This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Count on one thing: On January 20, 2025, we will indeed find ourselves in a new world. And that new world won't, I suspect, be all that familiar even to those of us who lived through the previous version of it from January 20, 2017, to perhaps January 6, 2021, when Washington almost literally came apart at the seams. In retrospect, the last four years have been kind of a waiting game with an old man (and I say that as an old man myself) holding down the fort until Donald J. Trump could sweep back into power and, from disease to war, climate change to immigration, turn this country into an increasingly unrecognizable new world (from hell).
I sometimes dream of bringing back my parents (both of whom died in the previous century) and introducing them (so to speak) to Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States a second time around. They wouldn't believe it! We're talking, of course, about the man who just nominated Matt Gaetz, a congressman who gives "far-right" true meaning, as the" yes!" attorney general, which will also give the phrase "the rule of law" new meaning. And then there's Pete Hegseth, best known as a Fox News presenter (and not as a once-upon-a-time prison guard at the Guanta'namo Bay detention camp) to run the Pentagon, the home of the generals who have lost just about every war imaginable in this century, while running into the ground the most overfunded institution in America, and who plans, above all else, to end its -- are you kidding me? -- "wokeness." And that's just to begin what will undoubtedly prove to be an endless list of appointees guaranteed to give the very word "government" a grim new meaning.
In such a world, we can only dream that we (and those we love) were in another, better America on another, better planet in another, better time. But since that's not possible, let me instead turn you over to TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan whose dreams of how this world might be, put the eerie world that now is the (dis)United States of America in (as you'll see) a far better context. If only! Tom
A Final Speech from the Great Disrupter
(If Only in My Dreams)
My inbox is full of lament (and encouragement).
My Instagram feed is full of anger and "the arc of the moral universe bends slow but--
My Facebook brims with exhortations to focus on the positive, on what we can control, on the next fight.
I live in a poor Democratic stronghold in southeastern Connecticut. Kamala Harris won our state by more than 200,000 votes. Our seven paltry electoral votes went blue. Here, Jill Stein got a lot more votes than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but nowhere near enough to swing the Nutmeg State red.
I didn't plant a Harris/Walz sign on my front walk. I didn't knock on doors in Pennsylvania. I didn't give any money in response to the desperate and constant text messages I received from Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and dozens of other Democratic pen pals. I also never figured out how to stop those texts from crowding onto my phone.
Now that the election -- the longest for Donald Trump (he started campaigning and fomenting insurrection even before the White House door whacked him on the bottom in 2021) and the shortest (just 107 days) for Kamala Harris -- is over, there's a small voice in my head asking why I didn't go in hard for Kamala's politics of JOY.
I love joy! I love her laugh! But I also know the answer: 43,000 dead in Gaza didn't spark joy. Continued shipments of U.S. weapons to Israel didn't make me happy. For all their good vibes alchemy, the Harris/Walz campaign failed to depart from the Biden administration's blank check for Benjamin Netanyahu's version of saturation bombing.
There's a lot her campaign should have/could have/might have done differently (if they had more time, if they had listened to different strategists) in terms of their ground game, how they spent their money, and who they focused on. There's already a cottage industry of podcasters, pundits, and policy wonks at work figuring out just how and where the Harris/Walz campaign went wrong. But at the end of the day, of course, she lost because Trump won, because white men, atheist men, born-again men, Catholic men, rich men, poor men, men of all colors voted for him. They embraced his misogyny; his nativism; his racism; his Teflon-Don persona; his tall walls and barbed wire; his hatred of trans kids and gender as a spectrum; and his well-financed, loudly declared, legislatively-wired hatred of just about anyone who isn't like him. Or maybe, just maybe, they held their noses against that foul hate-fest and voted for him because of some small, single, shining promise that rang out for them amid the cacophony of his raucous, roadshowing campaign. Who knows?
I'm not a pundit, a podcaster, or a policy wonk. I'm not a Democratic Party insider. In fact, I've often (but not in 2024) voted Green. I'm a mother of three bright, opinionated kids, two of whom don't fit neatly into the rigid gender-presentation box now mandated by the Republican leadership. All three of those gorgeous human beings love peace and kindness. They're friendly and trusting, as well as sharp and capable of sniffing out hypocrisy and equivocation. The day after the election, I sent them off to school with a warm lecture on staying true to our values of kindness and recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person -- even those who voted for Trump. "No one we know would vote for him," my son asserted with the confidence of the young. He is incorrect. More than 75 million people in this country voted for him. We certainly know some of them" Some of them are our friends.
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