Election Eve: Zen and the Art of Doomscrolling

A sense of confidence and excitement has seeped through the non-fascist public in the last several days...but remember 2016 like the fucking Alamo. Don't get cocky.

Note: the way this Substack works is that every public post has a paywalled follow-up with the spicier opinions either I didn’t have space for or energy to argue about with the internet at large. The follow up to PR Problems is coming, maybe even today, but it’s too close to the election for (hopefully) entertaining and perceptive posts about what might happen tomorrow to be behind barriers right now, so here we go.

It’s almost over. One way or the other.

I think I’ve aged ten years since the first primary. Twenty since 2020.

A century since 2016.

And I do feel cautiously optimistic about tomorrow. Cautiously. Because I have SOME VERY REAL PTSD ABOUT 2016. When we were so sure. When, even with everything going on, we thought there was no way America would elect that guy. That we were on the verge of the first female President. When we were excited to see the oh-so-cocky MAGA camp meltdown in defeat. I painted my nails red, white, and blue. I wore suffragette white to vote, and a jewelry-version of RBG’s dissent collar.

And I will never forget watching everything slowly fall apart at the Democratic Party’s official event

And I’m…not real thrilled to see this same sort of sentiment floating around the day before this election.

Yeah, that Selzer poll was crazy surprising and injected hopium into everybody all at once like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Yeah, the early voting demographics and numbers look pretty good. Yeah, the vibe you and I feel, in our bubbles online and in real life, is that this is maybe probably gonna happen. Yeah, it should happen because voting against micro

I DO NOT TRUST THAT SHIT.

You know what I trust?

I trust Democrats’ deep, passionate, and powerful longing to not vote. I don’t understand it, but it’s as reliable as sunrise and the tide and white male comics complaining that their warmed-over take my wife, please jokes are being silenced to millions of views and dollars. Democrats FUCKING LOVE not voting. At the drop of the smallest and most irrelevant novelty hat, Dems seem to start celebrating, throw up our hands and joyfully not the fuck vote because…blue state so it doesn’t matter (yes it does, downballot dingus)/I got stuff to do and it’s a done deal (it isn’t, and we will all have a lot more shit to do if Elon Musk gets to Twitter our economy while RFK leaves the rotting carcass of public health in a park for fun and Trump sells the entire country to Putin for $599 and a kiss)/electoralism doesn’t work (oh my god hold my earrings)/my not voting sends a message to the establishment (they have no way of knowing why you didn’t vote, it could have been because Chipotle had a BOGO deal that day, your message is just a blank, subjectless email sent to no one)if Trump gets in it will accelerate us toward the revolution and people will rise up (he was already in power and there was no glorious leftist revolution, just the breakdown of society and suffering, also a revolution would not turn out with gentle loving progressives in charge)/the candidate isn’t perfect and will win anyway so I can stay pure (they won’t necessarily win anyway and not doing the bare minimum of saying please not fascism though is literally the opposite of political purity) or whatever reason seems fun that day.

It’s absolutely galling. And I’m so afraid we’re about to coast on vibes into another brick wall of assholes who get visibly excited talking about daddy punishing America for being such a bad girl. (And by the way, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, guys) running our entire lives directly into the core of the fucking earth.

The white-hot boiling heart of American exceptionalism is thinking it’ll always be fine without any effort on our part

I’m hoping, too. But it’s very easy to forget how much of this country doesn’t pay attention at all, how much of this country hates women and POC and have no reason to be shy about that anymore, how much of this country went through their most formative years before the Civil Rights Act, Roe, or women being allowed their own bank accounts, how much of this country was so traumatized by COVID they have just aggressively memory-holed the entire thing plus everything else we went through from 16-20, and how much of this country literally just doesn’t give a shit, wants to watch the world (just not their cute lil house) burn, and profoundly enjoys watching others suffer.

And that part of the country? Never miss an election. They turn out every time to vote for pain and anger and fear and repression of others. They fucking love voting, because they fully understand it’s how they can get their way whether there’s more of them or not, while the rest of us seem to have a real tough time with that lesson.

I live on a small island. I moved here on November 1st, 2008. A few days later, we elected Obama in a landslide, and it was one of the most special nights of my life. Everyone crammed into the local bar, watching it happen. We’d voted in Ohio before moving so that it would count more, and when Ohio went blue, you’d have thought my ex and I had done it just the two of us. We didn’t pay for a single drink that night. The joy in the air was so intense and wonderful.

All those people, so happy, feeling like we’d accomplished something real. That the world was about to change.

