Argumentum ad baculum

See, I fucking told you guys. No way was this going to be easy or restful. I haven't been at ease this entire election season, not because I'm availed of any sort of prescience or political mastery, it's just the evidence before my own stupid eyes. If the argument is "Donald Trump can never be president because of who he is and what he's said" then the obvious counterpoint has to be: this is an election cycle in which Donald Trump was a major party nominee in the first place. To a certain degree, there's a systemic inoculation to his putrescent virulence by exposure to a smaller part of the whole body before introducing it into the blood stream. The GOP primary process was our exposure to the attenuated virus of unveiled racism, sexism, triumphalism and open appeals to violence. These are pestilences endemic to our culture as Americans, in a background* and gene-coded way, as inheritors of both Western thought in general and the specifics of our own peculiar institutions. Unlike most vaccines, this one works in reverse. When left to rampage throughout the entire body, these weaknesses should kill the host. Instead we've just been primed to tolerate the parasite without the promised release of death.

The guy still said "grab them by the pussy," that hasn't stopped being true. And yet if you look at the polling, things are tightening again. The entire arc of the post-primary campaign hasn't been an arc at all, it's been a goddamned oscillating sine wave of Hillary breaking out to an apparently insurmountable lead only to have it largely surmounted. Usually the wild breaks in her favor happen any time the American people have the opportunity to consider the candidates in person at roughly the same time, both after the conventions and after each debate. In all instances, Hillary benefitted hugely from the direct comparison to a sniffling, inarticulate, narcissistic used hotel salesman who thinks things like "reading" and "practice" are for nerds, the kind of pathetic humans who are doomed to spend their whole sex lives with one woman with a B-cup or below.

But then they go back to their campaigns and people... what? Forget? I have no idea. He's either an odious, intellectually incurious troglodyte or he's not. Right?

Well, not really, I don't think. No, he is obviously, but that's not the most important takeaway. I think actually, in a lot of ways, Mitt Romney was right about the numbers. There are about 47% of people who would never consider voting for him no matter the content of his message. Now, what he got wrong was by then going on to describe the people who don't vote for him in condescending and contemptible ways, turning voters off and leading to his inevitable defeat, for which we should all be grateful.

What else he got wrong is that, at this moment in American political history, that 47% number applies to both sides. It doesn't matter what Donald Trump says or how uninspiring you find Hillary Clinton. This election was always going to be close. You can see it in the historically unprecedented disapproval numbers. In a practical sense, nobody really likes either one. But the incentive remains strong to stick with the tribe.** You can see it in the way Paul Ryan and Marc Rubio and Ted Fucking Cruz are still voting for what is essentially a gallon Ziploc bag of room-temperature Sunny Delight. And yes, OK, their particular offers of highly begrudging support are made out of a very special and particular kind of calculation and political cowardice, but I think they're instructive for the nation as a whole: at this point in history, you don't cross the lines and vote for the other team. If you doubt their capacity to put faction (I won't even say "party" because that implies an idealogical underpinning instead of simple reflex tribalism) before country, please see every action of the GOP Congress during the last eight years. That means the whole election comes down to the leftover 6%, or to put it another way, plus or minus 3%. These are the people I call "the margin of error."

I'm doing a lot of talking without much of a point. I've spent most of the past week just trying to make myself feel better, if only so I can maybe get some restful sleep. I'm anxious, but not discouraged. I know my country is complicated and bitter, but not fundamentally self-destructive. But then again, we contain within us those who have the capacity to dislike Beyoncé. Maybe we don't deserve to survive.

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*Not "background" as in "gosh, racism or sexism have never really manifested before" but as in "it's not a question of if, it's a question of how much."

**Sorry, Cleveland Indians fans, I'm not referring to you or your team here. I know it's been a rough couple of days. Chin up. Also your mascot is racist.