…but Europeans (and maybe Canadians), bear with me, there’s important stuff in here for you, down a bit.
Okay. So.
If you’re reading this, you’re most likely not who I’m going off about. If you’re reading this and have been working against Trump – I mean actively working against him – you’re very definitely not who I’m going on about. In fact, why don’t you scream along with me, won’t you? You’re welcome to join in. It might be… fun? No. Cathartic? Maybe.
Regardless, if this doesn’t apply to you, then it doesn’t apply to you.
But if you did help Trump into power? If you voted for him?
Jesus fucking christ, you fucking imbecile.
You moron. You clown. You fool.
Or worse – you contemptible looting parasitical fuck, because that’s what fascism is, that’s what the urge to loot, to take, to own the lives and labours of other is – it’s parasitisation, pure and simple.
You are not some kind of Übermensch. You are a leech upon the body of humanity.
I don’t know which you – as an individual Trump voter – you might be, but you either had no idea what you were doing (I think that’s maybe a third of you) or you’re part of the cadre who did think you knew what you’re doing, in which case, you’re still complete fools, because you genuinely do not know what you have done.
Particularly you, Putin, you evil old Soviet remnant fuck. You have no idea what rough beast you’ve helped slouch into power. Vladimir, do you truly not know what lies directly beneath the Trumpian surface? Do you think that barrier will survive his inevitable – probably natural, I should stress – death? Do you not know?
Because I do, and I have screamed to the nine hells and the five heavens about it, I will not reiterate myself here except to note that their plan for fundamentalist white man Christian domination of all aspects of society globally to bring about the end of the world is both well documented and explicit. I will say that you deserve it – but nobody else does. Their inevitable eventual failure will scar the planet. The only question is how badly.
Europeans who are reading this – you need to realise that amongst other things, you are now a military alliance. Keep NATO but throw the US out of it, at least, assuming you don’t want your American NATO participation to rely on staying in Elon Musk’s good graces and letting him set up fascist propaganda fountains in your countries. Arm up, and get ready to get your hands dirty, or rather, dirtier.
Keep Canada, if you can. Hell, bring Canada into the EU if they’re willing – I assure you it’s going to be very much in their interests if they want to remain Canadian.
If the UK actually come to their senses, let them back in too. If they don’t, get Scotland, if they wiggle themselves free. But be aware that if the Atlantic Current shuts down that those islands are going to get a lot colder and much more quickly than you expect. Fancy being Celtic Denmark, Ireland? Scotland… Celtic Norway? Nobody really knows, and I know no more than anyone else. But that and worse are well possible.
As part of that, get ready to deal with the reality that the US is going to shift into dramatically higher carbon output, not lower. Trump’s plans will undo what progress has been done – I’m hearing projections of that being by a factor of two, unless he wrecks the economy so badly that we go into demand failure and a second Great Depression. If we don’t, I suspect that’ll end up being a lowball estimate, given how much energy “Generative AI” is burning right now.
If you’re wondering, the only one who pretends to give even half a fuck in his administration is literal plaguemonger RFK, Jr., whose official answer is regenerative agriculture and whose unofficial answer is mass death. The funny thing about regenerative agriculture is it can be a legitimate carbon store, and at some real degree of scale! But there’s absolutely no way in hell that it’ll cover the new American flood of carbon dioxide. What with him being a self-deluded shithead, I have no idea whether he actually believes his shit or not.
But it doesn’t matter. We’ve blown past 1.5°C and we will blow past 3.0°C, and what Europe needs to do now is decarbonise as quickly as possible not to stop it, but to delay it some, and soften the blow.
I mean seriously. Look at the endgame of 66m of ocean rise. See what that does to your shorelines. See what that does to Paris.
If that’s somehow not enough – if you’re one of those millions of millions of people who pretend to care about climate change but don’t let it affect anything you do – then you also need to do it to prevent your own economic irrelevance, because carbon fuels aren’t going to be an economic driver that too many people give a fuck about in another eight years or so. China knows this. They make no secret about it, and they’re right.
