November 2. This election is getting bizarre. As scandals go, Hillary Clinton's email thing is chicken feed, and it does not begin to explain Trump's surge in the polls over the last week. It's like those people were going to vote for Trump all along and as the election gets closer they'll take a smaller and smaller excuse. And why has Trump fallen in the polls when he's been most in the public eye, right after the conventions and debates? He's like that thing you do that you hate and you always promise yourself you'll never do it again, but then as it fades in your memory it becomes more and more attractive.
I see Trump as a correction, bringing together two things that have grown too far apart. On the one hand is how our civilization really works, a vast and inhuman network that is best managed by competent and dispassionate technocrats. On the other hand is the show, the public perception of how it works, that it's all about the personalities of human "leaders", like the tribal leaders of our ancestral memory, and if your life sucks then we just need someone strong and decisive to straighten those folks out.
I appreciate Trump as a performer, and I agree with his instinct that the political show has become a farce and deserves to be played like a farce. But if he actually becomes president, people will learn in the most painful way that their primal view of politics is bullshit, that you can't fix your computer by getting the most confident person to smack it with a hammer.
November 9. Trump's victory is the 9/11 of the American left. The Tarot card for both events is The Tower, a sudden shocking catastrophe in which something that appears secure is brought down. It's one of many tarot cards that is called a "trump", so you could call it the Tower Trump, and our new president actually has a Trump Tower. It's like we're already living in a world of myth.
Also, both the election and 9/11 were centered around New York City, and both events had a much milder precedent: the 1993 bombing, and Bush's victory over Al Gore.
In both 2000 and 2016 (and 1980) Republicans nominated a gunslinger, a candidate with great political instincts who inspired the base and didn't care about his own flaws. In both of those years (and 2004) Democrats nominated an uptight, awkward moderate who tried to avoid the appearance of having any flaws, but the result was that smaller flaws got magnified, voters were apathetic, and the Republican won. And in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, when Republicans nominated a dignified moderate, they lost. The only reason Bush Sr won in 1988 was that Dukakis was even more of a dweeb.
Remember in 2004 when Howard Dean lost the Democratic primaries after making that weird scream? Compare that to the ten thousand worse things Donald Trump has done in front of a microphone. My point is not that Trump is bad but that this is what a winning attitude looks like. Dean was loose and impulsive and raw in a way that general election voters actually like -- but Democratic primary voters fear it.
The American left has been on its back foot since the 1980's, and I'm not sure why. My guess is that in the decades before 1980, they were so successful working within the system that they lost the skill and confidence to work outside the system. You need that confidence to not be afraid to lose, and you need to be fearless before you can stand behind a flawed candidate. This is a dark night of the soul for a lot of Americans, but it's also an opportunity for us to organize in new ways and reinvent ourselves politically.
November 11. It would take several books to explain what "occult" even means, but there is a strong occult aspect to Trump's win, and it's not surprising that the next celebrity to die was Leonard Cohen. There's some weird, dark stuff around him, and if you have a couple hours, it's covered in this crazy two-part podcast from last year, The Liminalist 31.5: The Guerrilla in the Room.
November 14. If you watch UFC, you know that everyone talks trash before the fight, and during the fight they hit each other, and then after the fight they embrace. Donald Trump seems to understand that politics works the same way. For the general election I thought he would reinvent himself as a lovable moderate, and instead he doubled down on being dark and divisive -- and it worked! Then, the moment he was declared the winner, he suddenly pivoted to making peace and bringing America together. So I'm wondering, how much of Evil Trump was a performance? What's under that scary clown mask?
I barely considered the possibility that Trump would turn out to be basically the same as every other president. I said he'd be a great ceremonial president, but I might have underestimated how much the presidency is already ceremonial. When the whole Bush family endorsed Hillary, I was sure the oligarchy feared Trump. Now I think we all fell for a deep con.
Imagine you're the secret ruler of an America that's been hollowed out. All the power is in the cities now, and the peasants want a revolution. But there's nothing you can do for them. The manufacturing jobs are lost forever to automation, the immigrants will keep coming in, old-time white culture is dying -- but you still need those people to work at Walmart and maintain the infrastructure, and they have a lot of guns.
So you let them have their messiah, a big city billionaire who talks the language of the rural working class, and he pulls a shocking upset. Urban liberals are genuinely horrified -- they don't even know they're part of the show. A guy waves a confederate flag over a sign saying "Accept it, you lost," and he doesn't even see the irony. And Trump does his best. He gets eight years, because the charismatic ones always do, and he gets a few symbolic victories. But on a deeper level the world continues on its inscrutable path, and Trump serves to pacify the right just as Obama pacified the left.
I don't really believe in sinister rulers who consciously planned exactly whatever happens, and that we make a better world by overthrowing them. My actual belief is much weirder. Did you ever get in a totally baffling conflict, and years later you looked back and discovered a subconscious level on which it all made sense? So there's an example of one single link where the subconscious mind is in control and the conscious mind is just along for the ride. What if these links can form networks? What if they form a global subconscious civilization that is secretly running everything? Never mind the Reptilians -- the enemy is within.