This Is America: Turning Slander, Plunder, Sadism Into Honor

Harris supporters react to election results at Howard University.
(Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images)

Abby Zimet
Nov 12, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

Goddamn. This is a gutting one. Amidst our grief and shock at the ascendancy of a racist, vengeful, malevolent sociopath in cognitive decline who "represents everything we should aspire not to be" - but hey at least he's not a black woman - comes the awful realization, after years of telling ourselves as a country we were better than this, that we're not. We are tired, bitter, vanquished. But now that the country has failed us, say sages tougher than us, we cannot fail each other.

It's dumbfounding, of course. With eyes (if not minds) wide open, after years of seeing the cruelty, vulgarity, bullying, incompetence and mean-spirited braggadocio, a majority of the electorate decided to bring him back. There is no ignoring the result, that ghastly map of a blood-red sea with modest, hopeful pockets of blue. He won the Electoral College, the (rare) popular vote by several million, inexplicably more Latinos, Blacks, young people that anyone had envisioned. Despite his long history of carnage and neglect, his insane clown makeup, his terrible campaign of insults, fascism, misogyny, babbling, and Harris' admirable one of real plans, swing state focus, broad coalition from Beyonce to Cheneys - none of it mattered. People just didn't like her laugh. They didn't believe she worked at McDonalds. They thought butter was too expensive. They worried their gymnastic daughter would have to compete against boys - so unfair! And she's a woman of color (who probably slept her way to power), a bridge too far. Better to go with the wolf who straight-up asserts, "I'm going to eat you." Admiring sheep: "He tells it like it is."

"Who Are We?" asks a disconsolate Robert Reich. After years of saying "America is better than Trump, I'm no longer sure," he writes. But the roots of our failures go back far further than his sordid arrival: "This darkness has always been in us." Trump, the ugly consequence of racial, social and economic changes, has given us "an unsparing view of our country in our time" - one that reflects via our politics the deep flaws of our culture, and en route gives us the grotesque likes of Musk, Scott, Cruz, Bannon, Don and RFK Jr., and vomit-inducing headlines like, "J.D. Vance Congratulates Stephen Miller On Appointment to Top White House Job." Yes, it's part of an era of global and American anti-incumbency. Still, George Conway argues, most dispiritingly it's "what Americans chose for themselves," with the only possible saving grace Trump's incompetence. "The system was never perfect," he writes, "but it inched toward its own betterment, albeit in fits and starts. But in the end, the system the Framers set up - and indeed, all constitutional regimes, however well designed - cannot protect a free people from themselves.”

As a grim result, writes Charlie Pierce, the majority of our fellow-citizens (who voted) "will get exactly what they want." They will get attacks on women, trans kids, political dissent, a free press. They'll get a vicious attempt at mass deportation and chaos for millions of families, soaring inflation and national debt, global isolation, sixth-grade invective, 200% tariffs its author will still not understand, violent vengeance against opponents and dreaded "others," pardons for rioters, he end of accountability for felons and, possibly, Social Security. "We have decided that science and learning don’t count as much as misogyny and racism," Pierce adds. "We have traded engaging in the work of self-government for entertaining ourselves with a freak show." And all for a wannabe king who will - irony alert - giddily preside over the 250th anniversary of our toppling of a monarchy. A few years ago, Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover, made a video for a song about the carnage caused by our guns; you can add to guns the symbolic ravages of our racism, imperialism, capitalism and their attendant brutality, and still, This Is America.

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Meanwhile, notes Dem advisor Adam Parkhomenko after Monday's news Trump named Stephen Miller deputy chief of Nazi policy, "All the shit we warned everyone about is coming true, and it has not even been a week." In fact, within 24 hours of the win by a serial rapist and Jeffrey Epstein confidant, women were facing crass hate campaigns. Many echo the venom of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who sneered, "Your body, my choice. Forever." Or thug Jon Miller, who scoffed, “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO, as if you have a say." Outside Texas State University, triumphant MAGA fans toted signs that read, "Homo Sex Is Sin" and "Types of Property: Women, Slaves, Animals, Cars, Land." Trump lawyer Mike Davis, who's proposed throwing journalists in gulags and dragging dead political opponents through the streets, darkly warned New York A.G. Letitia James, who won a $454 million judgment against Trump for fraud, against "daring to continue your lawfare. "Listen here, sweetheart," he snarled. "We're not messing around this time, and we will put your fat ass in prison."

