what america voted for

[solarbird]

What America – mostly White America and Latino men – voted for last night in handing power to the American fundamentalist movement’s authoritarian leaders, scoping out from the most personal to the most global:

• a rapist
• making me and mine illegal again as people (via overturning Lawrence v. Texas (2003) via a now-assured long-term MAGA Supreme Court supermajority; see also Trump’s Agenda 47)
• making talking about me and mine illegal (via the fundamentalists’ revived plan of banning LGBT people by making us illegal to be seen or discussed in public; this is also how Russia made LGBT people illegal under Putin; see also Project 2025 under “pornography”)
• making my marriage illegal again (via overturning Obergfell v. Hodges (2015) via a now-assured long-term MAGA Supreme Court supermajority)
• making most forms of hormonal birth control unobtainable (via reviving the Comstock Act), and illegal (by banning travel for abortion); this will mostly be Vance’s hobbyhorse
• a mass ethnic purge in the form of Trump’s promised mass expulsion of “illegals,” which includes a whole fleet of kinds of very legal immigrants and refugees (via Trump and the Alien Enemies Act, last used to put people of Japanese descent into concentration camps, repeated constantly throughout his campaign)
• an economic dickpunch caused by Trump’s planned policies if implemented as promised (according to Elon Musk, who supports this implosion and sees it as a good thing, saying Americans will have to “embrace the pain”)
• throwing yet another ally – Ukraine – to its enemies, the fascist Russian Empire (via a fleet of Trump’s promises), and possibly the exit of the US from NATO (via many Trump statements)
• authoritarian misogyny and racism, arguably revised into a new kind of casteism not that it really matters (via basically everything he’s ever done or said)
• persecution of the press and political opponents (via repeated statements and promises; here’s a list of some of his top-level targets)
• “illiberal” democracy, in the form of a “republic” where there are still elections, but the ruling party always wins
• over time, the same kind of economic irrelevance as Britain (via swinging back to fossil fuels en masse, thus clinging to an obsolete economic driver in the same way that Britain clung to coal)
• over time, the return of several kinds of plague (via making vaccination difficult to impossible, via RFK, Jr.’s stated pre-election intent to go after vaccines and Trump’s promises to let him “go wild.”) [I must note that today, he’s claiming he won’t ban vaccines, just end vaccination requirements (though not using that exact word, that was the meaning). Even if true, though, you’re still talking plagues. He’s also going after fluoride, saying he’ll be “advising” water agencies and companies of their “liability.”]
• over time, 5.4°F/3°C of global warming or so (via Trump’s promises to “frack frack frack drill drill drill” on Day 1 and his many promises against zero-carbon/renewable energy.) We had ’til 2030 to cut carbon emissions by half; Trump’s second term ends in January 2029, assuming he lives that long. It’s literally an existential threat to civilisation, and how bad it’s going to get in the next 10 years will depend upon whether the Atlantic Current shuts down. Because it fucking well might.

If you voted for Trump, then you voted for all this, and I don’t know you, and clearly, I never really have, and you’ve never known me either, or, apparently, wanted to. If you think of me in the future, no, you didn’t. We’re strangers to each other. Let us never meet.

Everybody else… I’ve seen this year coming my entire adult life. Longer, really. I even had the years right. I gave half my life to trying to change this outcome, and I scored a lot of wins – some rather surprising – along the way, and yet, here we are, at the end of the Third American Republic…

…and I have no idea at all what to do now.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Comments

[jessie_c]

It's deeply, deeply sad to see that so many people would prefer to vote for a mentally-deteriorating Nazi than for a woman.

[solarbird]

A third truly have no idea what they've done and are just throwing the lever back and forth, the other two thirds think they have some idea of what they've done but oh my gods they don't.

And everyone who sat this one out can die in a fire.

And a lot of them actually will.

[jessie_c]

Leopards, faces, eating peoples'.

[melchar]

I knew this would happen. I predicted last year that this would happen. I warned everyone I knew that Trump would win and I explained why it was a bad thing SO many times.

I managed to change a couple minds, but woefully few. In California, for crying out loud. Sexism and prejudice triumphed over sanity and their own best interests. I am still just so damned depressed.

[solarbird]

You did the work. You did more than many, probably more than most.

We do, at least, have that much consolation.

[melchar]

Thank you for your response.

It helps. I spent so much time, emotional energy - sent so many damn links - including a LOT that I got from your posts. I just wish it had helped to produce a different outcome!

[dewline]

Same here. No ideas yet. I know I want a Brazilian outcome for this (like Bolsonaro getting the boot), not a Venezuelan outcome.

Just putting one foot in front of the other for now.

[solarbird]

Yeah. Yesterday I wasn't even managing that, so good job.

[kathmandu]

I voted blue. I cannot believe we're on the bad timeline. How could that many people...?

I feel like it has to be a lie. Votes not counted in Georgia, votes destroyed by hurricane in NC, dunno what happened in Iowa...

[solarbird]

We are on a very, very bad timeline now.

For what it's worth....

[kendraticmethod]

Remember the irreducible truth: there's only three choices for how to deal with a conflict: Fight, Run, or Endure the L. (and many, many things you don't even have all three choices. That's just the best case).

Whatever happens, this is a grievous emotional loss to process. Only you'll know when you're functional enough to decide what to do. I wish you luck in the choice you have. Hard or easy (or nonexistent) you still have to shoulder the cost and renew your sense of purpose going forward. That's going to be cruelly taxing.

Good luck drilling down to whatever sense of purpose and meaning you have to sustain you in paying that cost.

If you'd like, I can discuss my reasons why "people voting for their own purge" made sense to me. But warning, it's pretty depressing. I'm not sure its worth sharing, even, since as far as I can see, there's almost nothing that is _possible_ to do (within the constraints of flawed humanity in general and our particular configuration of contemporary trauma) out of the array of what is _necessary to do_ for better outcomes.

(I have a few things I will be doing from that list of "necessary", but I'm pretty damaged and I have no hope it will change the big picture. It's still vital to do even so.)

Re: For what it's worth....

[solarbird]

It was possible to change this... I still think... starting when I did, 35 years ago.

And gods know I gave it everything I had to give. But there were many other things it needed that I could not give, because I did not have them to give, and I was never able to persuade those who did have those things to offer them up.

I suppose this is the worst, largest-scale form of my inability to stop 9/11. Which, to be clear, I did not see coming in particular; I had no specific knowledge of it at all. No hint, no clue, when I heard noise about it on the radio I thought it was an ad for a movie.

But the conditions leaning to it? The training grounds and sanctuary in Afghanistan? That they would lead to catastrophe?

Yes. That, I very specifically knew. And spent a good six months trying like mad to get anyone to do anything about that little experiment our friends the Pakistanis were running in the north.

The next 35 years are starting to unfold in my brain. It's... barring a miracle, it's going to be a very, very rough ride.

Re: For what it's worth....

[solarbird]

Y'know, sometimes I think maybe I should've continued building that goddamn cult.^*

(I accidentally started a cult once. You've maybe heard of the subculture I was able to redirect it into. Is "otherkin" familiar to you at all? That was the longer-term outcome once I broke the cultness of its immediate predecessor from which it came.)

^*: Yes, I am joking. Mostly.