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AUSTIN, TX. Nov. 7, 2020. A Protect the Vote rally is held in Wooldridge Square shortly after former Vice President Joe Biden was declared the projected winner of the 2020 Presidential Election. Michael Minasi/KUT
When they finally told us who had won the 2020 presidential election, I felt a profound sadness. Not because I wanted the other guy to win — not hardly — but because I felt sorry for the winner.
Like most successful campaigns, Joe Biden’s offered a clear and simple promise — “I am not Donald Trump, I will restore competence and decency to government.” Eighty-one million American voters approved, more than voted for any presidential candidate ever before, and seven million more than voted for Trump. But not-being-Donald-Trump is not going to be enough. Consider what we confront:
- The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage unchecked across the country, and the rollout of the vaccine that is our only hope of bringing it under control has been bungled almost as badly as the initial efforts to contain the virus. Hospitals, medical workers and morgues across the country are stressed to the breaking point with relief not yet in sight.
- The economy, which was anemic before the pandemic hit, is in hospice now. The government continues to churn out cheery stats about recovery, but millions of Americans continue to lose their businesses and/or jobs, are facing eviction, protracted poverty, even hunger.
- With revenues shrinking and emergency spending skyrocketing, the national debt is turning into a deadly cancer on the future of the country. In fiscal 2020 the US government spent $3.1 trillion more than it took in — more than three times the deficit in 2019. America’s national debt is $27 trillion — it has tripled since 2008, when the Great Recession began. In addition to what must be borrowed to cover the deficit, this year alone nearly $8 trillion worth of bonds have to be rolled over — that is, paid off and replaced with new borrowing. This at a time when all the developed countries in the world are having similar problems.
- Climate change did not slow down while we were distracted by a virus. Rising seas are encroaching on our coastal cities, forcing many of them ever closer to having to decide: build expensive, doomed sea walls or abandon neighborhoods and infrastructure and move inland? Meanwhile a deadly drought deepens in the Southwest, a record number of wildfires ravaged the forests of the West and intensified hurricanes — a record 12 made landfall in the US in 2020 — tornadoes and even thunderstorms batter the whole country. There used to be one or two storms a year that do a billion dollars in damage — last year there were 22, an all-time record, and their total cost was $95 billion.
- The country that must confront all these challenges — there is no choice about that — is the most deeply and bitterly divided it has been since the Civil War. The divisions are racial, economic, and political, and have gone so far that not only do people one one side of a divide not trust the people on the other side, they don’t believe anything they say, and are increasingly brandishing weapons at one another.
I wish Mr. Biden the best for the coming four years. And I am glad that he is not Donald Trump. But the best I can imagine is that he, and we, somehow make it through alive.
One word comes to mind – ungovernable. And why not? Other than a common language (more or less) what has Vermont to do with New Mexico, or Kentucky with Oregon? Probably not much more than Estonia with Kyrgystan. The Soviet Union collapsed of diversity – a lack of commonality of ethnicity, culture and economic interests. Not to mention its sheer, unforgiving geography. Other empires have fallen for similar reasons. Apparently it’s now our turn.
The new kid on the block is climate change. I’m thinking that Fell’s Point, Baltimore might make it as the ‘Venice of America’: quaint, historic buildings, narrow but navigable streets…Who knows?
“The new kid on the block is climate change.”
The first modern scientific paper on carbon induced climate change came out in the 1880s.
The science departments at Texaco and Shell had much of the emissions math down cold by the early 1960s – predicting a 1C hotter world sometime in the first quarter of this century. Execs at the two companies briefed LBJ on the subject in ’65, and LBJ went on to give speech to Congress that same year outlining the grave threat carbon emissions posed to human civilization.
The equivalent of roughly 45C of man-made heat has been pumped into our biosphere since.
https://qz.com/1141633/if-oceans-stopped-absorbing-heat-from-climate-change-life-on-land-would-average-122f/
Rising seas are the least of our worries. Worries over rising seas – laser focused on the linear, while the exponential drives the dagger home – is just another form of denial.
