The End of History. The End of Tomorrow.

We are forever stuck in 2016.

Nov 08, 2024

Former President Donald Trump speaks during his penultimate campaign rally the day before the 2024 election in Pittsburgh, Pa. on Nov. 4.

Joe Biden basically died for this. Kamala Harris presided over a campaign so poor that it was defeated by Donald Trump in the throws of dementia, rambling about Arnold Palmer’s penis and lurid fantasies about mass deportations and dictatorial aspirations. Only in America can you go from working at McDonald’s to the White House in two weeks. If Trump had ever achieved anything legitimately historic the first time he was president, it is that his annihilating ego has so thoroughly filled the vacuum of vestigial politeness at the center of American politics. Everything really has been about him for a decade; the defining question for the past several election cycles has been nothing more complex than “Do you like Trump or hate him?” and both parties seemed convinced that their answer was the winning one. In a nation beset by any number of ongoing, unattended, belated, or worsening calamities, many millions of Americans have been turning out to vote more or less on that as a primary issue. Now the question is, how does this loss impact Brat streaming numbers?

The post-election moratoriums have been predictable, because the tenants of liberal narcissism dictate that it must always be someone else’s fault. As the punditocracy sifts through the wreckage of her campaign, there’s a bit of muttering about the choice of Tim Walz and whether Joe Biden should’ve stepped aside. There is the typical scapegoating of minorities who failed to fall in line and “irrational” voters who chose candidates based on “emotion.” Fingers are pointed at Russian interference, disinformation from right-wing media, third-party voters, and virulent racism and misogyny. All of these arguments have some merit, sure, but these schoolmarmy pundits are congenitally incapable of self-criticism. Democrats will learn nothing from this and for the next election—which will become the most important election in history since the last one—they will try to guilt people into voting for them again because the tether to their donors has hindered their ability to do good politics. They have lost the Mandate of Heaven. They have so thoroughly internalized the idea that cynicism is pragmatism that even when presented with blatant evidence to the contrary, they cannot accept their failures.

They lost in a humiliating landslide in what they branded as the Democracy Is At Stake election. In their last-ditch effort to protect America against Trump’s incipient fascism, they picked a goofy cackling woman who says shit like, “What can be unburdened by what has been,” who laughs strangely at inappropriate times, who seems mildly but permanently xanned, who simply feels like a homunculus. Kamala’s demeanor is that of an entry-level employee who wandered into a work meeting they forgot to prepare for and it was their turn to say something. Kamala was a historically corny candidate and the only campaign she previously ran outside of California was the 2020 presidential primary in which she was so thoroughly embarrassed that she bailed from the race before the first state held its election. She was a chronically unpopular Vice President, doing nothing with the position except garble through strange and incomprehensible phrasings.

Brat Summer was a bizarre mass psychosis in which her public image broke out in virulent lime green, rebranding her as a snotty egirl. There was a sugar-rush popularity spike despite nothing about her actually changing. The New York Times printed the words “coconut-pilled” in a headline and doughy old apparatchiks transformed into teenage girls in shiny lipgloss chittering about weird Republicans. The vibes were immaculate, even as missiles rained down from the sky in Gaza and the corpses of Palestinian women and children were being carried around in garbage bags or they weren’t being lined up and crushed to death by bulldozers—but all of that is abstract and far away.

Once Brat Summer faded, a vapid campaign with no political vision soon turned into uninspiring blackmail. Democracy is on the ballot. Project 2025. Remember January 6th? Republicans will snatch your pronouns and enact a national abortion ban. Fascism is on the horizon. All of which might be real: Trump exists within pure haphazard instinction, a kind of wafting state in which everything is possible, but mostly results in a series of compromises forced upon other people. But the Democrat’s antiseptic presentation and paternalistic lecturing didn’t work, the fear porn and the rightward drift on fracking and the border appealed to no one, the broken promises of the past are still remembered and always will be. There was no political vision or even an acknowledgment of the realities of living in America in 2024. Bill Clinton was haranguing Muslims in Michigan while Kamala paraded Liz Cheney’s endorsement on the campaign trail. The Hillary strategy didn’t work in 2016, so let’s run it back in perpetuity.

