme violence, as in Central America, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Syria—and thus reflects western privilege, as even the problems the west has created or exacerbated, like drug cartels, the climate crisis, and weak and unstable governments, are all ignored.
The misogyny finds apparent legitimacy in many translations of the Old Testament—I remember reading this as a child and thinking to myself that this was not the relationship I wanted with women. A god this horrible, I thought to myself, deserves only disdain.
But in truth, there isn’t even a requirement for any legitimacy as we see with the racism, pervasive and overt in Pittsburgh—and, I presume, other Rust Belt cities. It just simply is. As the misogyny appears in absolutely unacceptable comments directed at women that apparently started appearing even before the election.[9] I hadn’t heard about it then. I am now—on social media—so I infer that it has amped up even a few notches more since.
The recriminations are flying in every direction. Dan Rather is far from alone in blaming Joe Biden for taking so long to withdraw from the race, shortening the time Kamala Harris had to campaign, though he also points a finger at the economy.[10] I see women who support Gaza accusing women who were more concerned about abortion rights of, as one put it, seeking those rights “over the bodies of Palestinian women.” The simple fact is that the Democratic Party is out of touch—in a bunch of ways. Harris’ campaign was, to me, in addition to be heartless toward Palestinians, jaw-droppingly stupid and I assume she was following the lead of the know-it-all neoconservatives in the Democratic National Committee.
The larger truth is that we are a horrible species. We see this with Trump’s election, the toxic masculinity and blatant bigotry he appealed to, and yet again with the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon. Our extinction will be well-deserved and cannot come soon enough.
Update, November 9-10, 2024: Regarding Democratic Party recriminations over Kamala Harris’ loss: It should go without saying that if you want a united party, you shouldn’t be pointing fingers, blaming people. You should be taking their concerns seriously instead of dismissing them[11] and you should asking what we could have done better.
And there was a lot that could have been done better. But no, the neoconservatives who control the party are always right and everyone else is always wrong—even as the Washington Post confirms my interpretation, and even so, staggering my imagination, that Democrats have been gaslighting the public on the economy.[12] You just don’t get stupider or more arrogant than this in politics.
Update, November 10, 2024: I’m thinking of the Confederate flags I saw all around Pittsburgh when I first moved back here in 2019, but it has to be some very sick folks’ idea of a joke to send text messages to Black people across the country saying they would be rounded up to “pick cotton” as slaves.[13]
Over the years and decades, as I have criticized human cruelty toward both human and nonhuman animals, I have occasionally been asked what my solution is. It has taken me far too long to realize, as with the election of Donald Trump and with genocide, to say nothing of our butchery of nonhuman animals, that we find nothing quite so satisfying as that cruelty.
I will here be criticized for conflating oppressors with their victims, but not to do so only raises the question of if the shoe was on the other foot. Are victims really so much holier than their oppressors? I cannot say this with any confidence—indeed, what evidence I have seen is to the contrary, like the Jews as victims of successive pogroms and the Holocaust, recast as themselves committing genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. My answer is Noah’s flood—without the survivors this time, as climate change or some other stupidity, perhaps nuclear, will likely do the job.
All my life, I have dismissed the concept of “original sin,” the idea that through the literal or figurative (as in caesarian section) act of passing through a vagina, we are stained by sin. What a despicable way to think of our mothers, I have more recently thought.
But we are bigots. We are sexist. We are racist. We kill. We commit genocide. We indulge in settler-colonialism. We financially and materially support others who commit these sins. We vote for the “lesser evil” in a constitutional oligarchy and hail it as “democracy.” We are in every way and at every opportunity relentlessly brutal and we hail this as “heroic.”
I know not whether there is a god. But there is a devil—and we are it.
Update, November 12, 2024: Republicans have likely retained control of the House of Representatives, meaning they will control both the White House and both houses of Congress.[14] And with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, they will now effectively control the entire federal government.
To put it mildly, this is a dispiriting moment. Progressives collectively continued to bank on the Democratic Party and now these goals seem farther away than ever.
Update, November 18, 2024: Sarah Kendzior sees the Democrats as complicit in a plan for Donald Trump to win a second term for elite grift, leaving the U.S. like a closed and abandoned Days Inn Motel that she uses as in an analogy.[15] I’m not quite that cynical: I have rather regarded the Democrats as very much preferring to sit in opposition where they can complain about the Republicans and no one can expect them to actually accomplish anything. But I sense truth in what she writes.
