Election Interference

Well, the world looks very different this Thursday, two days after the Marxist Dawn that was Election Day 2025. Wait, or maybe it wasn't an overture to the next act of American life opening into a dystopian hellscape of free public transit and law enforcement accountability, maybe it just went exactly like we all thought it would go and the correct response is a collective yawn? Apparently the answer lies somewhere in between those two positions. I can accept this, but I'm different. I learned this kind of mental and emotional dexterity in graduate school, where thousands of dollars in tuition, much of it taxpayer subsidized, were devoted to instilling the confidence to respond to any question, no matter how dense, contradictory or ultimately unanswerable, with a full-throated "well, it's probably somewhere in the middle." I can tell you it was way faster than actually trying to read any of those books they made me buy. Never let anyone tell you a humanities education doesn't impart any practical skills.

It's a real challenge in New York City these next two months as they have to stare down the possibility of understanding a confounding, unfamiliar status quo of a mayor neither already convicted of comically blatant corruption nor a loudly inscrutable weirdo. But there is a silver lining: we don't have to give a shit, really, because we (statistically speaking) don't live in New York City. For those of us who grew up outside the sound of Mike Francesa snoring into a radio microphone, this past Thursday's results were the wendepunkt we'd all be waiting for, though probably not in German. OK, probably in German for some of us, but just the real enthusiasts.

OK, we can give a little bit of a shit, as it's definitely a curiosity as far as object-lessons go. Sure, Mamdani came out firing, shouting into a microphone (which, I get it, sort of doesn't let the microphone do what it's designed to do, but he was excited, that should be allowed) and name-dropping Eugene Debs in his first sentence. And if I lived in New York City or Virginia this morning, I'd feel great this week as someone who at minimum maintains at least a Susan Collins-level of concern about the shouting, stomping authoritarianism that stopped being eligible to be described as "creeping" a full calendar year ago. We seem to be entering a new era of political alignment, warped by the idiot gravity of whatever singularity of anti-intellectual information-hostility fires Donald Trump and only seems to work for him, where the obligatory softening of actual ideals in order to appeal to the electorate and then soothe the to-be-governed once the votes have all been counted, feels not only quaint but dangerous. It takes a projected, keening voice to cut through the static din of a hundred thousand contentless messages (more and more of it not even human-generated) from ten thousand noise-only outlets vying for the public attention. To be a normie political voice in these unsettled waters defined only by measuring the drama of chop and swell is to volunteer for a drowning. We've seen it in the past several months as corporations and back-bench replacement-level political figures have had to declare themselves as not just supportive of the Trump batshit scattershot incoherence of policies but also actively fash-tolerant, at minimum, just to keep up a public profile.

It may or may not matter in 2026 or 2028, when the DNC has to run national-level campaigns, and their instinct is always, always for caution, for the benefit of the big-money corporate donors who keep them in chicken dinners and the good offices in the Capitol. If those continue to be the priorities, they will bear themselves out electorally and this past Thursday will be a curiosity we forget, by executive order of President JD Vance.

Ha ha, just kidding, it would never be Vance, that weenie. It will probably be someone way worse.