freelansing in Seattle

After lifetime of trying to understand stuff, I’m not sure I understand anything anything anymore. Is it just me?

I devoted six years of college to understanding American society from a systems perspective, and then another 40 years learning about social change from a grassroots perspective, as a participant-observer in progressive independent media. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the subject, both in the big picture and a lot of the particulars of how our specific political system worked. I studied cultural biases, social psychology, our history, system dynamics, how the mechanics of our political system favored certain outcomes, and why. I could explain everything. Until now, when I struggle to explain anything.

In 2016, like many of us, I considered Trump to be a clown that no one could take seriously. (No offense to clowns.) He was a con man with a con too ridiculous for anyone with any common sense to fall for. He was a bad magician who gave away exactly how the trick worked every time he performed it. Who could possibly be gullible enough to fall for the same trick over and over? I figured he could fool some of the people some of the time, but nowhere near enough to be elected president.

Then he did it. We were all surprised. It made no sense, but we found ways it made sense: Twenty years of right-wing media twisting public perception away from actual reality. A huge national undercurrent of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. A working class that felt betrayed by neoliberal promises. People mad at the status quo and looking for any kind of extreme change. A culture of celebrity worship seeking a Hero who would make everything better. We who were surprised came up with explanations for what had happened. These explanations helped make sense out of what had seemed senseless.

Then came a four-year shitshow, in many ways worse than we could have imagined. Scandal after scandal. Many of his inner circle sent to prison. Impeachment. So many things happened that would have ended most people’s political careers. Yet he slithered out of each scandal & public embarrassment looking stronger to his supporters every time. That also made a weird kind of sense, that a cult of personality fed on grievance would see each new scandal simply as the Deep State & Fake Media trying to take their man down. They rallied around him every time he got into trouble. Classic cult behavior. Made sense for a minority of True Believers, but certainly nowhere near half the country, right?

Meanwhile, even those who willingly joined his administration soured on him after actually seeing him up close. They wrote books about what a Truly Horrible & Dangerous Person he was and how he constantly had to be bailed out by the adults in the room.

With all this evidence piling up, surely it would peel away support from those who simply voted for him in 2016 because they were mad at the status quo and thought, “Let’s push this button & see what happens.” They fucked around, and they found out. Total shitshow. That might rally the True Believers, but anyone with a lick of sense would surely bail, right?

Then came the 2020 elections. Not only did the Mad King not lose support, he actually received 11 million more votes than in 2016! What The Actual Fuck? More than 74 million people who’d just witnessed four years of unrelenting shitshow (including a mishandling of a pandemic that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths) voted for more shitshow?!

I can explain a lot of things from a socio-political perspective, but this I could not explain. Luckily, thanks to a huge voter turnout, 81 million voted against the shitshow. A decisive victory in the popular vote, but because of our twisted Electoral College system, too close for comfort in the votes that mattered.

Of course, as we all know, the shitshow did not end there, even after a clear defeat at the polls. Like a toddler deprived of the ice cream cone he thought he deserved, dude threw a temper tantrum for the ages, insisting he had won despite all the evidence. His protestations were thrown out of court 60 times for lack of evidence. All the Republican secretaries of state in charge of swing state elections stood by their results. His desperate attempts to turn a loss into a win were denounced by leaders of his own political party. After repeated failure in the legal system, he finally and famously sent in his goons to attack the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election, resulting in shock and horror throughout the country and the world.

Nobody could possibly come back from such massive public embarrassment with political fortunes intact, right? Umm…

Despite defying all empirical evidence, simply by continuing to scream, “MINE!!!”, the toddler managed to convince a large swath of Republicans that he actually did win the election that he clearly lost. Somehow he’s now the 800-lb gorilla that is squashing all Republican primary opponents and has his whole party cowering in fear, ready to affirm every delusion that emerges from his deteriorating brain.

Again, explanations can be found for this phenomenon within the Republican Party, which has been pushing the pushing the extreme right edge of the political spectrum for decades now. We can explain how a large swath of the country can collectively lose its mind. But can such delusions become a majority? That’s when explanations begin to fail.

Conventional political wisdom has long said that, nationally, roughly a third of the voters are hardcore Democrat, a third are hardcore Republican, and a third make up the moderate middle that actually decides national elections. For decades, candidates would moderate their positions in hopes of getting votes from that moderate middle. But Republicans—and especially Trumpublicans—have thrown out that playbook and decided the more extreme they can be, the better.

And now, according to recent polling, that moderate middle is throwing caution to wind and choosing to support the extreme right. Because what’s the worst that could possibly happen by supporting a candidate for US president who pathologically lies, cheats, bullies, and threatens to shred the Constitution to get vengeance against perceived enemies?

Today, the moderate middle seems looking to find out if fascist dictatorship is really such a bad thing. I really can’t explain that.

