by Laurie Penny
AND NOW WE GET SERIOUS
9 November 2016
The writing was on the wall, for those who knew how to read it. Specifically, it was on the wall of a black church in Mississippi, which was set on fire last week and spray painted with the words ‘Vote Trump’. It was plastered across the rolling news when voters were shot down outside a polling booth in California last night. The democratic sentiment in the United States has been tortured and twisted into a dark, violent thing. That does not make it undemocratic. It also doesn’t make it just or fair. Donald Trump has short-conned his way into the White House by saying what a lot of people were thinking. The people have spoken. That does not mean all the other people have to shut up.
Even on a clear day when a giant evil baby isn’t trashing the system because he saw a shiny desk he wanted, representative democracy doesn’t always deliver fairness and justice and a decent society. That takes a different sort of democratic work, work that does not begin and end at the ballot box, work that will resume right after we relearn how to look our friends and neighbours in the eye.
Today, all over America, black, brown and Muslim children are too frightened to go to school. Facts and figures may not win votes the way feelings do, but today’s polls tell us that this election was not just about class, gender or partisan positioning. This election was, more than anything, about race. It was about white resentment, which is now among the greatest threats to global security. It was about white rage, and there are a lot of us who need to own that inconvenient truth today lest it own us all tomorrow.
When they told liberals and journalists and policymakers, and anyone with the cheek to suggest that maybe immigrants weren’t the problem, that we weren’t listening to ‘ordinary people’, they meant we weren’t listening to white people. When they told us we didn’t pay enough attention to ‘real Americans’, they meant to white Americans. When they told us that we didn’t take their concerns seriously, they meant that we didn’t agree with them. ‘White working-class’ voters have been given plenty of airtime in this election, just as they were in the EU Referendum, including in the mainstream press that they claim to despise, because sober facts don’t sell advertisements like a mean-drunk playing with matches next to an arsenal of incoherent rage.
The time for complacency is long gone. So too is the time for bowing to the hurt feelings of those who were willing to fire at the elite directly through the stomachs of their neighbours. Every effort has been made to sympathise with their distress at a perceived loss of privilege that is felt, wrongly, as prejudice. The media on both sides of the pond has fallen over itself to consider whether the boiling bigotry on display might somehow conceal ‘legitimate concerns’. Somehow, the concerns of working-class people are only considered legitimate when they reflect a reactionary strain that does not threaten vested interests. Somehow, the concerns of working-class women who want basic reproductive rights, the concerns of working-class people of colour who want the police to stop shooting them with impunity, the concerns of working-class trans people who don’t want to be beaten up in public toilets, have been landscaped into the territory of the ‘liberal elite’. That rubbish needs to stop right now. If you’re angry and upset, that does not make you out of touch. If you suspect that a great wrong has been done today, that does not make you a bourgeois shill. It makes you sensible.
Today, hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world have woken up afraid – for themselves, for their children, for the future of a planet where an authoritarian psychopath has his hands on the nuclear codes and the fate of a burning world waiting on his pleasure. Those people are being told that they are sore losers. That they should shut up and accept it. That their fear is somehow funny. Laughing at the pain of the most vulnerable. Squealing with glee when the bully lands a blow. That’s the world millions of notionally decent human beings voted for, and don’t tell me for a second they didn’t know what they were choosing.
The president-elect told us who he was right from the get-go. If the lacquered, lying sack of personality disorders that is Donald Trump has any redeeming feature, that is it. He made no attempt to hide his narcissism, his hard-on for dictators, his vision of the entire damn world as the next acquisition in his dodgy property portfolio. During the campaign he was openly racist, sexist, xenophobic and openly willing to become more so as long as it played well with the crabbed, frightened part of his base that just wants to know someone else is hurting worse. He has vowed to jail his political and personal opponents, destroy freedom of the press, deport Muslims and give his donors free rein to frack as they please so he can carry on gaslighting the world. This is the man America elected. This, today, is what Democracy looks like. If you’re disgusted, that doesn’t mean you hate freedom.
It is not elitist to look fascism in the face and reject it. It is not anti-democratic to carry on believing in a society where there is space for everyone. Fighting for tolerance, justice and dignity for women, queer people and people of colour is not frivolous or vain. Who decided that it was? Who decided that only those who place fear over faith in their fellow human beings are real, legitimate citizens whose voices matter? That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know. Give me names.
This election was phrased as a populist revolt against a nebulous and nefarious ‘elite’ which somehow also included the parts of society that have had the least for the longest. Resentment against the political class is real, and it was fatally underestimated by those within the Democratic machine who were determined to have their anointed successor at any cost. It was decreed that the only alternative to naked screaming fascism was the status quo. Despite her gender, Hillary Clinton was the status quo candidate, the legacy candidate, the dynasty candidate. She also looks like what she is – a woman in politics – and that enraged as many people as it inspired.
