Good Grief
If We Nominate Biden and Trump then We Have No Right to Complain because There is a Consumer Demand for Theater
If anyone who is genuinely upset that a Biden-Trump rematch is likely to come to pass, then they have only themselves, the people, to thank for it.
I underscore the word, genuinely. Because though it’s our fault if we don’t like our nominees, we are nominating them, why, because we like to be upset.
Last year I wrote a newsletter where, long fed up with people who complain about how depressing the news is, nobody has a right to be upset about what they voluntarily will. For the enjoyment of drama’s sake.
There is but one major reason Trump voters voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and will vote for him again: because he entertains them. There is one reason Biden voters will vote for Biden: to be play-actors in the drama of saving “our democracy.”
As I explain to people why I think the Trump movement is a cult— if people only liked Trump’s policies, they would have ditched the man, along with his divisiveness and unelectability, and instead they would have embraced Desantis (Trump ‘without the baggage’) a long time ago. But since the indictments especially, they sold rational thinking to Trump’s personality. The fact is his supporters enjoy the drama, and the drama alone, to the exclusion of everything else Trump does. If they like his policies too, they serve as only subsidiary excuses to rationalize their attachment to, and their worship of, the personality.
As far as the Democrats are concerned, liberals are no better, flattering themselves that they’re heroes, all because they will vote for Biden to save “our democracy.” In a way the Democrats’ thrall to democracy is more sinister as they used the indictments deliberately to elevate Trump, just to use the crisis of democracy as grist for Biden’s reelection strategy.
At least the Trump movement is more honest about their attachment to Trump as a Rambo/Terminator figure, an entertainer.
They don’t sell tee-shirts depicting Biden like this.
The question is not why is our situation so depressing, but why are we so miserable that we enjoy it so much that we participate in theater that we know is corrosive and only leads to more misery?
The problem with our politics is much bigger than politics. It is philosophical. Western liberal democracy it is obvious to me, is suffering from a kind of midlife crisis. From having become wealthy and lived freely for so long during the so-called peace dividend, now we have become petty, tired, bored and anxious by the pace of technological change, the transformation of the economy and society, entitled enough to start to become lonely and long for things. Trump gives people a feeling of power, power above complex technological society and people like Mark Zuckerberg who are smarter than they are.
Biden and the crisis of our democracy gives people a sense of class distinction above the provincial climate-denying nativist herd, this gives them a new sense of purpose, that liberals are not going to be complacent. Uncredentialed non-elites cannot be allowed to have a voice or a say, not if I can help it!
It gives aging liberals a sense of belonging, a group identity. They are the Resistance. I don’t know what else explains why Never Trump Republicans like Rick Wilson or Chris Christie are so zealous to denounce and condemn Nikki Haley’s candidacy. The fact is that Never Trumpers want Trump to be the nominee. Just to complain about him and get validation from the legacy media and absolution being ex-Republicans.
The important thing to understand about what’s happening is that we are experiencing a new crisis of modern life much like the one that precipitated the World Wars. We are all reacting irrationally to large-scale change, very simply, change for which we lack the psychological wherewithal to cope maturely like adults. So we are outsourcing all our anxieties and insecurities and transferring them to the political realm and manufacturing perpetual existential crises, like climate change, democracy, racism, and abortion, American manufacturing, teen mental health, gun violence, fentanyl. Etc. etc.
I’m reading The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky right now. First time. But I think as Dostoevsky would argue, some of us would willingly accept to be unhappy if only our misery gave our lives meaning. I think of what Nietzsche said also that “he who has a why can endure almost any how.”
Yet the West has no why, and we’re flailing around in every direction to give ourselves one. Embarrassingly and obviously to our own destruction.
Putin, Xi, the Ayotollah and Kim Jong Un don’t care about our petty discontents and grievances. And they are going to make us pay for our virtue-signaling, role playing and gross stubborn attachments.
— Jay