The American Nightmare Is A Rerun

The week before the election, for two nights in a row, I dreamt about the moon. The dreams were in sequence: two parts of a single story that were braided together. A single day of my life became the intermission. Everyone thinks their dreams are interesting. We are self-involved creatures, infatuated with the shiny pictures our subconscious makes for us and presents like a movie in the mere seconds before our brains return to the living. But the week before the election, my subconscious gave me something special. 

In the dream, the moon was shrinking. I was staring up at the sky while it swirled around and around, becoming smaller and smaller, orbiting around nothing, counterclockwise in an oval like it was going around a race track. And just when it became too small to really see, it became larger and larger and larger and larger. It was coming toward us, falling, plummeting into the earth’s atmosphere. And then I woke up. The whole next day I read about the moon. I researched what would happen if the moon fell (we would all die). I tried to understand how big the moon actually is (very big). Of course it returned to my dreams the next night. In the sequel, the moon was lost. The moon had plummeted into the Pacific Ocean, and we could not find it. In the dream, I watched videos on my phone, desperate to try and understand what had happened here: videos from the ISS, or of the news, or of crews searching the Pacific. 

I wanted an answer, but there was none to be found. The moon was lost. The news knew nothing. It was not the end of the world, though it might have been. It was the most interesting dream I’ve ever had, and for days I could not stop talking about it. 

In the Jungian tradition, my therapist/analyst asked me many questions about this dream, about what it could mean, about symbolism. The easy answer is that it was an omen, or some kind of fear about the world ending. Maybe the moon was a symbol of some stability rocking, of things we had always known to be true, falling. We are entering the age of Pluto in Aquarius, maybe it had to do with this. It could be about my emotional life, or the stability of my experience in the world. 

But now, a few weeks later, I think maybe my subconscious just really wanted something —anything—that felt novel to happen, because every single day feels like a day I’ve already lived, a movie I’ve watched and not enjoyed, a rewound tape playing a song that I fucking hate. 

I started to feel insane right after Joe Biden stepped down from the presidential campaign. It was a different kind of insanity than the one I had already been living in. It is a waking nightmare to watch a genocide occur, to follow on your iPhone the destruction of a beautiful country and a beautiful people from afar. And for a very brief moment, when Biden announced that he was stepping down, it felt like something might be shifting. 

Part of the dread heading into the 2024 election wasn’t just that it seemed likely that Joe Biden—who had barely spoken to the press in months and seemed to be barely functioning as a person, much less a president—would lose. It felt inevitable that he would lose. And more than that, it felt boring. The fighters in the ring were, yet again, Joe Biden and Donald Trump: a boomer and a member of the silent generation, two vain and ancient men, both of whom felt more like America’s past than America’s present, neither of whom seemed inclined to listen to young voters. Sure, one of them is much worse than the other. I’m not an idiot. I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and I would have held back my own disgust to vote for him again this election to keep Trump out of office. 

But then he stepped down, and for a moment, there was a brief flicker of hope. Sure, the Democrats decided to ignore the concept of a primary in order to (I guess) get a belated start on a presidential campaign that was already behind. Sure, Kamala Harris had been historically bad as a national candidate, but at least she wasn’t dead! That was something, right? In retrospect, it wasn’t really. It was barely anything. A candidate that can live through a campaign cycle is hardly a bar worth celebrating, but there was a moment when it seemed like she might do something more than merely survive until inauguration day. It seemed, for a moment, like the rest of this year wouldn’t just be a replay of the last. 

The true sign of life was the word “weird.” The Democrats began deploying it constantly and effectively. And it worked. J.D. Vance really was weird. Talking about people’s private bodies as a matter of urgent public concern was weird. Being obsessed with uteruses was weird. It felt fresh to hear it called what it so obviously was. The Democrats—this failing, aging party that we have to vote for because the other side is full of fascists—seemed to have learned a new trick! They could simply … tell the truth. Instead of couching everything inside five independent clauses meant to appease some mythical moderate swing voter, they could acknowledge the truth, which is that J.D. Vance, now one unhealthy old man’s heartbeat away from the Oval Office, is in fact incredibly fucking weird. 

Maybe the reason this felt so interesting was that it was in direct opposition to the 2016 Democratic campaign, when Michelle Obama stood on a stage and promised that, “when they go low, we go high,” a mantra so useless and trite that she herself tried to walk it back at the Democratic National Convention this year. This was not that sort of grim and respectable duty; it was, or was reaching for, something almost fun. For a month, Kamala was Brat. She was President Coconut Tree. She was the future. And then she faded quickly into what she was always going to be: the past, or just another custodian of an untenable present. 

