On Being Loudly, Publicly Wrong

Some self reflection, some perspectives for the future.

Alas for me, I not only convinced myself that I would never have to think about Trump again because he was going to lose this election, but I loudly broadcast it to all who would listen. While most of my comrades correctly ascertained Trump was going to win, and braced themselves accordingly, I allowed myself the very-slightly more restful belief that in fact this was not the case, that he would lose the election and we would have to deal with a coup attempt and low-intensity warfare with the far right and then get back to the slightly more manageable two-way fight against the liberal state.

This was deeply motivated behavior and belief on my part. For the last two years or so I have been making strides in building a life really worth living, one full of community and joy, one that portends a livable future not constantly riven by crisis and fight or flight, for me and for the people I love. As a highly visible trans anarchist shit-stirrer building said life with another high-visibility queer anarcha-feminist immigrant, both of us having been the frequent target of right wing harassment and occasional objects of fascist obsession, the idea of a re-empowered MAGA street movement supported by a state set on Mass Deportation felt too threatening to that life to really contemplate.

In order to do the tremendously heavy lift I had to perform during the previous six months of 2024, I had to keep my head down, focused on the work I was already doing (a book manuscript, a full time job, this blog, organizing, future planning, fighting the genocide, deep personal growth work), and for me that required doing some intellectual cope. But to do that cope I turned to writing, posting, and arguing my position, and in the process of so doing I failed to stop and question my own motivations and drives.

While I correctly identified that the only question was, as it is every year, how many people come out to vote (not "swing voters"), I convinced myself that Trump was such a threat, his campaign so half-assed and shambolic, and Kamala's "ground game" and "GOTV" work (and all the other central tenets of left-liberal electoral organizing that have proven to be absolute bullshit) strong enough a factor to both suppress his turn out and increase hers. I believed that the spectacle of electoral organizing, since it happened IRL, would somehow be stronger than the spectacle of a fully bought off and biased media and social media apparatus.

It might have been too, if that had been the only question. But of course door knocking can't overcome the full weight of Biden's four years of counterrevolution. I hoped that people would remember the Trump years with revulsion, and while it seems many did (there was no swing to Trump, his electorate was even older and even wealthier than last time, and just as white) how many people made their voting decision with the personal experience and knowledge of Biden kicking fifteen million people off of insurance? 2020 was a year of intense politicization and near-revolution, and Biden and Harris spent the intervening four years depoliticizing the population, breaking Covid solidarity, dismantling the meager safety net, forcing people back to work and of course facilitating a genocide.

People are doing really badly, rent and cost of living is high, "goods basket" inflation may be nominally down but have you seen rent lately, mass-disablement and illness is rampant as the pandemic continues unchecked, and the Dems have spent the election telling people they're wrong when they complain about their hardship, that the statistics show a strong economy, that it's a "vibecession", which is the 21st century wonk translation of "let them eat cake". I let myself believe that even though Dems failed to protect abortion for decades and that Roe fell during the Biden administration and he did nothing, that somehow people would come out for them anyway on the basis of reproductive rights.

In short, I let myself believe that normal working class people would weigh their own brutal experience of the last four years against the promise of Hitler 2, and, despite everything, still put in the effort to vote affirmatively for the party saying "nothing will change" instead of just deciding to stay home.

There was a cost to my cope, my convincing myself that people would pay enough attention to read past the headlines and media spin and see that Trump was campaigning on anti-semitism, genocidal antiblackness and concentration camps (they didn't, even my close comrades didn't know about the extent of the official mass deportation plans, because they were healthily, wisely not watching the election), and that cost came in the form of about 48 hours of super intense anxiety. My generational trauma, my ancestral grief started screaming "Get out get out get the fuck out of here, this is it this is the camps" and I had no way to easily soothe the voices of those terrified uncountable Jewish dead.

But eventually that gave way to just feeling extremely pre-exhausted. I didn't want to do another four years of fighting rearguard battles in the street, every day bringing a new indignity, a new atrocity, of watching people I care about die in despair, isolation, and far-right violence. I'm eight years older now, I'm tired, we have so little leverage, wouldn't it be nice to somehow be able to avoid all this?

