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| My voting selfie! |
The 2018 US midterm elections occurred two weeks ago. Right before that I wrote a "Weird Al-Themed Voting Round Up" that included some of my thoughts on voting, and of course, some Weird Al references. I promised I'd have some thoughts back then. So now that the elections are a couple weeks behind us, here are a few thoughts going more-or-less from specific to general.
- All my races here in Tennessee went about how I expected (all Republican except my State House election, which went for Democrat Yusuf Hakeem). So far the only surprise is that the US Senate race wasn't even close statewide, although it was close in my county (What happened there, Phil Bredesen?). But Democrats took control of the US House. That's more of a wave than I expected to be completely honest.
- I stayed up late watching the election coverage. Here's some of my late night election silliness: During his concession, Beto O'Rourke looked like he was about to grab a guitar and start shredding. And did he drop an F-bomb, or did I imagine that? Also, I kept seeing a Mills winning for Governor of Maine. I secretly wondered if reading a bunch of Stephen King lately has somehow entered my name into consideration for the office without my knowledge. I figured that delirium was an indication that I had watched enough election coverage for one night, so I went to bed.
- Yusuf Hakeem, who won my State House district, is not the most progressive Democrat around, but that my district is sending a black man with an Arabic name to the State House in very Trumpy Tennessee gives me a certain type of enjoyment.
- I was a bit surprised the Democrats took the US House, although the party that opposes the President tends to do well in the midterms. I hope they can do something to hold the administration accountable (I'm not holding my breath for impeachment, though). Honestly, I was expecting to be completely disappointed. Even Tennessee only mildly disappointed me, but then I had very low expectations for my great state. My original home state of Minnesota had some pretty great results for Democrats.
- Definitely voter suppression and gerrymandering are real and probably our most dire political issues right now. I can see Georgia from my house (okay, not quite, but it's seven miles away). The election there has rightly worried a lot of people (including Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who almost couldn't vote herself).
- While acknowledging all that, I wonder if people on the left don't pay enough attention to another factor: a lot of Americans just aren't into us. A disturbingly high percentage of Americans are knowingly on board with Trumpism. Everything we on the left hate about Trump (his distain for government institutions, disregard for experts and the very concept of truth, brash name-calling, bragging about sexual assault, flouting of the norms of civil discourse, love of cruelty, and of course his trademark bigotry) is precisely what some of his fans love about him.
- Trump was here in Chattanooga for a rally right before the election. I showed up to protest along with a few hundred others, but to get to the protest I had to run the gauntlet of a small side street flooded with MAGA hats and "lock her up" t-shirts both for sale by street vendors and being proudly worn by thousands of Trump supporters (almost all of the supporters were white, but many of the vendors were African American). The whole scene was surreal and a bit terrifying.
- So, yeah, Trump has a lot of hard core supporters, and Trumpism is very much alive and well in America. We shouldn't forget this, but I still don't entirely know what to do about it. I disagree with most of the traditional planks of the Republican Party, but I always felt like I could understand enough to start a conversation. People who are Republicans because they don't like paying taxes or because they view the federal government's primary responsibility as national defense make sense to me even if I disagree. Trumpism is another thing entirely. I haven't understood the appeal since he descended down that escalator in 2015.
- Not that I think we must understand Trumpism from the inside in order to fight it from the outside.
- I continue to think that political disagreements--whether of the traditional left-right variety or within various shades on one side of the political spectrum--are far more about a framework or worldview than they are about information or surface-level opinion. Much of the dreariness of the 2016 election for me was getting into discussions I thought might turn to illuminating explorations of differing political worldviews, but which often devolved into a social media splattering of statistics or surface level think pieces. We need deeper thinking about politics. And I don't see a whole lot of it. I tried to avoid these sorts of discussions in 2018, which made me happier but also sad that there are deeper conversations we ought to be having.
- But political philosophy can itself become a fetish or an impediment to political action (I see this sometimes on the fashionable academic left, but some libertarians go in this direction, too). For me, political philosophy is about a broader understanding and critique of political systems, but political action is about making a difference by doing what you can with what you've got, which usually requires working with the political tools and systems we currently have. By all means we should contemplate utopia (and as a science fiction fan I do love a good utopia) or point to our very real contemporary dystopias, but I'd also like to do something to make things a little less shitty for people here in our current world.
- Voting is not going to solve everything. It won't change the system overnight. But I continue to think it's worthwhile, and I'll keep doing it as long as I can.
- Overall I've so far avoided the melancholy I was feeling around this time two years ago. There are still obviously a lot of problems in Tennessee, the United States, and the world, but maybe we'll muddle through to something like addressing a few of them. And in politics sometimes that's the best you can hope for.
