These familiar, unprecedented times

It's a Chaos Era, folks. Also: what happens in the next pandemic; a Gen X indie supergroup; and an uncanny touchdown celebration

Did you recently join Bluesky? Follow me there. Also, we pronounce it “blewski.”

Early in the morning of 2024 election day, I sleepwalked for the first time in my life.

I guess you’re never aware that you’re sleepwalking — you just find out later. In my case, I stumbled blearily into the kitchen for my coffee around 7:15am, and my son immediately informed me that he’d found my earbuds in his bathroom. I had been listening to a sleep meditation when I’d finally drifted off a few hours earlier, and somehow the earbuds had migrated from my bed to the sink of the kids’ bathroom on the other floor of the house. I checked my Fitbit, and yep, I had taken 100 steps around 4am. I had not even a shadow of a memory of this.

I had been nauseously optimistic for election night, but my lizard brain of doom apparently had other ideas. The Dem needs to be leading in the polls by 6-8% to win, but she’s not.

WTF happened?

As with all failures, we’re going to look back and wonder what could have stopped this. Inflation basically destroyed every incumbent government among the world’s democracies, regardless of their ideology. Unfortunately, none of those incumbents could have done much about the real causes of inflation. Democracy doesn’t always work perfectly.

As we covered last week, imprisoning Trump for his coup attempt would have been the right thing to do. Justice delayed was justice denied, and now we have a completion of the coup, not by violence but by apathy. People just don’t care to save the republic when the republic is not working for them. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a Crisis Era election.

Last Tuesday was different from election night 2016, but not really very much. That year was a test whether a candidate who broke all the rules and insulted our common heroes could still win. He barely raised money, and he stole a lot of what he raised.

His victory that year was nigh unthinkable. Or at least it was to white liberals who had previously elected Barack Obama twice. Last week I kept thinking of the SNL sketch that aired the weekend after the 2016 election, which lampooned the shattered innocence of complacent whites who thought we’d already solved racism. It’s worth a rewatch.

So to see Trump sprint back to victory last week wasn’t any kind of a shock. In fact, even the most optimistic Democrats seemed emotionally prepared for it. And yet, this loss was also far worse than 2016, because this time he gained share among the many groups that he’d supposedly alienated with his insults. It’s now impossible to write off Trump as solely a vestige of white nationalism, even though the Nazis are firmly in his camp.

This presidency will be worse than his last. At the same time, he may accomplish some difficult but positive things that have been held back by institutional sclerosis. His two constraints — the law and public opinion — have been obliterated by SCOTUS and the voters, respectively. He’ll also likely have two years of Congressional majorities, and he’s already exiled all the rebels from his party. On inauguration day, he’ll assume wartime executive powers, but during a time of peace.

This election isn’t just about the next four years. The breadth of this victory, only the second popular vote win for a Republican in 36 years (albeit with a plurality not a majority), enshrines Trumpism as the new American center of gravity, as generationally transformational as Reagan’s win in 1980. It’s now impossible to imagine post-Trump Republicans veering back towards international militarism or tolerance toward immigrants. Steve Bannon predicted in 2015 that economic populism could defeat all the other ideologies, and he was apparently right.

So how did this happen? Well, everybody will tell you that if Kamala Harris could have done this one thing differently, she would have pulled it off. Everybody is a Dunning-Kruger when it comes to election post-mortems. She should have criticized Israel and supported Palestine. She should have called Trump a rapist more often. She should never have campaigned with establishment Republicans. She should have distanced herself from wokeness.

Harris lost all the Blue Wall states by small margins — 180,000 more Dems turning out for her in PA/MI/WI would have changed the result. It also could have meant Harris winning while losing the popular vote, a shocking switcheroo which could have convinced more states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and neutralize the Electoral College, another toxic legacy of the 1700s.

My teenage son, the one who found my earbuds in his bathroom, had his own thoughts on election night. (1) It would have been better if Biden hadn’t run for reelection. Then we’d have had a Democratic primary so the candidates could duke it out a bit. (2) I don’t think people knew what Harris stood for, besides not being Trump. (3) Why isn’t Trump in prison? Didn’t he try to do a coup?

Everyone’s an election expert.

It wasn’t just racism

We all made fun of Trump when he won the 2016 Nevada caucus, and as he read through his exit polling in his victory speech, he noted, “I love the poorly educated.” His most recent scam at the time was Trump University, in which he victimized the poorly educated by promising to make them rich.

In the post-mortem of 2016, liberals argued over how to win back the white working class (WWC) without appealing to their whiteness. The nomination of Joe Biden in 2020 was a calculated strategy to stop the bleeding. Who better to win back Scranton than one of its own?

But what we saw last week was a broad shift away from Democrats. Trump will finish with almost the same number of votes as he got in 2020, but Harris will come significantly short of Biden’s total. The “shifts” among almost every demographic segment represent fewer people voting Democratic in 2024 than in 2020.

OK, let me put on my own Dunning-Kruger cloak here, and explain how I think Harris lost this election. A lot of it is going to tie back to what you may have read here in Rangelife, and some of it is new.

