It's going to take some time for me to process this. I'm already seeing a fair amount of beltway Dems talking about Kamala's perfect campaign, how it's all about misogyny, or my favorite, that she somehow had moved too far left - LOL. I think the only bet that I will make is that the Democratic National Committee completely ignores this opportunity to learn from their mistakes. I would bet a lot of money on that one.

I wrote a few months ago about the long list of issues we are facing. Unfortunately, it does seem that it's going to get quite a bit worse before it gets any better. And the answers to this question of what happened will be discussed for years if not decades to come. This was an historic loss. Maybe the momentum that Bernie Sanders had should not have been taken for granted. Maybe that policy of beating up the college kids standing up against the ongoing genocide, was not a particularly forward-thinking move. And this was the point I made the night before the election: in moments like these, "this is the best we can do" is just not a particularly catchy slogan.

On Creating Momentum

As a member of that weird generation that got a lot of their political philosophy from The Simpsons, I often think of the classic episode where Bart is running against Milton for class president, leading to this fantastic one-liner from Bart: "My opponent says there are no easy answers - I say, he's not looking hard enough!" Which, of course gets him a standing ovation and if i recall correctly, the election goes to him landslide. The Democrats were Milton in this election. The sad, and perhaps even tragic, truth is that if the Biden Harris administration had found the gumption to push back meaningfully against the IOF-led genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, the momentum of this election would have been completely different. The Harris campaign just didn't have a winning strategy, because they didn't have a winning message, because the KHive contingent of the Democratic Party has been, and forever will be, completely antagonistic and dismissive of anyone to the left of them, which is at least half the spectrum. Now, we know why they do this, because it's unpalatable to their high-income base. So for someone who doesn't know any better, it looks a lot like the entire Democratic establishment was willing and able to let tens of thousands of innocent people die, and hundreds, if not thousands of protesters become completely radicalized due to very harsh treatment from the police, just because of a fear that fundraising might be... difficult in the future? How about now?

Conservatism Equals Selfishness

This strikes at the heart of the matter here, which is that as long as we've had a capitalistic society, we've had these more or less opposing forces of profit versus humanity. The engine of capitalism is fed mainly by exploitation, both of human and natural resources. This led to some form of government regulation over those same forces of capital. There was a time that those with wealth felt that their situation dictated that they give back to society in some way. Isidor and Ida Strauss, for example; billionaires of their day, chose to give up their seats on lifeboats when the Titanic was sinking - out of a sort of humility and protective goodwill. Honor, you might say. They did that out of honor.

The idea that any member of our current billionaires row would do such a thing is just laughable. What has changed? It's the Overton window. This is the ME millennium. David Foster Wallace once warned us of the danger of moral apathy, or what he called institutionalized irony. He used the show Seinfeld as an example of a sort of celebration of the banal, coupled with a casual rebelliousness that eschews any meaning at all. Society was given both the blueprint and the encouragement to just stop giving a fuck.

Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself. This is why our educated teleholic friends’ use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic.

-- David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

When I say conservatism equals selfishness, I don't mean that in a personal way, I mean that in the way that we could say that motherhood is love, or capitalism is greed. You have to own the space. Selfishness, apparently, is still quite popular. Especially, and this is important, when the alternative offers nothing at all.

And for anyone that would respond now, talking about whatever policy agenda there was from the Harris campaign, remember the context of $1 billion raised in such a short period of time. Instead of taking that opportunity to create a new and exciting set of policy initiatives to really excite the base, tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on celebrity endorsements and event sponsorships that at least in hindsight really felt more 'bread and circus' and less 'I have a dream.' So here we are.

All I can say for now is that wagging the finger is just not worth the trouble. If you were once a liberal and perhaps are still a progressive, and really just want to feel good about the way you treat the world and the people that live in it, you have to understand that Trump voters by and large might not agree with you on those things. So it makes no sense to tell them why (you think) they should agree with you. The only angle we have as compassionate citizens, is to band together even more, and use that collective energy to create more beauty and more nurturing and more awesomeness in the world, so that we can finally offer an alternative to this era of obsessive selfishness. You don't point to someone and say, "don't be selfish." Instead, you say "look what kindness can get you."

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith