Superpower Suicide
The 229,726-vote Trump mandate and the counterfactual it hides
Counterfactuals are great mental guardrails for interpreting and contextualizing the nature of change, forcing us to realize how today is a product of past choices and how tomorrow can be re-arranged far more than we realize.
An example: To switch the outcome of the 2024 election from Trump to Harris, 86 electoral votes would have needed to be flipped from Red to Blue. This corresponds to a total of 229,726 popular votes strategically distributed across three key states:
Michigan: 80,103 votes
Pennsylvania: 120,226 votes
Wisconsin: 29,397 votes.
If Harris flips these 229,726 votes in those specific states, she would have won the Electoral College and become president.
All sorts of things DO NOT happen as a result:
America doesn’t get into bed with Putin
America doesn’t betray Ukraine
America doesn’t abandon NATO
America doesn’t give Netanyahu a blank check to eliminate Gaza by any means necessary
America doesn’t commit the bureaucratic equivalent of hari kiri by gutting the Federal workforce and disabling any number of key agencies
America doesn’t start a global tariff war it cannot win
Our own government doesn’t inflict a recession on what was an otherwise strong economy
Our nation doesn’t destroy our global brand.
When you fear the future, you invariably flee into the past. Trump makes clear his preferred past: a pre-World War II predatory global trade system coupled with imperial expansionism. Why? Because that was when America was on the rise, full of promise, and could not be stopped by anything. Most important: we profited greatly by “ripping off” the wider world, whereas today we’re constantly being “ripped off” by the same.
Trading in your sixty-something wife for a thirty-something replacement doesn’t make you younger; it just makes you look foolish and pathetic. Unable to inhabit your own life comfortably, you need to play vampire to someone’s else’s younger life — rewinding your lost opportunities in a search for fulfillment that cannot be borrowed but only self-earned.
America chose to create a world system based on its own rulesets following WWII. That system led to more poverty reduction and democratization around the world — in a mere five decades (1950-2000) — than had been accomplished in the preceding five centuries of imperial European world-orders (1450-1950). Globalization then doubled-down on that success, ramping up a global middle class of 2 billion souls into 4 billion consumers. Until recently, that world system was slated to add another two billion consumers to its ranks by mid-century, overwhelmingly outside of the Advanced West.
These are all amazing, world-reshaping accomplishments that do not unfold without US global leadership. They define our unparalleled national greatness and my secular religion of Americanism.
Were there costs?
Absolutely.
America’s middle class was hollowed out, our demographics were irrevocably altered — setting in motion the diminishment of White privilege within our nation, and the planet’s climate was dramatically altered in an ongoing experiment that now forces all species to radically adapt and evolve.
To me, this was a good trade, one that has dovetailed with 8 decades — now — of great/superpower peace (i.e. no direct wars and no World War III).
To me, this was an overwhelmingly moral path and accomplishment — one that Christ himself preached and thereby would have approved of.
You know how Wall Street seems to screw up everything up on a regular basis? That’s because of a generational turnover that pushes out all the experienced types who remember their past mistakes and abide by the lessons imparted and inserts a whole new generation of players who think the old rules do not apply to their particular brand of “genius.”
It’s like the Matrix resetting itself — you pathetic humans.
Well, apparently the smart-and-experienced-turning-into-dumb-and-forgetful cycle on Smoot-Hawley-like tariffs and Herbert Hoover-like resignation to mass economic suffering (being something the Federal Government should not give a damn about) … apparently, that’s about a century for all those lessons to evaporate in the minds of enough Americans to re-run a doomed experiment — a pathetic and desperate retreat into the past that we (Whites, Christians, proud nationalists) remember with such fondness and pride.
I get the desire to go back in time. Our house is full of turn-of-the-20th-century antique furniture. I grew up in a house built around the Civil War. I love historical documentaries and vintage clothing. My hospice social-worker spouse decompresses regularly by escaping to Amish land and temporarily living among those back-to-the-future natives. I love museums, especially the ones that recreate the past in great physical detail. I mentally return to my childhood all the time.
