In my last couple of posts, I promised a list of actions that Democrats needed to take to defeat Trump.
That was before Biden’s disastrous debate performance and its aftermath blew up everything. The path forward now is unpredictable, and so I have to abandon my intention to write such a piece.
Indeed, writing this blog at all has been impossible for the past month. I’ve had all I can do to keep up with the barrage of incoming messages from friends, relatives, and my fan base, all asking versions of one question: What the HELL is happening?
I understand. The insanity produced by “conservatism” has finally exploded. The list of wild events that have occurred recently is head-spinning. Here are just a few:
The Supreme Court destroyed the country’s ability to write any sort of regulations, which now, according to them, can be challenged by anybody at any time and only need a Federalist Society judge to overturn them.
The Supreme Court gave Trump a massive gift by creating a category of immune presidential activity. This not only makes it nearly impossible to prosecute Trump for his crimes while in office, but also favors any future dictator who manages to capture the White House.
In the process, Clarence Thomas gave Aileen Cannon, the Trump-loving judge overseeing the prosecution of his criminal theft of government documents, an excuse to dismiss the case—which she quickly took.
Biden’s showing at the debate, which unfortunately could not be unseen, cemented the public’s view of him as a doddering old coot who could not be trusted to beat Trump.
The press, of course, smelling blood in the water, turned away from Trump’s profligate criminality and daily expressions of lunacy in order to help finish off Biden. It has to be said that Biden was going into this election crippled anyway by the physical deterioration that had become evident over the past year, which seemed to support Trump’s criticisms of Biden in the public’s view.
The polls and fundraising dropped off almost immediately after the debate. More than anything else, this doomed Biden, although it must be said that the continued images of him mixing up his old self with his diminished self made it impossible for him to recover the public’s confidence.
The death by 1000 cuts inflicted in public by timid and fearful Democrats just further demoralized the anti-Trump forces. I can’t tell you how many letters and emails I’ve gotten asking, “What are we going to do now? Can this monster Trump really take the presidency back?”
Trump got shot. Was he going to become a martyr and be seen as politically untouchable?
Thankfully that pendulum swung right back. He neutralized that possibility by being his usual reprehensible self at the Republican convention.
Now Biden has dropped out. The coronation of Harris is proceeding apace, even though it seems barely to have occurred to Democrats that perhaps this is not the time to test the proposition that America is not a racist and misogynous county, seeing that racism and misogyny is at a recent high and being stoked unceasingly by the white “Christian” nationalists among the Trumpist hordes.
The wild speed of these incomprehensible setbacks and reversals is deeply unsettling. No wonder decent Americans have been tearing their hair out over that Trump’s forces may actually win the election and succeed in destroying the nation.
(As an aside, let me say that the media’s notion of Republican “confidence” is completely myopic. The narrative is that they showed unprecedented unity at their abominable convention because they are certain that Trump will win in a landslide, given Trump’s persistent polling advantage and his recent wins in court. This is false. These matters contribute to their joy, certainly. But the real reason is that the election doesn’t matter to them. If Trump does win in a landslide, they get what they want. If he doesn’t, they have been putting the mechanisms in place for four years to overturn the election in every red state. So, yes. They are certain that Trump will win because they think they can make him win even if he loses. The press ought to be highlighting this but it prefers the horserace. What else is new?)
So what the hell is happening?
You have to step back and look at the chaos. Literally.
One of the great advances in science of the past half-century has been chaos theory. (The Wikipedia article on it is really quite informative.) Basically, it says that highly complex systems reach a point where their behavior becomes erratic. Although still deterministic, their future evolution cannot be predicted. They swing wildly from one state to another until they finally settle into a new pattern which remains more or less stable—until the next bout of erratic behavior.
That is what is happening in the world right now. The post-WWII world order, a highly complex system of international relations rooted in decency and democracy instead of power and privilege, has become untenable for those who worship power and privilege. Their fear and hatred have pumped so much disruptive energy into the system that it has begun to swing wildly—from the Brexit pushed by “conservative” Brits to the ousting of “conservatives” from England’s politics, from the Polish experiment with autocracy to its sudden return to democracy, from eighty years of European powers not trying to take over other countries by force to Putin’s attack on Ukraine and from his overconfidence that he could destroy Ukraine to his current stalemate, from more than fifty years of a precedent-abiding American Supreme Court to a suddenly power-mongering Supreme Court willing to plunge the county into internal chaos over “conservative” wet dreams—the world has been crazy for a while now.
Does this insight help us to know what is coming next? No. The point of chaos theory is that the future state of the system cannot be predicted, although it can be seen as deterministic in retrospect. We can’t know if the world is going to stabilize somewhere close to decency or somewhere close to “conservatism.” Indeed, there is no guarantee that the new stability will be one of those options. It could be something entirely new, something not close to either of those options.
But whatever the new stability turns out to be, it will either appeal more to decent people or to “conservatives.” That is because each of the two options covers 50% of all the available outcomes. Oh, it’s possible that the outcome of the chaotic turmoil we are experiencing comes out very close to the status quo, which is detested both by decent people and by “conservatives.” But it’s not likely. Once a system becomes chaotic, there is an infinitude of stable outcomes that are nowhere near the status quo. So the odds are that the outcome will not be pleasant for one or the other camp.
Fortunately, this system is not purely deterministic. Free will injects a non-deterministic element into the dynamics. (Yes, I know that many scientists reject free will. They are wrong about that, for philosophical reasons that go far beyond the limits of this little essay. Maybe someday I’ll take up that topic. But for now, I urge you to accept the common sense view that your choices are not all determined.) So we need to use our free will to disrupt the dynamics of chaos and push the system purposively toward outcomes that will favor decency over “conservatism.” What does that mean?
It means we work as if our choices matter, because they do. Harris is not the perfect choice for carrying the flag of decency. The indecent Trumpists will quickly come up with lines of attack against her, even if they are momentarily flat-footed about no longer being able to run against the fool they portrayed Biden to be. Given the essential indecency of their extreme “conservatism,” the Trumpist lines of attack will be vile. I’m guessing that they are so mad at losing their years-long campaign against a bogeyman of their own creation will impel them to show more of their real selves than is good for them. If the racism and misogyny and fake religious zeal that Trump has allowed them to release comes out enough, it may well sink their chances. Even indecent people—some of them at least—don’t want to be lumped together with indecent people. Many there are enough to them to push Harris over the top.
So even though my original list of tasks Democrats would need to check off may well be dead, the path forward is clear.
Decent America can beat Trump. We just need to put all our heart and soul into it.
Whatever the outcome, it will be deterministic in retrospect. We will be able to look back and locate causes that produced the outcome.
But in prospect, the outcome is not predictable. Let’s use our free will to push it away from “conservatism” and toward decency.
Because the future of humanity depends on where this chaos stabilizes.
Great visual Scott. And excellent way to put life in my perspective.