The Unforgiven

This is Who We Are.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”- D.H. Lawrence

We are a flinty lot, aren’t we? The fact that we are the best-fed, fattest, richest, and most lethally defended humans on the history of planet Earth doesn’t matter. It’s not enough. We are afraid. We guard the door, we look out the window through pulled curtains. We don’t trust strangers, because we know what we are capable of, in our darkest moments.

Our empire has cornered the market on the world’s riches, and so we are coddled with too much of everything. We have more cars, more money, more cheap food, more good roads, more personal gadgets, more guns, and more independence than any country in the world. 

There isn’t enough Ritalin or Adderall in the supply chain to soothe the addling effect of all the choices we have, 

And yet - it’s not enough. All that stuff hasn’t made us happier. Gas doesn’t cost what it cost in 1989. The price of eggs went up. 

We are a materialistic, pissed-off, angry, and unfulfilled lot. We want cheap things, and we want respect for the expensive things we do manage to acquire. 

Our tendency toward resentment has only grown in the digital panopticon. Our lives aren’t as fancy as those of the Instagram influencers with hot bodies and luxury travel we see we scroll all day and all night. Where is mine?

With unfulfilled desire as baseline mass psychology, the right-wing media ecosystem has easily brainwashed more than half the country into believing that we are living in “the worst inflation in American history” and “the worst economy in history.”  Everything is dark and bleak. 

Then there’s fear. Katie, bar the door! The caravan of brown people! The haunting of 9/11, never forget. Thanks to Fox, half of America is fixated on “urban” crime. Twitchy with paranoia. A group of Syrians picked up at the Southern Border… what do you think they wanted? (Wrong answer: a peaceful life free of war.) No, it’s brown people coming to get your stuff - if not literally snatching it out of your house, then just given it by the government, using the ill-gotten taxes your family forked over.

Paranoia goes double for many of America’s white Christians. What would their version of Christianity be without the fantasy of persecuted faithful in the lion’s den? These most coddled and protected humans consider themselves to be “under attack” simply because gay marriage exists and because their once pliant wives and daughters can (or could) control their own breeding parts and bank accounts, and because a lot of Americans are essentially libertines (see above) thereby, de facto taunting them like Satan (see Mike Johnson’s porn app).

Early analysis by the Association Press identified a key Trump voting bloc - males 18 to 29. What’s happened to our boys? Weaned on the wireless controller, isolated in their headsets as post-apocalyptic caped warriors with magical powers, surrounded by female peers who have their shit more together and little or no interest in having sex with them… what could go wrong?

All that is not to say Americans shouldn’t be angry. 

We have lived in a politically regressive time since Reagan’s presidency crushed labor and elevated the Greed is Good Gordon Gekkos. Non-college Americans of all ages and younger voters in the formerly blue-collar communities could have been kept out of the Strongman political column (maybe) with national health care, stronger labor support, and decent wages. Our lives could be less hard and isolated with access to national health care and a national minimum wage. And those are things Democrats gave up on. Rather than fighting hard and consistently for political change they opted for leftish cultural manipulation  - DEI, gay marriage - and left it to the Orange Man channel the anger. And whether we blame them or the forces of greed and raw power arrayed against them is not something we can do anything about now. 

WHAT’S AHEAD

I drew the short straw at The New Republic and spent several weeks pre-writing the cover story we all hoped would never run: “Trump Wins.” I’ll be updating it today, and I assume it will now be published. I talked to a lot of people about how a Trump 2.0 will play out. I’m sorry to say that the future is not bright. The consensus is that the MAGAs will try to implement some of Project 2025 very soon, by executive order, “shock and awe” style.

Trump will pardon the J6ers, probably on day one, creating a paramilitary force answerable to him. Will they be handed an assault rifle on the way out the jail door?

He will initiate Schedule F, firing possibly tens of thousands of federal employees and replacing them with MAGA lackeys who will feel no qualms about following illegal orders or breaking norms.

Even though America is the biggest energy producer in the world, Trump will immediately reopen public lands for resource extraction. “Climate change” will be immediately erased from the official American lexicon.

Migrants without papers - possibly hundreds of thousands - will start being disappeared en masse from workplaces where white Americans will never want to work. They just won’t come home to their kids one day.  If the left tries to mobilize street protests, the regime, with a strongman twitching for a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act, will deploy troops. 

A little bit later: Ukraine will be handed off to Putin.

The Comstock Act will be initiated with a crackdown on mailed abortion pills. Women in the ban states will resort to the old DIY methods and more will start to die of sepsis when doctors fear to touch them. 

Retribution will begin. Individuals who pissed off Trump might see special IRS audits. The DOJ might be persuaded to open investigations into political opponents. Journalists who ever asked a hard question won’t be allowed in the White House pressroom - and maybe won’t be employed by some of the mainstream broadcasters who need access. Trump could even, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, apply the Espionage Act to journalists. 

The federal judiciary will go full Catholic integralist within a year to take advantage of the red Senate. Trumpers will pressure old guys like Alito and Thomas to leave (good riddance!) but replace them with reactionaries in their 40s. Little Aileen Cannons everywhere. 

I’ll end this on an up note: Stretching for a silver lining. Whatever happens, we live in a beautiful and privileged nation. We do have a democracy right now - a lot of Americans voted and Americans were not coerced - deluded, brainwashed, and fear-mongered maybe – but free to choose. The election was not stolen. Again, as ashamed I am to admit this to my horrified friends in other nations: This is who we are. 

But we are also fickle. After four more years of the right running amok, when Trump 2.0 kleptocrats have not delivered the fantasies Orange has peddled of prosperity for all - it will dawn on enough Americans that this regime will never fill the deep and endless yearning for our birthright - HAPPINESS. Because: Who can? And then, angry again, we will give this claque of oafs, orcs, rapists, misogynists, fake Christians, racists, neo-Nazis, and liars the boot they deserved last night.