Another American election has come and gone, and for many days and weeks, the internet will be drowning in words attempting to explain, interpret, and contain the result.
This is my small contribution to the avalanche of sound.
After we spend time grieving, there is a question we must ask ourselves. Is it really so impossible to understand why people have voted for Trump?
Yes, of course, he is horrible. Today, I fear most of all for the immigrants in the United States who, as always, will face the brunt of his terrible policies; who will be jailed and deported, separated from their families, and denied safety and opportunity for no reason other than tribalism, nativism, and fear. They do not deserve this. Neither do the women, queer people, and non-white people who will suffer under a radical and reactionary government. And I also fear for our environment—which is already hanging on by a thread—and the destructive effects of mass deregulation that will almost certainly occur under a radical right-wing government.
But are liberals and leftists going to continue to pretend that half the country is just willfully evil, and willfully supports an evil man? That Trump voters are illiterate, incomprehensible idiots? Does this election not, on some level, make blinding sense?
What kind of country are we living in today? It is a nihilistic, power-hungry, money-worshipping empire. It is a country is built on warfare and domination of natural resources. America is the police officer of the world. America is the conqueror.
There is a profound, disquieting, and obvious cognitive dissonance in being presented with a political party that presents itself as a lamb, while acting as a wolf. This is the Democratic Party. At every turn, Democrats protect existing power structures. Especially abroad, Democrats are equally war-hungry and equally unfeeling to the humanity of human beings in the Middle East. Yet, unlike Republicans, they claim to care for those they crush under their boot.
Donald Trump is a wolf who knows he is a wolf. He bares his teeth on stage, and certain Americans revel in it. There is a part of every human being that wants to be powerful. We feel our own strength and we want to take pride in it. America is rich and safe because we dominate and exploit the world. Why not embrace and enjoy that power?
Of course, once you give someone like Trump and his adherents absolute power, there is no telling who they will turn it against.
But the will to power is not unique to the Republicans. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris endorsed, funded, and protected Israel’s brutal obliteration of the people of Gaza, in part to protect their geopolitical and economic power. Yet the Democrats portray themselves to the public as the party of peace, kindness, and tolerance. What is this other than sheer, unbridled nihilism? It is a total obliteration of meaning, an attempted cancelling-out of reality that rings of pure emptiness. It is an ultimate act of double-speak. To believe in the Democrats as the party of “humanity” and “empathy” is to have been completely blind to the images of dead fathers, weeping mothers, ruined hospitals and homes, resulting from the Democrat-sponsored destruction of Palestine for an entire calendar year. It is a disgraceful claim. It is utterly meaningless.
Kamala Harris could not speak genuinely during her campaign, not in front of a group or in any individual conversation, because she was not genuine. Her act was a farce. She is simply a persona, a hollow vessel for the projections of people who align with the Democratic Party, and who crave—genuinely, and rightly—peace and safety for the marginalized people among us. But Biden and Harris serve empire just the same as Donald Trump. They’re just less honest about it.
Do I think that this lost election came down to people’s feelings about Gaza? No. No, unfortunately, I don’t think most people in America have the awareness to vote against the ongoing atrocity—and even if they did, there would be no way for them to protest against it. There was no viable candidate in this year’s election who would have stopped the genocide. I do not believe that Gaza was a conscious influence on most voters. But I think people intuitively sense a disturbing and startling emptiness in the Democratic Party—a lack of real content. For all Trump’s idiocy, for his racism, for his narcissism, he feels legible: he seeks power and attention, and he admits it. He’ll take it wherever he can get it. His bare-faced lust for power makes him feel real. He comes off as Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, reveling in his own strength.
Liberal nihilism, on the other hand, is flimsy and hollow. The reason to vote is entirely written in the negative: we must win to beat the other guy. That’s not even an exaggerated characterization; listen to any interview with Kamala over the past several months and you will see this was explicitly her strategy. Ask her a question about herself, she’ll answer: “Let’s talk about Donald Trump…” Unable to point to anything real about herself, she could only point to the realities of Trump—a reality she tried to paint as unacceptably dangerous and ugly, but a reality all the same, made of substance, clear and defined.
It’s not that Kamala didn’t have “enough policies”; it’s that she, and other centrist Democrats, have no real values that can survive the reality of Gaza. It breaks the illusion. Their position is becoming incoherent. The Democrats would have us believe that Kamala was the unifier, the redeemer, the champion of the marginalized. Her persona is patient, sweet, and kind; her platform is about “hopes and dreams.” But this is sheer symbol without any underlying substance. It was Kamala’s government, and Kamala’s administration, that funded and defended the killing of innocent children in Gaza, the weakest and most marginalized people in the world—the people who are the most in need of care and protection and brave action. Kamala was entirely simulacrum—flash and projection. She was a fictional character.
Watching Donald Trump take office feels terrible because it exposes America’s sickness. It is a rot that runs deep, maybe to the marrow. It forces us to admit that our country is broken, and it makes us feel unsafe in our home territory—a reality that is otherwise unthinkable for many Americans. But the reality is, the future we fear with Trump is already here. Our country is fascistic. It is the dominant empire of the world, and it rules with the dual iron fists of economic control and sheer military might. It does imprison its own citizens into modern slavery; it does keep immigrants in detention camps and blindly deport them into intolerable conditions; it does commit atrocities abroad in order to assert and maintain its power. These facts are true regardless of whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is in office. The only change is whether marginalized American citizens directly feel the effects of that power.
That harm to marginalized Americans is real. It’s terrible. And it hurts. But it can also force us to reckon with our country’s fundamental reality.
Those of us who desire an equal society, where people from all walks of life can live safe and meaningful lives, must discover together how to surpass liberal nihilism. We must decide if there is any way to bring our system of government towards humanistic, egalitarian, and empathetic action—or if we must completely change the structure of our government in order to do so. Otherwise, we must learn to resign ourselves to living in an oppressive state, hoping that its rage does not turn against us based on the results of this election, while learning to ignore when it is directed against others.
What is our alternative to the nihilistic nothingness of the Democrats?
This is the question we will face in the coming days.