Now the Fuck What?

Jesus fucking Christ; fuck grief and denial, we’re skipping ahead to rage

Nov. 6: Trump wins popular vote for first time … GOP wins Senate control … Progressivism won, centrism lost … The definition of insanity is doing the same Democratic Party things over again and expecting a different result …

You can listen to the TFN podcast here.

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We knew this was possible. No one knew it would be like this.

Which means we can no longer rely on the people whose job it is to know these things to counsel us on navigating 2.0.

And no one gets to shut people up for challenging established conventional wisdom anymore. Now every assumption gets a full inspection.

None of the pollsters saw this. Everyone everywhere predicted a tight national race. It wasn’t. President-elect Donald Trump won the popular vote easily and the Electoral College vote without even cheating.

None of the consultants or political leaders saw this. Including Trump’s.

There’s no hiding from this loss. There’s no excuse for it that leaves a single institution or accepted fact safe.

Don’t tell me about bomb threats to the polling places. There’s no indication they changed the result. Definitely don’t say Russia. Russia wasn’t invented on Monday. Democrats had four years of executive power to do something about Russia and it’s pretty clear that lies and misinformation and shitty empiricism would’ve done just fine even without Russia, spasibo.¹

The only surprise in this election was the outcome, not any last-minute scapegoat for it. Not Jill Stein or Cornel West. You can’t blame Palestinian-Americans or Muslims for passing on Vice Pres. Kamala Harris when (a) their votes wouldn’t have changed things and (b) they’ve been screaming at Democrats for a year that illegally arming a nation committing crimes against humanity is bad politics. Bernie Sanders and AOC fell in line; can’t blame them.

The alleged KHive told anyone (TFN included) who was pushing Harris on policy to shut the fuck up. And pretty much everyone did! Because, they said, this was about beating Trump. As if beating Trump weren’t a means to achieving policy goals.

As if not talking policy was a good way to beat a guy who was opposed to the entire fucking system.

As if Joe Biden in 2020 hadn’t achieved the greatest victory so far over Trump by running on wildly progressive FDR-esque policies.

Still, despite all the evidence, everyone pretty much fell in line. 

So in line that the Democratic establishment, defenders of small-d democracy, didn’t even hold a legitimate primary. How’s that decision looking now?

The Democratic Party establishment did exactly what it wanted and the margin of their loss was greater than whatever damage any rebels did. The party got everything they wanted, which means now they also have the blame.

Hell, I don’t even wanna hear blame of Harris. She had only one machine to work with and it was the machinery of the Democratic establishment.

As Dave Roberts observed last night, after “Elite journalists complained about Harris's lack of policy specifics … she rolled out two of the most exciting, novel policy ideas in ages -- her YIMBY housing-supply stuff & extending Medicare to cover in-home care -- & they didn't give a shit.”

She did everything the establishment asked of her. Political and media. The only other thing Harris could’ve done was reject that establishment. Which she didn’t

Democrats lost beyond the margin of any blame but self-.

Hell, I don’t even wanna hear about the short campaign time, as I did on one of the half-dozen godforsaken outlets I flipped between last night. Democrats had the White House. They had four years to craft the party’s identity. If four years wasn’t enough for voters to get to know the vice president of the United States that’s maybe not the fault of the space-time continuum.

Also, other countries have shorter campaigns all the time. And what exactly was Harris going to do with more time? Call Trump a fascist some more?

More interviews? Because those went great. Roll out four more economic opportunity zones? Announce another tax break providing up to $2,575 in rebates for six-person families making between $24,000 and $56,000 per year? Tsk tsk Israel for more dead Palestinians?

And anyone scolding us that not enough X, Y, or Z showed up to vote was telling us just one day ago how great Harris’s ground game was.

And definitely do not tell me that America chose fascism. It was almost impossible to see under all the spray-tan in the air, but America last night chose progressivism. America just didn’t believe Democrats would do progressivism. Because Democrats promised they wouldn’t.

You Call Trump Progressivism?

Trump’s rhetoric is obviously the opposite of progressive. It grew “darker,” the media (who were wrong about everything) told us. The people around Trump are twirling bigger and more outlandish mustaches than ever before.

So the predictions are dire. CNN is already up with a forecast of how much worse Trump 2.0 will be. All the ostensible grownups and moderating forces of Trump 1.0 are gone. Send in the evil clowns.

