Choosing Our Apocalypse Part 2

Welcome To a Post-Democratic America

The world has changed since I started this newsletter, it happened yesterday. The liberal world order, and Western Democracy along with it, are behind us now.

That sounds alarmist, but there are so many times that the cold, cynical but objective and calculating part of me has come to an extreme conclusion that I’ve wanted to shove outside my head only to see it come to fruition in time.

For example, 8 years ago when Trump was first inaugurated I posted on Facebook that this was the start of American authoritarianism. Up until tonight I cringed when seeing that post, now it’s prescient (and good advice for the coming months).

Right now I am not interested in railing against the ignorance of the electorate or the utter incompetence of the opposition party that was charged with resisting this authoritarian takeover. The truth is I’m tired of the clearly useless struggle we call(ed) American politics, and I don’t think Democrats will ever get the chance to learn from their mistakes even if we list them. As far as I’m concerned that party is dead - either something new will have to rise from the ashes (like the transformation of the GOP into MAGA) or it will serve as the vestigial opposition party that is only kept around in illiberal countries that like to continue the performance of Democracy (Hungary, Russia, etc) without the actual threat of sharing power.

The purpose of this series, and hell this entire newsletter, has always been to help my readers (and myself) cultivate healthy, happy lives in the face of a society designed to keep us unhappy and in a constant state of desire and consumption.

I cannot think of a better time to talk about how to do that than now. But my method will require embracing that cynical (but so far accurate) side of me and accepting some realities that may seem radical now but I’m sure will, in time, become the new normal.

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The Ground Is Still Here, The Future Is Still Uncertain, You Don’t Have To Watch

I imagine that most of my readers, while dismayed over the election, have some things going well for them personally. I imagine you are not currently ill and do not have a terminal illness. I imagine many of you might have a dedicated partner or spouse like I do, and maybe even a decent job or source of income (like I don’t). If you’re reading this you likely have a home, a place of comfort.

Go there, indulge in it. One of my regrets from 2016 was that the way it shattered me caused me to overestimate the immediacy of the degradation of American Democracy. I watched every move of the Trump presidency, I plugged myself into politics hard, I became aware of the fundamentals of collapse and spent over 9 months having an existential crisis looking for a solution.

All I did was waste time and energy (and make bad investment decisions) because I always thought the world was about to collapse.

As bad as the result is - this is not nukes flying. This is not you receiving a terminal illness diagnosis, this is not massive breadbasket failures and empty grocery shelves. You are not being sent to battle, you did not get magically transported away from being a citizen in the richest and most powerful country the world has ever known.

The world was slowly ending before this election, it is still slowly ending now.

The way we got here is that most people don’t tune into politics or environmentalism. So why do you?

One of my favorite writers, David B Lauterwasser, laid it out perfectly

What we need now is less information overload, less “news,” less nonsense – which of course also means less social media. I for myself have come to regard the Feed as increasingly dull, shallow, repetitive, and, quite frankly, mind-numbingly boring…The news on any given day are pretty much constantly the same, so it becomes somewhat pointless to follow them with any real enthusiasm or regularity.

In this case, we’ve lived through this shock before and also acutely know the ways in which it will be worse. You don’t need to watch it, the people that voted for this certainly won’t. You don’t need to know which types of Americans betrayed you, or who is to blame for this outcome, or “how we’re going to fix it next time”. Frankly, you can’t even imagine what the next election will be like and what it’s challenges will be.

Take a breath, life was never infinite anyway. We have always been playing a game of trying to stay present and make the best of what we have in a world careening towards chaos.

Life Beyond Democracy

When I was younger I believed in this western liberal project so adamantly I could not imagine myself existing beyond it.

Now, at middle age, I am less naive.

People have lives in Hungary, Russia, China, Iran and other illiberal countries. They experience joy and sadness, they have friends, meet spouses and make families. They study, find employment, create businesses, buy homes and eat healthier meals than most of us.

In fact, a sad part of me realizes that this system hasn’t been working for us since 2008. Had things gone the other way, where would we have been? More gridlock, more slow deterioration, more fighting off the inevitable change to a new political order thats underway now. The Harris campaign was fundamentally a promise to continue this system just a little longer, where neither party gets to actually enact their policy agenda and Americans remain isolated in an empty techno-paradise they perceive as hell.

