Trumping DeTocqueville

US voter leanings defy logical explanation. But logic is not the point.

Just this morning, a guy told me that the funeral homes see a lot of dead bodies from people who took a COVID vaccine. He said that their blood thickens and becomes a string in their veins. And they are told by the Biden government to keep it quiet.” He went on, “The same guy asked me a few months ago if I had noticed that many ‘illegals’ are very young. He said, ‘I wonder what the Democrats do with all these children.’ He believes that the Democratic Party is involved in organized pedophilia.” Pourquoi continued, “Even more widespread is the ‘news’ that Democrats want to make a law that can force parents to subject their children to surgery to change their genitalia.” He sighed. “There is no end to the uninformed nonsense.” I asked where to find such folks, and he said that they were everywhere: “Just go to the Walmart parking lot. You’ll see.”

— Charles Bethea, Letter from the South: Among America’s “Low Information Voters,” The New Yorker August 22, 2024

Lately I have been re-reading a book called Deer Hunting with Jesus. I visited the author, Joe Bageant, toward the end of his life and stayed in the guest bedroom upstairs in the old Winchester, Virginia home he liked to mention in his books. I didn’t know then that he was dying but he must have known. He only lasted a few months after my visit.

I was visiting because we had a common interest in Belize. He had been going there off and on over many years and so had I. For him, it was a way to freshen his perspective by getting out of the USAnian culture for a while. For me, it was teaching permaculture at the Maya Mountain Research Farm and machete’ing my way through the ruins of lost civilizations.

Plenty of voters defy easy categorization: evangelicals who vote for candidates connected to porn stars, prison abolitionists who vote for career prosecutors.
— The New Yorker

Bageant’s deer-hunting masterpiece, which is a free download on Audible, is about the culture divide in the American Empire, which he articulates authentically from both sides with inimitable humor and delicious prose. Here is a small excerpt, from a chapter called “Republicans By Default.” This was inked in the 2002-2006 Iraq War period and published by Portobello Books on June 19, 2007. It has since come out in 25 editions worldwide.

The seemingly hateful values that many working people display when it comes to sexuality and race are not rooted in any inherent malevolence… The brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.

Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying blood of commodity and spectacle. It is about making sure that they, and we, refuse to accept torture as the act of heroes and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the price of freedom.

Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of Imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat-screen televisions and the idea of an American Empire.

“American Empire! I like the sound of that,” they think to themselves, without even the slightest idea what it means historically.

Kamala Harris "for the people" is a brand Democrats unveiled at the 2024 convention in Chicago, two decades after Bageant explained what "the people" means to him. Harris needs to understand this.

“The people” doing our hardest work and fighting our wars are not altruistic and probably never were. They don't give a rat's bunghole about the world's poor or the planet or animals or anything else, not really. “The people” like cheap gas. They like chasing post-thanksgiving day Christmas sales, and if fascism comes they will like that too, if the cost of gas isn't too high and Comcast comes through with a 24-hour NFL channel.

That is the American hologram. That is the peculiar illusion we live within—the illusion that holds us together, makes us alike, yet tells each of us we are unique. And it will remain in force until the whole shittery comes down around our heads. Working people do not deny reality. They create it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non-sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction.

Meanwhile, for “the people,” it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns. That's what they voted for—an armed and moral Republic. And that's what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit. Genuine moral values have jack to do with politics, but in an obsessively religious nation, values remain the most effective smokescreen for larceny by the rich and hatred and fear by the rest.

DeTocqueville Reprised

In 1831, Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, obtained from the July Monarchy (later the Second Republic) a mission to travel widely in the newly formed United States. The result of that tour was De la démocratie en Amérique, which appeared in 1835. In it, Tocqueville warned that American-style democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism. “In such conditions, we might become so enamored with 'a relaxed love of present enjoyments' that we lose interest in the future of our descendants...and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one,” wrote one reviewer.

Tocqueville worried that if despotism were to take root in a modern democracy, it would be a much more dangerous version than the oppression under the Roman emperors or tyrants of the past who could only exert a pernicious influence on a small group of people at a time. In contrast, a despotism under a democracy could see “a multitude of men,” uniformly alike, equal, “constantly circling for petty pleasures,” unaware of fellow citizens and subject to the will of a powerful state that exerted an “immense protective power.” Tocqueville compared it to an overprotective parent who wants to keep its citizens “perpetual children” and who does not break men's wills, but rather presides over people in the same way as a shepherd looks after a “flock of timid animals.”

…one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.

— Alexis de Tocqueville

If Democrats and most people living outside the USA scratch their heads and wonder why so many seemingly sane people fly Confederate flags and shop for MAGA caps for their children to wear back to their heartland middle schools, this is why. It is hatred and fear, stoked ever more by algorithms that monetize outrage—a veritable doom loop. The difference between Harris and Trump is she is aware of the American Empire but wants to conceal the sins of empire that adhere like a bloodstain, while he wears the bloody red tie with pride. Harris apologizes for doing to Gazan babies what Bush and Cheney did to Fallujan babies, while Trump would more likely arrange for a private screening of Palestinian prison torture (as Cheney and Rumsfeld did for the black sites) and then go brag about it from the stump (which Cheney and Rumsfeld didn’t).

Twenty years ago Bageant got that. He nailed it a lot better than many who try to explain it in podcasts, Substacks, or YouTubes today. I wish he were around to see the national election drama this year—he would be amazing to have on long-form social media.

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#RestorationGeneration.

當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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Social Permaculture

Global Village Institute in cooperation with GEN Global Ecovillage Network Ukraine and Permaculture in Ukraine, invite you to a three-day training on creating eco-projects with the world-famous teacher and author Starhawk.

Where: Ecovillage Zeleni Kruchi (Green Cliffs), Ukraine.
When: 6-8 September 2024 (arrival on the 5th)
Participation fee: 1500 UAH
What: The course will cover:
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and much more.