But I — and none of us — can realistically live there … unless … we disconnect from the wider world, in effects ceding all of our control as to its ongoing evolution right at the point in history when humanity is called up to evolve like never before.
So, yeah, I get the desire to check out of the present and escape into the past. I get the performance anxiety.
Do we still have it within ourselves to lead and shape — much less own — the future?
But this all feels like surrender.
America emulating Hungary? To me, that’s just pathetic and sad and … giving up.
Ditto with Russia, a fake empire that never fully and truly cohered.
These are our role models?
Me? I see regime-toppling exercises just begging for execution.
Now, we mirror-image Iran’s culture police by snatching — can you believe it? — Muslim-garbed (graduate student) women off the streets and disappearing them in an act so un-American that the police officers involved feel the personal need to hide their faces.
The culture police (how else to describe detaining someone for co-authoring an op-ed?) in Iran aren’t afraid to show their faces, but American officers are?
To me, that is some serious shame-denial/avoidance, which seems rampant across much of our nation right now.
Politicians ducking town halls and reporters, a shameful and bizarre attempt to White-wash (quite literally) our shared and hard-earned past in which my ancestors fought wars to terminate imperialism, end slavery, and defeat fascism — all because a minority of Whites in our nation cannot accept a future in which they no longer dominate everything (to wit, the bizarro signaling by Trump 2.0 that either we destroy all DEI programs inside America or American Whites will be hunted down and murdered like some imagined reality allegedly unfolding today in South Africa).
None of these scapegoating efforts lead us to a future worth creating. There just aren’t enough transgenders out there to crucify.
Trump’s worldwide tariff war is just the most impotent attempt to make today’s “bad world” go away and resurrect America’s Gilded Age — as if that serves anybody’s purposes outside of the Billionaire Boys Club.
Whites, ironically enough, are re-running the same Ghost Dance dynamics to which Native Americans once turned in their existential desperation (also in the late 19th century, coincidentally).
The Ghost Dance was a Native American spiritual and cultural movement that emerged in the late 19th century, aiming to restore indigenous lands, traditions, and autonomy. It originated with the Northern Paiute prophet Wodziwob around 1869 in Nevada and was later revitalized by another Paiute prophet, Wovoka, in 1889. Wovoka's vision during a solar eclipse prophesied the return of deceased ancestors, the disappearance of White settlers, and the renewal of Native American life if followers adhered to moral living and performed the ceremonial Ghost Dance.
PERPLEXITYai
Less than a quarter million minds changed last November and none of these things has to happen. We don’t have to emulate North Korea’s Hermit-Kingdom approach to global economics. We don’t have to cozy up to war criminals like Putin. We don’t have to go all McCarthy-like on anybody who speaks up against Israel’s brutal ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.
We don’t have to degrade ourselves and our nation with all this fear-filled, hate-spewing anger seeking escape in an unachievable Golden Past.
I say it again:
In yearning for an irretrievable past, nostalgia is a lie concocted by our younger minds and sold to our present selves. An internal dialogue of grief, it is the death of strategic vision.
When politically weaponized, nostalgia ruins our appreciation of the present and deadens our anticipation of the future. It reduces leadership to steering by the rearview mirror. As an animating ideology, nostalgia is a rallying point for culture warriors determined to roll back time—the knee-jerk response of religious fundamentalists across the world to globalization’s liberating dynamics.
In economic terms, nostalgia often profiteers on prejudice by idealizing yesterday’s less-equal society. It narrows ambition and suffocates innovation by idealizing a simpler—but always more patriarchal and constricted—past to which return is impossible without re-subjugating those who have since achieved agency, thus disparaging their contributions (What have they ever done?) while discounting their consumer demand (Why must I serve those people?).
Worst, in its rosy memorializing of the “good old days,” nostalgia is social escapism bordering on emotional disorder. It is unhealthy and un-American.
Americans will inevitably look back upon this period with great shame and sorrow.
It did not have to be — this superpower suicide.
