What if the Unthinkable Happens?
Planning for a dystopian world is quite impossible
Most of us exist in an echo chamber. Even here on Substack. You subscribe to my Substack, I subscribe to yours, and we all subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson and Joyce Vance.
We see the tied polls, then gather around the Substack queues to read the reassuring comments from our favorite Substack pundits that there’s nothing to worry about because the polls are all manipulated by right-wingers or steeped in some kind of hopeless polling bias or flawed with the error of poorly conceived sampling that is too small to take seriously.
Whenever we take a deep breath long enough to consider possibilities, we typically conclude that Kamala Harris can't lose to someone as outlandish as Donald Trump. “How can the polls be this tight?” we ask each other as we plunge into another Substack that affirms that such things are not possible in a sane world.
What little confidence we have in victory is based on an obvious ethical consideration: How is it even possible, we ask each other over and over again in Substack comments, that this thing is tied? How is it possible that a craven monster like Trump polls at even 10%? How is it possible for this election not to be a landslide in Kamala’s favor?
It’s not because of a flawed candidate. Not this time. It’s practically impossible to have a more qualified and likable candidate. She was a county district attorney for a major metro area, California’s attorney general, California’s senator, and now the U.S. Vice President, where she is regularly exposed to the nation’s most vexing problems, even though she’s not directly responsible for fixing them.
On top of that, she gets high marks for running a nearly flawless campaign. If she loses, Democratic pundits will claim they knew better all along and blame her anyway, but it won’t change the truth any more than Trump’s litany of lies changes the truth.1
If the unthinkable happens, nobody will be able to point to her and say, “If only she had done this.” Done what? Not be a woman?
If the unthinkable happens, it will be because she’s a woman of color. Such a result will be an indictment against this nation that cannot be overcome, because America under a second Trump presidency will become a failed state. Any nation that refuses to elect a woman because she’s a woman is, by definition, already a failed state.
Under a second Trump presidency, the nation will devolve into a nightmarish plutocracy that oversees climate destruction and an unregulated attack on human rights on a scale unprecedented since the days of slavery.
The plutocracy will have an evolving AI and deep fake technology at their disposal that will shield the truth of what is happening from an unsuspecting public until it’s too late.
Many of us, myself, included, worry about our psychological well-being if Kamala doesn’t win. I barely got out alive from Trump’s last administration. But here’s the thing. So did a lot of people who seem poised to vote for him again.
Outside of our echo chamber lives another story. It’s a story about a business press that seems sure of, not just a Trump victory, but a landslide. It’s a story where millions of cult members plaster their homes and cars with political paraphernalia that worship a misfit who treasures grievance and hate. Much of this paraphernalia— bumper stickers and car signs and billboards, is obscene, even in neighborhoods full of children.
It is a story where people seem unable to recognize clear signs of dementia. It’s a story where millions of people shrug off his bizarre behavior as just more fun hijinks.
It’s a story where all the betting markets predict a big Trump victory. After seeing these alarming tales, we scramble to our Substacks. “Worry not,” say our Substacks in unison, “these, too, are manipulated by Trump acolytes determined to trick his believers into thinking he should win. It’s all designed to prep the cult for post-election violence!”
All of this may be true. But we’d be the last to know otherwise because we’re all so reluctant to peek out from under those comforting blankets of punditry that tell us to remain calm.
We’re reluctant to poke around the forums and conclaves of the other side to see what is happening around us. We are shocked when Ryan Girdusky says to Mehdi Hasan in a CNN discussion panel, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” in a sick reference to Palestinian beepers blown up in children’s faces by Isreal’s Mossad. We’re shocked because we don’t see them talking like this every day in their echo chambers.
We don’t understand that there are real numbers behind these polls, partly because it isn’t understandable.
Our echo chambers fearlessly project outrage over the Madison Avenue Garden March to 1939, scream when the corporate media compares Biden’s “garbage” comment to the outrageous one at the Garden, then tell us, again, that the polls must be wrong.