Democracy is on the ballot is an inherently anti-democratic slogan, especially from a candidate who was only on a presidential ticket because her party didn’t hold a primary. The Democrats knew Joe Biden’s brain had degenerated into clumpy spoiled milk that was leaking out of his nose and into his morning coffee, but they kept pretending otherwise until his face melted on live TV. They really seemed to think that people wouldn’t notice what was right in front of them, or maybe they simply didn’t care. But they made sure his defenestration and replacement went over as smoothly and seamlessly as possible. No messy primaries, no appealing to voters, no affirmative case to be made, and certainly no ideological bickering. Just a slick, stage-managed show. Whatever gasping android they pick is our only option, and we have no choice other than to Vote Blue No Matter Who. This, they insisted, was a democracy worth saving.

Another option would be to actually pitch something to the voters, like a social safety net attuned to the needs of its citizens and better guardrails against unchecked rampant corporations. Trump offered an enemy to blame and the prospect of doing violence to them; it may be psychotic, but at least it’s something. The strange imaginative project of MAGA is itself the result of the broader failure of imagination that has arrested progress and diminished horizons. The Democrat’s promise of a better-managed and incrementally improved version is better and more coherent on its merits than Trump’s chaotic and bigoted revanchism, but this platform ultimately couldn’t surmount how loathsome the present has become. It made for a pretty sputtering and undignified end to whatever this moment was—a party promising moderate institutionalism and meliorism at home and the usual brutality abroad lost to a no-shit oligarchic power grab built around less idle genocidal fantasies. About 12 million voters who had previously voted for the regime overseeing this current moment couldn’t quite find themselves to vote to keep this moment going any longer.

I’m not sure if a better campaign by and under the auspices of the Democratic Party would’ve altered their electoral fortunes. Maybe if there had been more of a visible willingness of the Biden Administration to route around Joe Manchin and “Problem Solver” Senators to abolish the filibuster so they could codify Roe v. Wade and boost voting protections, they might have catalyzed a coalition strong enough to continue staving Trump off while developing longer-term solutions to the structural problems that created him. But Kamala lost for the same reason why she was the candidate in the first place: The Democrats are an anti-party that’s allergic to politics and contemptuous of their voters. When it comes to responding to crisis, its leadership of bloodless technocrats coil in on themselves, suck in their farts, and negotiate against themselves. This is hardwired into their algorithm. They don’t owe anything to the public, but the public owes them love and respect and admiration and, crucially, their votes.

Maybe none of that matters when there is an entire coalition of glassy-eyed religious maniacs and troglodytes breathing through the spittle in their mouths. Frothing adult incels obsessing over skull shapes and globular neckbeards who have unwittingly outsourced their entire sense of reality to charlatan manosphere podcasters. Their eyes dart in terror once they rant about all the plans set in motion by the Deep State. Instead of articulate speech, they wail against Wokeism, gibbering with a fury that immediately degrades into mashed-up waste phrasings and meaningless drivel about a world they simply don’t have the faculties to understand. These people are aggressively stupid and offputting, and if you have the misfortune of conversing with them even for a few minutes, it becomes apparent that they are deeply unwell. Trump has surely done his part to hasten the ongoing degeneration of American politics, but that process didn’t begin with him so much as it more fully and floridly realized itself through their overt and oafish grievances. A healthy culture could not have produced Trump, let alone elevated him in a way that ours has. He is a gaudy metonym for unaccountable wealth and a flailing and stupid representation of the impunity it allows, and he has managed to maintain this status in defiance of, among many other things, more or less every single thing he says or does.

The depravity and abstraction of American politics at this moment is to some extent a result of a degraded and worsening information environment. All these alternative realities are being nudged outwards into impossibility by corrosive algorithms and influence campaigns and various toxic and longstanding cultural derangements. Millions of people voted for Trump believe things about him that are manifestly untrue—that he will do tremendous things for the economy, that he will only deport the people who deserve it, that he will work on behalf of ordinary Americans and not the predatory elites looting this country or even work for anyone but himself. They have convinced themselves of Trump as this idealistic god-emperor even after he already did not do any of those things during his recent previous term as president, a testament to the power of these abstractions. The things Trump says and does do not really matter as much as they should, or at all, to the people who support him. Whether they take him seriously or literally is immaterial; they simply take him for granted as whatever they imagine him to be.