And denial won when it mattered, when there might have been time to do something (thanks in large part to those same execs at Texaco and Shell). That’s why climate change might seem like a new threat. The whole world was, and for the most part remains, in denial, not so much any longer of the concept of climate change itself, but of the fact that it is an extinction-level crisis roaring at them at exponential speed.
Roaring at them in their own extra-valuable lifetimes!
(Hell, we just had a sizable mob of climate change denialists storm the Capitol building in Washington, they wanted to hold on to their particular form of denial – total (!) – soooo bad.)
There is one hope left. Solar Radiation Management. Inject reflective particles in the lower atmosphere to reflect incoming sunlight back into space. Bill Gates is on it.
“Spray and pray” I call it. Will begin in earnest and at scale before 2022 is out, is my prediction.
You’re right. Radical human causation of climate change is at least as old as the Industrial Revolution. However, my context is the rise and fall of empires. The British Empire fell apart in the 40s and 50s. The Soviet Union collapsed in the 90s. Neither of these failures was directly due to climate change. Ours is the first such collapse that I know of in which climate change is a significant contributory factor. I was remis in not making that point clear. Thanks.
Mr. Knepp,
” Other than a common language (more or less) what has Vermont to do with New Mexico, or Kentucky with Oregon?”
A human population.
250 years of culture has not overidden 250 million years of adaptation.
Please find an area of native ecology near your residence and mark off a one yard or one meter area. All of that diversity has arisen, in most cases, since the last glaciation. The range of life, from the microbial to you, in that area suggests to me that diversity is not the root of the problem.
A very deep sense of compassion for Mr. Trump is stirring within me. I see a man who, whether through a stroke of genius or a Walter Middy string of bumbling calamities, has replaced the fun house mirror with a more accurate mirror. The world stands naked in front of the new mirror and hates the man for their own reflection.
To put the situation in terms of Castenada’s Don Juan: Mr. Trump has stopped the world, and it appears that we lack the courage to make the leap into the unkown.
Please accept the preceeding as the ramblings of a well intentioned old man.
From one well intentioned old man to another, I believe your comparison regarding diversity is inaccurate, at least with respect to my comment. Diversity is not a problem per se. Without diversity there would be no evolution and without evolution there would be no biosphere – none! However, where mega-societies (civilizations) are concerned, diverse elements within those societies often cause fractures that can destabilize the overall social order. Historically, this has been a near-universal phenomenon of disintegrating mega-societies. Humans seem to have a natural inclination toward smaller social units, in which diversity can act as a strength.
This might make me persona non grata around here, but for a while, I was what you might call objectively pro-Trump. I call being “objectively pro-Trump” being more or less glad he won the 2016 Election for reasons other than being a MAGA-cultist or a Republican. I didn’t vote for him, and I never would have, but I sure didn’t vote for Hillary in 2016 and never would have, and I don’t especially care who doesn’t like that. My reason for being OPT could be best summed up with the word schadenfreude.
My time of being OPT was during the second half of 2015, 2016, and 2017. I was kind-of-sort-of OPT during 2018 but slowly moving away from that once the shallow and fleeting vindictive satisfaction of Hillary Clinton’s defeat started wearing off and the Democratic Party made a strategic decision to abandon pursuit of the War on Cannabis.
The reason I was OPT for so long had a lot to with Hillary Clinton’s supporters. Any criticism of her corruption and war-hawkishness was always, “Sexism, sexism, REEEEEEEEE!” That mindset and other factors got me interested in watching anti-SJW videos on YouTube. (Listening to Carl Benjamin AKA “Sargon of Akkad” is the one thing from this period of my life about which I am genuinely abashed.) And the way Hillary Clinton’s partisans behaved in the wake of Donald Trump’s squeaker of an Electoral College victory really made you think that they wanted the Democratic presidential candidate to lose the next election, too!
