As one of the three hosts of my most-listened to podcast (Accidental Tech Podcast), John Siracusa has been the “voice of reason” for over 15 years in my podcast listening universe. Prior to ATP, he co-hosted a podcast called Hypercritical, which has the best motto to explain John himself that I’ve ever heard: “Nothing is so perfect that it can’t be complained about.”
In the latest episode of ATP (starting around the 2:00:44 mark), the guys are relaying their feelings and frustrations and reactions to the recent U.S. election of Donald Trump (again). In the after-show, Marco and Casey turn to John to help explain why some people are feeling sad right now. In his very practical and logical way, John explains it exquisitely:
(I’ve transcripted, to the best of my ability, the entire 12-minute explanation here. It took a long time to do this, but I think his message is worth preserving here. Also, please excuse the typos if you find them 😀 )
For anyone who’s listening to this who is on the opposite side of us and somehow managed to make it to this point, congratulations on your hate listening. I bet one of the things you’re thinking is:
“This is so overblown, you’re so sad because your team lost the Super Bowl. Who cares? Like, get over it. Oh, you’re depressed, that’s ridiculous. Like what’s the big deal?”
To try to explain why this is different, I’m old enough to have lived through the election of many presidents that I didn’t want to win the election. I lived through many Republicans, and I didn’t want any of them to win. They did. Right? None of them felt like Trump, term 1 and term 2. And there’s a reason for that. This is different. This is worse than it has been in my lifetime for presidential elections. When George W. Bush was elected twice, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it the first time and I couldn’t believe he was elected the second time. Like, are we doing this again? You kidding? Have we learned nothing?
But it was not as bad as this. Because George W. Bush, for all his faults (and there are many), and for all the terrible things his administration did (and there are many), had sort of, minimum baseline level of humanity and at least an attempt to pretend to care about the duties of the presidency and the people who live in the country. And the whole thing with Trump has been, like, there is no floor. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t wanna know anything. He doesn’t care about anything. It’s like trying to decide who’s gonna fly your plane. Like, I don’t care if this person knows anything about planes, knows what a plane is, and has ever flown anything before, cares about any of the people on the plane, doesn’t actively want to kill everybody on the plane. None of that matters. Trump is the bottom. I can think of worse people to be president, but it’s hard. And it’s below the baseline. And so for people are on our side, when we see him elected not once, but twice, we think “how many millions of our fellow Americans think this is acceptable?” And we’re sad about that.
Obviously, we’re sad about all of the people are gonna be hurt, and killed, and have terrible things happen to them under his administration. But a big component of the sadness of both elections is all of us thinking we’re in this country with these millions and millions of people who think this is acceptable for the presidency. Right? It is not a good feeling.
Can you imagine if you were on the other side of this? If the Democrats elected somebody who said “we should kill all puppies”. That was a big thing on their platform. We should totally kill all puppies. And that person had murdered their wife, was convicted but got off on a technicality. So, was a murderer and he said we should kill all puppies. He’s not actually killing all puppies but he thinks we should kill all of them. And we elected him president. Wouldn’t you be sad thinking that millions and millions of people think it’s ok that the person who wants to kill puppies and killed his wife should be president? And you’d be like “Really? The puppy-killing guy? I know he hasn’t actually killed any puppies yet, but he said he wants to? And he’s gonna really try to? And that’s OK?”
And the response to that would be “Forget about the puppy killing, we like the other parts.” Wouldn’t you be sad, thinking that so many of your fellow citizens think that’s ok? Now that’s ridiculous, Trump doesn’t want to kill any puppies. But it’s the same type of deal. There’s a minimum level of care and humanity and knowledge that Trump does not pass. It’s hard living in a world where you think that’s OK for a lot of other people. It’s hard thinking all the bad things that he says are ok. Now you can say “I don’t believe all things he says I just like him and I just ignore all the bad stuff.” But at a certain point, knowing that your fellow citizens are on board with all that. Not on board with it being done, but on board with saying “the guy who says all that, he’s my guy. I don’t think he’s ever going to do all that, but he’s my guy.”
