Not watching the news as a lifesaving decision

A post-election survival guide

There was an American election. Someone won that election. Someone who we knew had a very good chance of winning and yet somehow we were all surprised. We might have said things like “I’m shocked but not surprised” but in truth we were flabbergasted, appalled, horrified, baffled, stunned, shocked and surprised. I mourned the person I was when I went to bed the night before blithely thinking, “Well, let’s see how it turns out.”

Well, it turned out.

In the immediate aftermath, I decided I was not going to watch Seth Meyers again. Or Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert. Ditto CNN or MSNBC. On YouTube, I hammered the unsubscribe button. No post-mortems: the blame game and post-match analysis… none of it mattered. Someone had won the election: they had won the popular vote and they had won every fifty-percent toss-up state.

It was time to consider several important points.

One. I do not live in the USA. The US election might have an international impact but the US whether run by the Democrats or the Republicans were no longer a force for good in the world. They sided with dictators; their climate change action was piffling and they aided and abetted an ongoing genocide. Ukraine should be supported against Russian aggression but Biden had been so half-hearted that the blood churn was set to continue indefinitely and the gross hypocrisy in the acquiescence to Israel. Shining city on a hill? More like mattress fire in a ditch.

Two. The world is shifting in a far right direction. This was an international movement. In Italy - the Fratelli di Italia, in Hungary - Victor Orban, in India - Modi, in Argentina and Israel, the extreme right had taken power and the opposition was weak and divided. Everyone said versions of “This is not who we are” while showing that this is exactly who we are. Nationalistic, xenophobic, racist, homophobic, reactionaries are making hay. They want to roll back women’s rights and squash the rights of the gay and trans community, while at the same time strip-mining the public finances to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and strip away regulations that protect the vulnerable and treat everyone equably. Despite these policies not being particularly popular we’ve called them populists and given them a huge boost. They’re media campaigns - funded by dark money - thrive on disinformation and division.

Three. The centrists will not hold. Ideas of dialogue and compromise, healing the divide and crossing the aisle: all of these concepts were obsessively followed by the centre-left and the centre and convinced no one. This often meant moving ever rightward to chase the centre and so it meant leaning towards anti-immigration, anti-woke, austerity policies, “all of the above” climate solutions which watered down genuine solutions to attract a right wing that was never going to move. And in the process the centre alienated the young and the radical who had genuine ideas on what to do next.

Four. Institutions are not going to help. The media, the legal system, the system of government have proved feeble. The Far Right are an anti-democratic force. They will use democracy to win power, but they don’t believe in it. To fight them the way you would fight a conventional political party is to be playing Twister at a knife fight. If you go high, when they go low, they’ll slice your belly open.

Capitalism is not your friend. The naivety on display in the reaction to the news that businesses are lining up to donate to the inauguration revealed how lacking we have become in any kind of ideological infrastructure. Ideology has long been a dirty word - which usually means you end up assuming someone else’s. Coca-Cola, Amazon and Meta are built with one purpose and that is to make money. They already exhibit a form of artificial intelligence much more pernicious than anything Chat GTP can come up with. Corporations are now a huge hybrid superhuman mind, devoting millions of hours a day to thinking up ways of making more money and clearing all obstacles in their way to achieving that goal. The billionaires who own them now no long pretend to be apolitical and are showing their hands with their bonkers ideas and hatred of anything that would restrain them.

The center ground that wants to some how appease the extreme right while securing a modicum of human rights is a business-as-usual model in the midst of a burning kitchen. The British Labour Party won their election with a landslide which they have failed to translate into anything like a radical rethink. They want to deport more people to take the wind out of the sails of the Reform Party; continue the dismantling of the welfare state and hope that issues such as trans rights will just go away as a wedge issue and vote loser. When Margaret Thatcher was asked on her biggest achievement, she said, “Tony Blair.” The Far Right have won so much consensus that the parliamentary left is now right wing. John Major would easily fit in as a cabinet minister.

So what to do? On the rare occasion my party won an election, they had become so conservative it tasted like ashes. On the far left, we have iconoclasts and Tankies, people who verge close to a mirror image of the Far Right with conspiracy theories and a monolithic view of the world. There are many activists who can shame me with their bravery and commitment. There are many communities as well who will likewise fight and lose and then fight and win. Things will change, the pendulum will swing - though that makes me think of Edgar Allen Poe and it horrifies me to think about how many lives will be needlessly damaged before the change occurs, how much irreversible damage will be done.

I want to stay in my garden like Candide at the end of Voltaire’s book, just concentrating on getting that little corner of the world to look nice; to feel okay. I’m privileged. I’m a white, heterosexual, cis man, my working class upbringing a nostalgic but long gone memory I can’t honestly trade off. Some people won’t get the option of retreat I’m wishing for, as the hatred pursues them through their workplaces, on the street and through every pocket of their lives. Some people will see themselves degraded and humiliated by the ruling parties who will actively seek to harass them. That won’t be my case.

But watching the news, following the show of the inauguration and the media, the podcasts and the talking points is not political. Arguing on social media is not political. Reading the latest New York Times best seller by Michael Wolff is not political. It is the Netflix and shopping simulacra of politics. It doesn’t matter that the person who won the election has a wife who hates him, bad hair, bad skin, a poor diet, breaks wind, dances poorly, makes gaffes… none of those things is important. Something is deeply wrong with the world that CNN and Seth Myers can’t explain or giggle away.

I’m going to take a deep breath. I’m going to stand back. Read some novels, listen to some music. I’m going to put my thinking cap on and see if I can come up with some ideas, some ways we can address the challenges we face going forward. No one is going to turn up at my house and ask me for the solution to the problems of the world, so I’m not going to stress overly much, but on the off chance they do I’m going to have something to say.