Meanwhile back in the real world…
All along I’ve said two things about the “Trump is disqualified” thing. First, it was never going anywhere. The courts were never going to allow it to stand, and even if they had, it still wouldn’t have had any impact in any states where the electoral votes were actually up for grabs. This was always just a simplistic internet fantasy, doomed to fail once it came up against the complexities of the real world. Second, once the “Trump is disqualified” fantasy inevitably came crashing down, it was going to generate a crushing amount of defeatism on our side. Sure enough, here we are.
There’s a reason I always push back whenever I’m accused of being an “optimist” – I’m not one. Optimism is when you choose to believe that things are going to turn out better than the odds say they are. That’s not me. At all. I just make a point of pushing back whenever the media and pundit class tries to convince us that the odds are far more against us than they are, which of course is most of the time. The political media nearly always tells us we’re in worse shape than we are, because that’s what keeps you glued to your screen and drives ratings.
The kicker is that even though the media pushes doomsday hysteria 95% of the time, there’s that other 5% of the time where the media goes the other direction and starts promoting magic wand ideas. More specifically, the framing is that “we’re doomed unless this magic wand idea happens.” The psychology of using this approach to drive ratings is something that Freud could have a field day with. But the bottom line is that it’s very, very dangerous.
For the past year, large chunks of the media and pundit class (on TV and Twitter) have pushed the narrative that Trump would definitely be removed from the ballot, and it was a good thing it was going to happen, because otherwise there was no possible way we could defeat him. If we didn’t magic wand him off the ballot, he’d magic wand us instead.
This stuff sounds unbelievably silly when you take a minute to think about it. What is this, Harry Potter? Come to think of it, even though they did have magic wands in Harry Potter, it still took seven books for the story to play out. Even works of fiction primarily aimed at children tend to portray the complexities of real life more accurately than the political media and pundit class tend to do.
Once you stop subjecting yourself to the daily chanting of magic wand scenarios that you hear on political TV and political Twitter, you come back to reality and you realize that nothing in the real world could ever work that way. The Republican Party will have a 2024 nominee, that nominee will be awful, there will be an election, and we’ll have to grind it out. Trump will be a convicted criminal by then. He’s senile already. He’s far from a lock to come out of his party’s convention with the nomination. But no matter how that goes, there will be a Republican nominee, there will be an election, and there will be work for us to do if we want to win it.
When I rail against the dangers of defeatism, it’s not because I want you to feel happy and relaxed. It’s not because I believe in the power of positive thinking, or any of that crap. It’s because this is a battle, and if you decide you’re going to lose, then you’re not going to be psychologically capable of putting in the effort required to win the battle.
If you go into a winnable battle thinking you can win, and planning for how to win, and accepting that you’ll have to put in the work required to win, then you’ll have a serious chance of winning. But if you go into a winnable battle thinking that you’re going to lose, you’re going to lazily skulk your way through it instead of trying to win, which will directly reduce your odds of winning.
At this stage of the game there are so many things working in our favor, it takes a moment just to list them all. Biden’s numbers are improving. Consumer confidence is through the roof. Trump is a few weeks away from his first criminal trial. He’s also suffering from worsening dementia. And Trump’s numbers within the Republican primary base are pretty ugly.
If you’re rooting for Biden, there’s every reason to feel good about 2024. If you’re rooting for Trump and/or the Republicans, you’re in a real mess when it comes to 2024. That’s simply what all the available evidence tells us. It’s not optimism, it’s realism. Biden is in a far better place for 2024 than Trump and the Republicans. Anyone who’s being objective can see that. All we have to do is put in the work for Biden, and help make sure that he wins.
Of course we’re going to be told that all these other magic wand scenarios are going to dictate the outcome of the election instead. The media is already telling us that if Biden wins, he’ll just magically not be sworn in. They’re also telling us that “No Labels” or some other irrelevant group will decide the election. They’re also telling us that Putin will just wave his magic wand and install Trump, which is curious given that Putin couldn’t even pull that off in 2020, and Putin is far weaker now.
But for all the simplistic magic wand scenarios that they keep throwing at us, what we keep seeing is that these things never happen. Trump was never going to just be magically removed from the ballot and the election automatically handed to Biden. Nor does Trump’s side have any magic wands of any kind. This is, after all, the real world.