Maybe Democracy just cannot function rationally at this scale with social media, AI and the internet hacking into human brains constantly. Maybe there’s a reason the founding fathers created the electoral college as a bulwark against the will of the masses.

Of course, the cost of discarding democracy is that illiberal countries do not allow their citizens to speak like I am now. When Russian’s protest the war, they go to jail or the front lines of that very said war. When the Chinese disparage their government online they receive a visit from the police.

In illiberal countries the affairs of the state are not the business of the masses, even if the country is being run poorly. The political element of life that Americans enjoyed is just not present in the day to day of illiberal countries, because there is no real form for the masses to interact with or direct political power. In the world we left making your voice heard was something to be celebrated, in the world we’re going to making your voice heard will have seriously negative ramifications.

We (I) will need to brace for this. It’s why this newsletter may not stay online indefinitely. It’s frankly why, on the eve of this election, I stopped writing while waiting to see what was going to happen - what was the use in building up a political newsletter that may need to be wiped off the internet for my own safety?

If you are an “out” group, I would seriously begin taking real precautions to blend into the picture Republicans want to paint in 2025 while in the United States.

However, there is life beyond Democracy. It will feel different to Americans, but it is the norm for most humans on the planet - and they make do. People can live lives worth living without expressing themselves fully.

And hey, I’d love to be wrong, I’d love for the pendulum to continue to swing. But I just don’t see it. When I first became activated to politics in 2016 the MAGA movement was much weaker and institutions were much stronger. This time they are more experienced with how to wield the power of the government and have a plan to hit the ground running. I see many liberals vowing to continue the fight, but I can’t see how thats constructive considering the game has changed and we don’t even know the new rules yet.

My only clear hope is the states. Yes the GOP will likely pass a national abortion ban and gut Obamacare and try to drown the regulatory state. However, it’s a federal crime to ingest marijuana and yet my entire state is littered with marijuana dispensaries. Before Obamacare states ran their own private health insurance markets, in fact Obamacare itself was literally designed off the back of Mitt Romney’s healthcare program when he was governor of Massachusetts. California has always had it’s own environmental and health regulations that the federal government detests.

Hell even the Chinese communist party has to work with provincial powers in order to get anything done or enforced. It’s just the way ruling such a large population works - and there are boundaries to how extreme the federal government can be without absolutely tanking the economy and losing our status as the world’s reserve currency (and even then, this is a when not an if).

So it’s hard for me to see truly fundamental rights - like the one that allows me to speak freely to you here without fear of imprisonment- being taken away from me that quickly.

But…if I was an Obama, Biden, Harris or Cheney I’d be much more concerned (and planning a long vacation before January 6th). Good riddance, these people are already trying to say that the parties path forward is to tack even more to the right and basically become the GOP that Trump destroyed. If that isn’t vindication of the “both parties are the same” rhetoric that most Americans spout than I don’t know what is. These people have completely forgotten that it was only when Democrats were racing to the populist left that they beat Trump. And that both times Democrats ran an inclusive, traditional, centrist campaign the electorate shunned them and refused to turn out.

You can bookmark this: If we see an actual movement to take back power from the new authoritative state it will be as extreme and alien to the current Democratic party as MAGA was to the GOP. It’s not Mitt Romney and It’s not AOC, its something we cannot foresee until the true weight of the choice American’s just made has disrupted our lives in a way very few people that voted for Trump last night imagined.

And even then, I don’t expect it to succeed just due to the sheer power concentrated in the Federal Government. Honestly, I’d expect something like the collapse and dissolution of the soviet union to be more akin to how we get out of this - because man once the rest of the world figures out how to trade without using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency we are in for a rude awakening.

Ok, So How Do I Cope?

As you have read throughout this article, I have made a lot of room for grief and acceptance. Just like how the MAGA-ts are not going to be able to resurrect the 1950’s no matter how hard they try, liberals are not going to be able to resurrect the 90’s no matter how hard we try in the future.