Meanwhile, the target of most public anger and mistrust is our current president. Exactly why that is is also quite confounding.

I confess I was quite a Biden skeptic when he first arrived in the White House. Of course I was glad to be rid of the Former Guy, but my expectations for Biden were quite low. He’s far exceeded my expectations on almost every front, and accomplished a surprising amount of good, despite unified Republican opposition that tried to crush every good idea in the cradle.

Let’s recall that Biden entered the White House with a pandemic raging and an economy consequently in free fall. He finally brought an approach to the pandemic rooted in science and prevented untold damage that might have occurred if the virus was left to rage unchecked. Repeated mutations and unprecedented circumstances created a tricky balance between shutting things down enough to stem the spread of the virus but not shutting down enough to make the cure worse than the disease. It was a difficult balancing act, but the Biden administration provided a steady hand guiding us through, constantly adjusting to shifting ground and new information as it emerged.

Then there were all the economic and social dislocations brought by the pandemic: shuttered businesses, job loss, school closures, and so on. Biden and Congressional Democrats also brought relief to those suffering from those effects, eventually making the economy strong again and bringing unprecedented job creation. Pandemic-caused supply chain issues led to a temporary burst of high inflation, but now that’s been brought under control as well. A year ago most economists and pundits were saying that efforts to curb inflation would almost certainly cause a recession, but that did not happen. Inflation has been tamed, unemployment is low, and the economy is strong.

Biden supported the Green New Deal, a truly transformative legislative package, but was stymied by unified intransigence from Republicans plus Democrats Manchin and Sinema. Still, out of the ashes of that failed attempt, Biden’s team managed to salvage a compromise deal with Manchin (The Inflation Reduction Act) that brought down medical costs, made big corporations pay a fairer share of taxes, and made historic investments in climate solutions. It involved some trade-offs and compromises, but was still a solid package that most political observers had considered impossible just before it happened.

Team Biden also managed to get an infrastructure investment package passed (which the previous president talked about for four years but never did), the first federal regulations on guns in three decades, and much needed student debt relief.

Internationally, Biden repaired foreign relations damaged by his predecessor, and has steered support for Ukraine against an unjust and illegal invasion by Russia without allowing the US military to be drawn into the conflict. (That might seem simple common sense, but after decades of US militarism and war-mongering, it’s something of an accomplishment.)

Again, all this was achieved in the face of united opposition from Republicans. So much more good that benefits average Americans than was accomplished under the prior administration. Just looking at the record, conventional political wisdom would predict strong support for the incumbent. Umm… Nope.

Conventional political wisdom has long held that people “vote their pocketbooks,” that “It’s the economy, stupid,” and so on. One might think that with so many benefiting from the COVID relief efforts, the economic guidance that reduced inflation while keeping unemployment low, the reductions in medical costs and especially prescription drugs for seniors, student debt relief, and other tangible pocketbook benefits, that old Joe might be pretty popular. But that would be to assume some correlation between political dynamics and actual reality.

Pollsters have started to note the disconnect between public opinion and reality on economic issues. Throughout the history of polling, both here and abroad, when the economy was bad, public opinion about it was also bad; during good economic times, public opinion reflected that. Not any more. Pollsters are noting a wide gap between economic reality and public sentiment not seen before. There is a public gloom about our economic health. Gas prices and overall inflation rates have dropped dramatically recently, but public opinion still registers them as high as ever. Interestingly, pollsters find people saying they are doing fine personally, but think the overall economy is in bad shape.

Is this just a time lag between economic reality and public perception, or is there something else going on? Is politics simply losing all contact with reality? Of course, there’s always been some disconnection—voters have never been completely rational actors, but the current disconnect seems challenging to explain.

Some can be explained by media failure. Political coverage is more about winners and losers than substantive issues. Individual stories are rarely placed in the context of larger trends. But those media failings are hardly new. The overall defunding of media certainly hasn’t helped. But probably the biggest factor has been better funded right-wing media setting a false narrative.

What is the right-wing narrative? We constantly hear Republicans and right-wing media squawking about taking back the government from the Radical Left and Marxists, but what exactly are they talking about? Things like reducing prescription drug prices for seniors, reducing student debt, and investing in clean energy are not exactly policies drawn from the Communist Manifesto. Can anyone name a single “radical Leftist” thing done under the Biden administration? I sure can’t.

Politics divorced from reality. May be the death of us all.

Of course there also some simpler explanations. Most Americans are what is known as low-information voters. How many could name Biden’s accomplishments while in office? Versus how many are aware that he is old? Even though the other guy is just a few years younger and shows greater signs of both cognitive and physical decline, Old Joe has more gray hair and sometimes stammers when he speaks. That seems to be all some people care about.

Hopefully Americans will somehow come to their senses before marching blindly into the abyss in November. But I just don’t know anymore. Goddess help us all.