You know, everything really does seem obvious in retrospect.

We all know what the results are, and many people are unhappy about it. 139 million Americans voted in the election held yesterday. 155.5 million Americans voted in 2020. 129 million voted in 2016. 126 in the election before that.

In the first and third of the above, the Republicans won. In the second and fourth, the Democrats won. Despite the fact that it’s a 50/50 split, there’s been a steady march to the right in American politics, largely a product of the post-Clintonian steerage of consultants in the Democratic party: the idea is that it’s possible to safely ignore the left flank, because they’re not going to go to the other guy – you need to compete against your main opponent for the people in the middle.

Keir Starmer during Prime Minister's Questions, 22 April 2020. ©UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor, and available on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY 3.0 license. This man is Prime Minister because he managed to beat Rishi Sunak, who was second choice after a woman whose premiership lasted a shorter period of time than a head of lettuce.

But if you triangulate towards the middle – which I fear is what happened here, given the fact that the DNC dropped the viable strategy of pointing out that the Republicans are weird, a baffling decision that I believe stems from the influence of UK Labour operatives who acted as advisors on the Democrat campaign – you lose.

I’ve talked about it before – and while I was incorrect about the difference in margin between the McGovern loss and the Mondale loss, the fact of the matter is that their margins were roughly equal, which means that it’s amazing to me that leftism is considered radioactive and centrism is considered the winning strategy.

If you look at the numbers, three million fewer people voted the former president this election than last election. The problem is that the Harris-Walz campaign lost fifteen million votes. The problem isn’t that the former President is unbeatable, it’s that the DNC strategy is bad. Clinton and Obama won because of personal charisma, Biden won because he hadn’t (seemingly intentionally) worsened a global pandemic. These victories are not because of a brilliant strategy, they are in spite of a terrible strategy.

If it was about the triangulation strategy, we’d be at the tail end of a Hilary Clinton presidency. That didn’t happen because very few people wanted to vote for her, because she was a bad candidate that received a coronation, because it was “her turn”. This emphasis on “turns” is what allowed the relatively charismatic Bill Clinton to defeat George Bush, Sr. and Bob Dole and his successor Barack Obama to defeat McCain and Romney.

I wish it was about policies, but this election came down to Harris – who seemed like she was going to make you do paperwork – and Trump – who probably, statistically, killed several people each of his voters know. It’s just that the Democrats underestimated just how much Americans hate paperwork.

There is another possibility: there’s something that can be relied upon besides charisma, strategy, and policy. It’s called “principles”. Unfortunately, the Democrats have demonstrated a lack of those: after making noises about wanting some kind of relief for Gaza, they set about trumpeting a crueler border regime and accepting the endorsement of war criminal and guy-who-shot-his-friend-in-the-face-and-received-an-apology-for-it Dick Cheney.

This isn’t to say that there’s no strategy here. I happen to think that Brett Heinz has a fairly solid breakdown over on his Medium. Still, I’m skeptical of cutting out the ethos of the situation. The DNC seems to be a fair-weather friend, trying to make their tent big enough to include both Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists on one end and the architect of the Iraq War on the other end.

You can’t do it. I can’t even agree with Dick Cheney on what constitutes good barbecue, much less anything related to policy, and I don’t think I’m alone there.

Perhaps I’m just bitter. Maybe people will interpret this as a leftist’s sour grapes, but here’s the thing, and it’s a thing I’m ashamed to admit: I did vote for Harris. I was swayed by the arguments, and – as the title of this piece suggests – I feel like Krusty the Clown, from the Simpsons, having bet against the Harlem Globetrotters. Worse than that, I feel like I was the lawyer, and I opted to become Krusty.

Here’s the most important point: everyone is going to be searching for some kind of blame in the electorate. They’re going to talk about predominantly-black counties in Georgia that broke ranks. They’re going to talk about the number of latinos who voted against their interest. They’re going to talk about the working class going for the former president.

This is a distraction.

Something like forty million people who were eligible to vote didn’t. We know this because half of that number showed up last time when a plague was ripping through their communities and they voted to get rid of the guy who was making it worse. They didn’t vote this time because no one represented their interests — which might be as petty as the price of gas, or as high-minded as the apparently controversial position that genocide is bad — in a way that was legible to them.

Instead of picking a charismatic candidate with a platform that serves the interest and represents the values of the majority of Americans – and I know, as soon as I say this, someone will argue that but they did, and that person is going to be wrong, and will point out that the person I’m describing would not be electable, yet will insist that their candidate is electable “if you vote for them”, thus showing themselves to be a deeply unserious person – they let Biden ride too long, skipped the primary, and now we’ve got this guy again.

The next four years will be bad. If you live on the border, do migrant outreach. If you have extra money, donate to worthy causes. If you have time, volunteer. If you can, support organized labor.

I’ve been wrong about many things, but I’m fairly certain that, for most people, the thin end of the wedge won’t be a jackbooted thug stopping you to ask for your papers. It will be the mail getting worse. It will be more listeria in your food. It will be the weather app on your phone costing extra. It will be a lack of help, care, and attention.

A Community Garden in Harrisonburg, VA. Uploaded by Matthew.kowal, and used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

So, to the best of your abilities, you have to provide that help, care, and attention to the people around you. Sure, you can’t deliver everyone’s mail, and you can’t necessarily forecast the weather, but you can join a community garden and learn how to mend clothing. You can give a neighbor or friend a ride to the store or the laundromat.

What we can do is small, but as we do it more possibilities will occur to us.

In prison abolition circles, you often hear the phrase “we keep us safe”. That doesn’t just mean being on the lookout for crimes. It means providing for others where you can. It means being there for people.

If, on the other hand, you’re more inclined toward nihilism, or more interested in specifically the plight of transgender and other queer people, I might recommend some words offered by Elizabeth Sandifer (author of neoreaction a basilisk, a book we’ve effused about previously.) on her Patreon.

The key portion, to me, is found at the tail end of a paragraph, where she writes that

Most likely you will experience joy again, just like you’ll experience horror again. This too shall pass, as they say. The thing to keep going for are values. There is simply work to be done, and it’s not going to do itself.

Which, I’ll be honest, are words that I think it’s good to hear sometimes.

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