What next?
Waking up to empirical reality
Bear with me a moment.
On Disney Plus, I have been watching Chris Hemsworth’s Limitless under the National Geographic imprint. Episode two is all about the shock of cold, and the counter-intuitive benefits of extreme cold exposure. As he enters freezing water the first time, he experiences what his trainer describes as the “gasp reflex” - a whole-body shudder that is the entire body sounding the alarm. Devotees of ice-bath therapy know that this is a physical reaction that can be overcome, mentally, and with repeated exposure. In fact the episode was so compelling that I am resolved to try it myself, in baby steps, during my morning shower. The point however is that the immediate reaction is a defensive one, and it can not only be withstood, but embraced.
The metaphor I am laboring towards here is probably obvious, but I think for all liberal folk today, we have experienced the gasp reflex upon waking up and seeing that WI and PA called for Trump and realizing that, since NC and GA were called last night, it truly is over and Trump is the President-Elect. The repeated exposure to this fact over the next few weeks is one we have to embrace, and allow to change us. What we need now is resolve.
Resolve is a quality that is difficult to grasp, harder to learn, and impossible to teach. The resolve we need is that of the Stoic philosophy, to determine what we can control, what we cannot, focus on the former, and utterly ignore the latter.
The resolve we need is to focus on our lives at the scale in which it matters: the hyperlocal scale. Devote ourselves to our families, our communities, our neighbors. Focus on our jobs and careers and strengthen ourselves so that if there are rough times ahead, we have the resources and the friends and family to weather the storms ahead.
And there are storms ahead, indeed. Anyone who argued that “we will survive Trump 2.0 just fine” is as unserious as those who argued a Trump victory would genuinely lead to mass deportations and fascism. We are going to take a bad hit on the national scale in every realm of policy. Every lever of power is going to be tuned to extract and exploit wealth from the vast majority to the benefit of a tiny few. The looting of America will begin. A lot of Americans will die, but a lot more are going to suffer, needlessly, because the true solutions to our problems as a nation require leadership and courage and wisdom, and of these, Biden had two, and Trump has none. The judicial system will be entrenched with judges who rule based on dogma, the civil service will lose its institutional knowledge as experienced public servants are chased out and replaced with partisans, and the health system will bend to its breaking point. The Supreme Court will be 7-2, and the dismantling of the federal safety net and undermining of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will now begin. It is all spelled out right here in detail. All of this will be to the detriment of the poor and the middle class, the elderly, minorities, and women. It is going to be a hard four years and “we will survive” is glib nonsense. Of course we will survive. But only a select few are going to thrive. We have replaced the concept of the rising tide with a gilded escalator.
Hindsight is a good teacher, if you let it be. I was completely wrong about my prediction of how the election would go, though part of that was an attempt to rationalize my increasing fear. I defended the process of Kamala Harris being the nominee, but she under-performed Biden 2020 in every single county, meaning that a primary process might indeed have provided validation to get the base to the polls. And my argument against Jill Stein was ultimately moot because her numbers weren’t the spoiler in WI and PA. The lesson here is that the process matters, there are no shortcuts, and hope is not a plan.
So, find your resolve. Decide what is important to you and focus on that above all else.
But there are two more things we can do, and should do. The first one is to engage. I think that we may feel betrayed by people who voted for Trump (or Stein) and may ask ourselves, how can anyone possibly have voted like this? The answer isn’t an easy one. What is needed is engagement more than ever, not turning away. Trump didn’t the popular vote on the backs of MAGA alone. These are real people who made a decision based on information they had.
And we did the same, right? Arguably, there are three realities here - one for them, one for us, and the empirical one that actually exists despite the first two. Which means that the other thing we should do is reorient. It’s time to stop letting the political tribe determine where we stand. Everything is polarized and we have gotten lazier about thinking about where we actually stand on issues and we just default to the tribe. We need to figure out what we value, what we believe, for ourselves, and then articulate that so that our identity isn’t defined by who we are, but what we do, and what our values are.
And that’s what I intend to do here.
I started political blogging a long time ago. Specifically, March 2002. My earliest blogs are still online - Unmedia/City of Brass 1.0, Dean Nation, City of Brass 2.0 at Beliefnet, and then Aziz for America at Patheos. It’s a lot of writing, and most of it was an attempt to explain to myself what I think I believe. My goal here now, at Aziz For America 2.0, is to engage in a more formal exploration of my own political values. I am going to try and analyze the issues and assess what I think is right, wrong, smart, and foolish. I want to articulate a platform of sorts that can find consensus rather than compete, be rooted in common sense instead of ideology, and provide an alternative to the tired left/right red/blue axis.
In a way I am returning to my idea after the 2016 election, in which I articulated the idea that there is a potential purple majority that still hasn’t been represented. The main point was this graph:
As I noted then, this graph is important to understand that this country did not actually elect Trump in 2016. In fact, less than 1 in 5 citizens in the US voted for him. Only 27% - less than one third - of the eligible voters voted for him. We do not have final numbers for 2024 yet, but it is going to be substantially similar. Compare, however, to the 2008 results for Obama’s victory over McCain:
As I argued back then,
When visualized this way, you can see that Obama’s victory wasn’t nearly as broad based as the electoral college outcome made it seem. Obama recruited a few percent of the purple non-voters to his cause, and that was enough, because those voters were in the right place – specifically, a few rust belt states.
No one has really tried to persuade the purple pool to join in our democracy. That means that our election doesn’t represent them – the plurality of eligible voters who didn’t vote for Hillary or Trump or McCain or Romney or Obama or Bush or Kerry or Gore.
Articulating a platform that can attract 5%, or 10% of the purple pool is how you win, not on a technicality, but with a true mandate of representing the true majority.
What would such a purple platform look like? That’s the answer that both sides need to be asking. The answer is likely to be in the realm of policy rather than identity. What do Americans fundamentally want? They want the Dream: that you can come here from anywhere, work hard, and succeed. The promise that you will be rewarded for your effort and you will thrive, not just survive.
Well, we have a chance the next four years to try and answer that question. I certainly am going to try, and I hope you join me.
And for those who voted for Jill Stein, or for Trump, as a protest vote against the Democrats - I don’t know how you are feeling this morning. It’s probably not a feeling of victory, that much is certain. For you, I hope this helps you: