WATCH GRID: We're gonna win
Regardless of what happens next week
This is maybe the coin-flippingest coin-flip American presidential election ever — no matter how unbelievable that still sounds, nine years into this.
While you can look at any social app and find all the doom and/or cope you like, nobody knows how this is gonna go. I have a guess, and I feel fairly confident about it, but that’s not worth much to anybody.
In the meantime, here’s a version of what I plan to tell my kid, who wisely has never read any of my posts, meaning there’s no risk of spoiler (I’ll say it much more quickly when I say it to her, because she doesn’t care about reaching the spreadsheet on the other side of it):
Next week, we might suffer a loss.
If that happens, things will get worse for almost everyone. That includes all of the groups who have long been bullied for being different from the group that believes itself to be the in-group.
And that list also includes most of those supposed in-group people. They’re never actually going to belong inside that group, and in fact, they were never even eligible for consideration. Whether those alleged victors know it yet or not, they are already part of the “we” who “might suffer a loss next week.”
Donald Trump did not invent any of his ideas, if we can call them ideas. He was far from the first face of what he represents, and he won’t be anywhere near the last. This isn’t really about him, no matter how hard it is to imagine anything in America being about something besides its most miserable attention slave.
The battle between the impulse to treat all of your neighbors as you would treat yourself and the impulse to conquer your neighbor because you have been told your neighbor is inherently inferior to you: This battle has been ongoing since neighbors were invented. We have documentation of this, and you already know which example I’m going to cite, though it’s likewise far from the oldest:
The Book of Genesis is about collective creation vs. birthright status. The Book of Exodus is about unifying via liberation vs. clinging to power. The Gospel of Luke is about overturning society vs. negotiating exceptions within that overturning. The Book of Revelation is about a country whose borders are always open vs. an empire that would rather damn itself than let go.
There has only ever been one conflict.
And many times in many places, its results have gone poorly for people while profiting powers. As we all know, that’s still happening throughout the world right now.
It might start going much more poorly for those of us in America, and that might start very soon.
A second Trump presidency would be so much more damaging than the first was, which is saying a lot. His team has openly admitted it would tank the economy, make people sick, strip away freedoms, establish internment camps, further erode his own restrictions, attack his personal opposition, and spend four years obsessively delaying environmental progress or peace in Palestine. Things would feel hopeless, even worse than last time.
To say things have also felt hopeless before, many times and in many places, isn’t minimizing, though. The battle started tens of thousands of years before 2024, and it won’t end next week, no matter what happens. That sucks for those of us who won’t live tens of thousands of years and thus get to outlive the bad times.
Still, every power is doomed to fall. They always have, and they always will. Use whichever math you like, historical or theoretical or religious or fictional, and you’ll end up with that same result, because those are all the same math.
And then there’ll be a new power, because it’ll always be easy for somebody to accept the recruiting pitch — “All these kingdoms I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me” — and it’ll always be easy for somebody else to go along with it, even as it poisons them both.
I don’t say the following in a “religious” sense, not that I have any idea which of anybody’s thoughts count as “religious” or not, because I have no idea what that word means to anybody, including me. Everything said by any of you sounds “religious.” I just say this because it’s true:
It will not be easy to get there, but there will come a day when we win, and by “we,” I mean everybody, even the people who currently believe themselves to be in a group that isn’t everybody.
Next week could be a step in the wrong direction, away from that win. Or it could be a very Democratic Party-style kind of shuffling standstill (which would feel great, at this point). Or it could even feel like something else.
Regardless, even if next week is an Electoral College blowout by Harris, next week certainly won’t be the week when we win-win. In that scenario, next week will be when we exhale, do uhh something to try to make sure the election actually counts lol, and then begin trying to actually get somewhere.
Regardless, at some point after whatever happens next week, we’re gonna win.1 2
Business: Sunday, November 24 at 5 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida, I’ll be at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church for a free (RSVP here) event about my book and stuff. I will not care which religious status you leave with afterward. Q&A, signing, panel, etc., and then we’re going to the bar selected by Pastor B.J.
Additionally, we’re passing the plate in order to help erase over a million dollars’ worth of medical debt — you can also pitch in now, if you like.
About all this, I’m supposed to say, “It’s easy for me to say things will end up fine, because of my demographics.” But why the hell would any of this be easy for me to say? Many people have it much worse than me, and a Trump win would greatly worsen that. And at the same time, I’m publicly a red-state race-traitor apostate with younger family members who do not have as many privileges. We all have perspectives that affect how we’re able to view the world, but I’m not exactly my demographics, and I’m not saying any of this from some unexamined place. It is going to suck at least a little, it might suck really bad, and eventually, we are going to win.
And yeah, the Democratic Party is so very far from perfectly representing “the impulse to treat all of your neighbors as you would treat yourself.” But as things stand at this exact moment, I would argue putting up with it is one of the simplest ways to love most of your neighbors.
Thank you, Jason. Very well said.
This is beautiful