- Our mistake was thinking we lived in a better country than we do;
- The US has lost faith in the American dream;
- Connie Willis’s detailed daily political summaries are now at CW Daily on Facebook;
- With today a dozen or more reason why fascism may not succeed in the US;
- Switching gears: an essay by cosmologist Paul M. Sutter on how the emptiness of the universe gives our lives meaning.
A few more comments on the current situation.
The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit, 7 Nov 2004: Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do, subtitled “Americans will be stuck cleaning up after Maga’s destructive streak because men like this never clean up after themselves”
Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.
\\\
How to abandon ideals and appeal to base human nature. It works. It’s worked.
The Guardian, Andrew Gumbel, 9 Nov 2024: The US has lost faith in the American dream. Is this the end of the country as we know it?
A dozen years ago – an eternity in American politics – the Republican party was reeling from its fourth presidential election loss in six tries and decided that it needed to be a lot kinder to the people whose votes it was courting.
No more demonising of migrants, the party resolved – it was time for comprehensive immigration reform. No more demeaning language that turned off women and minorities – it needed more of them to run for office.
“We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them too,” the party asserted in a famously self-flagellating autopsy after Barack Obama’s re-election as president in 2012.
Even Dick Armey, a veteran Texas conservative, told the authors of the report: “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you.”
Just one voice on the right begged to differ: Donald Trump. “Does the @RNC [Republican National Committee] have a death wish?” he asked in a tweet.
His objection received little attention at the time, but it wasn’t long before he was offering himself as flesh-and-blood proof of how wrong the autopsy was. In announcing his first campaign for president in 2015, Trump called Mexicans rapists and criminals.
\\\
There is now a CW Daily group on Facebook where Connie Willis’ exhaustively detailed daily summaries of political events, which until now have been reposted (from where? I never could figure that out) by Lou Anders.
Here is Lou’s post for today, who shares Connie’s latest post and advises us of CW Daily.
The post is divided into “good new from blue-state governors,” “They’re Already at Each Others’ Throats” news, and “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” news. Plus this, which I’ll quote (the CW Daily post is public).
And here are a Dozen More Reasons Fascism May Not Succeed in the U.S., at Least Without a Struggle (from Daily Kos, with additions by me and others):
–1. We have a large, well-organized, and well-informed opposition. We did many, many things well this cycle and have many resources at our disposal. (Including those zoom calls, which people are still organizing.)
–2. We’re not the only ones who are upset. People with a lot more power than us–military officers, government officials, Senators, Representatives, governors (see above), etc.–are just as horrified as we are, and they’re in a position to actually do stuff. (In regard to that, a commenter on Daily Kos said that a Democratic Senator said that high-powered DC types have been planning for the last five years for the possibility of a Trump administration and are trying to defend us in various ways.)
–3. Many major and popular celebrities oppose Trump and jailing or murdering them would be politically untenable. (Which is putting it mildly. Think Taylor Swift. And Harrison Ford. And the same goes for the Obamas and journalists like Rachel Maddow and Nicole Wallace.)
–4. Even though the media has largely failed to rise to the occasion (so far), there are many serious and dedicated journalists in this country, like David Folkenflick, who has already quit the Washington Post because of its yanking of Kamala Harris’s endorsement, and who was relentless in exposing Trump’s dishonesty when he was President and afterwards.
–5. Modern technology makes it easier to capture and share abuses of power, to communicate and organize in ways that weren’t possible in the 1930s. (That’s even with the complicit mainstream media caving. In the 1930s that was all there was. It’s not the case any more. (In the old days nobody would ever have known about Tianamen Square or the Arab Spring. And I know tech also makes it easier to spy on the population and identify protesters, but it still works both ways.)
–7. The U.S. is less white and less religious and Trump’s whole plan ignores these realities and a lot of others, like global warming and how the economy works. And reality is–well, reality, no matter how much you talk about “alternative facts.” (See Galileo. When he was tried for heresy for his astronomical work, which went against the Church’s belief that the Heavens were the Realm of God and therefore perfect and unchanging, he said, “Nevertheless, it moves.”)
–8. The right really doesn’t have an ideology or a shared belief system other than “owning the libs.” Which many of them said was the reason they voted for Trump. Well, they’ve owned us. Now what?
–9. We have experience with Trump and with the authoritarian playbook. We know their plans in advance, since they so kindly laid them out for us in Project 2025 and other documents) and can prepare. This isn’t like they pretend to be one thing to get elected and then spring their real plan on us once they’re safely in power.