What really started moving me away from being OPT was the way the MAGA-cultists claimed that the only reason that the 2018 wasn’t the red landslide predicted by QAnon was because of all the illegal immigrants that the Democrats had voting in that election. That made me see there was more than enough “cultiness” in the ranks of MAGA to match what Hillary Clinton’s Russiagate-obsessed partisans were cranking out.
Then the pandemic happened, and Trump, being the developmentally-arrested narcissistic man-child he is, demonstrated that he was singularly incapable of leading a proper response to such a catastrophic event. And so I voted for Biden and Harris despite not really wanting to, hoping that they at least had the willingness to co-ordinate a real response to Covid-19.
And then there was Trump’s defeat as a result of neglect of the pandemic situation and the subsequent fairy tale of the outgoing president’s “Sacred Landslide” stolen from him by Democratic Party/ Deep State perfidy. That so many “Libertarians” on the Internet guzzled this Kool-Aid as eagerly as Hillary Clinton’s supporters guzzled the Russiagate Kool-Aid made me realize that being objectively pro-Trump had a way of metastasizing into being just plain, old, credulous, brainwashed pro-Trump.
And then there were the events of January 6th in DC. I’m not ashamed of my fling with being OPT (I still think that the neoliberal/neoconservative globalist Deep State faction that Biden and Harris represent could just easily lead us over the edge of the cliff), but the bloom is certainly off that particular rose for me forever.
And BTW, I live in Wisconsin and voted straight-ticket Libertarian in 2016, so you can place some of blame for Trump becoming president on me. Blame away, I really don’t fucking care.
I don’t blame you; in fact I voted for Trump myself back in 2016. As a life-long Democrat, I was one of those Sanders supporters who went for Trump as a second choice. It was a mistake, but sometimes folks make mistakes for the right reasons. So be it.
Each incoming administration inherits a mess from the previous one. Seems to intensify with each 4- or 8-year interval. Can’t even begin to establish an good inflection point for that statement. Kennedy? Carter? Obama? The really big issue for all of humanity (and all creation, if you will — bullet 4 above) normally manifests in geological time, but that extended time frame has been radically foreshortened. All the early prognostications that this year or that would be the defining one turned out to be too pessimistic. Earth absorbs more bruising insults every year but keeps plodding on. Considering the physical scale is planetary, I suppose we can be grateful that the full effect is delayed (but still inevitable).
I think it’s pretty clear that there is such a thing as the Deep State, but when Trumpsters refer to this, they are generally talking about the neo-conservative/neo-liberal globalist faction it. I really do believe there is another faction of the DS, and that would be the authoritarian-nationalist faction, which has seen its power remain in very steep decline since Bill Clinton became president.
However, the globalist faction became complacent and sent away too many American working-class jobs, thinking that wouldn’t blow up in their faces at some point. And so since 2016, we have been seeing a resurgence of the authoritarian-nationalist faction in the form of the rise of Donald Trump. My evaluation is that Internet thinkers such as JMG whom one would think might know better, support Donald Trump and the AN faction because they are alarmed at the social, political, and economic damage that unrestrained globalism has done to the USA. Therefore, it seems logical, or at least defensible to them to support anybody or anything that promises to put the breaks on “Globalism Ueber Alles”.
I could understand that for a while, but the more the Trump Administration went on, the more dubious about that whole proposition I became. For one thing, the religious far right (unsurprisingly) is thoroughly aligned with this AN faction and is in fact a major power-base for the AN and its plans for resurgence.
What ended up being just too much to get down the old epiglottis for me was that for reasons I’m not really sure I understand, the AN faction has been furiously promoting a strident denialism as the way to respond to the Covid1-19 pandemic that is currently bludgeoning the human population of this world. If I were to venture a guess, the reason is because the pandemic is shining a very bright light on the effects of big disparities in wealth and power, and most authoritarians are by their very nature about such disparities. It could be that I’m wrong about that and it’s a much more complicated picture than I’m able to perceive right now.
So that’s what made me decide to give the globalist soft-authoritarians another chance when I voted, even though they almost certainly don’t deserve it. The fact that the authoritarian-nationalists are promoting this falsehood about the election being stolen from Donald Trump (never mind the fact that the Democrats only control Congress by the very skin of their collective teeth) and that too many people are believing that when they should know better, erases any sheepishness I might have felt about voting for those hacks Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
I don’t really think this because it’s pretty much a QAnon-worthy conspiracy theory, but the darker part of my imagination can’t help but wonder if maybe the globalist faction deliberately caused Covid to escape from some bio-weapon research facility laboratory as a counter-move against resurgent conservative nationalism happening all across the globe, and the nationalists are just denying the severity of it because they just don’t know what else to do against such an utterly diabolical master-stroke? Okay, I should probably shut up for a while, now. :-)
The globalist faction doesn’t give a rat’s ass about ANs, as long as they play ball. And they all play ball or are removed. See Donald Trump.*
Did they release Covid? It’s a big community, the globalist faction, and clearly some are benefiting quite nicely from this crisis while others are getting crushed.
So it’s a possibility, a faction or three gets together that have the best odds for success going in ( Big Finance, Big TelComs, Big Pharma say) and hatches a plot. But there would have been a lot of negative variables on the board, including EVERYONE getting crushed to name just one, so I think not.
The QAnon-worthy conspiracy theory that makes the most sense is the China released it theory. Create a Covid storm, and ride it out (something China preternaturally disposed to do), and pick up the global pieces on the other end. Very logical. Very simple. And it IS currently playing out that way.
But again, I think not. China is playing a Battle of the Nation-States game, against literally, NO opposition. Avoid war and total dominance of the planet is a certainty, so why muck things up? Why risk nuclear annihilation when your up 49 to nothing?
*Those damn democracies are a pain-in-the-ass, though. Trump played ball but something about him as a two-termer smelled of … wild card. So he had to go, and forces aligned. Still, he IS a two-termer if he had simply pushed Congress write a few more checks with his name on it.
Or pretended to show a modicum of leadership during a pandemic.What a lazy dumb ass. My base! My base! My boaters! No masks! I cannot lose!
Really, it should read, see Bernie Sander’s.
In my lifetime, the greatest threat that has arisen to; let’s call it “the established order” and not the “Washington Consensus,” which is several rungs down the subservience ladder; was the centrist, middle-of-the-road milquetoast so-called-Socialist Senator from Vermont. Never have I seen so many disparate and powerful forces align in such perfect cooperative opposition to a … um, nemesis?
He drove our Western world’s movers and shakers to edges of madness. The Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s perhaps had the same, “negative psychological impact” on these people, but I don’t remember them. I came of age in the 70s when the USSR was sill an evil bogeyman on everyone’s mind, but the Soviet menace of the 70s did not hold a candle to this recent Bernie menace.
Not even close.
Bernie was lucky in a way. He was … non-violently removed, and fairly early in the process. There where other fates awaiting him if he had made all the way, to the Oval Office.
If Biden’s policy-behavior in this first week is any sort of indication of what’s in store for us, I predict a massive Republican blow-out in November 2022 ala November 2010. What a charming era that ushered in!
According to James Howard “oh pretty please bring back my Trumpy to me, to me!” Kuntsler, Biden might not be in office in 2022. Technical issues, don’t you know.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/flying-blind/
Also, transsexuals make up .042 percent of the population. I didn’t know that. I learn something new about the LBGT community with every JHK column.
The ship is going down, and the two most prevalent human characteristics I’m seeing on the chaotic decks are … hatred and denial.
Yeah, Kunstler has become a bad joke with no punchline. And his comment-section over the past few years? JFC!