While Trump is the most important person in Trumpism, he is both an avatar for something both greater and smaller—a long spate of complaints and a certain sour cast of mind, sudden blistering sadism and skeins of wild self-pity, a relentless and unappeasable grievance, an idea of power that exists only to blame and punish and deny. These servile cadres of eggheads, meatheads, and buttheads chose Trump because he was a bellowing asshole selling a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. The relationship between Trump and the outrage industry that sustains him has finally and devastatingly slipped out of sync, and as a result, the man and his followers have found themselves too upset and too adrift to ascertain what they were even upset about in the first place. Rising egg prices. Migrant Visigoths flooding the southern border. The decline of Western Civilization. The very grave crimes against Mr. Trump perpetrated by the familiar supervillains of the Fox News Cinematic Universe. His voters never cared about policies, and he never gave them any. As it exists up and down the culture, Trumpism in its various guises is a hair-trigger fan community and a deliriously servile online cult, a shared metonym for a suite of musty grievances and a television programming strategy, a gaudily gilded aesthetic and a perverse herrenvolk fantasy. But for all the things it is, Trumpism is not complicated. It is a graceless, gloating, recursive celebration of white power and white grievance.

Trump ran for president to capture this overwhelming mindshare, and thanks to the sheer persistence of his immovable self, it is what the presidency has become. He is America’s most thought-about and talked-about man, the one who is on television the most, whose idioms and idiosyncracies are most ingrained into the lexicon, the person whose name everyone knows. If his presidency has an ideology beyond the expression of lifelong bigotries and the pursuit of his personal feuds, it is the maintenance of this status quo. Trumpism is about perpetuating and justifying the centrality of one man.

And in response, we may see a return to circa-2016 turbo woke and pussy hats and #resistance culture, but more zombified and clearly on autopilot; I’m sure Jeff Tiedrich’s keyboard already looks like a box of glazed donuts left in the back seat of a hot car. SNL will pump out more lazy Trump sketches. The discourse will have no room for nuance, a cacophony of idiot shrieking about inane culture war bullshit forever. Everything will stay the same except get worse, corporations will get to do a little more child labor and the average Pennsylvania chump will be forced to acclimate to taking a shot of Dupont sludge with their morning joe while Yellowstone is auctioned off to Jared Kushner. Maybe we should allow the losing side to riot the U.S. Capitol every four years, a Tranuary 6, but instead of taking a shit on Pelosi’s desk, they wrap Ted Cruz’s office in kente cloth and there’s a land acknowledgment before J.D. Vance is hogtied and AOC glues a bedazzled rainbow dildo to his forehead. To save democracy, Kamala should do what Mike Pence didn’t have the guts to do and refuse to certify the election.

Trump will be bad. I’m not sure if he will be as Hitlerian as his enemies keep screeching, but he will degrade institutions and make life considerably worse for vulnerable populations. Republicans have been telling the rest of us, everywhere and every day, what they want and how they intend to take it. The tension between Trump’s grandiose threats and signature soggy inertia has made for some uneasy days, but I am hopeful that the selfishness and nihilism inherent to the MAGA project will lead to administrative infighting that thwarts the most muscular Christian fascism and evil fuckery promised by Project 2025. Trump’s team consists of his dull and preening family, superannuated legacy goblins, the thirstiest and least principled members of D.C.’s lickspittle GOP community, whatever waiver-wire flotsam is available in terms of legal talent, and Elon Musk. This is not really a group of people that do well with the concept of unison for reasons having to do with ideology and more urgently their own appetites and personal defects and awful personalities. Trump governs by telling someone whose name he’ll soon forget to fix a problem he didn’t care enough about to understand, and then watching television to see how well he was doing. But incompetence is also dangerous, like a monkey with a hand grenade. I have no reason to gloat about any of this, as we will all live with the consequences of this election to varying degrees, but maybe it’s finally time to demand something better from the Democrats and ourselves to get us out of this mess.