Most notably/horrifically, Trump has vowed to deport some 15 million undocumented immigrants. A number so great it would be a seismic event for the nation’s security apparatus, economy, and psyche. A number so vast just the margins of error would sweep up hundreds of legitimate citizens, anchor-birthing dozens of media horror stories along the way.

Everyone’s in jeopardy from Trump’s Draconian approach to law and order, because now anyone may now be robbed of the due process they need to prove they’re a citizen.

And then there’s women. Trump is, of course, already responsible for the gravest rollback of women’s rights in living memory, on top of being an admitted, adjudicated sexual abuser. The media (who are wrong about everything) have warned us that he’ll use the Food and Drug Administration to classify as unsafe every drug a woman might even think about taking.

New Health Czar Robert F. “Wonder Why My First Wife Killed Herself” Kennedy, Jr., is going to defluoridate our water and remumpify our children.

Trump’s going to pardon the January 6ers, and kill the outstanding but fatally late prosecution by Attorney General Merrick Garland, may his name be a curse.

Scientists years ago pinpointed 2030 as our deadline for avoiding irreversible, cataclysmic climate change. But it’s really hard to run on that when (a) the media ignore climate change and (b) Democrats endorse fracking and brag about drilling more than ever before.

The media also memory-holed Trump’s absolute botching of Covid. Imposing a travel ban that was useless (a) without a whole-of-public-health approach here at home and (b) because it let Americans back in as if the virus were literally Chinese. And Biden and Democrats quickly dumped public-health measures. Covid fatalities under Biden were higher than Trump’s.

You can’t complain that voters aren’t inspired by your contrasts with your opponent when you keep erasing them.

On issue after issue where Trump’s terrible, Democrats aren’t far behind. They endorsed the underlying premise of Trump’s immigration approach by treating the border crisis as a crisis of people coming in rather than a crisis of people not being processed fast enough.

The only rational defense of the Democratic approach would be that Republicans and the media rendered it politically untenable for Democrats to take all these radical common-sense positions.

But then Fucking. Say. That.

Fucking lead. Either change the dynamic or let someone else do it, but definitely do not acquiesce and then on top of it act as if drilling is great and masks and immigrants are bad and you’re bummed about Gaza but won’t stop it.

Voters see all that, so why wouldn’t they hand the car keys for that entire four-year drive to 2030 over to a guy who’s gonna let oilionaires ride shotgun, opening up millions of acres of land so they can drill even more than, uh, Biden let them drill?

(Which, of course, will increase the likelihood of pandemics. Which will be handled by…our new health czar.)

We knew all this, right? So how can anyone deny America chose fascism? Like this…

Did America Choose Fascism?

Fuck the polls forever, obvi. As far as I’m concerned, polling itself should now be reclassified as a felony and/or a war crime or at least in poor taste. The media co-conspirators who pose as polling experts on TV also need to go.

And, yes, your raging TFN speaks as someone who believed them. Who believed the absolutely unanimous declaration, the certainty we were assured that this was going to be close. “Get comfortable because we won’t know for days.” Et cetera Et bullshita.

It’s not like we can pig-nose our way through the manure to find the one pollster or outlet who got this right. Literally no one did.

Maybe polling had its uses once — or even still does in targeted ways. But apparently our country has become too broken, its people too unreachable or unknowable, for pollsters to tell us anything about “The Country” anymore.

Go home, pollsters. You don’t have to stop polling but you can’t poll here.

And take your media friends with you so they can stop abetting the systemic failure to do aggressive, adversarial, issue- and policy-based journalism.

What does that leave us? With the one poll that counts, the actual polling, at polling places, where America went to the polls.

And look at this: Y’know who doesn’t think they’re gonna get fascisted under rePresident Trump? The increased number of people of color who voted for him in greater numbers even after eight years of being told Trump’s a racist fascist.

Here’s a New York Times snapshot from the backyard of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), The Bronx:

Here’s a snapshot of Wisconsin, courtesy of NBC. As NBC’s Amanda Terkel writes, Trump more than doubled his support from Black voters there over Biden’s showing in 2020:

So maybe calling Trump a racist didn’t work. Voters didn’t believe the people saying it.

Was it accurate? As TFN has always said, that’s not a thing humans get to know. We can know whether words and deeds are racist, but personal essences are out of our jurisdiction.