This is not a war that has started, it’s a war that is over. This is not the 1st stage of a cancer, it is the last. Liberal democracy has been given a two month terminal diagnosis, and the ecosphere isn’t too far behind. 2000 was our last chance to seriously combat climate change, 2024 was just a referendum on whether we’d adopt some sort of mitigation strategy or just stick our heads in the sand.

However, I feel more grounded today than 8 years ago.

8 years ago I had a different partner. I remember sitting in her apartment in dismay, trying to sketch out the different options we had for finding a comfortable life. She vehemently did not want to “hear it” and my emotional state became an argument. In the end we didn’t react to the first Trump victory at all and never built any avenues to inoculate ourselves against Trump’s first term so we were entirely dependent on everything just turning out okay.

This time, however, my actual life partner and I have been discussing and planning for this outcome for years. This partner met me after I became politically and environmentally activated - she has seen the things I was alarmed about happening in a decade when we first met in 2017 come to fruition in half that time. She understands the value of sketching out options and being serious about hedging against a darker and darker future.

This is why we didn’t purchase a house yet, this is why we have both been working our asses off to pile up savings, this is why we have actively researched what becoming expats will look like and where we can go.

So last night this is where our conversation started. What are our options? Do we want to make a plan to leave? Where would we want to go? How long would that take?

We have each other, our pets and a nice (rented home) - is that enough? Can we live in an illiberal country (for now)?

How long until the world out there affects the world in here?

This is where I see constructive value. Most of us have some sort of a moat of privilege that we’ve been building around us just by virtue of living in the United States. Now it’s time to asses that our advantages and cash in our chips.

Some of us have the privilege of dual-citizenship or being bilingual. Can you make a plan to use that to go somewhere where the state will provide you more opportunities?

Some of us naturally uphold the nuclear family values MAGAts idealize and can blend in easily. Maybe you can just stick your head in the sand and move to a blue state?

Some of us have literally no commitments or responsibilities and can use this as an opportunity to travel and discover the best communities and opportunities that fit the lives we want to build.

Some of us can or do live in areas so remote the machinations of the federal government have little interest in us, so we can have little interest in them.

Yes, I understand that there are many people that have practically no moat, no privilege - in a literal sense very little money. But if you’re reading this, comprehending it and can focus enough to get this far you’re clearly more intelligent than most. I built the wealth, skills, knowledge and experience I am “cashing in” now to plan for the future after a lay-off, a very difficult career change and now my country veering straight for authoritarianism (again!). It is that work towards something stable for yourself or your family that can drag your focus away from the political machinations of the world and the collapse of our ecosystem. It’s still a good bet that you have the most agency over what the next four years look like for you - not them.

So, if you’re going to be an anxious wreck, put it towards that realistic personal solution. Don’t put it towards screaming at a political party that was just dealt it’s death blow. Don’t put it towards gnashing your teeth, wailing that your fellow countrymen are different people than they are and have been for the past decade (and will continue to be as we can see from Gen-Z’s voting preferences).

Asses the situation, honestly, and make a plan to inoculate yourself from it as best you can for as long as you can.

When coming from a calm and rational place you may find that inoculation is as simple as letting go of a political life while enjoying the fruits of living in the most powerful and (currently) wealthy country every recorded in history.

And many of you, like me, will find it’s going to be much harder than that. Which means you have some work to do. Instead of bemoaning the work, make progress on it - and you will feel better than you do now because even if the country is going backwards that doesn’t mean you cannot go forward.

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Thank you for reading this full article. I have felt guilty for not writing anything new these past couple week despite gaining new subscribers. I imagine that I will be writing more again as I process *waves hands around* all this.

Years of Gap is a passion project for me, and will always remain one. However, I do have to make rent and groceries every month in order to continue to write. So I’m inviting you to buy me a coffee if you’d like to support my writing. If I can reliably make just a couple bucks each month on this Substack then I can justify the time and energy investment to make these articles more in-depth, have better citations, have better editing and be more frequent.

But just reading and providing some feedback is really giving me alot of joy and drive to continue putting my real opinions, experience and knowledge out there. So thanks again for getting this far.

Now please go touch some grass, commiserate with your loved ones and take care of your body even with an ailing mind.

My sincere condolences,
Jordan S. Lovinger