It is hard enough to tell an exciting story about the status quo at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. These are anxious, febrile times where millions see their future closing down around them like a great dark mouth. The status quo is a roll-call of vacillating neoliberal technocrats who are unable to offer any alternative to kamikaze capitalism and its discontents. It was hard to cheer unequivocally for Clinton, just as it was hard for conscientious British progressives to bang the drum for the European Union. But the actual elite – the people with real money and power – are not the ones struggling to retain their breakfasts today.
I happen to be in a conference room with a few hundred of them right now, at a tech convention bustling with lobbyists, businessmen and venture capitalists. I’m looking around me, and they’re still making deals over finger-food. If they’ve been vanquished, they don’t seem to have caught on just yet. The elites are going to be fine.
America has always transposed its class tensions into cultural violence, and that, more than anything, is how racism and xenophobia serve the same ‘corrupt elite’ that Trump voters claim today to have trampled. Donald Trump is still a reality TV star, and he knew just how to rig the glittering gameshow of American realpolitik to his advantage, and now we all get to see what we’ve won. Let me give you a clue: it isn’t money.
It is no longer accurate to speak of dog-whistle racism. The whistle is now audible to everyone, and it’s a screaming air-raid siren, and there aren’t enough shelters to run to. A number of people have taken the time to let me know, on this day of all days, that despite voting for the preferred candidate of every neo-fascist with a network connection, despite voting for a man who has whipped up a wave of racial hatred and surfed it all the way to the White House, they do not feel that they are racist, and would prefer that nobody said so. They didn’t put it delicately, and nor will I; I am done caring what the people prefer.
I am done listening to my liberal friends contort themselves to take into account the notional opinions of the ‘white working class’. What does that even mean? How did we come to the craven consensus that the ‘white working class�
�� is a homogenous mass of blustering bigots who must be pandered to as one might pander to a toddler having a tantrum at the edge of a cliff? A great many white people who are far from wealthy take issue with that particular patronising strain of self-scourgery on the left. They manage not to blame all their problems on feminazis, immigrants and their black and brown neighbours. Those people are real Americans, too.
So, no more of this nonsense. I’m done. I am done pretending that the good intentions of white patriarchy are more important than the consequences enacted on the bodies of others. Good intentions aren’t the issue here. Feel free to be as racist as you like in the privacy of your own heart, if you can live with yourself, but not – and this is very important – in the privacy of your own house.
I understand that a great many people are aggrieved that women, migrants and people of colour no longer seem to know their proper place. I understand that a great many otherwise decent humans believe that more rights for black, brown and female people mean fewer rights for ‘ordinary people’, by which they mean white people. But just because you’re angry doesn’t mean you’re right. Just because you feel bad doesn’t mean you are allowed to break things to make yourself feel better. It’s okay to be annoyed that you didn’t get a seat on the bus. What’s not okay is to lash out, trash the seats, smash the windows, snatch the wheel and steer the whole damn bus off a bridge along with yourself and everyone you know.
Because let’s be very clear: this was a revolt by white Americans and their allies, but it is not going to be a victory for most of them. In the extended chuckle of smuggery that passed for an acceptance speech, Trump promised his supporters that all of them would get the chance to realise their dreams, even and especially the weird angry horny dreams that don’t make sense when you explain them. He promised to double growth, even as stock markets tumbled around the world. Those promises will not be delivered upon. The moment when that becomes clear is not the moment when Trump and his followers get humble. It’s the moment when people start looking for scapegoats.
It’s also the moment when we get serious. The rest of us, I mean. Because there are a lot of us, and we’re ‘the people’, too. Now is when we get serious. Not right now, obviously. Speaking personally, the end of this chapter is all that stands between me and the bottle of vodka in my immediate future, but that is not a sound long-term strategy for dealing with the days ahead. Now is when we get together and get to work, because the bullies have been given a licence to act, and that cannot go unanswered. I understand if you want to shout at a few friends right now. I know I do, although I haven’t yet. But be ready to reach out to them tomorrow, because the fight against despair continues, and alliances matter, and so does basic self-care. We need to be serious. I need to be serious, and I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry that the time for witty barbs about the president-elect, his hands, his hair and the howling ideological void of opportunistic narcissism behind his megalomaniac clown-mask is over, because inappropriate as those witty barbs are right now, they will probably be actively illegal before long. Now, we need to be serious. Some of us worked very hard to turn this ship around. Now we need to work even harder to stop it sinking.
I’m not going to give you any fluff about hope at this point in history. Hope is possible, and necessary, and remarkably tenacious, but in the meantime there is always spite. We can carry on living, carry on looking after one another, carry on working towards a world beyond this burning pile of rubbish to spite those who want to see everyone who looks and thinks differently from them cowed and silent. We can carry on to spite them, and in spite of them.
The bullies have won today. They will not win for ever, unless we let them into our hearts and souls as well as the seat of government of the nominally free world, and that is something I am not prepared to countenance. ‘The people’ have spoken. ‘The people’ will continue to speak. But if freedom means a thing any more, the other people – all of the other people, all those inconvenient millions of us all over America and all over the world – cannot and will not be silent.