Let’s put aside her natural disadvantages, like incumbency, her late entry into the race, her race and sex, and the lack of a primary season to sharpen her message.

First, there was the message and the underlying policy. When Harris first declared for the presidency in 2020, she’d been a US Senator for two years. That campaign quickly fizzled because she failed to define her policy and leadership ambitions as president. It was instructive to watch her campaign collapse in real time.

When Harris hastily assumed the 2024 Democratic nomination, she also had to hastily differentiate herself from Joe Biden. The eventual result was “The Opportunity Economy,” which could have been lifted from Bill Clinton in 1996: a neo-liberal smorgasbord of tax credits and new programs. Do you even remember anything about it? It was so tepid that even Trump mostly abandoned his “Commie Comrade Kamala” routine and instead just relied on calling her stupid.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard a number of liberals complain that the voters’ demand for change was unwarranted. What’s everyone so upset about? Our economy is the envy of the world! (True.) We beat inflation faster than any other growth economy! (True.) Violent crime has plummeted! (Shockingly true.) You’re going to sacrifice reproductive rights for the promise of cheaper eggs?

But these indicators all missed one key fact: the median American voter is broke. Only 39% say they’re better off than they were four years, vs. 52% who say they’re worse. Four years earlier, those numbers were flipped, 55%-to-33%.

Inflation, or more precisely higher prices, made everything less comfortable for those outside the top income brackets. Inflation-adjusted consumer debt is nearing an all-time high, close to where it was before the financial crisis. Housing shortages are more acute; 24% of renters are spending more than half their incomes on housing. The median first-time homebuyer is today 38 years old, compared with 31 years old in 2012, and most younger people believe that they’ll never own anything.

That’s a lot of pain. Buttloads of policy were never going to win people over.

But it wasn’t just the message; it was the medium. I remember my late-night panic attacks in the fall of 2016: Why does Trump have an arena-sized rally every day and get wall-to-wall news coverage, while Hillary is doing school gyms and buying TV ads on CNN? Why am I even seeing her ads in San Francisco? Why is Trump dominating Facebook?

For 2024, Trump’s campaign migrated from Facebook to the new new media. He did Logan Paul, Joe Rogan, Barstool, Theo Von, seemingly every bro-Tuber and streamer with a large young (male) audience. They let him talk, they never challenged him.

Meanwhile, liberals were performatively canceling their New York Times subscriptions. (OMG, all the people shrieking that the NY Times was rooting for Trump. He just sued them for $10 billion!) While they were complaining about legacy media whose influence was confined to a ever-shrinking bubble, Trump was speaking freely without challenge, to millions of people at a time.

(Yes, Harris did some podcasts, too. Trump did 20 of them. It wasn’t close.)

And this gets to a core problem with liberals and Democrats — we’re still holding onto a past when TV networks and newspapers framed reality. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans checked out of traditional media years ago: a busy night on cable news draws fewer than 5 million viewers these days, with more than half of those people ingesting Fox. By comparison, Joe Rogan’s podcast gets 10 million listeners / viewers a week. His interview with Trump on YouTube has 48 million views. (He claims he offered Harris an interview, but she wouldn’t agree to his conditions.) Logan Paul’s interview with Trump got more viewers than Harris’s much-heralded sitdown with Fox News.

This also reflects a natural advantage for Trump. One Trumpian slip could be a mortal wound for Harris. The rise of authentic media rewards the candidates who don’t ask permission or apologize for authenticity. Old white guys are playing this game on Easy mode. His stunts like the garbage truck or slinging fries at McDonald’s broke through in a way that a $25,000 tax credit or a celebrity concert never could.

Living through the Trump presidency as if we’ve been here before

Trump is already building his kakistrocracy. This administration is going to be more effective, more extreme, and more unrestrained than the last. The billionaires who eschewed him in 2016 and even abandoned him after January 6 came back in a big way.

Trump the man is extremely predictable, but the output of his administration is not. Here’s what I think is going to happen. I may be wrong about all of this.

(1) The deportations will be horrifying by design, but also more performative than structural. A real mass deportation of undocumented people would cause economic upheaval and instant food inflation. The people he listens to — American oligarchs — will tell him this. Obama and Biden deported millions of undocumented immigrants; Trump will be crueler, more violent, and more showy about it. This was always about optics.

(2) The tariffs will come fast, but they also will be less broad than promised. Again, tariffs will be instantly inflationary, and the retaliation will batter exporting industries, many of which are dominated by the plutocrats who financed him.

(3) He will effectively abandon NATO, and that’ll be a wrap on the post-war order. Russia is no freer or greater a force for good in the world than when Reagan was around, but here we are. Trump may have killed the American appetite to defend Europe from Russian expansion. Raise your hand if you imagined this possible 10 years ago.

(4) Trump will do nothing meaningful about health care. The deficit will continue to grow. The billionaires will beg him to reform Social Security, but he won’t touch it.

