The Witness Chronicles, 12/2/24

Reassessing everything

The Great Disappointment or the Great Underestimation?

Or maybe just a moment in time that will pass

After the election, though I was never sure of the outcome, there have been many mixed emotions and angry reactions, but ultimately they don’t matter. At least that is my gut feeling at this moment in time. We watch the unfolding of arrogance and pride and bottomless anger and we wonder why more people are not feeling distraught.

Oddly enough, I do not feel distraught because I can’t see the point of it. We’re watching history unfold but any historian will tell you we cannot understand it in context until time and events provide a longer range view that is not clear right now.

Meanwhile life does its thing as it always does. Winter is at our doorstep here in the northeast with lake effect snows boiling up and a deep chill on the way. But the winter solstice is only weeks away and the days will start their infinitesimal lengthening, as always.

For me there has been an unexpected positive result of the election, the immediate lack of interest in the news I have been so compulsively following going back the uncertainty of 2020 with the pandemic, the election, and its aftermath. I simply no longer saw the point in the constant speculation about the future.

The positive result has been regaining time to read books, time that had been replaced by endless doom scrolling. I was once a voracious reader, most writers are, but found myself unable to concentrate on long form writing when there was a constant temptation to distract myself with the news. You know, the important stuff, or so you think.

Then the shock of finally understanding that my focus was not shared by many, if not most, of the people around me. People seemed vaguely aware of the news though there was surprise and then resignation about the election results. But no outrage. This was likely because I live in a very liberal city in a liberal part of the country, though drive a few miles out of town in any direction and that shifts.

Now, with a few weeks perspective it all seems kind of obvious and almost inevitable, almost. As a political writer, among other topics, I was faced with a void. I could either rage against the injustice of it all or throw blame wherever I thought I saw it, both actions that were easy to discard as options. The only attractive option was to look forward and speculate about how many of the Trump team’s plans could ultimately backfire on them.

But to do so as an optimist because that’s my nature, despite the enormity of some of these actions and events. I’m not going to stop this writing but I’m hoping to be a little less righteous in my outrage because righteousness can be very unattractive. There’s a lot of it going on in the Trump campaign right now.

We’ll see how that works out for them. I suspect it won’t but I don’t know and it doesn’t matter right now.

What matters may be the little things, at least for a while. Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday and mine was very pleasant. My small family are all talkers and we talked up a storm about anything and everything, though strangely not much about politics.

A few weeks ago it would have been the opposite but I have to admit I’m glad we were not having those conversations. And I know I am far from alone in feeling that. For now I’m enjoying the lull in the storm.

Trump is incapable of acknowledging how thin his power base is right now. That’s why they trumpet the notion that they have a mandate, a go ahead from the majority of the people for their extreme agenda. But to some degree he is beholden to a few members of his own party in the Congress, particularly the Senate.

The Trump campaign essentially starved the down ticket races, most likely eroding his support among congress members already on the edge about his policies.

His razor thin majorities in both houses are evidence of little mandate and it may very well be that he faces a quiet revolt within his own party, their own form of revenge for his constant bullying. I’ll be watching that. The same with the pronouncements of Musk and Ramaswamy who are likely to find out they have little actual power, and who are likely to wear out their welcome because of their overwhelming arrogance.

The bigger challenge is the so-called low information society that voted Trump in, voters who simply can’t be bothered to care about anything outside of their own lives. They have that right and I understand it, though it’s not in my makeup. The world is so overwhelming that the temptation to simply ignore it is understandable.

Especially because the election takes us straight into the marvelous escapism of the holidays and the celebration of Americans’ delight in stuff. I’m not much of a holiday guy except for the social activities. I don’t really need any more things, but that’s me.

I suspect that mid-January is when politics heat up again as the Trump administration tries to fulfill the many expectations he claimed to do on his first day, a massive list. But those were just bombastic promises to stir people up. His actual record of fixing things is practically non-existent.

I take some comfort in that. Small comfort maybe, that may be the best we can expect right now.

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