Of course, those things are happening now in Gaza and Lebanon, those things would be happening under Kamala, but, I also convinced myself, at a slower rate and with less upsurge from the far right than under Trump.

But then, is a Trump victory really the worst case scenario? What about a barely eked out Kamala electoral victory that was then overturned by a coup? Or a Democratic victory that immediately descended into civil war? Such counterfactuals are impossible to game out, and kind of don't matter: shit was extremely bad the moment Trump once again had the aura of being a normal presidential candidate. You can't tell people that the two-party system is fundamentally good and legitimate while also saying Trump and his Republican Party is an aberration that must be stopped, or rather, as the Dems seem committed to proving, you can, but it's a terrible fucking argument.

The last Trump administration saw a huge increase in the volume and power of far right movement, violence and attacks, here and globally. That doesn't mean the second will necessarily mean the same, but it seems likely it will. It already has increased the level of hostility and harassment me and other trans friends, anecdotally but consistently, are experiencing in the world. Fascists, for all their piteous cries of victimization, are cowards who can only be motivated and emboldened by already being on the winning side.

All the same, Trump does not have a mass mandate for the camps, for total fascism. The fact that millions of people voted for Trump while also voting to protect abortion rights in their states shows just how incoherent elections are as a measure of political temperature, and how deeply his coalition is based on misinformation, confusion and lies. Which is scary, of course, because it means he could probably pull off some levels of extreme violence without anyone in that coalition really understanding the real extent of it (see: the population of Israel), but it also means that if Trump does, for example, manage to institute massive tariffs and immediately spikes the economy, that coalition might evaporate like gummi bear flavored vape smoke.

But eventually what got me through that doom feeling wasn't this further analysis of the situation: it was the fact that before, during and after election day I was taking time off-work to travel around as part of a project of trans mutual aid, a project that has felt like building real power while also being a joyous and fun way to spend my time.

The most reliable way to counteract PTSD from traumatic events is to act with agency and purpose in the face of those events, no matter what the outcomes of those actions. We can think about Fanon's psychology practice in Algeria, which discovered anti-colonial freedom fighters suffered much lower rates of PTSD than colonial soldiers, even though the latter were on the winning side when he performed his analysis.

To move through the next four years (at least) I am going to have to disconnect from daily news, from living on the internet and keeping track of every latest development, because that proved during the first Trump admin to make me extremely anxious, to keep me in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and this year it has already kept me from seeing the bigger picture, floating on cope in a media cycle of information that had little impact on the world outside itself. That cope-float helped me complete some goals over the last six months I might not have otherwise achieved, but it also left me mistaken and embarrassed, vulnerable to a traumatic and violent shock.

Luckily for me, I'm already engaged in the projects I would want to be doing no matter the electoral outcome, so the main thing was to get through that shock to return to the equilibrium I've won at such great effort the last few years. But if I hadn't been, that confusion might have been much more dangerous.

I would like to apologize if my analysis contributed to any of you feeling that shock harder than you might have otherwise. I hope my writing about the election served you emotionally and analytically, even if it failed to bear out predictively. But if it didn't, or if it ended up making things worse, I am genuinely sorry. The one thing I wouldn't want is to be defensively doubling down on a failed analysis or trying to deepen some form of authority by describing how in fact in the grand scale of things actually I was right, to pretend I didn't flub it hard and retcon my analysis to make myself look better. If you decide to stick around, there's lots of more exciting things coming down the pipe soon, but we also should not continue to consume media, writing and thinking that does not serve us.

We are going to have to move, to organize, to take care of one another, to act against the fascism that is and has been already here, not just because we'll lose if we don't, but because regardless of what happens, for those of us who survive, that fighting will have been the best antidote for despair. If you're wondering how to get started, I wrote something this summer to help kick start the imagination. Things are bad, things get worse, but no power constructed by human activity is immune to being dismantled and abolished by other humans engaged in other actions.

Don't let anyone tell you that your grief and fear is just liberal bullshit, there are reasons to fear, especially if you're not cis, not a citizen, or liable to get pregnant. But the best cure for that fear is to act. Always has been, always will be. See you in the streets.