We Said Yes Please, More Please

The optimism that animated this newsletter over the past few months was, I suppose, a way of dealing with the anxiety that simmered within me, and surely within you.

I decided back in the summer that I would not walk into this election with my shoulders slumped, with my chin down, with doom consuming every thought. It was a conscious decision, and one that went against my default setting of crushing negativity and dalliances with nihilism. Folks responded well to BFT pieces in which I expressed confidence – and pride – in the American people. I refused to believe – I could not believe – we as a people would embrace an openly fascist presidential candidate. An electorate open to such political grotesqueries – to a man so nakedly evil, so proudly villainous – I could not accept. We were better than that. We had to be better than that. I could not accept any other outcome.

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I couldn't have been more wrong, and for that I apologize. It feels misleading in hindsight, writing tens of thousands of words in BFT essays meant to portray a rosy picture of a nation ready to move on from a petty dictator who had no business running for president after proving to be an enemy of the nation. Every shred of that optimism was misplaced. I was painfully naive in a way that makes me question everything I know and believe.

I rejected out of hand that 2024 would be like 2016 because this time around, voters knew what Trump was. And they certainly did. And they said yes please, more please. We want the pain, the hate, the lawlessness, the revenge, the end of this little 250-year experiment. We want it all. Feed us the horror, Mr. Trump. We are starving for it.

It's not that Trump eked out an electoral college victory like he did in 2016. Every demographic in the US moved hard to the right in ways that made no sense judging by the results of the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. There was no real gender gap. College educated voters went hard toward Trump. Latino voters rallied around the man promising mass deportations on Day One. Abortion rights didn't matter at all. Men largely could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for president, a woman so presidential in stature that she could have played one in Hollywood. American voters heard Trump's fascist offerings and they were dying for it, they wanted the worms more than anything.

Groceries got expensive a few years ago and that was ballgame, I guess. Back to fascism we go in search for slightly lower prices on milk and eggs. Concentration camps for immigrants here both legally and illegally are a small price to pay for an almost imperceptible dip in inflation (this won't happen of course; Trump's tariffs will destroy working families).

Harris losing so handily to such a hideous shit stain of a human being is, for many, a gut punch exponentially worse than the one we took in 2016. She was an outstanding candidate, someone for whom I voted with great enthusiasm. I wanted so badly to hug and cry and maybe even dance with my wife and daughter when the TV told us Harris had crossed the 270 electoral vote mark and had smashed through that goddamn glass ceiling, which sits as pristine as ever today. I wanted to celebrate with my girls; I wanted my daughter to know we lived in a country that was brave and righteous enough to elect a woman to the land's highest office. Instead, my daughter sees we are a morally repugnant, utterly soulless nation desperate to be ruled by a sexual attacker, a living embodiment of the most corrosive misogyny one can conjure.

My third grader learned a lesson on Election Day, a lesson that all women learn as children: Her life does not matter to the people of the United States. What other takeaway could there be?

Today marks the end of the postwar liberal world order we have known for 70-some years. That might go without saying, but it's a landmark day that was coming one way or another. World orders don't last forever. Alliances come and go, they form and fall to pieces, sometimes in a few years, sometimes over generations, sometimes for hundreds of years. It was a question that festered in the back of my mind over the past month: Even if Kamala Harris were to somehow keep this order going for another four or eight years, then what? Ascendant fascism was always going to overwhelm the postwar order. It had disintegrate at some point, and it was likely never going to be replaced with something that created an equal level of political and economic stability. This nice little run we've had as a democratic republic is over, even if the right suffers defeats in the coming years. The America in which you grew up is never coming back. It is but a memory. Where we go from here I have no idea, and while I believe a better, more stable order is possible over the (very) long run, it will not resemble what we've known since the middle of the 20th century.

We are now ruled by people who will ally with the men bent on destruction: We will allow Putin to colonize eastern Europe, we will let Benjamin Netanyahu "do what he needs to do" in Gaza, as Trump told him last month. We will free the America-hating insurrectionists who should have spent the rest of their lives in prison. Our most prominent politicians will be, at best, persecuted by a vengeful and corrupt judiciary. The horrors to come have no limit. I suppose I can't even imagine the awful things that will percolate in the minds of the pain-ridden men who will deliver their pain to everyone they hate.

We live under authoritarianism now. There is no question about that. Things might feel normal for a while – and surely right-wing ghouls will gaslight us into oblivion on this front – but norms will start to fall away, slowly at first, then all at once. The Justice Department will be used to go after the nation's most vulnerable people and Trump's many enemies. We might see assassinations and disappearances of prominent regime critiques. Due process will be gone eventually. Businesses and media will bow to our new king and will not challenge him in any meaningful way.

Your kids might come home from school one day and wonder where their classmates had gone and you might know that those classmates had been rounded up by Trump's deportation forces and shipped to a concentration camp in Texas. Your coworkers will just stop showing up to work one day and you'll know where they've been taken, against their will and in total fear and panic. Maybe elections will be delayed or outright canceled. Maybe elections will be rigged the way they are in authoritarian wastelands like Russia and Hungary. Maybe prominent opposition leaders will go to prison under ridiculous pretenses and mysteriously die there, the way they do in dictatorships. Long-dead diseases will re-emerge and perhaps kill scores and scores of Americans across the country as conspiracy theorists take charge of public health and bring the worst of the blackpilled internet to federal policy making.

The world order that emerges from this election will define the rest of our lives. There is no use in denying that, or pretending a Democratic win in our next presidential election, whenever that might be, will reverse the coming changes between nations and leaders. There's no going back now. The only way out is through, and I'm afraid – and so terribly sure – that path will require much pain and sacrifice. Going through the darkness will be nightmarish in ways we can't even imagine right now. But we must, because what is the point of all this if we cede to evil men? This is going to get much worse before it gets better, unbearably so.

One morning last week my son left the house for the school bus in a bit of a huff. I had raised my voice about him losing his school laptop and he wanted none of it, so he stormed out of the house and toward the bus. I was highly agitated, could barely focus on my work, when I got a text from my son.

"Look outside, behind the house," he said. I got up and walked to our sunroom door overlooking our backyard.

Another text: "Look at the sunrise. It's beautiful."

All my anger and annoyance washed away in an instant. I watched the sun peak over the horizon, as my son watched the sun peak over the horizon at his bus stop, and I remembered that the little shit doesn't matter. There is something more, something greater than our thoughts and fears and petty differences and massive fucking egos. We are not everything. We are part of a whole, and you don't have to be religious or even spiritual to grasp this. The sun on that morning was bigger than the aggravation I felt, bigger than the hurt of the nasty words my son had said to me before he left for school. The light enveloped me in that moment, and I was grateful.

The sun inched up over the trees in our backyard and I texted my son: "I love you."

"Love you too dad," he said.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social