Endorsements that Make Sense

I was thinking of posting my October BlueSky round-up tonight, but it's Halloween and I'm sitting here waiting for trick-or-treaters, which is pretty distracting, and then it will be late.

So instead, here's one tweet thread from the other place from David Roberts @drvolts about my least-favorite candidate of all time.

(Don't read the responses on Twitter — it's generally not worth it these days.)

I'm glad I don't have to write an endorsement piece, because I really wouldn't know how to go about it. Ever since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator, I have had the same feeling, which I've never quite seen articulated, so I will briefly try:

It's basically this: Trump is so obviously, manifestly repugnant — his words, his gestures, his behavior, his history — that it strikes me like a tsunami. It's a kind of total, perfect, seamless repugnance that I've never witnessed before in my life. Which means pointing out some particular piece of the repugnance and arguing against it feels ... surreal, I guess. "He has regularly sexually assaulted women, almost certainly raped a few, and ... I think that's bad."

Yeah. I mean, I think rape is bad. But here's the thing if you think rape is bad, you will already oppose Trump. If you don't, what could I possibly say to reach you? I don't understand your moral universe, your basic precepts. We are different in a way so fundamental that I literally don't know how to speak to you.

It's the same with all of it. I could point to some obvious bit of repugnance — "I think it's bad to cheat every small business you interact with" — but ... it's obvious. You've surely see it yourself. And it doesn't matter to you. So how is me pointing it out going to help?

You see what I'm getting at? I feel like there's nothing I can say about Trump that isn't obvious, that isn't well-understood public knowledge. If you still support him at this point, you clearly don't *care* about tall that stuff. And if you don't care about all that stuff, then ... what do you care about? How does your brain operate? What does morality mean to you? What language could possibly reach you? What could cause you to care? I genuinely don't know. It's like when you're trying to speak with someone who doesn't speak your language  and you respond by just repeating yourself, louder. "HE'S A CAREER CRIMINAL WITH 34 FELONY CONVICTIONS." It's pointless. They *heard* you. They just don't understand, don't care. You're assuming they share the premise "criminal rapists are bad," but they don't.

And so, if you're that far apart — if you do not share basic, fundamental moral precepts, if you live in different moral universes — how can you communicate? Literally, what do you say?

So I could write the 5000th piece once again listing Trump's sins — "He's explicitly said he loves dictators and wants to be one!" — but they've all been listed a million times. His supporters don't care. And I wouldn't know what to write to make someone care or be decent.

That's where I've been ever since 2015: feeling like language is pointless. Like the reality I inhabit is so far from the reality Trump supporters inhabit that discourse between us is impossible, or at least futile. The divide is unbridgeable.

This is a genuinely depressing and unsettling place to be for someone whose whole *life* is words, who was raised and trained to believe that language can, with care and attention, bridge any gap, excavate and find commonalities among any people, no matter how far apart.

Anyway. I just wanted to get that feeling down. Maybe some of you feel it too.

In the meantime, my grand manifesto against electing Trump amounts to this:

[points at Trump]

In response to Roberts's cross-post onto BlueSky (which linked to an unroll of his Twitter post, it didn't repost the whole thread), Eric Blair @protecttruth.bsky.social [who uses George Orwell/Eric Blair's photo as his avatar] responded with an analysis that said it's really 20% of voters/adults who fit Roberts's description. There's another 20%, he thinks, "who pay nearly zero attention" to any of this and only know Fox News as connected to football and things they hear from friends.

They're reachable — they're not part of the cult — he says, but are hard to reach logistically because they've checked out of keeping up with real news. It's a hopeful idea, but it faces a big challenge of its own:

We all need a media strategy going forward that has a plan for fixing the rightwing falsehood firehose. Let's work on that.

Which is something Roberts has said many times in the past as well. So they don't disagree.

Having that type of counter programming takes money from billionaire(s) or government-run media, probably, in order to overmatch or at least match the right-wing infrastructure that exists, and we already know that things like Air America didn't succeed in reaching that hard-to-reach audience. (At least before the money ran out.)

I think banning or even requiring a balance on the right-wing firehouse is a nonstarter, legally. A modern Fairness Doctrine wouldn't work in the age of the interweb and many more media channels, which make the scarcity reasoning obsolete. 

Getting the falsehoods out, or at least limited back to some less heinous level... I don't know, maybe there's a way to do that. It wouldn't be fast if its method is based on the legal system, and it once again relies on either corporations or billionaires to fund it, as with the Dominion case against Fox News. But we're on a bad, bad path if there isn't some set of changes to regulate conspiracy theories, deep fakes, and Russian/enemy propaganda.

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Another endorsement (of Harris, against Trump) worth reading is this from The Verge, a tech publication. It's called A vote for Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles. The editor of The Verge writes about government as solver of collective action problems, and how Trump doesn't recognize that as a category of problems that exist or need dealing with. "Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working." Harris, in contrast, is "trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion."