No War But Culture War
There’s an image I haven’t been able to get out of my head.
If you’ve seen Uncut Gems, you know what comes next. If you haven’t, I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I kinda have to in order to make this point; plus, the movie did come out last Christmas (and it’s available on Netflix right now), so per my official rules, it wouldn’t count as a spoiler.
Anyway, I can’t shake the feeling that this image is where we’re at as a nation. We’ve spent the past four years like Howard Ratner: bouncing frantically from one crisis to the next, punting on our problems, deluding ourselves into thinking that if we can just hit on this one big bet, everything will be okay. We refuse to acknowledge that we are to blame for the precarious position in which we find ourselves, and we have actively resisted any attempts to step back from the edge by addressing the institutional rot that is central to this country’s DNA.
In Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner’s woes aren’t of his own making — if Arno hadn’t canceled that bet, he’d have been free and clear. If KG had bought the opal at the auction, he’d have made a tidy profit. If Phil and Nico had just been cool, Howard wouldn’t have had to lock them in the security cage. By the same token, Trump didn’t win in 2016 because his nationalist rhetoric resonated with people who’d been ignored by politicians for decades; he won because Russia helped him. Cops aren’t brutalizing people because they are encouraged to use “ruthless violence” in order to win a “fight to the death” with civilians; Antifa is forcing them to be violent. The damage to America’s economy (and population) isn’t because of COVID, it’s because of oppressive lockdowns. Everything is someone else’s fault.
Like Howard Ratner, we’ve had a run of bad luck, but our ship is about to come in. On November 3rd, we’ll turn it all around. Smooth sailing from here on.
Sorry for locking you in there, guys. Here, I’ll let you out so we can celebrate.
After Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination, his campaign introduced some policy proposals: adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act, investing in infrastructure, a $2 trillion plan to combat climate change by moving America to renewable energy, and ending the COVID-19 pandemic, among others.
Relative to previous presidential elections, however, Biden’s proposals are startlingly vague: he has yet to outline how he plans to implement a public option, he has not committed to a timeframe for his climate plan (and is already softening his language about it, suggesting a lack of confidence in his ability to make it happen). Similarly, his plan of attack against COVID-19 looks good on paper, but experts have expressed concerns about the lack of detail in his proposal.
In any other election year, against any other candidate, Biden would probably be torn apart for his lack of a concrete strategy; at the very least, he would have been pressed on it by now. Fortunately for Biden, his opponent is Donald Trump, who is the human equivalent of a 32-minute Phish solo. Compared to Trump — who has a tendency to abandon his own ideas before they’ve even finished leaving his mouth — Biden’s meager policy proposals look downright wonkish.
One could argue that Biden learned from 2016, when Hillary Clinton focused on the issues, discussed policy specifics, studiously avoided demonstrating anything resembling a personality…and had her presidential hopes punted into the goddamn sun as a result. The only thing people like less than a nerd is a bore; Hillary managed to be both. It’s possible that Biden’s campaign does in fact have carefully-thought-out strategies for enacting each of his major policy proposals, and his reticence in sharing those details is a strategic maneuver. But that seems unlikely.
The foundation for Joe Biden’s long political career is not his deft legislative maneuvering or his intellectual prowess, it is his charisma. I doubt Biden is strategically withholding policy details; in fact, I doubt he has many more details beyond what’s already been shared.
I think Biden believes he can win this election simply by not being Donald Trump. The case his campaign and an alarming number of his supporters are making is simple: C’mon. In their minds, Trump’s performance over the past four years is all the information voters need. The details can be ironed out later — what’s important right now is getting Trump out of office.
Over the past couple of months, there’s been a dramatic uptick in social media posts with one simple exhortation: “VOTE.” Usually these posts come immediately on the heels of a news report detailing some fresh horror, the unspoken implication being If you don’t like this thing that happened, then VOTE (for Biden, obviously), as though casting a ballot will right a wrong or prevent further harm.
If we VOTE, then we can get the dang Cheeto out of office! Now is not the time to ask Joe Biden how he can claim to take the climate crisis seriously when he keeps insisting he’s in favor of fracking, now is the time to VOTE. Now is not the time to press Biden on his health care policy that still forces the public option to compete with private insurers and would still leave 10 million people uninsured; the only thing we should be worried about pressing is that VOTE button.
The problem with saying “VOTE” over and over — besides the fact that it’s really goddamn annoying — is that it’s telling everyone to vote against something instead of voting for something. The most forceful argument Biden’s campaign and his supporters can muster on his behalf isn’t that Joe Biden should be president, but that Donald Trump shouldn’t be. That, it seems, is the real reason Biden doesn’t feel the need to elaborate on his policy ideas: he doesn’t particularly care whether or not they become a reality. As far as he and his supporters are concerned, everything will go back to normal once Trump is out of office.
