"You Maniacs! You Blew It All Up!"

Waking up to a harsh new reality

“I believe in America.”
-- Bonasera, The Godfather

Donald Trump will be the President of the United States when the country celebrates its 250th birthday in 2026. I didn’t believe this until last night, but it turns out he’s exactly what we deserve. 

When Obama won in 2008 I reversed a decades-long streak of anti-American thinking. I had been brought up on hippie and radical music and books - Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman was one of my great texts in junior high school, and I religiously read The Tales of Hoffman, the book collecting the court transcripts of the Chicago 8/7 trial - but when Obama won I started to think that maybe progress could happen. That this country of ours was not a shithole but rather a nation of generally good-hearted people who had been led astray at times, or who had made bad choices that didn’t reflect their actual hearts. 

When Donald Trump won the first time this belief was shaken. But I took comfort in the fact that he lost the popular vote, that the majority of Americans didn’t even want him in office but that one of the relics of our dark past - the slavery-driven Electoral College - had worked in his favor. The defeat of Trump in 2020 solidified this for me; yes, there was darkness at the heart of the American Dream but there was light that overtook it. 

Now I have no such illusions. Donald Trump didn’t just win the election last night, he won it decisively. It looks like he won the popular vote, at least as of the time of publication. He made huge gains all over the country, including in blue stalwarts like New York City and New Jersey. And he won Hispanic voters over in astonishing numbers. These results are not the result of dissatisfaction with Harris’ wishy-washy statements about Gaza, they’re not about campaigning with Liz Cheney, they’re not about any of our pet complaints about the Harris campaign. These results are pointing to something darker and deeper within the country. 

Here’s the thing: Donald Trump ran a terrible campaign. Objectively so. He’s a moron, and he stood on stages being a complete incoherent moron night after night. He’s clearly entering dementia. What’s more, his half-assed plans are prima facie bad. Like, awful. His economic policy is guaranteed to destroy our economy, and that’s according to dozens of Nobel Prize-winning economists. His foreign policy is about to open the doors for Russia to begin encroaching on Europe, which means the beginning of World War III and guess what - we’re not on the right side of that coming conflict. And he’s about to give Netanyahu the green light to show us in America what a genocide really looks like. And a guy with a worm in his brain is about to take away vaccines. Insane stuff, and none of it hidden. All of it out in the open. 

American voters knew what they were getting with Trump because they’ve already had it. Unlike 2016 no one is going to be taken by surprise when every single day of the next four (and let’s be real, our lives) is one crisis after another. They made this choice anyway, and it’s because of the two elements that live at the heart of the American soul: stupidity and hate. 

I used to believe that decency and hope lived at the heart of the American soul, but it’s clear that isn’t true. It’s stupidity and hate, the perfect combination for a bully. We’re a nation of bullies, of people who want to harm other people because we’re resentful, and we’re dumb enough to believe anyone who tells us they’ll harm the people we want harmed. There’s simply no denying this, no sugar coating it at this point: this smooth-brained fascist shit is what Americans want. They want Mean Daddy, because they believe Mean Daddy will only punish the siblings they don’t like. 

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

--Benjamin Franklin

To be fair, there are some mitigating factors at play here. The Trump victory echoes political moments across the globe; in the post-pandemic world order people have turned against ruling parties. That’s because of frustration with the way that recovery from the pandemic has gone: inflation has been rampant across the world, and economies everywhere are having a hard time. The thing is that this is actually not the case in America. Our economy has recovered the best out of all others post-pandemic. Our economic situation is actually quite good; while prices are high because of pandemic era inflation, that inflation has been significantly slowed down. We have people working. The economy - which Trump will inherit and promptly crater with tariffs and tax cuts for the rich - is moving in the right direction. 

So what the hell happened? I think the hate part of the American soul needs no explanation; the anti-woke movement of the last few years was not some outlier thing but rather the reflection of a deeply socially conservative streak in the electorate that hates gay people, hates women and hates positive social change. But the feelings about the economy, that’s all down to the stupidity part, and that stupidity was deeply impacted by the current information environment. 

See, the old ways are dead but Democrats don’t act like they are. Newspapers are of the past. TV news is for fogeys. The real information environment is online, it’s on YouTube and Twitch, it’s on Twitter and TikTok. And those social media networks reward saying outrageous things, and so the louder and dumber the speaker, the more reach their speech. More and more this is where Americans get their information, if they’re getting it at all. The days of people having the newspaper delivered to their homes are over, and most Americans just see whatever happens to float by on their heavily algorithm curated social feed. 