I’m also nowhere near as optimistic as Camonghne Felix, who argues that the Uncommitted Movement succeeded in making the genocide in Gaza and a widening war in the Middle East a mainstream issue.[16]The neoconservative movement should have died in abject humiliation with the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its moral imperative, neoliberalism, should have died in disgrace when Hillary Clinton was defeated in 2016. Both live on as zombie ideologies with an unbreakable hold on Washington, D.C.
Finally, I have confirmation now that misogynistic attacks of the most vile sort have surged on social media since the election.[17]
[1] Zeke Miller et al., “Trump wins the White House in political comeback rooted in appeals to frustrated voters,” Associated Press, November 6, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/election-day-trump-harris-white-house-83c8e246ab97f5b97be45cdc156af4e2
[2] Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick, “Control of the US House hangs in the balance with enormous implications for Trump’s agenda,” Associated Press, November 6, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/congress-elections-house-senate-harris-trump-9a38fb935f94ac1e3f5cdcef621a39ca
[3] NBC News, “2024 House Results,” November 6, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/house-results
[4] Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
[5] Adam Cancryn, “Dems rage against Biden’s ‘arrogance’ after Harris loss,” Politico, November 6, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/democrats-blame-biden-trump-win-00188092; Belén Fernández, “It was anger that won Trump this election,” Al Jazeera, November 6, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/6/it-was-anger-that-won-trump-this-election; Shadi Hamid, “Democrats can’t blame anyone but themselves this time,” Washington Post, November 6, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/06/trump-harris-reckoning-2024/; Bernie Sanders, “It should come as no great surprise . . . .,” X, November 6, 2024, https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1854271157135941698; Matt Sledge, “In Dearborn, Rashida Tlaib Did Nearly Twice as Well as Kamala Harris,” Intercept, November 6, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2024/11/06/dearborn-michigan-rashida-tlaib-kamala-harris-gaza/; Julia Terruso et al., “Pa. Democrats on what went wrong against Donald Trump and what’s next,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 7, 2024, https://www.inquirer.com/politics/pennsylvania-democrats-what-went-wrong-20241107.html
[6] Adam Cancryn, “Dems rage against Biden’s ‘arrogance’ after Harris loss,” Politico, November 6, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/democrats-blame-biden-trump-win-00188092
[7] David Benfell, “Get ready to fight, kids,” Not Housebroken, September 9, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/get-ready-to-fight-kids; David Benfell, “Kamala Harris, the neoconservative,” Not Housebroken, September 11, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/kamala-harris-the-neoconservative; David Benfell, “Neoconservatives, neoliberals and the conflation with Democrats and Republicans,” Not Housebroken, October 15, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/neoconservatives-neoliberals-and
[8] Ishaan Tharoor, “Trump’s victory cements the triumph of the illiberal West,” Washington Post, November 8, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com//world/2024/11/08/trump-victory-illiberal-west-russia-orban/
[9] Jennifer Matson, “‘Your body, my choice’: Women face new surge of hate speech on X and TikTok following Trump’s election victory,” Fast Company, November 8, 2024, https://www.fastcompany.com/91225746/your-body-my-choice-hate-speech-against-women-after-trump-election
[10] Steady, “Our Loss,” November 8, 2024, https://steady.substack.com/p/our-loss
[11] Julia Conley, “DNC Chair Jaime Harrison Calls Sanders Critique of Election Loss ‘Straight Up BS,’ Common Dreams, November 7, 2024, https://www.commondreams.org/news/bernie-sanders-dnc-2024
[12] Matt Bai, “What Biden did that infuriated people,” Washington Post, November 8, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/08/biden-failure-lost-voters-trust/; Abha Bhattarai and Jeff Stein, “Americans deliver message to Democratic Party: The economy isn’t working,” Washington Post, November 9, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/09/democrats-election-economy-inflation-harris-biden/
[13] Bess Levin, “Black People Across the US Received Texts Saying They’d Been ‘Selected to Pick Cotton’ Following the Election,” Vanity Fair, November 8, 2024, https://apple.news/Ag9o_h4NFS_-NhM-Yvz8Gqw
[14] 270toWin, “Republicans Retain House Majority,” November 11, 2024, https://www.270towin.com/news/2024/11/11/republicans-retain-house-majority_1680.html
[15] Sarah Kendzior, “The End of Days Inn,” November 14, 2024, https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-end-of-days-inn
[16] Camonghne Felix, “Uncommitted achieved its goal in making Gaza a mainstream issue,” Guardian, November 18, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/18/uncommitted-campaign-democrats-gaza-election
[17] Clare Duffy, “‘Your body, my choice’: Attacks on women surge on social media following election,” Cable News Network, November 13, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/11/business/your-body-my-choice-movement-election/index.html