As I heard said last night, documented immigrants — people who’ve been here for decades and made a life here — they don’t want more of…well, themselves, apparently. So Trump not wanting more immigrants either doesn’t in their eyes make him any more racist than they see themselves.

Similarly, Trump has qualified his language about the January 6 convicts and even about cops. He constantly leaves himself a door. He won’t pardon violent January 6ers. He admits there are bad cops. So voters who heard him say that didn’t believe The Resistance that called Trump a fascist.

If people recognize that you’re not hearing nuances they can hear, they stop trusting you.

Y’know who else hasn’t bought the idea of Trump as fascist? The Democratic Party. Was Trump arrested on Jan. 21, 2021, for trying to kill Vice Pres. Mike Pence and home-invasioning the House of Representatives?

Or did the Justice Department take forever to launch an investigation that, yes, surfaced valuable info but also wasn’t needed because we all saw the crime getting crimed on national television.

And why did it take so long to go after this threat to democracy that the only thing Trump’s been criminally nailed for is not disclosing checks he wrote eight years ago to a woman he Trumpsexed?

Even before yesterday’s voting began, Democratic members of Congress were out there telling us they would hand the White House to a candidate who’s constitutionally barred from holding federal office.

Did anyone even try to float the notion that it’s unconstitutional to certify Trump’s election because the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — in order to fight racism — prohibits insurrectionists from serving as president? Because I guarantee you on Jan. 6, 2025, congressional Democrats will violate their oath to uphold the Constitution (because norms) and then on Jan. 20, 2025, Pres. Joe Biden will violate his oath, too, and let Trump take his.

But more to the point, Americans didn’t believe that Trump’s a fascist. The Resistance pushed the media to start calling Trump a fascist, which many media then did. And accurate or not we now know it didn’t work. Turns out pressuring journalists to adapt our preferred name-calling is not effective! And maybe it became just one more reason not to trust the media.

I’ve chronicled more than one instance of the media treating as fact its interpretations of things Trump has said and done. Everything since blood coming out of her wherever in the 2016 debates. Time and again, anyone who rejected certainty about Trump exegesis, who pointed out his ambiguity, was not just wrong morally and factually, they were an enabler, a fascist sympathizer.

Well, it turns out that millions of Americans who saw Trump’s ambiguity decided the media and Resistance who denied that ambiguity weren’t trustworthy.

Yes, they heard Trump shit on immigrants — which he really, really did! And, yes, some truly evil fucks heard it and liked it.

But tons of people — including some very likely to get swept up in mass deportations — also heard the other things Trump said: About great immigrants. He was making a distinction, in other words, between “good” and “bad” immigrants.

It was a distinction immigrants heard. 

There are other examples. Time and again, the media sloppily, falsely mischaracterized what Trump said with maximalist bad/evil interpretations.

Trump never said Kennedy would be Health Czar or in charge of anything. He said Kennedy would “work on” women’s health. Big difference; one that the media missed. Why would Trump leave himself that wiggle room? Maybe because he doesn’t trust Kennedy!

And, again, people listening to Trump and not the media may have heard these distinctions. Every time Trump was called on the obvious bad outcomes of the policies he was espousing (for perceived political advantage) he left himself the wiggle room to reverse course.

So, if at least some people rejected the notion that Trump was a fascist, what were they voting for? Some of them, it turns out, were voting for progressivism.

What the Fuck Does TFN Mean America Chose Progressivism?

Sure, Trump and Elon Musk tarred Harris as a Communist. But she wasn’t. Neither was the political party powering her. In fact, she ran to the right.

Because no one actually runs to the center. You can only run toward the center, which means running right or left. 

Trump won — I know how crazy this sounds — by running LEFT. The center just happened to be in the way. The media and The Resistance didn’t see it because they were so committed to absolutist Trump-is-evil-ism that any pointing out of his nuances was dismissed as “defending” Trump. Meanwhile, voters heard him.

Harris ran right. On policy. On personnel. If the Democrats had gotten behind progressivism — systemic economic populism — think about the movement-building they’d have been doing for the past four eight years.

Consider all those texts and emails we got every fucking day for the last two months.

The Democratic Party has everyone’s info. They have the machinery to be in direct contact with all of us.

Can you recall a single message that asked you something? How you felt about $15 minimum wage? Or Universal Basic Income? Hey you, this is Tim Walz’s dog and I just wanna ask whether you’d be okay with free college and not having to fill out forms every time you go to the doctor?