(5) The Elon relationship will be extremely corrupt, but also it will end badly, and the two dudes will at least pretend to feud a little. (Don’t forget that Trump ultimately has the power of the state over Elon — see item (6) below.)

(6) The Department of Justice will hunt anyone who prosecuted Trump. We’ll probably see several indictments of Democrats. These are likely to be for real crimes of corruption tolerated by members of both parties. He will also take a page from Putin and MBS and prosecute one (1) billionaire to prove that he’s the boss of the oligarchs now.

(7) Trump will make no attempt to pretend that he’s conducting his business separately from his statecraft. He’s already jacked the price of Mar-a-Lago to $1m/year, which is 4x higher than his first term. He will openly take massive bribes in the form of “deals.” Jared and Ivanka have been doing “deals” for which they provide no value for the past four years in preparation for this. Don Jr has joined a venture capital firm so he can invest in companies that will benefit from his dad’s influence in office.

(8) Although expressly unconstitutional, Trump will muse about a third term. We’ll hear about this very soon, maybe before inauguration.

Define “can’t”

(9) Above all, Trump is going to quietly wield the threat of mob violence. The Washington press is missing this, but as Trump “negotiates” with Congress and other domestic powers, his ability to command an unwell-organized militia of Second Amendment fans will remain a source of juice for him. It doesn’t require another January 6th — for the past 8 years, Trump could name someone and expect their family to receive a flood of violent threats. And maybe a bomb.

And that’s why we have to act like we’ve been here before. Because we have.

Trump is going to engage in layers of mischief in his second term. We might feel drawn to return to Trump 45 mode, in which we focus on his insults, mistakes, or stunts, hoping that people will finally notice what a monster he is, that his voters will admit they made a huge mistake, that some legal authority will hold him accountable.

But we no longer live that world. There will be no Robert Mueller or even Alvin Bragg, no impeachments. He’s legally untouchable until he dies. Most of the new people who voted for him now have an emotional investment in their decision, and they want to feel like they were right. And his fan base is already loaded up.

And so it’s ultimately incumbent on us as citizens to focus on the stuff that matters, and not distractions like how bad his diaper might smell, the way a foreign dignitary rolled his eyes, or how he’s serving cold fast food to college football champions.

This isn’t easy. Trump 45 showed that the federal government is so big and powerful, that nefarious or incompetent people can bungle or corrupt something new every day. His White House casually engaged in hundreds of activities that might have inspired televised Congressional hearings in past decades. Did you know that Trump’s personal White House doctor was running a pill mill out of the White House? This isn’t some Twitter allegation, it was an actual report from the US military. That’ll appear on page 876 of All the Fucked Up Shit from the Trump Administration, Vol. 1.

One very specific thing I’m worried about

I’m worried about the next pandemic. It may or may not be bird flu, but we’ve now seen how quickly a virus can spread. Although Trump badly botched the initial response to COVID in 2020, his prioritization of rapid vaccine development saved a lot of lives.

But the paranoid heart of the American Right rejected the vaccines. It took Trump a while to understand this, because he believed Project Warp Speed to be a win for him as President. (It was!) But I think everything changed for him in late 2021. Although he should have been in prison for trying to overthrow the government, he was instead speaking at an event in Texas with loofah aficionado Bill O’Reilly. When Trump mentioned the COVID vaccines, he was met with a wave of boos. You could actually see it rattle him at the time.

Now he’s appointed a mentally ill anti-vaxxer to run federal health programs. When the next pandemic hits, we’re likely to witness a response driven by paranoid fantasy instead of science. Save us, Gavin Newsom!

Rangelife Shorts

How many people died in the China ramming incident? China has suffered a spate of mass murders this year. The worst one was earlier this week, when a man plowed his car into a crowd of people doing group exercise. Because this is China, the government is mostly focused on trying to make the world forget it happened. How many people died? Nobody is sure, but the local officials say it was 35, which is weird because almost every major casualty event also happens to top out at 35. It’s common enough that “35” has become a meme on the Chinese internet, and people speculate that’s because 35 is the upper limit above which local officials have to report it to the central government and then people get fired or worse.

But Mr. Show proved in 1997 that 24 is the highest number. How many years ago was that?

GIFaanisqatsi. Someone made a bot that pulls time-lapse and slow-motion GIFs and sets them to Philip Glass’s score to Koyaanisqatsi. It works?

Related: Koyaanisqatsi came out 42 years ago, and Siskel & Ebert both loved it.

Cybergoth Dance Party Prequel. It’s an alternative angle of one of the most famous viral videos in Internet history. This is like if someone found another Zapruder film from across the street.

Nailed it. The Vikings’ Cam Bynum celebrated with a faithful recreation of Raygun’s infamous Olympics breakdancing routine.

Hard Quartet. It’s maybe inappropriate to call a new band comprised of Gen X indie rock darlings a “supergroup,” but Hard Quartet’s new album is a banger. Their first music video for “Rio’s Song” is a shot-by-shot remake of the Rolling Stones’ “Waitin’ on a Friend,” and it’s a little delight. Yes, that is Stephen Malkmus in the Keith Richards role.