A few days after Kamala was announced as the presidential nominee, I asked my editor to let me write about how she had no policies. Harris didn’t, at that point; my editor, wisely, told me to wait, and sure enough she released a plan the next week. And Harris did have policies: to lower the cost of groceries, to help fund elder care, a first-time homebuyer program, a plan aimed at bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. 

But despite what every highly-read political operative will tell you, policies do not matter unless they can be made to matter to voters. This begins with voters knowing what those policies are. While Harris’s policies would have helped millions of Americans, they were not and could not be a rallying cry. They are not succinct; they’re policy, not politics. Joe Biden ran in part on a failed promise: to eradicate student loan debt. It was sexy! It was needed! He failed to follow through on that promise—the plan was thwarted by conservative judges, and Biden was too much of an institutionalist or just too old to push back vigorously against the unelected people stopping him from what he had been elected to do. But at least there had been a big, reaching promise to begin with. The Kamala campaign never had that. The Kamala campaign ran on the past, or against it. “We’re Not Going Back” they said constantly, they encouraged their own already locked-in voters to chant. And then, quickly, they went back, not to the Trump administration, but to 2016. 

CNN reported that Geoff Garin, a 71-year-old Democratic “numbers man,” advised the campaign to lay off the word weird after that giddy early push. Garin was co-strategist of the latter part of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, which you may remember as a losing one. He also advised the Harris campaign to stop focusing on the past. The campaign ignored that bit of good advice, and took the bad bit. They stopped saying “weird,” and started saying “extreme” and “dangerous,” just as Hillary had. Everything since, down to today, has felt like a replay. 

The Democrats ran a historically unpopular middle-aged woman, from the right wing of their party and part of a world-historically unpopular administration, for President of the United States against Donald Trump. They gave her a white running mate from a swing state named Tim, and made him stop saying the stuff that had made him a popular pick for that role. They put her in a pantsuit, sent her on a tour bus, let her make a couple of jokes. A parade of celebrities stood up on the stage with her and promised they would vote for her. The signs came out. The moral superiority reached a fever pitch. 

And the polls were narrowing. At the same time, the confidence reeking from the Democrats was becoming unbearable. Had they not been here in 2016? Did they not remember? Did their bodies not keep the score? Sure, there were people out door knocking. There were people trying to keep Trump from being elected. Normal people. Volunteers. But what had they been given to peddle door to door? Not a promise, but a threat: Elect democrats, or lose democracy. 

It’s familiar, exhausting even, this threat. How many times must I personally vote for someone who does not offer anything besides an alternative to hell, in order to save democracy? This is the third “most important presidential election” of my lifetime. Only once, in 2012, have I gotten to vote against anyone who isn’t Donald Trump. 

But unlike in 2020, this election did really feel inevitable in its result. “A plurality of voters said that regardless of who was elected, the next president would make things worse,” Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The New York Times. “Nearly 80 percent said the presidential campaigns did not make them proud of America.” That’s bleak. It’s dire. There is no hope or change to find there. There are only power-hungry tyrants dying to rule, to give money to the billionaires that give money to them in turn, so that all involved can maintain their own position. 

Throughout the election, I kept remembering a scene in Veep where Selina Meyer pitches a fit about polling numbers being bad. “You know what I would like to tell people, but obviously I can’t? I should be president because it is my goddamn turn! […] America owes me an eight-year stay in the White House, and this time, I want a war.” That’s what it felt like. That’s what it continues to feel like: like the people running for president were running for it because they wanted power, they wanted to command the army and drop bombs, and they wanted everyone to shut up about it.

Elected Democrats, in particular, seem to have wanted this more than they wanted to win the election. An overwhelming 77 percent of Democratic voters support an arms embargo on Israel; 40 percent of Republicans do, too. That is a majority of the American electorate, and still the Democratic party stood firm in its stance, which amounted to sending Joe Biden out there to say the word “ceasefire” and then never actually making any progress toward one.

The Uncommitted National Movement, an anti-war movement that asked American voters to withhold their votes, was 500,000 people strong; they voted in Democratic primaries, but not for Biden, in numbers that were too significant to ignore. The Democrats hated this. They claimed that these voters were putting democracy at risk, a selfishness that made them nearly as bad as the fascists. This is an insane take, especially when you look at what the Uncommitted movement actually requested. They offered to endorse Harris for a single request: a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. They were refused.

