{"id":176166,"date":"2020-08-19T19:22:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-20T00:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/08\/19\/i-now-have-a-motto-for-the-election\/"},"modified":"2020-08-19T19:22:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T00:22:00","slug":"i-now-have-a-motto-for-the-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/08\/19\/i-now-have-a-motto-for-the-election\/","title":{"rendered":"I Now Have a Motto for the Election"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Fine to Feel Like Sh%$ About Joe Biden and the DNC<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014David Sirota on Jacobin<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This pretty much typifies my feeling about this election.<\/p>\n

The choice is between Trump, and the people who, through their venality, corruption and incompetence, made Trump possible.<\/p>\n

It is always hard to get back from some time away \u2014 the email backlog, the pile of bills, the untended to-do list, and the inevitable aggravation from the home appliance that somehow no longer works, even though it was running smoothly before you left. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

I\u2019m wondering, because this isn\u2019t how it\u2019s supposed to be. I\u2019m told I should be bouncing up in the morning, uplifted by the Democratic convention and its promise of a new era soon \u2014 seventy-five days. But at least for me, watching the cable TV snippets, the convention speeches, and the celebratory Twitter dunks has left me with that feeling you get after eating junk food \u2014 full but not nourished; bloated, tired, and vaguely nauseous. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, wins and losses. I\u2019m literally married to a Democratic elected official. Over twenty years, I\u2019ve put in an almost embarrassing amount of time working to support the Democratic Party. So these feelings are somewhat new for me, and I don\u2019t think I\u2019m having them just because Democratic officials decided to turn this year\u2019s convention into a promotional platform for Republican icons who attacked unions<\/a>, laid off thousands of workers<\/a>, promoted climate denial<\/a>, endangered 9\/11 survivors<\/a>, and lied us into a war<\/a> that killed hundreds of thousands of people. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

I think the despair is deeper \u2014 and it has something to do with the now-yawning gap between social expectation and reality. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

But pretense is the necessary ingredient for authentic enthusiasm, and there is no pretense anymore. Everyone, on all sides of this situation \u2014 and I mean literally everyone \u2014 knows that politics today is pantomime. You may not say it out loud, you may not like thinking about it \u2014 but I\u2019m not telling you anything you don\u2019t know, because somewhere deep down in there, everyone senses the fraudulence at hand. <\/p>\n

This is a moment of apolitical crises \u2014 that is, crises that aren\u2019t just manufactured by and confined to the political soundstage, but instead life-and-death, out-here-in-the-real-world emergencies in the realms of money, biology, and ecology. We\u2019re facing an economic and environmental collapse in the midst of a lethal pandemic. And we\u2019re going through this cataclysm with a legislative branch controlled by right-wing senators, a court system that rubber stamps corporate demands<\/a>, and an authoritarian president whose major crisis-management experience was firing people on the Apprentice. <\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
Democrats have turned Iraq War criminals into #Resistance<\/a> heroes, Wall Street thieves into economic gurus & the governor of Mount Covid into a hunky mancrush.<\/p>\n

If you’re not psyched about that, you’re not crazy — you’re refusing to self-lobotomize. https:\/\/t.co\/IxuIh1NoJe<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

\u2014 David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 19, 2020<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span>
Not ready for the home lobotomy kit<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n

And yet, in the middle of this five-alarm garbage fire, we\u2019re asked to white-knuckle it and feign excitement for an opposition party machine run by insiders, lobbyists<\/a>, and careerists who keep letting us know that they think campaign promises are distinct from policy. In so many ways, they keep telling us over and again that the most we can hope for is, in the words<\/a> of the nominee himself, that \u201cnothing would fundamentally change.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

The worst part is that dispassionately recounting any of these facts obviously proves you love Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin \u2014 at least, that\u2019s what you\u2019ll be told if you dare even whisper this. In our tribalized politics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and dissent is disloyalty. Failure to match the rah-rah spirit of the Blue Team, refusal to get psyched for the charade, asking questions about inconvenient facts \u2014 it all means you must be on the Red Team and are being paid in rubles, comrade. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Either way, the constant, incessant demand to be happy about fraudulence \u2014 the insistence that we put on a smile and insinuate that the New Deal is on the ballot \u2014 is shamefully dishonest. It helps make the whole process into exactly what Ohio state senator Nina Turner described<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s like saying to somebody, \u2018You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you\u2019ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.\u2019 It\u2019s still shit.\u201d <\/p>\n

This is demoralizing for obvious reasons, but to feel demoralized is to feel like you\u2019re crazy and alone \u2014 because it requires you to deviate from the norm of blissful and willful ignorance. It requires you to pay attention and reject a culture that tries to turn you into a goldfish, forgetting your entire world every fifteen minutes. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

If we forget how bad the old \u201cnormal\u201d was and just have to go back to a Wall Street\u2013run White House championing incrementalism in the face of existential crises, what is to stop another Trump from emerging afterward? <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Fine to Feel Like Sh%$ About Joe Biden and the DNC \u2014David Sirota on Jacobin This pretty much typifies my feeling about this election. The choice is between Trump, and the people who, through their venality, corruption and incompetence, made Trump possible. It is always hard to get back from some time away \u2014 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[464,504,374,405],"class_list":["post-176166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-good-writing","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-presidential-campaign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}