A Dyke A Broad, #5
Preventing Trump 2.0, plus... what lesbians do in bed.
I’m switching days, so... Happy Tuesday!
We did it. We won. Because it’s 2020, the year of pandemics, fires, armed militias, and murder hornets, I was still worried about the vote up until Saturday night when my friend Mathilde sent me the text, “Youpi!” and I knew the networks had finally called it. Trump was done. And we had a VP-elect who was not only competent, but someone I could crush on.
The Girl and I weren’t celebrating alone. Practically every leader in Western Europe instantaneously offered congratulations to Biden and Harris, as if their messages had already been typed out, a finger poised to hit send. Most were some version of, “I look forward to working together with our longtime ally.”
Translation: “About fucking time, Uncle Sam. It’s been awful without you.”
I was happy for a whole night, but crashed the next morning with a voter’s version of post-partum depression. Mood swings, anxiety and tears close to the surface. Yeah, all it takes is a signature to quit putting kids in cages. End forced sterilizations of immigrant women, evict anti-education Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, re-hire actual diplomats instead of grifters, and scientists instead of science-deniers. But…
How long will it last?
This newsletter is not about whether or not Trump will try to stage a coup. (Oh, please god, no.) But …
How do we prevent Trump 2.0 in 2024?
As Zeynep Tufekci wrote in The Atlantic, America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent.
This is not being addressed in our short-sighted analysis. Most Biden voters are still arguing over whether Trump was an aberration in the glorious road of progress, or the logical conclusion of America’s particularly evil white supremacist history. In fact, the truth may be more banal.
Tufekci writes,
From an international perspective…Trump is just one more example of the many populists on the right who have risen to power around the world: Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, my home country. These people win elections but subvert democratic norms: by criminalizing dissent, suppressing or demonizing the media, harassing the opposition, and deploying extra-legal mechanisms whenever possible (Putin’s opponents have a penchant for meeting tragic accidents). Orbán proudly uses the phrase illiberal democracy to describe the populism practiced by these men; Trump has many similarities to them, both rhetorically and policy-wise.
He campaigned like they did, too, railing against the particular form of globalization that dominates this era and brings benefit to many, but disproportionately to the wealthy, leaving behind large numbers of people, especially in wealthier countries. He relied on the traditional herrenvolk idea of ethnonationalist populism: supporting a kind of welfare state, but only for the “right” people rather than the undeserving others (the immigrants, the minorities) who allegedly usurp those benefits. He channeled and fueled the widespread mistrust of many centrist-liberal democratic institutions (the press, most notably) —just like the other populists. And so on.
If we allow ourselves to consider that Trump is not an especially American phenomenon, but an expression of a nearly universal human desire for the straightest, quickest, easiest path to power, then we have to rethink everything.
Racism contributed to Trump’s appeal, and U.S. history was shaped by the enslavement of black people, but it’s also useful to see white supremacy as a version of the larger human tendency everywhere to create excuses to dominate and exploit. Somewhere else it would be religion. Somewhere else, language. Another predictor of Trump voters was misogyny, which likewise, is about controlling our sexed bodies, but also maintaining and enforcing power in general.
If we accept that, and acknowledge that things like racism and misogyny are not just concrete forms of bigotry affecting real life people and having particular histories, but are generic weapons and tools convenient to divide and subjugate us all, perhaps we will begin to see that most of us are in the same leaky, rat-infested boat.
(Don’t worry. This is not an appeal to dole out easy, honeyed sympathy.)
It’s a recommendation to do something much harder. Uglier. E.g., when we look in the mirror, learn to see a little bit of everybody else in our own reflection.
On Facebook, my friend Ri writes:
This is a difficult thing, but: in trying to understand why so many people voted for Trump, we need to look at the discourses that are spreading on the right. They're not, "I'm fine with putting babies in cages so I can be rich" discourses like I think we tend to imagine. They're actually mirror images of the discourses happening on the left (Democrats are stupid, naive, and corrupt and don't believe in truth or justice). The values that are being expressed to mobilize voters are in many ways the same values that Democrats espouse. Presumably this is a disinformation campaign of massive proportions, but it's going to be much harder to uproot than we imagine considering that it is actually appealing to people's better natures, not their selfishness.
My pal, Beryl, defending the polls in Detroit told me about a conversation she’d had with a couple of Trumpists who showed up at a vote counting place ready to do battle for democracy, whipped up by the right-wing propaganda machine.
They said something along the lines of, “We have to get in. Democrats are destroying ballots. Democrats are stealing the election. Biden is a Communist. Communists were horrible.”
She responded, “I’ve been inside and hadn’t seen that.” And “I think that would be really hard because there were actually a lot of Republican vote monitors inside. And no, Biden’s not a communist. That’s not what I heard. And yes. Communists don’t have a great history.” They were surprised that she agreed.
Then she flipped the conversation with these two anxious, angry women by saying, “I can tell you care. That’s why you’re here. I admire your passion.” She wasn’t just trying to defuse the situation. They were there to defend democracy (at least in part). Just like her.
I’m writing a lot these days about misogyny and the abuse of women. On Facebook several months ago a relative posted in disgust that Biden was a rapist and monster, and like Hillary Clinton, participated in the trafficking of children. How could anyone vote for him?
If that’s what you truly believe, you can’t.
I often write about the temptation of hate and anger, which truly are delicious. But what if blind love and blind goodness are just as bad?
Our problem is not just a question of different politics, but different realities. We’re not shouting across the gap in a sidewalk, but a whole galaxy.
The only way to bridge it is to assume, like my pals, that Trump voters are not monsters. History tells us that given the right circumstances, any of us will believe anything. Do or say anything. Find ourselves standing in someone else’s shoes, or even stealing their shoes.
You think only certain Americans are whack? Two months ago a female gynecologist here in supposedly rational France told me that Covid wasn’t dangerous anymore and the government was just fucking with us. A few months before that, the male family doctor downstairs called me a despicable, hysterical, germaphobe for raising questions about how he used the hallway as a waiting room for his sweating, coughing patients.
Now we’re back in lockdown and the hospitals are almost full. Because apparently the whole country agrees I’m a hysterical, government-loving monster of a stooge. Yes, I’m the crazy one.
I always get punked by France. Imagining it the land of the Enlightenment and Descartes and Reason. Forgetting how it also nurtured dada—which I love— and the surrealists. People as likely to burn a car as write a carefully reasoned essay. That’s life. That’s the world in a nutshell.
If America is going “to heal,” as Biden wants, and prevent another Donald Trump, we’re going to have to start by one incredibly radical act—admitting that none of us is as bad—or as good, or reasonable—as we think. And no country, no person is immune to the temptations of power and lies, or love or hate, or just wishful thinking.
Well, those are my big thoughts so far this week. Now I’m going to do something useful, and finish up proofreading a new version of the Lesbian Avenger Handbook, which will be appearing any time now, along with another tee-shirt sale.
If you know somebody that will be interested, encourage them to subscribe because I’ll def announce it here.
What Lesbians Do in Bed #1
Yeah, that’s right. Among other things—we read! And I don’t care who knows it.
Drop me a line if you want to share your own anti-erotic photo.
Still more or less disgruntled, still yours,
Kelly van Nogswell
Nice to see your happy face.