By electing Trump – assuming he follows through on his evil promises – Americans have doomed their own country to either be a long-term economic laggard akin to late-coal post-industrial Britain or out and out economic irrelevance, hanging on as a militant fundamentalist agricultural state with islands of civilisation. And while you should never confuse the end of a Republic with the end of an Empire, Americans have more firmly ended the American Century than they’ve ended the Third American Republic.
I mean that. It’s over. The fallout will be nasty, brutish, and long.
Don’t believe me? Look at the reality.
If you have any goddamn sense at all, you know the Republicans long ago became a party that never met an ally they wouldn’t betray. For decades, there was consensus against that, but it’s gone now. Since America’s now highly variable value as an ally will depend entirely upon who wins the next election, nobody should be dumb enough to rely on it; you simply can’t form a foundation on that kind of ever-shifting sand. America’s great export was stability, and we’ve done run plumb out of that.
Accordingly, if you want to keep anything of the post-world-war-II world order – in particular if you want to keep the agreement that wars of conquest are not okay and that peoples have a right to exist – it’s gonna be mostly up to you, Europe.
And don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just the Christofascist right. It’s not.
American Liberals are absolutely onboard with the old global order, particularly but not only those parts. The left kinda sorta theoretically is onboard with those ideas? But not really. Even amongst the non-tanky American left, so very, very many people are way, way more personally invested in seeing Democrats lose than keeping fascists out of power. That makes their theoretical positions moot, and their operative positions the same as those of MAGA.
Over the last several months, I have come to a much better – or much worse – understanding of the “Bernie Bro to Trump” pipeline phenomenon. In just the last few days I watched someone I otherwise like … I don’t know if they’d call it gloating about Harris’s loss? But that’s what it was, posting about going at liberals to make them angry, enjoying it with a “hee hee die mad,” and most of all, blaming liberals for everything. Not the fascists, not the people who voted for him, oh no, it was “the libs” and “the Dems.” The ones who actually tried to stop him and keep him out of power.
Seeing someone so very clearly looking forward to liberals suffering under the boot heel of fascism absolutely repulsed me.
I don’t want to single them out, they’re far from the only one. They’re just the person who came closest to me while saying it most recently.
And the more that I watch that kind of shit, and the more I talk with people from the 2016 Bernie movement, the more what I see is a group of people who came in new to politics with enthusiasm, came astonishingly close but lost their first fight – as one almost always does, no matter who or what it is – and then most of them – not all, I hope, but the loud ones, most of the ones I’ve met – just decided fukkit, we’re burning everything down because we didn’t get our way the first time we tried.
(If you push them on it, they say 2016 was “fixed” because had neither Sanders nor Clinton won a majority of delegates it would’ve become an open convention, and the superdelegates would’ve become able to vote on the second ballot, and they’d’ve voted for Clinton, and that would’ve been cheating. That’s the “fix.” The stone cold reality that Clinton got more votes than Sanders and had an outright majority of regular delegates – she won that campaign 54-46 – doesn’t matter to them. Not really. Does that also sound familiar? Because it sure should.)
The real tragedy is that they took a near miss – one which was in a very real way a triumph and a dramatic showing of future strength – and tossed it into the bin. They could’ve built on it – it would’ve taken a while, but with enough determination it would’ve worked, and they’d’ve been a if not the dominant force in the party by now. Instead, well… here we are.
It appals me, but like so many things that are true despite my hated of it, I accept it as what it is. My disgust does not make it less real. Like I said:
I understand the Bernie Bro to Trump pipeline a lot better now.
The real shock horror of it all is that what I think needs to happen now is that the Democratic Party needs to move left. Sharply. Fuck, I thought it needed to move more left this election, and now that it’s not incredibly demoralising to the actual-anti-fascist political workers who were working their asses off trying to keep fascists out of power rather than sabotage Harris – I’m free to say that I thought at the time that Harris’s rerun of Obama’s “centrist” play was a big mistake, even if this election still had to run on the old rules for one last time for reasons I detailed months ago.
I understand Harris’s decision, and I understand why she did it, and maybe if I were a Black woman, I’d understand it even more. But it sure looked like a mistake to me. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, maybe it would’ve been even worse if she hadn’t. I couldn’t change it either way so didn’t try, and we can’t know.