AND THEN TWO YEARS LATER NOBODY FUCKING SHOWED UP AND THE WORST REPUBLICANS MOVED ON INTO CONGRESS. And we were all surprised! I’m not exempt from this at all, either. I was young and dumb as a broken fencepost and I didn’t vote in the midterms. Have I learned my lesson? Yes. Has everyone else? I MEAN MAYBE BUT WHAT ARE THE CHANCES. Democrats just hate voting regularly. If all registered Dems voted, even Texas would be blue. But we don’t. We just refuse. Someone else will do the work, right? Someone else will make it okay. Someone else will fix it so we don’t have to pay attention.

And then we’re all shocked when SCOTUS is made up of out of three decent people, two out-of-touch old men, a seething frathouse rapist, a corporate lich, Serena Joy, and Clayton fucking Bigsby.

Clarence Thomas I swear to fucking god

You can’t be shocked. We have to turn out, and at best, we seem to be able to manage it about once every other Presidential cycle. People keep whining that Democrats have been calling Republicans fascists for too many cycles, but we’ve been doing that because it’s literally just the same people over and over again. Reagan’s administration was half Nixon men, the first Bush’s was half Nixon and Reagan men, the second Bush’s was whoever was still breathing out of that ring of hell, Trump’s was half bonkers right-wing grifters and half whoever was left standing by the 2010s out of Roger Stone’s ancient shrieking goblin tribe of well-dressed national vampires. Who had mostly also been around since Nixon, plotting revenge. It’s been the same gang of Pennywise understudies slurping out of the public trough while starving the rest of us since my parents were kids, and yes, they are fascists. They just think it’s not fascism when they do it. It’s just the way things oughtta be, don’t you know?

THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT ALL FASCISTS THINK BUT FINE WHATEVER.

The point is, my heart is full of hope but my guts are full of dread. Not because of them, because of us. Because we have failed to protect ourselves and our neighbor so many times by giving up our voice and choosing not to vote. Because so many of us still want to vote for Jill Stein even though I’ve never met one single person who genuinely loves her and wants her in (funny how her not being perfect is fine with protest voters but the candidate with an actual chance not being perfect is intolerable), only those who want to use their vote to punish someone else. Because when optimism abounds, Democrats stay home.

Yes, it can be hard to get time off of work. It is also hard for Republicans to get time off, and early or mail-in voting is available in all but three states, only one of which is even close to a swing state (New Hampshire, because New Hampshire just HAS to do their own thing). Yes, voter suppression is everywhere, so yes, we have to try a little harder in some places. But we have to try. Please try. No, voting for Kamala isn’t going to end capitalism or fix Gaza or even make your groceries cheaper tomorrow, but what it does is make those things even remotely possible in the future.

The Democrats have been begging people to vote for 18 months now. I’m begging. Please don’t sell us to that creature and his rogues’ gallery. Please let us just try to get a little better every year, to fix more problems, to end more injustices, as best we can, within the law, as best we know how, within contemporary mores, as best we are able, given that America doesn’t actually rule the world. And if you aren’t voting because you think America is an evil empire—hold onto your fucking hats if MAGA wins.

Nothing is perfect. Everything sucks to a greater or lesser degree, most of the time. But that doesn’t mean we get to just nihilistically lie down and let these weirdos tell us who we are or how we can be allowed to exist. They don’t get to do that.

Everything hinges on tomorrow. Go. Vote. Speak. Say no to the last nine years of having to hear that man absorb and curdle every single part of daily life into his own stew of narcissism and sadism. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the rest of us, who want to determine our own lives and have a political party in power who can be persuaded to act for the people. Who, most of the time, try to all on their own.

Or do it for the next generation who cannot speak for themselves yet, but deserve to grow up to be whatever they can be, and not punished for not conforming to Gilead’s latest decree.

I don’t care who you do it for. I hope you do it for yourself. Just vote.

And if Kamala wins, if we escape this particular bad timeline, you have to keep voting. It isn’t ever over, because this push-me-pull-you between conservative control and liberal freedom has been going on for centuries. It does not end. Don’t you dare leave her hanging out to dry in the midterms. There is no permanent victory. And yeah, victory tomorrow doesn’t fix much right away. That work is hard and unlovely and takes so many years and so much arguing, so much compromise. But the needle does move. Toward something more open, something brighter. The first step is just not literally electing a supervillain.

There is and can never be any final repudiation of conservatism. You have to show up every time, forever, or there is no progress, on any cause you or I care about. And some progress is always better than losing progress.

It’s just one action a year. If my generation can finally learn to do that, maybe there is a future ahead that has room for all of us, and not just a few rich men full of hatred who think love, mercy, peace, kindness, and diversity are mortal sins.

Don’t get cocky. We can lose so easily tomorrow. Fill in the little bubble next to: I and my loved ones would rather not descend into a ravenous maelstrom of suffering today.

We don’t ever get to tune out again. Let’s get this done and start arguing over how to fix things rather than arguing over our right to continue existing with people who never wanted us to in the first place.