Doom Report (Week -9)

This week, the saga of Trump’s cabinet is both better and worse.  Matt Gaetz at least is gone, and he was certainly the worst of the bunch.  But, then, Gaetz is the very epitome of shifting the Overton Window.  If you don’t know that is (and aren’t willing to click that perfectly good link I just dropped on you, though you really shoud), I’ll give you a quick precis:  The Overton Window is the set of what’s acceptable to voters.  But it’s constantly shifting over time, usually in small increments.  For instance, gay marriage wasn’t even remotely acceptable in the 50s—you couldn’t even bring it up in conversation.  Now it’s legal (at least temporarily).  Same for smoking pot, although that was still considered verboten as late as the 80s, and isn’t legal everywhere even today.  Those are things that took decades for the window to shift.  But, if you’re clever (and have some sort of authority behind you, like being an intellectual thinktank, or a president-elect), you can shift the Overton Window much more quickly.  All you need to do is, put forward an idea that is so ridiculous, so outlandish, so ... well, to use the official Overton term, unthinkable ... that suddenly the ideas that seemed radical before are now not so crazy.

So Matt Gaetz was a bridge too far.  To the point where everyone was stunned by it—even the Republicans.  Susan Collins, who you may remember from her comment that Trump had “learned” his lesson after the first impeachment (her exact quote was that he would be “much more cautious in the future”), said she was “shocked” by the Gaetz nomination.  (Apparently there’s much money to be made on betting whether Collins will see things coming, like, say, the changing of the seasons.)  Lisa Murkowski and John Thune (the latter set to be the new Sentate Majority Leader now that Mitch McConnell is finally being put out to pasture) also expressed doubts.  And now Gaetz is stepping down.  See, the system works, right?

But, the thing is, that was all a distraction from the other insane picks.  Which keep on coming: Linda McMahon (yes, the wrestling executive) to head the Department of Education, and Dr. Oz, the TV quack huckster, to run Medicare and Medicaid.  And let’s not forget the previous insane picks: Pete Hegseth, the Fox “News” host, is in no way qualified to run the two trillion dollar Defense Department, and is also apprently a sexual predator.  Then again, as many have pointed out, that’s apparently a unifying theme for his cabinet: Hegseth, RFK Jr, Musk ... even McMahon has been sued for enabling sexual abuse.  But I suppose that makes sense for the adjudicated rapist who’s hiring them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are falling over themselves to blame each other for why Kamala lost.  Many, for instance, are saying that her campaign was “too woke.” Which is completely moronic, because the Kamala campaign flew so far to the center that they were actively pissing off the proper liberals: from trans folk to people opposed to the Palestinian genocide.  Palling around with the Cheneys, for fuck’s sake, is about as far from “woke” as you can get.  But still people want to believe it’s someone else’s fault.  Awfully convenient for the white supremacists that the Dems now apparently want to blame the same “others” that the Republicans do.

As to what is the real reason why Kamala lost, I’ve heard a lot of theories in the past weeks.  But probably the best one came from the author of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class, in a recent Jon Stewart interview:

So yeah, people are hurting.  And if you’re looking at them in the face and saying, “actually, you’re not” ... whether that’s a move to kind of defend your own administration that, of course, the Democratic candidate was part of—and that’s very difficult to thread that needle, the task she was handed to propose how we’ll change, but also still be riding with the last administration.  ...  But most people are hurting. And here’s the thing, because I know that a lot of liberals and Democrats and progressives alike might be saying: ... the Democrats have the better policies. They address all of those needs better, even if imperfectly.  In the end, ain’t the Republicans worse?  And while I happen to agree with that, here’s the trick: the Republicans, meanwhile, are the ones validating the pain.  And politics is an emotional business before it’s a rational one.  And that’s why they win.

— Sarah Smarsh, The Weekly Show, 11/14/24

Partially I like this because it lines up with my own theories that I talked about nearly a year ago, and partially because it’s the more insightful version of what James Carville pegged as the reason.  Carville is a bit of an asshole, but he ain’t stupid, and his assessment was that it all came down to when Kamala was asked (in her interview on The View) what she would do differently from Biden, “and she froze.” Or at least that’s how Carville put it; I would instead say that she waffled and ducked the question, but the end result is the same.  And while trying to boil down an entire failed campaign to one moment is overly simplistic as well as reductive, it is emblematic of the point that she was trying to toe the party line that everything was going great with the economy while ignoring the real concerns of real people.  And, even more incisive to me personally, it’s exactly what my friend said to me in the conversation I reported on a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a trenchant observation.

Of course, let’s not discount the sexism!  Here’s one of Stewart’s producers on another episode:

It can also be true that there’s some sexism and racism ...  Every election, the person who has spent the most money has won, except in two cases: the women.  Just saying.

— Lauren Walker, The Weekly Show, 11/21/24

Again, haven’t fact-checked this, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.  I’m not entirely sure what it says about says about us that we’re finally willing to elect a member of a religious minority that’s around 25% of the population, and a member of a racial minority that’s around 15% of the population, but not a member of the gender that’s not a minority at all.  But not anything good, I don’t think.

Will things get worse before they get better?  No one can say for sure, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s where the smart money is.  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned to find out.