Last night, I drank and ate with a couple of friends who are way, way richer and smarter than me. One of them is a journalist pal. And, on our second bottle of wine, after gabbing about work and partners and their kids, things finally turned to politics because, you know, it fucking well has to. It was prompted by me looking at my phone to see that President Trump had "selected" Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to the Supreme Court. "Of course, it's Kavanaugh," the journalist said. "It was always going to be Kavanaugh. That fucker is in Trump's pocket."
Then the journalist stated, simply, "This country is done. We're finished. It ended the night Trump was elected."
Because I try to fight off that kind of nihilism, I argued that the midterms were our last hope. They're at least my last hope. I've been pretty clear that I'll be looking for an exit strategy from the United States if Democrats don't win back at least one chamber of Congress. "Fuck that," the journalist said. "Democrats aren't going to win the Senate. They're not going to win the House. The country is too far gone. Trump is going to win a second term. We're going to bail on NATO. They're gonna crack down on free speech."
Bob Dylan's "Everything Is Broken" has been playing in my head a lot lately, and it did then.
The journalist is one of a couple of friends of mine who have relatives who were targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted. They see echoes of that terrible era now. His mother told the journalist, "I'm sorry that you've had to see this happen. I was hoping you'd live your life without the nation going mad."
I want Democrats to feel despair. I want us to be panicked. I want us to be shitting ourselves from now until November, hoping we're able to change things.
The journalist says he will vote, but he recognizes his helplessness. "There's nothing we can do," he said. "There's no book we can write, no report we can make, nothing, that will change any of this." We bemoaned how the MAGA crowd is impervious to facts, as if those were just for libtards to comfort themselves with, not the foundation of any rational argument. We are fighting not just a cult, as many like to say, but a form of mass hysteria.