Regardless, what’s important now is that I’m pretty sure the Democratic Party really does need to move left as part of rebuilding. But I see all this post-election sneering and gloating on the existing Left, and I see how they hate the Democrats and “the libs” so much more than they hate actual fascists, and I don’t know what good it’ll do.
Nothing will be enough to bring this so-called Left – the Bernie Left – onboard. Nothing. Because the real motivator isn’t fix shit, it’s fuck the libs and fuck the Dems.
It’s a little like watching “South Park Conservatives” all over again. Trey Parker and Matt Stone once said that oh yeah, they hate conservatives… but they really hate liberals.
What they meant, of course, was that they mostly just hated liberals.
So here we are with “the libs” being the only ones who have been trying to keep a Republic for a while now, with a two-front war of the former-conservatives now-fascists on the right, and a left that in large part doesn’t give a single flying fuck about anything but their beautiful love affair with failure in everything except burning the Republic down to get back at “the Dems” for not nominating Bernie in 2016 and looking for any reason they can to make it happen.
Some of those reasons are super valid, though. In isolation. (And if only they were in isolation! Life would be so much better! But they’re not!) Because you’ve got the whole “complicity with genocide by voting for Harris” thought-stopping rage-trigger line and that actually makes sense and is right and just if and only if the person you help into power is on the other side of the issue and is not even more super invested in the same genocide.
And if you’re one of those people, well, guess what, pop-tart, he fucking well is super invested in that genocide – way more so! – and is also invested in another genocide in Ukraine, and wants to start a couple more at home on top of those, too! So ding dong, dipshits, you did not keep your fucking hands clean by helping him into office. In reality, what you did by helping hand him power is sink yourself up to your neck in blood.
Well done. Well fucking done.
There was no “hands all clean” route here. It wasn’t a goddamn option, and holy shit, did you blow it, and you’re still going to blame it on “the Dems” because you’re still mad about Bernie, even when he really, sincerely isn’t.
And all of that is a really very long and roundabout way to deliver the point I’m making, which is not to expect the Democrats to make a comeback real soon. The attempt to revive the Third American Republic has failed. I think the next opportunity to start something new might be after Trump dies of natural causes, not unlikely while still in office.
But all that’s just me guessing, at this point. Maybe the American electorate will surprise me at long last. Maybe Trump will trigger all the disasters his plans will trigger if implemented and people will go “oh shit, that was a bad choice” and Republicans themselves will revolt. Or who knows, maybe the American Left will get the fuck over itself like it needs to if it ever wants to mean anything at all.
I know, I’m hilarious, aren’t I?
But maybe. So if you call yourself part of that Left and you have any ability to pull your friends into the actual fight against the actual fash, and you’re going to try? You have my support and my gratitude. I don’t have the “fuck the Dems” cred to try to make any of it stick, when I try. Little old me who only has the experience of being actually illegal and routinely beaten down in the street just for existing just gets screamed and/or sneered at and told how I know nothing about oppression. But if you have that credibility, and have started to realise how completely the current strats haven’t been working, and want to do something about it? Gods be with you and good luck. You’ll definitely need it. If you can use my work to help, please do.
Or better, maybe it’s time to just start a different Left entirely. One that actually goes after fascists and Christian Nationalists more than they go after Democrats and liberals.
That really would be refreshing, wouldn’t it?
Something to consider.
Because seriously. Fuck those guys.
…
I’ve got more I could say. I could go off about climate change, and how absolutely nobody gave a single fuck about it in their voting decisions. It changed no minds, as far as I can tell. Not a one.
I really hope I’m right that oil won’t matter in eight to ten years. Maybe that’ll leave enough margin for saving civilisation. Maybe.
I sure hope so.
But I gotta tell you…
…I just don’t know.
Other than… maybe I do.
Maybe it’s time for a completely new Left.
Maybe that should start today.
Maybe that should start…
….with you.
You’ve made it this far. You clearly have some stamina or you would’ve already bailed, and I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest. This is a real horse pill of a post.
Whaddya think, though? Are you ready? Can you be ready?
Does it start with you?
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