The Democratic Party gambled with the future of this country, allowed a man who fomented a coup in response to a fair and free election he insisted had been stolen from him to regain the most powerful position in our government. They did this not just because they didn’t want to stop the genocide they are funding, but because they could not be moved to listen to their constituents. And that has consequences. The Harris campaign lost Michigan, where Rashida Tlaib won down ballot, because those voters were not permitted to speak, and were not listened to. 

There is a tendency amongst pundits and online yappers to blame voters for the loss of a political campaign. But while tens of millions of voters that pulled the lever for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris this year, voters do not run the campaign. The campaign, in this case Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, must win those voters over, and the failure to do so—in some cases, even to try to do so—lost this election. No amount of celebrities on stage could do the persuasive work that the campaign, for whatever reason, simply failed to do. 

“The [Uncommitted] movement also offers a useful retrospective on the race: when the party of the people chooses to remain hostile to Palestinian protests and refuses to show any proportional empathy to Palestinian people, the voters they need will reject them,” Camonghne Felix wrote in the Guardian about the Uncommitted movement. “Anger and disappointment took up the space that hope might have, and was the dominant emotion felt by many in the electorate, due in part to the persistence of uncommitted voters in elevating their voices and pushing others to consider the value of their vote.”

There was a broad drop-off in turnout for Democratic voters, above and beyond anything that could be explained by Uncommitted. But the same principle holds true: It is really hard, at some point, to vote for a party that does not do anything for you. The Democrats asked for a favor, and people simply declined to do it. I live in a swing state (Pennsylvania) and got almost a dozen Kamala Harris door-knockers. By the sixth, I was annoyed, and I asked the poor 20-year-old girl what Kamala could offer me. I wanted to see what the campaign was teaching them to say. She told me about how bad Trump was, which I already knew. 

Certainly, you have always had to be deranged to run for president. But at least in the past our candidates pretended to care about something more than their own station behind the Resolute Desk. Obama ran on change, but not just on changing the face of the man in the White House. It all feels like a long time ago—back when that might have mattered, back when our leaders weren’t signaling, through their abstraction and inaction, that we weren’t already irrevocably and completely fucked. 

Of course Trump won. He was always going to win. People in the country are almost uniformly miserable. If the young white men can’t get jobs or girlfriends or healthcare, imagine how bad it is for everyone else. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys,” a pollster told Semafor in May. “They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

I went to bed a little after 1 a.m. on election night, with the needle pointed toward red, with the people on MSNBC acting shocked and surprised. I didn’t need to see the end. In 2016, I rolled over at 5 a.m., looked at my phone, and saw the TMZ news alert that Donald Trump had been elected president. That’s also what I did, again, two weeks ago. And every day since then has felt the same. 

It’s bleak, sure. People will die because of this. People’s rights will be stripped away because of it. Those are not exaggerations; we have seen this happen before, not very long ago. Electing Donald Trump as president of the United States was supposed to be one of the things we had learned not to do.

But there’s something else creeping underneath the misery and the doom. It all feels so terribly repetitive. For all the dread, it is also so boring. 

The narratives are the same. The same white men who talked about polls in 2016 are still talking about them; the same failures have the same explanations. America has always been run by tyrants, by people who will sacrifice the lives of the many for the benefit of the few. This was the lesson that we went over eight years ago, when Trump was elected the first time. He really did a lot of what he said he would do, people suffered and died, he lost because of it, and then he was re-elected, after promising to do it again.

People are talking about counter-programming, about “self-care” again. Or I guess, we’re calling it “doom-spending” now. On TikTok girls were describing their spending at the Sephora sale “as an anxiety response” to the election. Which we have also seen before. Jessica deFino, in her Substack last week, called out the direct correlation between this push for self-care and the beauty industry. She wrote that over the first year of President Trump’s first term, “skincare became the fastest growing market in beauty, amassing $5.6 billion in sales and totaling 45 percent of the industry’s growth. And over the next eight years, every failure of care by the government created another opportunity for Big Beauty to expand the reach of its narrowing standards, all under the banner of wellness.” 

There was a rumor of a second women’s march, which itself was a rerun of an earlier women’s march. People are threatening to start up resistance book clubs again. This scares me. History is not supposed to repeat itself this quickly, and with so little learning. And while I do really wish she had won, I’m not sure that Kamala Harris becoming president would have cured any of this amnesia, or stopped this downward spiral. 