Instead of appealing to Americans’ better angels, social media appeals to their darkest demons, and it does so by design. What’s more, it did so the past few years by direction; in many ways the election of Trump is the ending of the second Cold War. The information environment has been taken over by people who amplify Russian disinfo and who are paid for it. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s fact. We beat ‘em the first time, but Mother Russia got her revenge last night. And she didn’t have to even work that hard, she just had to identify the fact that as a nation we’re actually incredibly stupid. 

When Franklin said “if you can keep it,” he meant if the people didn’t fuck it up, and that’s exactly what has happened. I don’t know what’s next for the United States as a political system - like, we’ll probably have elections still but will they just be for show? - but I do know that the American people have proven they can’t be trusted with this form of government. The movie quote that most defines the entire arc of America over the past few years is Captain America in Easy Rider saying “We blew it.” We did. Enemy actors poisoned our media ecosystem but we let them do it, and we spent the last fifty years destroying education in this country so that our people would be vulnerable to the toxin. We did it.

“This is how liberty dies. To thunderous applause.”

--Padme Amidala, Revenge of the Sith

So what now? Back in 2016 I posted all this inspirational, hopeful stuff on my Facebook when Trump won, but I don’t have that in me this time. I’m going to be real with you: as a canceled widower who turns 51 in two days who was already wondering why he was being forced to still trudge through the rest of his days, I’m not feeling some great burst of meaning. I don’t feel the “RESIST!” urge rising in me. 

That’s okay. I think the thing to do now is grieve. Mourn. To feel the loss. To take a little time to understand the realities we are now facing, and to make peace with the true nature of our fellow countrymen and women. There’s a lot that is good in America but there’s an awful lot that is rotten, and is only going to get more rotten. 

But after this breath that we take, these days to find a little bit of a center, it’s important to begin figuring out what’s next and what we will do. If my demographic understanding is correct many of the people reading this right now are cis white men, like me. We’re in a good place, all things considered. I mean, the problems facing the country extend far beyond identity, but in the meantime it’s going to be vital for us to be there for our friends, family and strangers who are not white, not cis, not straight. I don’t mean like “Venmo a BIPOC woman!” and I definitely don’t mean be fucking weird about it, but make sure folks can feel safe around you.

I’m going to do what I have done in other hard times, which is take comfort in the stories I love. In this case it’s Star Wars, and it’s going to be thinking about how the Republic fell and the Empire ruled for twenty plus years but it too eventually fell (and then the New Republic fell but let’s not get ahead of ourselves). Nothing is forever, change is always around the corner. I have lived a life long enough to see regimes come and go, to see people who, like those living under the Empire, thought they would never know freedom find themselves in whole new worlds. 

I’m also going to keep talking about Star Wars and Marvel and DC and that sort of bullshit on podcasts, because quite honestly the lesson from 2016-2020 is that we need entertainment in the worst times. We need a space where we can go and have a nice time, which is why we’re not going to turn our podcasts into some kind of political resist thing. We talk about our lives on these shows a bunch, so likely some of that will seep in, but it will never be the focus of Marvelvision, The Bad Batch or Watch Men. This isn’t about pandering to fascists, it’s about having a little bit of space to relax.

And moving forward? Who knows. I’m so disheartened right now, so sad and so disappointed. I’m dealing with a lot of disillusionment but also a lot of fear - I truly believe that things will get very bad globally in the next year. The post-WWII order is over, and what that means isn’t entirely clear, but it will certainly involve chaos and death. 

But you know when I said earlier that I’m a 51 year old canceled widower and I don’t know why I’m still alive, and I don’t know why I’m being forced to keep trudging through my days? Well, I lied a little bit. I do kind of know. It’s because I’m stubborn. Speaking of stories I love, I have a little bit of Rocky Balboa in me - you may beat me but you won’t keep me down. I don’t know if that’s healthy - Rocky got brain damage! - but it’s just how it is. I think maybe you do too. So let’s end this quote-filled piece with one final quote, from the Italian Stallion himself (by the way he definitely voted Trump, both Rocky and Stallone): 

“It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!”