It remains to be seen whether “I’m not Donald Trump” is enough to propel Biden to the White House. But anyone who believes Trump’s ouster will usher in a return to normalcy is sorely mistaken. There is no “normal” to return to. This is normal.
In the last four years, we’ve watched as a sizable portion of the population let the mask slip. The majority of this group may not have welcomed Trump’s unabashedly white-nationalist and fascistic rhetoric, but they certainly didn’t reject it, either. Sure, Trump “fanned the flames of racial animus” or whatever the New York Times wants to call it, but he didn’t build the fire. He just blew on the embers.
What the past four years has taught us is that the number of Americans who embrace white nationalism and fascistic tendencies is pretty high, and that the average person is apparently a lot more flexible on these issues than previously realized. It is easy — tempting, even — to lay the blame for the rise in hate crimes, anti-immigrant sentiment, police brutality, et cetera squarely at Trump’s feet. Liberals and centrists are content not only to accept this version of events, but to actively promulgate it by insisting that removing Trump from the White House will cure what ails us.
As scapegoats go, you could do a lot worse than Trump. His unslakable thirst for attention means he’s more likely to take credit for a horrible event than admit something took place without his knowledge or input. And his need for approval is so all-consuming that he will endorse an extremist right-wing group like the Proud Boys rather than turn his back on his fans. Beyond that, he’s just a deeply unpleasant person; by all rights, his dietary habits should have caught up to him on the 13th green of one of his many shitty golf courses years ago, yet he lumbers on, driven by a spiteful desire to outlive his many enemies and the nightmarish prospect of a future in which Donald Trump is no longer alive to remind everyone about Donald Trump. He’ll probably live to be 140.
But Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 didn’t ignite in his acolytes some previously-unexamined passion for rounding up immigrants or taunting Native Americans. Tucker Carlson isn’t more racist today than he was in 2015. Ted Cruz didn’t wake up on January 20th, 2017 in the storm drain he calls home and say to himself Gosh, you know what? Starting today, I’m going to be a tremendous piece of shit. The culture war has always existed; the various fronts on which it’s being fought are usually more fractured and disparate, but Trump unified them under one banner. Trump didn’t inspire these attitudes, he just made it acceptable for people to publicly embrace them.
Trump’s victory in 2016 didn’t start the culture war, and a Trump loss in 2020 won’t end it. There are millions of people who’ve spent the last four years saying the quiet part loud, verbalizing how they really feel about things. They were emboldened by the knowledge that they were part of a much larger group than even they themselves recognized, and by the knowledge that finally, someone in power supported — encouraged, even — their ditching the political correctness crap once and for all. They no longer had to hide how they really felt, and so they didn’t.
And now, they’re faced with the prospect of returning to the dinner table where they once gleefully called their relatives “snowflakes”; the convenience store where they sauntered around in their MAGA hat, daring the Pakistani employee to ask them to put on a mask; the post office where they stood on Election Day, hands resting on the rifles slung over their shoulders as they stared down anyone who looked like they didn’t “belong there.” This election isn’t about re-electing Donald Trump; it’s about all the people — voters and politicians alike — who used Trump’s first term as a justification for indulging their worst, most hateful impulses, and for whom there can be no turning back.
Biden and his supporters believe this is the most important presidential election in modern American history, and maybe it is. But they also want us to believe that all of this can be undone by one day at the polls. That we can just keep moving forward as though the last four years didn’t just demonstrate how razor-thin the margin is between democracy and authoritarianism. That Trump’s presidency wasn’t just a dry run for someone like Tom Cotton to dismantle the institutions that Trump exposed as being held together by little more than faith and a few Band-Aids. And, by beating Trump at the polls, that voters will have reaffirmed their support for more centrists, more moderates, more vague assurances of future incremental improvements.
I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen today; anyone who says they does is lying. What I do know is that Biden, centrists, #resistance liberals, and the “moderate” conservatives at The Lincoln Project are betting everything on this election. I hope they pull it off, just like I wanted Howard Ratner to win his bet. But Howard was as addicted to the thrill of ducking loan sharks, eking out another day on earth by the skin of his teeth as he was to gambling itself. Unless he fundamentally changed who he was, it was always going to end the way it did.
If Biden wins, we’ll have bought ourselves a little more breathing room to figure out what to do next, but one thing is certain: the culture war will continue long after this election is over. If we’re expecting things to go back to normal all on their own after November 3rd, then voting Trump out is just delaying the inevitable.