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I’m so tired.

I’m not even angry. I’m tired.

I look at what happened, I want to find solace in something. I want it to be not my problem. That’s happening over there. Its not here. There are a lot of worse leaders in the world. Probably.

But that’s the thing about that fucking country. You can’t ignore it. Its hegemony makes it necessary to care.

2016 felt different. Maybe I was naive. But his rhetoric was definitely less fascist. There was an uncertainty, it came as a surprise to everyone. They were disorganised. But they won’t let that happen again.

I’m not going to deal with the concrete. There are many people better placed to tell you what it means for marginalised people. What it means for Gaza. What is means for immigrants. What it means for trans people. It’s not going to be good.

I wonder what the future holds. I wonder how far he will go. The 22nd amendment is his first barrier. It’d be pretty hard to repeal through normal processes. There will be a way around it. I imagine you can just ignore it. Run again despite it. What happens if he runs again and is elected again? Well you get a constitutional crisis. That probably works in his favour. If the constitution says the person who won the election can’t be president, then just ignore the constitution. Its only a old bit of paper anyway.

I do think there will be another election. But I’d be very surprised if the democrats win. He’ll put his fingers so hard on the scale that it goes one way. It depends on how strong the individual states are, but I’d not be confident. The one thing going for is that all the rust belt states have democratic governors for now. He’s already laid all the groundwork with his electoral fraud allegations. Stop the steal and all that. He just needs to set up some election integrity task force. Then its pretty easy to suppress votes. Obviously the constitution gets in the way again, so it’ll go to the court. Maybe the court rejects it, but its a coin flip. If they do, pack it and try again.

Everyone is looking for someone to blame. The first instinct for many is the Democrats. Or Kamala. From my perspective, I don’t think they did much wrong in the campaign. Biden had fucked it, they got rid of him. They replaced him with the only viable option. And for what its worth, Kamala is quite likeable. She’s was a solid candidate. Much better than Hilary. And I think she ran a much better campaign. But I’m watching it from a distance.

Obviously, people on the left will say she was too right wing. I’d definitely have liked her to go further. But I think she did a good job of balancing a broad coalition. I know people will criticise her on Gaza. And from a moral perspective, fair enough. But I can’t see what else a mainstream democratic candidate would have done. Bernie isn’t much different.

I think the democrats have had a tough few years. Bidenomics is exciting. And he did all that without ever really controlling congress. Fucking Joe Manchin. The inflation reduction act is the most exciting pro-climate legislation any major country has passed. And it was way better than you could have expected. They should have came down tougher on Trump. If I was Biden, my primary goal after January 6th would be to make sure Trump could never run for presidency again. But this is the problem with the democrats particularly strain of liberalism. They think the marketplace of ideas will decide. Well it did.

Outside of that, and maybe some anti-voter suppression work, I don’t know what they could have done. DC/Puerto Rican statehood was never a possiblility with the realities of power. Neither was meaningful healthcare reform. That’s the insanity of the US system. The fact that the Head of Government doesn’t even have to notionally control the legislature. Yeah, parliamentary systems can have weak weak coalitions that can barely do anything, but that seems to be the norm for congress. Midterms are a terrible idea, it basically ensures that the last two years of the presidents four are going to be deadlocked. And don’t get me started on the senate. It’s been functional maybe 45 out of the last 200 years, and the majority of the time its been functional it just came up with various compromises to keep slavery for a bit longer.

That’s not to say its not the democrats fault. It is, but not recent democrats. I would probably say it started with Newt Gingrich. Reaganomics never really worked, and the right hasn’t had an idea since. Then, as get people excited about more tax breaks to big business, then you have to get them fired up about something else. Immigrants, terrorists, whatever else. General culture war stuff. But you can never win the war, because then voters will go back to being unenthused about tax cuts. So you have to up the ante. Do this for 30 years, and you end up with Trump.

Add to this the social internet. Make it possible to become rich, successful and famous in a small niche. Tune the algorithms to prioritise engagement. Soon you have yoga teachers spouting blood libel. Quickly, you can turn sceptics into conspiratorialists. Add to that the crank realignment, which is a whole other topic, and quite soon you have a divided society that sets the perfect conditions for Trump.

I don’t really know what I’m saying. But I think I needed to say it. Things are going to get a lot worse.

I’m so tired.