In early 2022, I wrote about how bad the feeling in this country was, how depressing and frustrating it was that after a pandemic and all its misery, after nation-wide massive protests, the populace of this country were given nothing. That is still true. If you are a policy bro who pays close attention to tiny things, the Biden presidency has been one of the most liberal of our lifetimes; it has done some real good. But if you are a normal person, the vibes are still atrocious, and extending credit for all that laudable stuff feels ridiculous. Everyone feels bad because things are bad. Groceries are expensive. Childcare is expensive. Elder care is expensive. Housing is increasingly out of reach. All of the money seems to be going to 20 extremely annoying men who care about nothing and no one. There are scams and gambling apps but nothing like a New Deal aimed at improving the lives of every American. Everyone seems to feel stuck, and bored, and like nothing at all is changing, because it’s kind of not. 

We are stuck, in more ways than one. “1980 to 1968 is the same distance between now and 2012, when Girls first came out,” Sam Kriss wrote on his Substack. “After all the massive convolutions of the last decade, the riots, the moral panics, the populist insurgencies, the total collapse of the post-Cold War neoliberal order—despite everything, we’ve somehow ended up back exactly where we started.” It’s tempting to blame Hollywood or artists or civilians for this failure to launch. But when you look at how those industries have collapsed—or been gnawed to bits by finance capital, or cannibalized themselves out of spite—over the last decade, it’s clear that this is a structural problem, not an individual problem. Rich people are much richer than they were sixteen years ago, and indeed than they have ever been. Workers have no more protections. And for most of that time, Democrats have been in power. 

At some point, I realized that even if Kamala Harris did win, the Democratic party would not be moving into the future anyway. The war would continue; no one was even saying it would stop. There was only the saccharine cotton candy positivity that I recognized as what Vulture coined Obamacore. The best the Democrats could offer, the most they were willing to offer, it seemed, was 2012. The best the Republicans could offer was 2016. And then we would just do it all again.

What an embarrassment. What a failure. Still, in these days after Donald Trump’s re-election, as he scrambles to boost ever more evil doofuses to positions of power, the Democrats are responding as they had before. They are tsking, and meekly disagreeing (barely) with inhumane and ridiculous policies in their own workplace without really threatening to stop them. It is easier to do this—to wait for the pendulum to swing and the future to come back to you, at some point. They should know that by now that this doesn’t work, that change is something you have to actually work for—something you have to want, and win. You can see the cycle: This inaction makes you wonder how much they want it, which makes it that much harder to believe when they tell you how urgent this all is.

“There are certain Americans who, becalmed by competency, articulate their politics as a search for the grownup in the room,” Lauren Michele Jackson wrote in The New Yorker. “They do so while seemingly unaware of what putting politics in such terms implies about themselves. I fear that their helpless daze will chart a path toward retreating from the shows of grit that were required of us before this election and will now be needed as surely as ever.” 

As I have written before, there is a difference between protest and resistance. To ask for something is not the same thing as to demand it. Part of what is so frustrating, and exhausting, and boring about this re-election is watching the Democrats return to their well-worn groove in response to these familiar events. And because there is no leadership, no rallying of the electorate, nothing being given to fight for, people are tired. There is no march this time. People are sad, but they are not as angry, or just much more exhausted. They’re right to be. 

The second Trump Administration will surely be just as annoying and slapdash and dangerous as the first, and I cannot sit here with my LED light mask on and make fun of cabinet appointments again. I cannot watch 18 effectively identical ghouls shuffle through the press secretary job again. I cannot read the same articles about Ivanka’s involvement, and who is attending the White House Correspondents Dinner, and critique bad newspaper headlines. I cannot do this shit the same way again. And I will not do it while the same Democrats hold the same positions of power they did the last time this happened and refuse to do anything different. 

I am tired of hearing that the other side is worse. They are; I already know this; that is not enough. I am tired of watching the people who are supposed to represent us roll over in front of Republicans every time they have the majority and then hesitate or capitulate when the Republicans refuse to do the same. I want the fucking moon to fall. I want something to change. I want the future to be different than the past, and I want that to start now. 

Instead of licking our wounds, I want an outcry. I want us to believe not only that a better future exists, but that we deserve it and should fight for it, and then I want to do that. I want us to take this massive heaping misery of a country and transform it into something better for everyone.

It is important to remember that the Republicans in power do not hate the Democrats in power. They hate us—the electorate, the people. The policies they are passing are made to hurt us. And if the Democrats we have elected to fight on our behalf won’t do it, they should be relentlessly reminded of what it means to be an elected official, of who exactly they work for and what their job is. And if that means that their positions of power are less enjoyable and more difficult to do, good. They failed to win what they billed as the election that would determine democracy’s fate; they failed, very obviously, to take it nearly as seriously as they encouraged us to do. Every day that they continue to do that, they continue to fail us. It is our job to remind them of that.