The next obvious targets, perhaps yet more vilely, are people of color, especially young vulnerable ones. In a text campaign and hate crime spewing from some 25 states, Black students from college age to middle school have received messages claiming they'd been chosen as "house slaves" and were due to appear at "plantations." "Greetings, Samuel. You have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation," read one. "Be ready at 12 sharp...Our executive slaves will come get you in a brown van. You are in Plantation Group W." The recipients in at least 10 states and D.C. ranged from students at historically Black colleges to high-schoolers in New York and Massachusetts to middle schoolers in Pennsylvania. “This is mandatory,” the message read. “Sincerely, Trump Administration." Defending their "commonsense mandate for change," Trump officials say they had nothing to do with the racist attack. But the NAACP still called them on it. "The unfortunate reality of electing a President who historically has embraced and at times encouraged hate," they charged, " is unfolding before our eyes."

More well-publicized horrors await. Trump promised a blank check for rounding up millions of immigrants, even U.S.- born children who've never been to the ravaged countries their parents fled. To facilitate this atrocity, he's appointed dead-eyed ghoul, Project 2025 architect and "devil on earth" Tom Homan as Border Czar. "Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?" Homan's asked on 60 Minutes. "Of course there is," he responds with brutal alacrity. "Families can be deported together." A gleeful prison-industrial complex sees the upcoming carnage as "an unprecedented opportunity"; their stocks are soaring in anticipation of at least $400 million in tracking, transporting and detaining millions of new victims, and greedy kingpins like Musk Bezos have joined on bended knee. The rest of us, meanwhile, grieve. Choking back tears, Jimmy Kimmel declared the election "a terrible night" for pretty much everyone, even MAGA fans who don't know it yet: "I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs the guy who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. Who knew?

The night was perhaps most painful for women - "It is an awful thing, how much this country hates women" - especially Black women for whom it "affirmed the worst of what many believed about their country": That America would rather elect a racist, rapist, liar, convicted felon, "the world's worst man," than let a woman lead. Hell, they don't even trust us with our own bodies: "This is, it turns out, who we are." "Our biggest mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do," wrote Rebecca Solnit, "to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it." She cites MAGA's angry masculinity - cue ludicrous Trump-as-Rambo memes - a media that failed to explicate the climate crisis matters more than a trans girl playing softball, and a social media run by rich white men that "arose like a school of sharks" to spread hate and lies. All overseen by Dorothy Thompson's standard Nazi: "He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature...He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man." Whose devastation we now must grapple with, and endure.

We

We are feeling our way through the sadness and horror, seeking a way forward. We are weary, hopeless, soul-scorched. Everything sucks. We need time to process. But not, experts say, too much time. In his book On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder warns of the Russian strategy of “internal emigration," turning away from politics or resistance in powerless despair, leaving the vulnerable among us to suffer first and worst. His mantra: “Do not obey in advance.” Do what heals or feeds you. Consider Raymond Carver's "small good thing," and do it. Here in Maine, we've done a lot of walking and talking with friends in the woods or by the ocean, usually with dogs, who these days, as all days, seem much happier than the rest of us. Community is key; we are going to need each other. Michael Moore just emerged: "Silence. Thinking. Then acting. In that order." From one sage, "Remember that living your life with purpose in a country that wants you to fade away is a radical act." Also, remember that on Nov. 26, the president-elect is due to be sentenced in a New York courtroom on 34 felony counts. What a time to be alive..

"It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” 

– Joseph Heller, Catch-22