–10. Trump is old, stupid, and in severe cognitive decline, and it will only get worse. Plus, he has no ambitions beyond himself. He’s also unfocused and easily distracted. True, the people around him are neither old nor stupid and are really dangerous, but they are also wildly ambitious and will be vying for control. In fact, they already are. DeSantis thought he would be Chief of Staff, and Trump gave the job to Susie Wiles, and there are already signs that RFK, Jr. is being sidelined into some sort of “health-czar-think-tank” job instead of really letting him be in charge of the CDC and the NIH. (The early days of the Russian Revolution were all about different factions killing each other off, and let us not forget Hitler’s “Night of the Long Knives,” in which he had almost everyone who helped him come to power murdered.)
–11. Dictators never name successors because those successors might try to dethrone them. So if Trump dies or is incapacitated, his successor is unlikely to have the same following and party support. Considerable energy will be consumed by those trying to seize the mantle of his authority.
–12. It’s a cult. It always has been. They love Trump–they’re willing to wear diapers and bandaids on their ears for him and they buy paintings of him as Jesus and George Washington. And cults never survive the death of their leader–or his supplanting. The same arguments and “policies” and language just don’t work for other people, as witness Ron DeSantis and Mark Robinson and Kari Lake. They may think they can switch in J.D. Vance (I saw a post where they were already talking about running Vance and Don, Jr.) but it won’t be that simple.
Let me propose this observation, which I’m not certain is true. We understand them far better than they understand us.
\\\
Now let’s start to switch gears. It’s unproductive for me to spend so much time commenting on the political news — though I do so in consideration my reading and subsequent theories about human nature, in the context of long-termism.
There is a real universe out there. This piece was posted a week ago, and appears in today’s paper.
NY Times, Paul M. Sutter, 3 Nov 2024: The Emptiness of the Universe Gives Our Lives Meaning
Another take on this theme. Again, there’s a real universe out there, far vaster than most humans imagine, and considering it dwarfs most of the petty conflicts among human beings. But not all of them. Yet again it’s about short-term thinking, living in the human bubble of immediate survival, and having the luxury of relatively assured survival in our modern global world to contemplate the nature of the universe, with an understand built up over millennia that surpasses the naive notions of our ancient ancestors, who wrote our ancient holy books.
Sutter has a particular issue in mind here — the voids that fill the universe, i.e. the irregular distribution of matter throughout the observable universe, not to mention Earth’s own particular place in it.
I’m a cosmologist, the kind of scientist who studies the origin, history and evolution of the universe. I have spent my career researching one special part of the universe called cosmic voids: the vast expanses of nothing that stretch between the galaxies. Most of our universe is void — somewhere around 80 percent of the volume of the cosmos is made of nothing at all.
By strict accounting of cosmic abundances, our planet and the life we find here amount to essentially zero. Insignificant. A small speck of blue and green suspended in an ocean of night, a tiny bit of rock and water orbiting just another star. The great forces that shape our universe have grown the voids over billions of years, and their present-day monstrousness puts cosmic insignificance into stark relief. Forget planets and stars; at these scales, even mighty galaxies are reduced to mere dots of light.
There is a temptation, when faced with the true scale of the empty cosmos, to look at our tiny world with nihilism. To feel that our great achievements amount to nothing. That our history fails to leave a mark. That our concerns and anxieties are rendered meaningless. That our very humanity is reduced to irrelevancy.
It’s a matter of perspective, of course, which the cosmologists perhaps appreciate best of all.
It’s true that in cosmic terms, Earth is neither large nor long-lived. But that is only one way of measuring significance. Compared with the voids, there is something special happening on our planet. Despite decades of searching, Earth is still the only known place in the entire universe where conscious beings raise their curious eyes to the sky and wonder.
Earth is the only known place where humanity exists — where humanity can exist. It is the only known place where laughter, love, anger and joy exist. The only known place where we can find dance, music, art, politics and cosmology.
Our disagreements and jealousies and all the beautiful complexities that make us human aren’t meaningless. The presence and dominance of the cosmic voids guarantee the opposite — the stories and experiences we fill our lives with are special precisely because they will never happen in the empty expanse of most of the universe.
Voids sharpen and define. He concludes:
Billions of years from now the sun will engorge and Earth will turn to dust. The cosmic voids, guardians of great nothingness, will remain. That bare fact, at first uncomfortable, gives us the ability to treasure what we’re given.
Tell a joke to your friends. Fight for what you believe in. Call your mother. Create something the cosmos hasn’t seen before. The implacability of the cosmic voids calls us to action. The universe won’t do anything for us except give us the freedom to exist. What we do with that existence is entirely up to us. It is our responsibility to imbue the cosmos with meaning and purpose.