Or what if they educated people on issues? Or connected us with likeminded people oriented geographically or around issues and policies?

Imagine having all of that machinery in your hands and using it not to build a massive, grassroots movement in a constant effort to fight for humanity but instead holding it in reserve and utilizing it only to tell you that Hi it’s James Carville and I’m begging you to donate just $5 before tonight’s made-up funding deadline.²

How small is that vision?

And where were all of these texts and emails when Democrats were supposedly fighting to pass landmark legislation? Hi it’s Cardi B and I’m BEGGING you to donate five dollars come to Washington for the biggest demonstration and general strike in history to ban oil drilling.

No one inspired people to fight climate change, so they focused on other things. No one roused them to fight corporatocracy, so they focused on other things.

Your TFN warned going into this that Democrats were ignoring tens of millions of poor people who might have risen up if they’d been given something inspiring to be inspired by.

And there’s plenty of evidence to think that would’ve worked better than choosing as campaign poster-child a conservative member of Congress who to this day defends her war-criminal father … all because you hope that maybe a handful of women and Republicans would cross the aisle.

The Democratic standard-bearers were the Lincoln Project — Republican consultants who couldn’t elect an Arizona war hero over a Kenyan Muslim — and Republicans who are now somehow insanely the left’s favorite pundits. Because our Democratic elites are too cowed to champion real change.

Have any exit polls told us yet how many voters pulled the lever for Harris because they were so moved by:

• Democratic eagerness to put a Republican on the cabinet,

• Repeated compromises with the party of Matt Gaetz, and

• The heartwarming appreciations Biden kept sharing about oil millionaire Joe Manchin, who didn’t want his own constituents having food money because he thinks they’re all on drugs?

No one cares about this shit except pundits and the politicians who fear pundit wrist-slapping and norm-policing. Most voters don’t give a shit about any shit. They just want their lives to be better. 

There is no constituency organized around opposition to free basic housing, free basic income, free health care, free college, and an end to income taxes for anyone making less than [insert whatever number makes sense].

Americans are dying to tax the fuck out of billionaires. I’m asserting this shit without evidence because it’s obvious. But also, look at the only poll that mattered!

In state after state — including solid red states (a phrase TFN should stop using as soon as TFN figures out a new taxonomy) — voters who voted for Trump also voted for progressivism. Some examples your cultivating TFN cultivated through the night:

• North Carolina voted for Trump. And Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein. And Democratic attorney general candidate Jeff Jackson.

• In Arizona, Trump is leading, but so’s Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in the Senate race. (Yes, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) lost, but he was also up against tens of millions of crypto-bro money.)

• Look at Missouri. They voted for Trump. And a $15/hour minimum-wage. And guaranteed paid sick leave. Trump voters fucking love socialism. What cause has Trump championed more in his life than getting stuff he didn’t work for?!?

Trump remains a unique figure precisely because he’s not a doctrinaire right-wing ideologue. That’s why I argued over the weekend that Republicans will have a very hard time finding a Trump successor.

Which doesn’t mean they won’t try. Vice Pres.-elect JD Vance³ joined Trump in outflanking Democrats on the left on multiple fronts.

Who blasted Harris for not even mentioning poor people in her acceptance speech? It wasn’t Democrats. It was Trump.

Trump’s signature policy proposal was tariffs. As proposed they’re terrible for us and will — if enacted in their unthought-out form — devastate Americans economically. But they read as economic populism. As a dramatic defense of American economic prosperity.

Vance championed antitrust crusader Lina Khan — chair of the Federal Trade Commission and sworn enemy of Big Tech and Big Monopolies — more than Harris and her surrogates did.

When Trump was accused of anything unpopular on the right, he disavowed it. Abortion. Project 2025. Killing Obamacare. Cutting Social Security and Medicare. He went right when it helped him and tacked left again when that helped.

And we were scolded not to believe it because The Resistance knew that in his heart Trump bad. Well, someone believed him.

Here’s Ralph Nader⁴, whom it hurts to quote because 2000 still stings:

If the Democratic Party loses tomorrows elections to the worst, cruelest, most corrupt, bigoted, misogynistic, anti-worker, anti-environment, vote suppressing, climate denying, book banning GOP in history, will there be an accounting? Will there be a cleaning of the house, discharging the colossal architects who have contracted out their trusteeship to profit driven commercial consultants? 