AGAINST BARGAINING
Late November 2016
What does it mean to be mentally healthy in a world gone mad? Sirens are blaring, lights are flashing, and we have been whisked out of the territory of metaphor on to the hard ground of fact. The rise to power and election of Donald J. Trump is the sick recrimination of a society shrivelled by anger and anxiety, and the response from deep within the psyche of the same society has been various degrees of panic, depression and grief. Illinois suicide hotlines have been overwhelmed since the election, with calls up 200 per cent, according to Chicago public health officials. A mental health asteroid has smashed into the carapace of a culture already calcified with anxiety and ambient dread. Major newsrooms are rumoured to have hired in therapists so their journalists can continue to work. Everyone is wondering what this crisis will mean for their future, for their families, trying to work out how they’ll cope. Some coping strategies, however, are more dangerous than others.
The first time I suspected that Donald Trump might become president, I was at the back of the convention hall in Cleveland, watching the reality TV tycoon accept the nomination at the climax of a shindig that was somewhere between the Eurovision Song Contest and the Nuremberg Rally. I listened to the delegates in front of me whoop and scream and earnestly debate whether Barack Obama would be among the Muslims forcibly deported from the United States, and I thought to myself: these people love him for all the reasons my people hate him. We’ve underestimated the ignorance, the hate, the showmanship. This guy might win.
I should mention at this point that I have an anxiety disorder. As I staggered out into the soupy Cleveland night, I felt the familiar rats-in-the-belly squirm, the tightness of breath that precedes a full-blown panic attack. And so I did what I have learned to do to manage anxiety. I calmed myself down. I took some deep breaths, had some sugary tea, turned off social media and told myself that I was over-reacting. Millions of Americans couldn’t possibly be that stupid. It would be okay. That was a big mistake. Yuge, as a certain someone would put it. I should have sat with that panic attack. I should have listened to what that legitimate anxiety was trying to tell me. It turns out that you cannot stop fascism by turning off Facebook and doing some deep breathing. All you can do is make yourself feel better, and there are limits to how much better it’s safe to feel right now.
There are none so blind as those who won’t see – specifically, those who have been conditioned through generations of history lessons and Hollywood propaganda to be suspicious of authoritarian strongmen and yet still refuse to recognise an actual fascist when he struts into the White House with a suicide squad of goons. I studied Hitler’s rise to power almost every year at secondary school. You may well have done the same. Thinking back through those textbooks I memorised, though, one question was always glossed over: what was it actually like to be an ordinary German in 1933? What were people feeling, listening to the state wireless whine out the workings of the new world order? How many were pleased to see the blackshirts on their streets – and how many were simply keeping their heads down, telling themselves that they’d been through worse, that they should give the new guys a chance and see if they really meant what they said? How many tried to normalise the utterly unconscionable, because the alternative was despair?
As I write, fascism is being normalised on every uplit screen and white liberals are turning away to gaze pointedly at their own navels. Asking how much of this is our fault is more comfortable than asking what the hell we do now, because it’s a question with an easy answer. ‘All of it was our fault’ is the easy answer. It’s the wrong answer, but it’s the easy answer, because if you can persuade yourself that it’s your fault, that means you still have control.
At times of turmoil, your brain plays tricks on you. Normalisation is not just a thing people do because they secretly like fascism and want it to win. Well, not all of them. Normalisation is also psychic armou
r. It is a way of making the intolerable tolerable. It is a survival strategy, and like many such strategies, it is largely available to those with least to lose. Most black and LGBT Americans, along with anyone else who grew up feeling unsafe in America, moved through the stages of grief for a culture that cared about their lives long ago. For everyone else, the same grief is sore and shocking, and it’s causing some strange behaviour.
The trouble with the five stages of grief is that one of them is bargaining. As a rogue’s gallery of far-right ideologues, white supremacists and howling authoritarian sociopaths line up to take control of the White House, bargaining is what well-meaning liberals have spent all week doing – at least, those who have not already been personally threatened into silence. They’ve hopped from denying a Trump win was possible to telling themselves and each other that maybe it’ll be all right, just as you might soothe a child in a storm shelter. Maybe the federal government will save us, or moderate conservatives, or Jesus. Maybe there’s something reasonable in the rage of disinherited white Americans who rolled Orange Hitler into the Oval Office. Maybe we should have listened to them more, had more empathy, even as Trump voters deny any possibility of empathy for those whose beliefs, nationality or skin colour happens to differ from their own. Maybe we shouldn’t have called their behaviour racist, misogynist, extremist. Maybe it was us, we say, rearranging the traditional post-crisis leftist firing squad into a perfect circle. Maybe we had this coming.
This, of course, is an internalisation of the language of abusers everywhere. Look what you made us do. We wouldn’t have hurt you if you hadn’t provoked us. If you’re quieter, nicer and better behaved from now on we can put this behind us – although we’ll have to punish you first. The people who have taken power in the mightiest nation on earth are native speakers of the language of abuse. They live and breathe the rhetoric of control, of gaslighting, of shame. This is how abuse works: not just overtly, but insidiously. It claims territory in your heart. It colonises your mind until it becomes comfortable. Until it becomes something you can live with, or at least survive.
