I think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Not of America; America is still an ideal, ambitious and aspirational, and an avatar of hope. It is, however, grotesque and embarrassing to be branded by this goldbrick, promoting himself alongside the Tupperware.
There are, it turns out, some 90 million non-voters in American elections. 64% of eligible voters, 155 million, voted in the last one. 77 million voted for Trump. Do the math. It adds up to about one-third of the eligibles, and just under a quarter of the U.S. population. This is somewhat shy, shall we say, of overwhelming support. But the number that sticks in my mind is that 90 million. 36% of 242 million voters. It means a third of the vote went to Trump, and about a third for Harris, but the other third couldn’t be bothered. What gives?
What it suggests is that although we have a serious division between Right and Left, which has been with us historically since the early struggles between capital and labor, the present phenomenon is a separation between those of us who are engaged, and the others who’ve disconnected from the public conversation altogether. They’re going about their business like the rest of us, one foot in front of the other, but they’re submerged.
This is, to a large degree, a function of our degraded information environment. You can’t blame people for surrendering to exhaustion. The noise level is deafening. And much of it, clearly, is inessential. Or it doesn’t seem to affect us, in bread-and-butter ways. But the stuff that could affect us comes so thick and fast.
The issue is, that trying to differentiate, to sort the wheat from the chaff, means you have to pay attention, and a lot of people have just given up. The obvious question would be, is it intentional? Steve Bannon’s famous instruction, flood the zone with shit. Maybe, maybe not. In a very real sense, it doesn’t matter, the end result is the same. Whether by accident or design, we wind up with a government of malignant incompetence.
What does it take for people to notice?
The theatrics don’t move the needle, either way. It’s of no consequence whether Pam Bondi falls on her sword, because of the Epstein lather, or if Kristi Noem gets thrown over the side, because of God only knows what, but none of it is material. We shrug, and move on. This is rightly seen as dumbshow, shadow puppets, comic relief. These people are clowns. They’re doing things that cause genuine harm to other people, in the real world, but we have a hard time taking it seriously, because we can’t take them seriously.
Something has got to happen, to break through this wall of noise. Trump is a shameless blowhard, with no principles except the raw acquisition of power. His acolytes and enablers are morally derelict. That any of these people can pretend they’re serving a greater good is utter delusion or the deepest corruption. They’ve sold their souls to the Devil. MAGA is fond of characterizing this struggle in Biblical terms. Let us at least allow that the forces of darkness have come to collect the debt.