But what if the polls aren’t wrong? What if this nation is truly as sick as it seems? What if, in fact, the nation is on its deathbed? What’s the plan if the unthinkable happens?
I can’t say that I have one. I’m at the age where leaving the country isn’t practical. As a software engineer, perhaps I could disappear from the grid and help a nascent resistance. But what’s the point of that? Why should I help young people (ahem, young men), who at the end of the day will be responsible for Kamala winning or losing, when they clearly don’t want the help?
If the Musk fanboi cult is so powerful that young American men succumb to the daily doses of misogyny and racism that America’s father of apartheid extolls, why should I help them dig out of the inevitable rubble?
If young people, convinced that Biden is a genocidal maniac, refuse to vote for someone who has no authority to make changes in Biden’s policy, why should I offer a helping hand when their planet burns down and the rest of Gaza is destroyed by a madman (Netanyahu) who has initiated brutal bombing runs with the sole intent of influencing the American election?
Bernie Sanders, who has been vocal about the Gaza situation, expressed our future well when he said that the war against climate change will be over if Trump wins:
Many other battles will be lost. Trump will pick additional Supreme Court justices as the nation drifts further into the land of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. The Musk cult has correctly predicted an economic collapse (temporary but necessary!) if Trump’s economic policies are enacted.
It will be checkmate on everything most of us hold dear, from women’s control over their bodies to my friends in Ukraine, whose circumstances I saw change over Zoom calls during project meetings a couple of years ago as they prepared for an invasion from a vampiric Russian sociopath.
It isn’t possible to plan for the coming dystopia. There are too many vectors to consider. Will there be urban violence? Mass arrests? Or will the American experiment simply fail because climate change finally does us in? Climatologists tell us that it’s technically already too late to prevent climate refugees from overrunning some nations as the earth warms. A Trump election will signal to other industrialized nations, like China, that, at best, climate change can’t be controlled, and at worst, simply doesn’t exist.
Genocide is an inevitable result of the earth’s coming climate refugee crisis. Whereas a sane administration would try to contain it, all bets are off with a Trump administration that considers anyone not from the cold climates of Northern Europe as garbage.
I see some folks in my echo chamber say that if the unthinkable happens, they will fight on because they love their country.
I say this: If we live in a country that can re-elect Trump, what’s there left to love?
Losing is not an option. Vote. And bring a friend.
Notes
I leave you on a positive note. Before the Kansas abortion referendum of 2022, which lost by a 60-40 margin2, public opinion polls showed a dead heat within the margin of error (with “Yes” slightly ahead).3
Kansas voters, powered by an incensed female base, hammered the referendum into the ground where it belonged. This happened even though the wording of the referendum was designed to confuse voters. A Yes vote would have ended abortion rights in Kansas by codifying it into the constitution. A No vote preserved the right to abortion, which had been established by a prior Kansas state Supreme Court ruling.
“No” won by twenty points. Several special elections favorable to Democrats have taken place since then. The polls have been consistently wrong on all of them by wide margins.
Unfortunately, his litany of lies does change the truth for some people.
Smith, Sherman. 2022. “Kansas Voters Defeat Abortion Amendment in Unexpected Landslide • Kansas Reflector.” Kansas Reflector. August 3, 2022. https://kansasreflector.com/2022/08/02/kansas-voters-defeat-abortion-amendment-in-unexpected-landslide-1/.
Taborda, Noah. 2022. “Poll Shows Kansans Closely Divided on Constitutional Amendment on Abortion • Kansas Reflector.” Kansas Reflector. July 20, 2022. https://kansasreflector.com/2022/07/20/poll-shows-kansans-closely-divided-on-constitutional-amendment-on-abortion/.
You’re saying what I’m thinking. Thanks, even though it’s terrible to hear. All I can do is pray & try to think of ways to stay in France & liquidate my possessions in the USA. I have a base in both countries at this point but France is not exactly safe politically either. Bon courage.❤️🩹