On CNN the handwringing began several hours ago, and it’s likely to go on for days and days. I dread the mawkish elegies for democracy I am expecting from the Atlantic, Timothy Snyder, and Anne Applebaum. And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is getting into the act with this (understandably) craven congratulatory message on x.com:
Congratulations to @realDonaldTrump on his impressive election victory!
I recall our great meeting with President Trump back in September, when we discussed in detail the Ukraine-U.S. strategic partnership, the Victory Plan, and ways to put an end to Russian aggression against…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) November 6, 2024
This is not to say that the Atlantic, Snyder, and Applebaum will be wrong, or that Zelenskyy isn’t playing as careful a game as he can. But in all this handwringing, the emphasis has been on how the Democrats and the Harris campaign blew it this time. Unfortunately we now have proof that all those Hallmark-card Benetton-ad sentiments about the American voter were based on a profound misunderstanding of the ability of that voter to practice even a modicum of critical thinking, and how narrowly that voter sees their self-interest, whether it’s the price of eggs or religious and cultural belief. Never mind, really, that Trump wound up over and over again in bankruptcy court, even losing money on a gambling casino, or that he regularly sat down for dinner with anti-Semites and racists. Never mind the grotesque misogyny, the careless personal smears, the crude jokes, the daily chaos of his first term, the smug shit-eating grimace that passes for a smile, the disparagement of scientific fact, the deep-rooted xenophobia, the shameless pandering, the irresponsible conspiracy-mongering, the felony convictions, the sexual assaults, the insults to veterans and soldiers, the vile demonization of journalists, the religious hypocrisy, the philistinism, the dismissal of the right to free speech and assembly, the breathtaking greed and corruption, the threats of retribution, the incitements to violence — the constant regurgitation of every possible stupidity of which the human mind is capable.
Last night, he won, fair and square. And I know people who voted for him. God bless America.
No, it wasn’t the fault of the Democrats or Kamala Harris. It was the fault of the American voter; this is what they want. The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will now become a quaint and very expensive museum rather than a celebration of the democratic spirit in America.
So what to do next? I had been hoping to spend the next four years of my sixth decade bereft of the constant stomach-churning irresponsibility and unpredictability, the constant insults to the human spirit, of Trump’s first term, but those who voted for Trump have decided to deny me that. I blame them for that the most (though perhaps this is only proof that I can be as selfish as they are).
Oh, well. I can still turn to the elegance of Vienna and the German language, as well as the charms of Philadelphia. My family continues to give me the greatest pleasures, outstripping even those of Vienna and Philadelphia. There is good wine to drink, good music to listen to, good writing to read. There’s also my dwindling ability to do what I can to promote kindness, peace, and decency (though I seem to be in the minority here, based on the election results).
And laughter, they say, is the best medicine. I can continue to turn to the great American satire of Mark Twain (“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand,” he wrote — perhaps wishful thinking, but I’ll take what I can get) and H.L. Mencken, to whom perhaps I should have been listening more closely. I doubted their misanthropy and mistrust of the American citizen; clearly, I was wrong.
And there is also Jonathan Swift, with whom I shall sign off today. In the second book of Gulliver’s Travels, the adventurer finds himself at the court of the Brobdingnagian king. “He desired I would give him as exact an account of the government of England as I possibly could; because, as fond as princes commonly are of their own customs (for so he conjectured of other monarchs, by my former discourses), he should be glad to hear of anything that might deserve imitation,” Gulliver (yclept Grildig in this country) explains. Gulliver describes the government of England to the Brobdingnagian king at considerable length. And, although England is a constitutional monarchy and the United States a representative democracy, I think the king’s response remains valid. Quoth Gulliver:
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”
His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Or, as P.J. O’Rourke once put it, in much the same spirit, “Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.”
