Pre-Election Hell Chat

The world is burning, and only blog posts about American politics can save it.

So hey, remember 2016? Maybe it’s just because of the personal circumstances I’ve found myself in since then, but the last US election feels like it happened approximately forty years ago. Anyway, in just a few days it’s time to do all of that over again because existence is suffering and time is a flat circle and all that jazz.

I’ve been seeing a lot of pessimism from my fellow left-leaning people on twitter. In this post, I’m going to break wildly from character and explain why you should actually be optimistic about November 3rd...but still concerned for what might come after.

The most immediate fear is that Trump is going to win again. This will almost certainly not happen. Biden is polling well ahead of him in all but one of the swing states and--

Yes, yes, I know, The Polls betrayed us all last time, but 2016 was a close election. Biden’s current lead over Trump is far greater. Maybe The Polls are still wrong, maybe the whole “shy Trump voter” thing is actually going to pan out, but I genuinely don’t think so. I think Trump is going to lose.

The next thing people are worried about is the possibility that Trump will lose but still manage to steal the election anyway. To be fair, this is something he’s been laying the groundwork for since literally the beginning of his first campaign, blustering about election fraud and sowing the idea that any Democrat victory is to be viewed with suspicion, if not open hostility. Just in the last few days the Trump administration has been furiously banging every election fraud drum they can get their hands on (almost like they know they’re about to lose), including the novel idea that counting all of the votes is bad.

I don’t think this is a serious concern, and again, it comes down to that Biden margin. Every method a presidential candidate could use to legally steal an election (or, depending on your point of view, has already used in the past) depends on a very narrow race where jiggery-pokery with votes can swing things one way or another, whereas Biden is currently predicted to win by a wide margin, if not an out-and-out landslide. I have absolutely no doubt that Trump and the Trumpites will try to steal the election; I just don’t think they’ll be successful.

But what if Trump doesn’t just try to steal the election? What if he tries to steal the whole country?

The idea of Trump--or someone riding Trump’s coat-tails--pulling a straight-up coup and going full dictator is something that many people, myself included, were concerned about after the 2016 election. Then we realized that Trump is way more incompetent than we thought, although he arguably still managed to do many of the things we were worried he might do anyway, because it turns out that non-dystopia America overlaps with hypothetical future-dystopia America like 65% of the time.

If he did want to do a coup and become president for life--and I absolutely think that he would like for that to happen, at least some of the time--then he’s rapidly running out of time, and the immediate aftermath of a “controversial” and “contested” election would be the best moment to pull the trigger on it. Elections are often flashpoints for political turmoil for a reason.

Trump has the loyalty of at least some military officials (depending on who you ask), the US intelligence apparatus, the police, ICE and much of America’s other heavily-armed and well-funded paramilitary law enforcement organizations (America has a lot of those compared to other countries, how odd). He also has the loyalty of the country’s burgeoning far right, including a plethora of armed militia groups and organizations that I think it would be entirely fair to describe as nascent terrorist cells. And many ordinary Trump supporters are extremely militant and hostile to the idea of a Democratic victory. And there’s also the bizarre internet cult that believes Trump is a literal messiah sent by God to destroy his enemies, who are all satan-worshipping pedophiles.

On paper, the ingredients are there. You can see how this would play out: Biden wins, Trump and his cronies try to have the election results invalidated through questionable legal means, the Democrats mount a comically ineffective defense because they’re useless, people take to the streets in protest, Trump calls on the power of the state to crush this threat to democracy and oh by the way, for the sake of law and order we need to “pause” the election and put all of Trump’s enemies under “protective custody.” Enough of the people in positions of power go along with it for it to stick. I feel that this scenario is plausible enough that it warrants some concern.

But I don’t think it’s going to happen.

The thing is, Trump and all of his minions are self-serving weasels, and I don’t think they’d go all the way with this if they thought there was any chance it would end with them getting arrested for treason. Despite all the propaganda about how Trump is America’s darling and only fringe leftist radicals hate him, they know they don’t have the support of the people. He didn’t even win the popular vote last time, and he’s currently projected to lose it by a much wider margin this time. It’s hard to stage a popular uprising if you don’t have popular support.

Here’s what I think will happen. Biden will win, the Republicans will throw a big tantrum about how the Democrats played dirty, Trump will make veiled calls for his followers to rise up and take over the country, there’ll be some sporadic violence from the Proud Boys and Qanon fanatics and other doofuses, and then it will be over. Trump won’t admit defeat, his followers will swear to their dying breaths that his loss was a nefarious conspiracy by the Democrats, the election result will become the new Benghazi and Republicans will launch lawsuits and investigations to find out “what really happened”, but at the end of the day Trump will shuffle out of the White House next spring in his big overcoat looking all sad and mopey.

Here’s my actual concern: what happens after that?

Trump’s legacy is going to outlive his presidency, and almost certainly his remaining lifespan. He’s radicalized the American right to a level that hasn’t been seen since the KKK were popular. Before Trump, the Republican party was implacably hostile to the Democrats; now they’re hostile and venomously angry. The American right views the existence of the left as fundamentally illegitimate, and Trump scraped away the thin veneer of political respectability covering that truth to the point that it barely exists anymore. To the Trump faithful, his presidency was supposed to be their final victory, the last election where the Democrats posed any threat. This was meant to be the beginning of a new America, where conservative ideals would go unchallenged and all future elections would be a choice between slightly different flavours of conservative thought. Being denied that reward is going to make many on the right angry and militant.

(At this point the savvy reader could point out that the American left has also become increasingly radical over the last four years. I agree, but the difference is that that’s a good thing).

In a few short months Trump is going to be gone, but the extremists he emboldened and created are still going to be around, and they’re going to be furious. That fury will manifest itself in the political sphere as Republican politicians promising to follow through where Trump failed. It will manifest outside of politics as a generation of right-wing militia who view the Democratic government as an illegitimate imposition, to be resisted with every method available, including violence. God only knows what the Qanon people are going to do.

I haven’t lived in the US since I was a child, and I have no intention of living there again. But the unfortunate reality is that America’s economic influence and military strength make its politics a global concern, moreso now than ever in a time when we’re facing unprecedented global challenges that the US will have to be a part of solving (or, as is more likely, not solving). An America in thrall to the radical right is a danger to the entire world, especially those parts of it that have already been victimised by US imperialism. And we’ve already seen how Trump’s term in office emboldened the far right in other countries. His defeat might embolden them further.

What’s to be done about all of this? Well, personally I’d like to see people in the US becoming more politically active and moving beyond the narrow range of choices offered by the Democrat establishment, but I guess Bernie Sanders’ campaign flaming out the way it did indicates that that’s not happening any time soon (and my ideal left-wing political candidate would be a lot further left than Bernie Sanders). Arrayed against this rising tide of neo-fascism, we instead have the unbuttered toast of presidential candidates, a political party that--as previously stated--has been monumentally inept when it comes to challenging the right in pretty much any way at all, and of course there’s the #Resistance liberals who have spent the last four years LARPing that they’re the rebel alliance from Star Wars. They’ll probably greet Trump’s defeat with at least some disappointment, although they’ll doubtless get over it once the US returns to the conditions of the Obama administration, which they usually consider to have been basically the ideal model for society.

Wow that got salty, didn’t it? I need to finish this up with something inspiring. 

Things are probably going to improve somewhat in a few days, but remember, they could always get worse again! Really quickly, too! You won’t even see it coming!

Nailed it.