Post-Mortem
11.8.2024 / Essay/ Daisy Dale
Amber A’Lee Frost, one of my favorite political writers whose memoir I couldn’t recommend more, gave me a semblance of hope going into 2024 (which maybe isn’t her usual goal with writing). In 2017 she included a brief reflection on Donald Trump’s “muslim ban” in one of her essays, which had a short run thanks to highly effective protests. She highlighted another segment of the protests that wasn’t as publicized, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which came into play by telling all drivers of the union not to pick up any customers at JFK Airport.
Make no mistake, we’re playing with a different set of rules. Republicans who didn’t want to lay a finger on Trump’s first term are now eagerly coalescing with his second administration, and for most any area where Trump was bafflingly incompetent, the Heritage Foundation knows how to maneuver exactly to their liking. I have zero interest in ignoring the bleak, cataclysmic implications of a second term of the conspiracist con man, but I wouldn’t be alive if I didn’t think rebuilding should be sought after.
The Left, which I’m using as an umbrella term in this case, will maintain what power they still have while working from the ground up everywhere else. And that groundwork will require operating in our local communities, from soup kitchens to council meetings. In the soon-to-be future, we’ll be dealing with the 2025 Indiana legislative session, midterms throughout all of 2026, and in Muncie there will always be shit hitting the fan!
What was revealing nationwide was the seemingly widespread class dealignment, a phenomenon which if it was evident back in 2016 was then solidified this week. As of now, we shouldn’t have any affinity for the heads of the Democratic party, but we shouldn’t act as if a party of deregulation, social alienation, privatization, and rugged individualism that is the Republican party gives any solid answer to labor. Roger Overbey, Democratic candidate for County Council-At-Large, held onto that reality without coming off as a carpetbagger like many of us would.
There’s plenty more to be said about Democratic leadership and their failure to bring us back to a reform era such as the New Deal, but the results even raise the question about how political messaging can even work anymore through the internet. The stone cold history of what the party used to be, before Clintonian deregulation in the ’90s, cannot be bothered to be taught if right-wing media can come up with any batshit revisionist theory under the sun. The internet at every turn it’s taken in the last few decades has led to an even more addictive experience that’s giving us shorter and shorter attention spans, and so providing a left-wing framework for understanding politics has become next to impossible. And, as much as this is as big of an “information era” as the creation of the printing press was, absolutely everything is behind a fucking paywall. It’s no wonder that conspiracy theories have hit such levels of popularity when people can’t access information that should be a click away.
We’ll play it by ear, fiercely and without the consultant/punditry class that failed us, but it’s going to take work. There were broader social factors affecting voters, some maybe half-justifiable and some that people like me avoided listening to completely, that need addressed. But even then, an astonishingly high level of xenophobia, racism and sexism that had a larger role than we could ever comprehend. Such problems need to be understood in terms of social and economic class, and we can’t have marginalized groups be perceived as aberrations to the people running our future elections.
I knew even months back that writing a post-election piece would be a messy collage of thoughts, but I at least wish I knew how to end this. I guess, whatever your understanding of politics was going into 2024, be willing to expand it from here. You have every reason to fret, but the repetition of that just isn’t productive. Um… I’ll end with this: America’s a dying empire but Muncie’s pretty cool.