Twenty years ago I found myself visiting Cuba fairly often. I rode a bicycle across the country on one trip and worked on a Documentary filmed in various cities for a couple of months. The documentary centered on a group of friends that were artists and writers and one of the topics that came up was George Orwell’s 1984. A novel I had read a couple of times by then and had viewed as a piece of scary science fiction. Well, they didn’t view it quite that way, the idea of a society demanding that people deny reality was a very palpable concept to them. I gotta say, I never fully understood what they meant until these past few years of living in America. I could get it in theory, as an exercise in understanding, but to feel the crazy-making weight of it was something that didn’t resonate with me. Until now. Now, I’m starting to get it.
From a distance, it seemed so cartoonish. How could anyone buy into this stuff? And how could being surrounded by it cause people to lose their bearing on reality when it’s so obviously based on falsehoods? Well, now that I’ve watched tens of millions of my fellow citizens fall for cartoonishly false crazy-town stuff I can’t say I understand exactly how it happens but I can recognize the reality that it does indeed happen. And I can now feel, and that’s the more important part, feeling it, I can now feel what it can do to your psyche.
And to clarify, I don’t mean the normal amount of propaganda that anyone who grows up in America has to unlearn, like what Manifest Destiny was, or that the Civil War was over states’ rights, I mean cold hard real-time reality. Like, are immigrants eating pets? Can the government make hurricanes? And of course, who won the 2020 election? Or having to be told that Donald Trump is not a con man.
Or even more insidious, that we should accept the vulgarity of Trump and the insincerity of the whole Republican party and the lies being endlessly spewed out from their propaganda apparatus. That really crept up on us, hasn’t it? We’ve allowed it to be normal for so long that anyone Under 20 in this country has never seen a time when this would rightly have been considered absurd. We never should have accepted this behavior, but enough of us did, and we have one last chance to repudiate it. Because after this election there may not be a way to put that genie back in the bottle.
The podcast Autocracy in America, hosted by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev – two journalists who studied Poland and Russia at a time when their democracies were slipping away – examines how autocracy is taking hold in America. One of the first steps begins with undermining reality. In episode one of the show, Adam Kinzinger, one of only ten Republicans in the House who were willing to vote to impeach Donald Trump, said that he couldn’t take what was being asked of him anymore. At first, he tried to excuse what Trump was doing against a mountain of evidence but after a while, he essentially said that it became impossible to live in reality and do what the Republican party wanted from him at the same time. When he voted to impeach Trump he was ostracized from the party and received death threats against him and his family. An Iraq war vet he flew missions with told him that he was ashamed to have served with him.
That’s how far we have let this go. And how far along the path to autocracy we’ve come. Where people who stand up for the truth are met with hostility and lies and shame. Really? That’s what we want? Lies, and vile rumors, and insults? We want to put Donald Trump in power and let him denigrate women, and immigrants, and queers and anybody else he feels he should put down. And we’re going to let crowds of people cheer him on while he spews nonsense and hate. Are we really going to signal to the rest of America, to the world, that this is okay behavior? That’s what’s going to happen if Kamala Harris loses this election.
Of course, this didn’t start in 2016, this is decades in the making and if we don’t buy ourselves some time with this election we may not have the opportunity to fix the systemic problems that brought us to this point. And no matter what we have a hard path in front of us.
There are two possible outcomes in this election. The first is that Trump loses, and I would say even a landslide loss will be hard for his base to accept. So we’re going to have to contend with that for the next few months and probably even years. And hopefully, we are ready for the violence that will surround whatever the Republicans try to do to get Trump back in office, because they’re not going to just go quietly. Then if we get past that we can get on with healing and bringing people back to reality and more importantly rebuild a belief that we can have a functioning government. Which of course means we will have to have an actual functioning government. And that’s going to require some serious effort that we haven’t been able to make much ground on in decades. But that is what we have to do. So that’s a hard road, but by far, a better road than the alternative.
The other possibility will be much harder. Because we will be told that we have to accept what we know we should never accept. We have been already for quite a while, but we’ve been able to make fun of it on late-night shows and we all are hoping that it won’t get worse. But it is getting worse, and if Trump wins we will be surrounded by people who will be emboldened by the affirmation of their choice to have already bought into these fictions and have been willing to accept disgusting behavior as normal. I’m sure you’ve already noticed how Trump’s constant display of vulgarity has brought it out to the masses. That’s just going to get uglier when he wins. It will give license to millions of emboldened assholes to let their freak flags fly. Right now these idiots are somewhat constrained but they’ll be a lot more aggressive when they believe that the majority of society chose Trump. Of course, it won’t actually be the majority. Trump will never win the popular vote. That’s what’s going to be ultra-maddening about the whole thing. An untethered from reality minority among us will be demanding that the rest of us deny what we see with our own eyes and believe in their reality. And they’ll have a government on their side telling us the same thing. And that’s going to drive us all crazy.
If you haven’t read 1984 it’s filled with stuff like this:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” – George Orwell, 1984.
Really fun light-hearted stuff.
I’m not going to get into what their plans are when they win. It’s well documented in the Project 2025 website and I think most people still living in reality have an idea what it is, even if they think it’s far-fetched that these people will be able to achieve it. Well, I’m here to say the roots of autocracy have always been here and we have always been in a battle between autocratic rule and a more inclusive democracy. We just happen to be living in a time of a 50-year winning streak for inclusive democracy. But that winning streak may be coming to an end and for a lot of people it’ll feel great and they’ll ask us to accept it as the way things should be. When you do, that’s when they’ll truly have won. That’s what Orwell is saying in 1984. I think it goes without saying that we don’t want it to get to that. Reality is on the ticket people, you got that?
So tell everyone you know to vote, talk to your friends and neighbors, do some phone banking, volunteer, give money, I know it seems like how much more goddamn money does it take to win over the less than 500,000 people who are going to decide this election, but apparently it helps. That’s just one of the many things we’ll have to fix when we get past this election. But it’ll be really hard to fix anything if all we’re doing is trying to keep our sanity.