Daily wasting billions of campaign dollars on repetitive, vacuous and forgettable advertising so they can receive their 15% commission. Infected through and through with corporatism, the Democratic Party turns its back on unions and progressive civic groups with millions of members and campaigns and curries the favor of the war criminal, war mongering Cheneys and Clintons.

Kamala Harris campaigns with them but declines to campaign with the most popular elected official in our country, Senator Bernie Sanders. She’s not sending messages that could have landslided the worst Republican Party in history. -R

He ain’t wrong.

And I didn’t write about this at the time because I, too, feared harshing the vibes, but I saw something terrifying at one of Trump’s rallies on Monday. The placards in the crowd read: “Dream Big, Again.” Not, “Create economic opportunity in economic opportunity zones with tax credits.”

It was Trump thinking or at least talking big. That’s populism. That’s progressivism.

All those A-list celebs? My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that lots of voters just saw them as evidence of Harris’s establishment-ness. Trump, meanwhile, marshaled the dirtbag armies of toxic, dangerous shitposters and bro-podcasters, who have zero to offer society except their rejection of the status quo.

It was Trump offering a vision of dreaming big things. That’s what the most beloved Democrats of the past century — JFK and FDR — did. Democrats could have run on the radical Republican platform of the 1950s: Strong union protections and massive top marginal tax rates.

Instead, 2024 Democrats ran on the Reagan-lite playbook of Bill Clinton (who never won a majority) and the technocratic tweaking of Mike Dukakis, a joke (unfairly, but truly).

This isn’t a case of “ha-ha, my progressive prescription was right all along.” This is recognizing I was wrong to buy the conventional wisdom. Now we all know how wrong it was. The people who said it was wrong were right. And got shat on.

Which means now the party and the establishment and all the voters who saw the dangers of Trump have to change. And do things not just differently but counterintuitively. Instead of deferring to the establishment — as we did in 2016 and 2020 — now everyone who did so has to do the dangerous, uncomfortable thing of deferring to the “radicals.”

Democrats are the party of believe-the-science, right? Well, look at the fucking shit that turned up in the test tube this morning. Centrism didn’t work. Proposing technocratic tweaks to a system that would remain intact didn’t inspire anyone.

So, no more Republican-lite candidates. No more Republican standard-bearers. No more TV. No more blue-no-matter-who. No more centrism. No more consultant class. Now we put the radicals in charge.

How do we do that? We starve the establishment out. No more donations to parties but to causes. No more volunteering for candidates but for movements.

Don’t worry, establishment Democrats worth keeping will be just fine. They’ll follow the money and sign up to serve genuine progressives rather than police them.

As I wrote before Election Day, no matter who wins in any election, we always have to fight. So now, just like we knew it would, the fight goes on.

Only now, the losers don’t get the presumption of unity anymore. They told everyone to fall in line and everyone did. Now it’s their turn to fall in line. Now they can shut the fuck up in the name of unity.

Now we do it our way.

TCB

POST-MORTEM With every institution getting it wrong, every institution worth its salt needs to earn back trust. That means I need to think about where TFN can do better going forward.

That means figuring out how to balance my own radicalism against my own fears about my own economic survival. And it definitely means figuring out how to make a living doing this without horseshoeing my ass into the far more lucrative lanes of the billionaire-funded right wing.

Some folks have already canceled their subscriptions. Which, fair. I can’t fault anyone who feels let down. If you feel it’s important to support TFN still — or even more — that means the world to me, and of course I still need enough paid subscribers to make this work possible. But if you do upgrade to paid, I’d just ask that you share why. What’s the value of TFN to you? What can TFN do better moving forward? Hey you this is Tim Walz’s dog asking how TFN can help make a better future.

You can email TFN or hmu up in the chat. And of course we’re on all the socials: Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Spoutible, and (still) Twitter. If I’m right about everything I’ve argued today, the vast majority of Americans are not evil and didn’t vote for evil. We just need to fight to offer them something good. To do that, there’s only ever one option, and it’s not despair.

Go get ‘em, kids.

1. Russian for thanks.

2. Which at best was a federal reporting deadline that just meant the campaign would be reporting its latest fundraising numbers, not that you couldn’t donate after the deadline.

3. Sorry to call him that so soon, I gotta follow the science

4. h/t Jim Earl