I’m OK, You’re OK, We’re Screwed<\/a>. The 1988 story, told in short, is that shortly before the election, I read pieces written as if from four years in the future, each candidate represented by a supporter as if they had won and were now running for reelection. The supporter of George H.W. “Poppy” Bush wrote as if from Elysium; the supporter of Michael \"Drop off your turkey carcasses\" Dukakis wrote as if from, I don’t know, Detroit. Things were hard at the close of the putative first Dukakis term, but they were starting to improve. I read the two columns and thought: That’s it. It’s over. We lose.<\/i>\nWhile I didn’t actually know much about how elections really work back then, I have to say, I was right. At that moment, the American public didn’t want hard work to turn around a country with ingrained problems, they wanted the illusion of peace. Now, there was a lot more to it than that, and it’s not as if a different column in whatever magazine I was reading would have changed the outcome of the election. So long as the country was largely feeling that things were OK, or (as I think) didn’t want to face those things that were lousy, the incumbent Party was going to win the election.\n
When I was writing that note, a year and a half before the election, I was wondering whether the country largely felt that we were screwed, or whether we wanted to elect a soothing President, who would tell us that things were OK. What happened that year was largely different: among other things, Barack Obama was the First Black President, and on some level there was the sense that just electing him would mean that everything would be OK. He was peddling audacious hope but not, if I remember correctly, soothing pap—but it almost didn’t matter, since we were so euphoric about the end of racism.\n
Sigh.\n
At any rate, what Donald Trump is trying to do seems to me very difficult. He is saying that things are awful, terrible, dangerous and nearly catastrophic. And he is saying that we won’t have to buckle down and work hard to fix it. He, it seems, will do that for us. I don’t know if I think the country will buy it. Either that things are awful (they aren’t—well, there are always things getting better and things getting worse, and we’re running out of time on climate change before our focus will have to shift toward living with the damage rather than preventing it, but the economy is meh-not-that-bad and crime is down and while of course Daesh is scary, terrorism is at a horrible-but-livable level, and while race relations are of course bad and tense, that’s not actually worse than it has been) or that he will fix them. In fact, it seems to me that in terms of my 1988 concerns, either the zeitgeist is reasonably satisfied at the moment, which is good for the incumbent, or Donald Trump will actually convince people that things are scary, which may well be good for the competent-manager type in the race. Which isn’t him.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger knows that a surprise convention appearance by Beyonce would be the most awesome, but is still kinda rooting for DMC at the DNC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16403,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15330\/revisions\/16403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}