Wondering about authority in the aftermath of 11/06/2024 (and my personal prequel ‘Summer of Confusion’), I wandered thorough a few posts mainly as a reaction to all the pundits telling me why millions of people voted for a self-admitted sexual abuser also a convicted felon with a plan (Project 2025, which he glibly and unconvincingly denied) to alter the USA’s governance and way of life. The cognoscenti on the left tagged as the villain the Internet in all of its manifestations from TikTok to Podcasts. But this seemed like a mystery story or policier where every viewer with half a brain can see the authorities have indicted a nefarious character who didn’t do the crime.
Some sleuths claimed a fellow gang member of the InterWeb, The MEDIA, did the deed of electing a person only four years earlier thought unelectable. Curiously, this charge involved saying that some elements of that airwave mafia did too little, others too much, and none hit the Goldilocks mean. Again, the proof is still missing as I discussed here
The best clue I found was a notion that the needs of those voters (and those who stayed home were NOT the needs that the Dem candidates (Harris, Walz, and, yes, Uncle Joe Biden) seemed capable or perhaps even interested in satisfying. Then I turned to other matters — a new play reading (and subsequent rewriting) was a most welcome January distraction, finishing the last chapter of a book on self-producing co-authored with my son, Gifford Elliott, babysitting grandchildren. But it was the last assignment (at which I succeed given my tendency to give out sweets promiscuously) that brought me back to this consideration. If this administration and the discontents it already is visiting upon the country are a test for us then what will the aftereffects frame as a test for these younger generations?
And I continue try to make sense of how this happened by diving into thoughtful streams of analysis like this one by Henry Farrell:
The fundamental problem is this: we tend to think about democracy as a phenomenon that depends on the knowledge and capacities of individual citizens, even though, like markets and bureaucracies, it is a profoundly collective enterprise. That in turn leads us to focus on how social media shapes individual knowledge, for better or worse, and to mistake symptoms for causes.
Henry concluded that the problem was not disinformation, a position with which I already agreed, but still thinks that the online environment is responsible for the formation of opinions, which still seems to me unproven. Maybe these feelings of needs unaddressed are always there and a large swathe of the voting public swings from one side to the other no matter what the reality of achievements or failures has been. We both ended up holding a similar dismal judgement on the USA albeit from different perspectives. Here’s how he put it:
Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space? How can that control be limited or counteracted, even in principle?
Henry worries about the control of these public spaces; I worry about control of the government apparatus by those highly atypical men. But we both end up questioning if democracy can work.
And then I read Freddie DeBoer this morning and I agree with Freddie DeBoer in his desperation:
“I have long ago given up on the idea that adulthood and maturity and moral seriousness could ever make a comeback as highly prized values, as goals that everyone understands we should strive for. But maybe this awful moment, when the wolf is truly at the door, politically, in a way that hasn’t be true for twenty years – maybe this moment is also the moment when people can rethink things. We freaked out about diversity at the Oscars and called that liberation in 2017; can we understand that that approach to diversity has already failed? We withdrew into all manner of digital and chemical and social analgesics in the first Trump administration; can we understand that that approach to coping has already failed? Can we grasp that it’s precisely our refusal to acknowledge just how bad things are, and how implicated we all are in that failure, that disarms us? Can we grow up in time to actually resist?
Probably not.”
I spend my days now thinking of how to resist, not for my sake so much, over the hill and rappelling ever quicker to that Base Camp Oblivion, but for my children, my grandchildren. Can anyone not in the oligarchy or one of its lickspittles believe this will end well for those now starting in the world? Obviously, posts like this drawing out my anger and desperation are the equivalent of bloodletting to help rid the body of impure fluids and balance my humors: they appear to be doing something while achieving no repair. How do we regain the authority that will change minds, alter behaviors, establish alliances? Unlike Beckett’s tramps, my belief has not yet curdled to a state of ‘nothing to be done’.
So, in response to this post, I’m open to ideas, impervious to abuse, and understanding of those who ignore or unfollow.