Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Two

The joke going around Europe and north of the border is this: "What borders on stupidity?  Canada and Mexico."

Americans are in fact quite stupid, believing that Hemingway wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" and that Hamlet wrote "Cyrano de Bergerac," and that Alexis de Tocqueville should never have divorced Blake Carrington.  And Americans are so ignorant of European history that they probably think that England has never had a revolution or a civil war, supposing that kings and queens have simply died and been succeeded for a thousand years with no fuss or muss.  They're so stupid that restrooms in restaurants and coffee shops have signs that say "EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEOFRE RETURNING TO WORK," a point of fact that once went without saying.  Conservatives - at least MAGA conservatives - are especially lunkheaded, believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed and that all Frenchmen are homosexuals.  Certainly, this stupidity propelled Trump back into the White House.  But there's a lot of idiocy among so-called progressives - and that's another reason the Democrats lost in 2024.

Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, the last period in which the Democrats were unquestionably dominant, the party adhered to a liberalism defined not only by support for labor, civil rights legislation, and anti-poverty programs but by building infrastructure and promoting science, which is what the space program was.  As the only elected Republican President between 1961 and 1981, Richard Nixon bent to the liberal ethos of American politics by nationalizing passenger rail transport, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, and expanding scholastic athletic opportunities to girls. And, as liberalism, all of this made sense.

In today's neoliberal era, the Democrats have pursued a so-called progressive agenda that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson would hardly recognize.  The Democrats have been happy to trust the free market to deliver the nice things that governments should provide while they pursue such nuts-and-bolts issues as hair anti-discrimination legislation.  Instead of prioritizing economic issues that people care about, they've been busy appealing to different groups and been playing identity politics.  They've even tried to police the lexicon in which to have a discourse.  Non-heterosexuals were called "LGBTQ," an unpronounceable acronym (the Q is for "questioning" - my question is why so-called progressives spend time trying to come up with acronyms no one can pronounce).  They decided that blacks should be called "Blacks," with a capital B - elevating a statistical population group to an nationality, after realizing that "African-American" took too long to say.  "Hispanics" were then called "Latinos," because Spanish-speaking populations must be referred to in the Spanish language only, but given the gender-sensitive nouns of the Spanish language, liberal English-speaking Americans decided to call them "Latinx" - pronounced "Latin EX," not "la-TINKS."  And all of these groups have been called "communities" - as in, "New Jersey's Black community," suggesting that every black person in New Jersey lives on the same block in Newark. (And how about "Jewish Americans" or "Muslim Americans" in place of "American Jews" and "American Muslims," the former terms suggesting that an American's religion is more important than his nationality?) 

Even the Black Lives Matter movement, essential as it is to raise public awareness of the senseless killing of black citizens by trigger-happy police officers, has mutated into ignorance and moronism.  So-called progressive activists tied the movement to an effort to "defund" the police, failing to understand that most residents of underserved minority neighborhoods want a strong police force to protect them from criminals.  They stigmatized Democrats like Martin O'Malley for saying that "all lives matter" because conservatives have used that phrase to downplay racist policing and because the premise that all lives matter should go without saying but is an obvious contradiction of reality - even though Democrats like O'Malley, the most recent white mayor of black-majority Baltimore, have a proven track record of serving everyone, not just one group or another.   But the stupidity persists.  A meme I came across on Facebook once explained that saying "Black lives matter" does not mean that other people's lives don't matter, just as people in the movement to save the whales would never say, "Fuck the other fish."

How is that an example of stupidity?  A whale is a mammal, not a fish.  

If liberals can't grasp the nuances of biology, how can we expect other Americans to do so?

Of course, the greatest stupidity of the Black Lives Matter movement occurred when, after Trump had the military violently cleared Lafyette Square, which is in front of the White House, of peaceful civil rights demonstrators per Trump's orders in the wake of George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered that two blocks of Sixteenth Street Northwest - the street that terminates at a T junction in front of Lafayette Square - have the words "BLACK LIVES MATTER" painted in yellow letters so large they can be seen from space.  Those two blocks are now called - you guessed it - Black Lives Matter Plaza. 

Note the presence of the words "DEFUND THE POLICE" at the right end of the street mural.  This picture was taken on June 7, 2020,  almost seven months to the day before the much demonized police in Washington tried to protect the U.S. Capitol from insurrectionists.  (Click on the picture to see it better.)

This is an embarrassment to our country.  Consider the great public spaces of other national capitals.  London has Manchester Square.  Paris has the Place Vendome.  Rome has the Piazza Navona.  Berlin has the Potsdamer Platz.  Washington has . . . a street mural in a "plaza" named for a slogan.  A good slogan, but still a slogan.  This is the extreme equivalent of renaming streets for Martin Luther King in our cities' worst neighborhoods.  It solves nothing and it does nothing.   

You know, on second thought, maybe "Black Lives Matter" isn't a good slogan.  Originally, the movement was considering "Black Lives Matter Too" as their slogan, the "too" softening the rough edge and appearing to be less divisive.  But that was rejected.

As for Black Lives Matter Plaza . . . maybe Mayor Bowser should have considered, oh, I don't know, creating a real plaza, a granite-paved square with park benches and flower beds, and not create a fly-by-night public space next to an existing public space - Lafayette Square.

Brought to you by the same folks who shortened the official name of Rhode Island from the "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" to the "State of Rhode Island" even though the word "plantations" in the state's name referred to the mainland settlements in and around Providence, not cotton farms worked by slaves.  Instead of simply changing the name to the less racially charged "State of Rhode Island and Providence Environs," the "State of Rhode Island" adopted a misnomer as its official name.  Because apparently that was a more important issue for Rhode Island than hearing the economic concerns of their residents.

Democrats will continue to lose elections and supporters as long as they engage in this politically correct nonsense in lieu of real solutions to the problems they purport to address.   Calling non-heterosexuals an unpronounceable acronym won't protect them from discrimination.  Painting "BLACK LIVES MATTER" in giant letters so that people Get It won't bring back George Floyd or prevent other black men from dying at the hands of the police.  And none of this crap will help the middle class pay their mortgages or rents.

As Paul Fussell might have said in his book "BAD Or, The Dumbing of America," in which he distinguished between plain bad - something no one would say was good - and BAD - something phony or stupid that is praised and held dear - it's not the badness of liberal euphemisms or symbolism that appalls.  In a country so welded to superficiality, that's to be expected.  It's the BADness, the idea that superficial sloganeering and gestures can bring about positive change in place of doing the work of communicating and listening to voters while doing the work of educating people in general on the need for a just and equal society.  Real BAD. 

Stay tuned for Part Three.