According to a new poll, Americans think our best days are ahead. I've been saying that!
According to a new poll, Americans think our best days are ahead. I've been saying that!
USA! USA!
How was your Labor Day? Did you labor? I hope not. Labor Day is the opposite day of federal holidays. One does not do labor on Labor Day unless labor must be done, which would be unfortunate.
Do you know what else is sort of an opposite-day holiday for (some neurotic) people? Independence Day.
For most Americans, July 4th is a day of rah-rah American pride, but for a certain strand of self-loathing liberals who are uncomfortable with ever saying anything nice about America, July 4th is a day of constructive criticism for America.
Before the July 4th long weekend at Mother Jones, we would have an editorial meeting and discuss what to schedule for publication and promotion that day. Everyone always had very critical stories about America. Things about “forever wars” and income inequality. These were often pegged to July 4th only in the loosest sense. The opening line would be something like, “This Independence Day, let’s all remember how far we still have to go” or whatever. Sad sack “please don’t ever be happy” stuff.
No one ever read these stories because 1) the number of people reading the news on a holiday is significantly lower than on most days, and more importantly, 2) the number of people who want that counterprogramming is very low.
One year, I decided to do the exact opposite and had us publish a story with the headline “WE LOVE AMERICA, AND YOU SHOULD, TOO.”
This was a mighty win for liberal patriotism, considering it is just anathema to the Mother Jones tradition, summed up by my colleague in the piece as “America: It’s Far Worse Than You Think ” or “America: Get Out. Seriously, Get Out While You Can.”
JW: So the idea is we’re chatting about what makes this holiday so great for Americans and America and by extension the world, because for Americans: America is the world. It’s a bit off-brand for Mother Jones, no?
BD: You could say that, yes. We don’t have a lot of stories called “America Is Great.”
JW: It’s usually: “America: It’s Far Worse Than You Think ” or “America: Get Out. Seriously, Get Out While You Can.”
BD: But you can’t be critical all of the time or you’ll have an aneurysm. So let’s talk about the truth of the thing, which is that we actually love America! We’re harsh and critical about it, but that’s because we love it so much. We wouldn’t bother writing these stories that urge it to be better if we didn’t have some deep-abiding love for it.
JW: I mean, I love America more than is reasonable, because I left a sun-soaked beach paradise with universal health coverage and a social safety net to move to this rat-infested fuckshow called New York City. But anyway, I’m going to start with a simple question. What is your favorite thing about America? FIRST THING that comes to your mind.
BD: Blue jeans. I think blue jeans are amazing. I also love Hollywood and rock & roll. Blue jeans and Hollywood and rock & roll won the cold war.
You can read the whole thing here, if you want, but you don’t have to. It was our most successful July 4th story ever. We didn’t get a lot of whiny how dare you email, but we did get some. I remember some tweets about how terrible and stupid I was. C’est la vie.
Labor Day is not nominally about just celebrating how great America. It’s about celebrating the contributions of the American worker and the labor movement. But I don’t have many thoughts on that one at the moment, and, in practice, Labor Day is about the end of summer, putting away all your white clothes and toasting America.
And by gosh, what a time it is for toasting America!
Americans are pulling the guns out of their mouths
For years and years, the number of Americans telling pollsters that America is “on the wrong track” has been increasing. This is mostly commensurate with the general rise in political polarization. But at the moment, the polls are spookily optimistic! Democrats now—by a wide margin—think our best days are ahead! Republicans also think our best days are ahead but by a smaller margin.
All of this is very silly indeed. Not because our best days aren’t ahead—they surely are—but because people are addicted to thinking one election will be the difference between Heaven and Hell. Our best days are ahead, which will be true no matter who wins in November. (I’m not saying elections don’t matter—stop shouting at me—but that we aren’t suddenly going to be cast down for all eternity into The Bad Place™ just because the other half of the country gets their favored candidate in the White House for four years.)
It does make me smile, though, to see the uptick in red, white, and blue optimism. America is number 1!
A few days ago, a friend of mine told me that a friend of theirs was moving across the globe this month. I asked her why. “Trump.”
I didn’t think they were serious and they protested they were very serious so maybe they were a little serious, but this was, of course, secondhand information, still, it is the closest I have ever come to learning about an actual flesh and blood human doing the thing partisans threaten to do every four years. This one is especially funny, though, since the person is moving in September, and, you know, he might not even win. You’d have to feel very silly if, come election night, you found yourself sitting in a sparsely furnished apartment in Reykjavík watching CNN International call Pennsylvania for Kamala. And you should feel silly in that situation even if they called it for Trump.
One razor-close election does not make or break a country.
Trump loves to say that “you are not going to have a country” if he doesn’t win, but he’s an idiot.
The Democrats have too often veered into this lane over the last 8 years or so.
It’s not that I disagree with my fellow liberals that Trump is a threat to “Democratic norms” or that I think everything will be fine if he makes it back into the White House—i do disagree with the extremist version of this argument which is that he would somehow run for a third term—but the “threat to Democracy” messaging is. It isn’t even effective. As I have observed before, after 8 years of “Democracy Dies In Darkness,” polls show that people trust Trump more than Biden to prote Democracy. (They trust Kamala more than Trump, even though she doesn’t talk about it as much, which should tell you something.)
Ever since the switcheroo, Kamala and Kompany have been pretty good about not falling back on this Democracy stuff. Some people who should be ignored think that is bad. I think that’s smart from an electoral perspective, but I think it’s good for another reason.
Catastrophizing harms the catastrophizer
This election is going to be close. Let’s just say it’s a coin flip. If Trump wins, Democrats will have to wake up in the morning and go to work and raise their kids and live their lives and find constructive political behavior. They will not be able to walk into the sea. If they have been told that this is it, and the is becomes a was, because the thing that must not happen has in fact happened, they will be the victims of that despair. Not Republicans.
Democrats will have their well-being disturbed, and their serenity upended. They will gain weight and lose hair. They will estrange themselves from that which is healthy. And they will get nothing in return for it. It won’t make them more or less able to obstruct Trump’s plans. It won’t make them more or less able to win the midterms in 2026. All it will do is make them more neurotic and more crazy and more stressed out and more sad and more dysfunctional.
But, Ben, Trump tells his voters that the world will end if Kamala wins!
Right, but that’s bad. It has made the GOP way dysfunctional. And it has made lots of his supporters weird. If the coin comes up heads and Kamala wins, a lot of Trump supporters are going to inflict on themselves the exact inane, self-defeating thing I want Democrats to avoid. I would like Republicans to avoid it too, but I think they’re further gone at the moment since Democrats are actually in power. (In 2017-2020, the situation was flipped.)
It’s an irony of electoral politics that so much of it requires politicians to tax their own voters. Take fundraising emails, for example. I can’t open my inbox without 1500 emails from random Democrats in states I do not reside saying they’re basically going to slash their wrists unless I give them $25. Many of them will lose no matter what I or anyone else do. However, there is a small money arms race between the two parties, which requires wringing every last drop from their supporters’ pocketbooks. And then the election ends, the Democrat running for governor in Montana loses by 15%, the political consultants and direct mail people all cash their checks and move on, and the nice, well-intentioned grandmother in Costa Mesa who gullibly gave money begins receiving new emails.
And that happens with emotions, too. The parties ask you to panic because your bliss is on the line. If the other party wins, you will be dispossessed of your contentment. You may soon be miserable! And then that anxiety makes you miserable in the now and potentially distraught in the future.
Not here at the Calm Down substack, where our mottos are “take a pill” and “it’s not like the Japanese are marching you out of Bataan.”
“We few, we happy few”
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