We’ve Fallen Off the Sled


POST 1122

There is no end of pundits punditing wildly in an effort to explain how Democrats managed to embarrass themselves and allow the country to be imperiled by power mad, greedy haters and traitors. We used to wonder why so many people would vote against their own best interests, but how did we get to the point where half the country has voted against our nation’s best interests?

It takes very little effort to imagine what those of The Greatest Generation would say to those millions who want to tear down what those heroes risked their lives for and what several hundred thousand lost their lives protecting and defending. It wasn’t a flag or the lakes and the land. It wasn’t amber waves of grain or purple mountain majesties or pompous chest thumping by tyrants. It was sweet freedom and the ever young promise of democracy. So many blithely voted all that away, as though doing so would whisk away their personal malaise, but it won’t.

Surrendering rights and freedom always – always – creates misery and hopelessness. We like to speak of American exceptionalism, but if we have that, it’s from a bedrock foundation of hope, of endless possibilities, of the freedom to be free and the dream – The Dream! – of something better for ourselves and for our children. We can and will be exceptional, but only if we grant ourselves the ingredients for it.

But we’ve cut that short. We were having a fine, if imperfect time, but now we’ve fallen off the American Dream sled. We’re tumbling and cold. Hard snow is plugging our nostrils and blinding our eyes. We grunt with each body blow and hope for air. We’re dizzy and disoriented and we don’t know where the sled is. The snow fog has obscured everything and we can’t tell up from down. We’ve got to find that sled and get back on it. Then we’ll fix what needs fixing. Everything of value, everything we hold dear depends on our doing that.

But the sled is nowhere to be seen. It’s turning dark and hope is dimming. The dawn will come, of course, but we will need to dig the snow from our faces if we’re to see the light and figure out what to do.

Find the sled before someone steals it from us and it’s gone forever.

Find the sled.

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See the post this Wednesday for How We Fell Off the Sled.

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4 Responses to We’ve Fallen Off the Sled

  1. Dan Wallace November 17, 2024 Reply

    Jack, my father, who is now 101 1/2 (at the opposite ends of life, it turns out the 1/2’s matter) is one of those Greatest Generation guys you spoke of. He sacrificed greatly. His sacrifice came in the form of his duty – he was a ball-turret gunner in the 8th Air Force. If you know your WWII history, you know what that means and how low his odds of survival were. He flew 34 missions, including 2 over Omaha Beach on D-Day. Over the past several months, the words, “This isn’t what he fought for” went through my head many, many times.

    To Kirk’s point, however, no there isn’t a rational reason to have voted from Trump. But he won, which tells us it wasn’t a rational election. In fact, it never is. We know from neuroscience that humans make decisions emotionally and justify them rationally. That’s how our brains work. So IMHO we can stop looking for rational explanations and start trying to understand how well over 50% of the voting public felt disaffected, aggreived, demoralized enough to vote for a psychopathic wannabe dicator, because that’s what they did. This is a democracy, the election was not rigged, and we are about to have the government that we, collectively, decided we want.

    David Brooks (often annoying, in this case, spot on, I think) captured it well here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-elites-working-class.html.

    When I look at the last 40 years, going back to my days at the Capitol as an aide to a US Senator, I see three dominant things:

    1) We have had hard decisions to make, especially about who we’re going to be in the world after our 20 years of unprecedented post-WWII hegemony ended. That’s the “great” America many want back even though most of them never experienced it. My departing observation as I headed off to business school in 1984 was that the institutions created by our founders were not designed to make tough decisions that involved taking things away or saying no, which by then is what they were being asked to do, and that things were going to have to get a lot worse before the political pain of doing nothing exceeded the pain of doing something.

    2) A Democratic party that fell into a mindset that the world consists of oppressors and oppressed, and that a person’s views, wants and needs are purely a reflection of their gender, race, national origin and gender identification, and that the more boxes a person checks that move them away from being a working-class white male, the more valuable they are. As Brooks points out, human beings are a lot more complicated than that.

    3) Traditional Republicans began speaking to the working class in the 1980s, with a message that amounted to, “We care about you, we care about you, we care about you. Thank you for electing us. Now, let’s cut taxes for rich people.”

    Lots of blame to go around, and few, if any, clean hands.

    So my take is that this election was a primal scream from a lot of people who feel disconnected from their government, a feeling that has been building for two entire generations. Strauss and Howe, the Fourth Turning guys, would have said – in fact, did say – that we would be due for a reset around now because we have one about every 80 years. They also say that those resets are ugly and often bloody.

    I believe that reset is inevitable. I don’t pretend to know how it will play out. We have the worst possible person at the wheel – someone who will drive us into turmoil headlong and at high speed rather than attempting to guide us through it with minimum damage and maximum gain.

    What do we do as individuals do now? I don’t have great prescriptions. Buckle up, get ready for a wild, potentially dangerous ride. Hope the crazies fail both early and big, enough for even their staunch supporters to realize this was a mistake. Start figuring out what we want to come next because whatever it turns out to be, it will not be what came before.

    • Jack Altschuler November 17, 2024 Reply

      Thanks for your, as usual, thoughtful comments, Dan. I have just one thing to add.

      Besides the constant anger and hatred stoked by Trump, his lackeys and sycophants and the ignorants who dumbly mouth far right propaganda, I believe that there are millions of Whites who realize that they are incrementally losing White privilege. Some read about such things, like that this will be a majority “minority” country by roughly 2040 and simple math tells them that they will no longer have the privilege to which they feel down to their bones is theirs.

      So, they cheer Trump proclaiming that he will round up (i.e. arrest) 11 (or is it 20?) million people, put them in concentrations camps “somewhere”and then deport them “somewhere.” These are the people who work the fields so that we can have reasonably priced produce, who work in packaging plants so we can have reasonably priced meat and more. Our angry, non-thinking ones can’t quiet do the mental work to realize that their food prices are going to skyrocket once we’ve deported the labor that sustains the food industry – and those Whites raising a fist to kick out the 11 (or is it 20?) million people won’t do that work. Ask the Proud Boys if they’ll do the stoop labor to pick strawberries. I don’t think they will.

      The point is that it’s craziness based on a superiority complex. You can read more about it in Alexander Stevens’ justification of slavery.

      We can try to make nice with our angry, hateful, militant hordes, but they are dedicated to being that way, having no clarity about how self-defeating they are. They just want to continue to yell, “FUCK YOU!”

  2. Kirk Landers November 17, 2024 Reply

    I find the Democrat’s blame game the second most disgusting trend in our current politics, second only to our abandonment of democracy. The fault lies not in the Democratic leadership, but in a morally and intellectually bankrupt electorate.

    The economy? Ours is the strongest in the world and rife with opportunities for those who are willing to work to better themselves.

    Insecure? The worst thing that’s happened in American society in the past four years is that your neighbor has won the right to marry who he or she wants to marry and colleges have had the right to balance their student bodies ethnically and racially.

    There is no rational excuse for voting for Trump. The incentives ranged from bigotry to fear (the simple-minded, terrified by Fox, et. al., and too lazy to pursue fact-based reporting, which is everywhere), to mental laziness (my friend at work says Trump is right about everything), to blind, stupid naivete (it can’t happen here).

    I fully expect Trump, who is already showing signs of senility and physical decline, to be replaced by Vance within the next couple years. He’s the worst possible fascist leader–amoral, ruthless, intelligent and manipulative.

    If you love freedom and democracy, this is the time to be investigating safer places to live. The US has voted to repeat 1930s Germany.