That’s a sad feeling. A sad feeling to know your fellow humans, forget about citizens, your fellow humans, think this is good. And knowing that you’re in the same country with the same laws under the same government, and you have to deal with the consequences of their vote. And again, it happens all the time. Sometimes, your person doesn’t win. I did not feel like this when George W. Bush won, when George H. W. Bush won, when Reagan won. It didn’t feel like this at all. This feels different. This feels worse because it is worse.
That’s why some people in your life are really sad right now. Maybe they’re special snowflakes and they should just “get over it” and not be sad or whatever, but it is worse. We feel worse. I didn’t feel like this in any other presidential election when “my person” didn’t win. This is different. This is worse.
And we know what we’re in for, and we know it’s going to be bad, and I feel if you study history and see what it takes for a governing system to be sort of broken apart and broken down, so that what was once a functioning society that tried to raise the standard of living for everybody and do better over time, becomes the domain of dictators and warlords. It happens all the time throughout history. How did these societies end up in a situation where there’s one super powerful person who’s oppressing everybody and doing terrible things and everyone else is suffering? How do you end up that situation?
The whole American experiment was to try to design a system where that’s harder to do. But people are constantly trying to find a way to break down that system, to break away all the things that are keeping us from becoming a lawless system. And we’ve made progress. If you look at the book “The Power Broker”, and can learn about, as a side effect, Tameny Hall. And all of the political corruption machines where politics was just a way, it was basically like street gangs, essentially. And when you got elected, you gave money and jobs to the people who supported you. Graft and bribery, that was the system. And that was a bad system.
And we had reformers who said “hey, this is no way to run a government” because it lets the people who are loyal to the political machine, it was like organized crime. That’s bad. Because the citizens suffer. And it’s the same reason having organized crime families battle each other is bad, even if they’re not killing each other in the street. They’re hogging all the money and the good stuff for a small number of people and everyone else suffers. Let’s reform the system. Let’s add laws and ethics and try to have a different way of governing ourselves that doesn’t involve patronage and graft. That took years and years of reformers battling to try to make our system better.
That’s history, not just in America, but over the entire world. It’s difficult to make a governing system that is resistant to people chipping it away. If you don’t constantly resist that, you end up with a small number of very wealthy, very powerful, people living really great lives, and everyone else suffering. And the American system is currently in regression where we had all these things that were trying to be bulwarks against that terrible thing happening that are being eaten away slowly, but surely: Citizens United, all the Supreme Court Justices letting the president do whatever he wants as long as it’s part of his official duties, reversing Roe v. Wade, installing judges who are loyal to Trump instead of the law.
All the checks and balances that we had are being chipped away in service of bringing us back to, essentially, Mad Max and warlords. Which by the way, is not a good system of government for the general citizen.
[…]
We are chipping away the institutions that try to make life better for everybody in service of making life better for a small number of people, while everyone else suffers. And part of that is convincing most of the population to vote for you by feeding them information that makes them think what they’re doing is in their own best interest. When it really isn’t.
And we will obviously disagree on that, but every time I even think about the idea of talking to somebody, and trying to convince them of my political position, I think of the concept of going back time to the 1800s in America and trying to convince somebody that women should have the right to vote. If you really want to understand another depressing thing that people are upset about, do you think you could go and convince somebody that women should have the right to vote in the 1800’s? How difficult would that be?
Presumably, you believe it. You’re a modern person, and like, of course the women should have the right to vote. That’s stupid. Now go back in time to the 1800’s and try to convince literally one person that should be true. Everything you say they will have a comeback to, and your brain will explode. You will think, “But, but..” And they will respond “It’s ridiculous, women should vote? What’s next? Dogs voting? It doesn’t make any sense.”
That’s how a lot of us feel trying to say “maybe don’t vote for Trump”. But people did it. And trying to convince them makes my brain explode in the same way that trying to convince someone in the 1800’s that women should vote. There’s nothing you can say to convince them. They have a completely sealed, completely logical, completely sensible, functioning worldview that does not include the idea of women voting. It took decades and decades of people fighting for it for us to finally get that done. And these days, I often think that we would never get a constitutional amendment to give rights to a minority group just because our current system of government has been so degraded that that will literally never happen because as long as one side doesn’t like it, it’s never gonna happen.
Anyway, I’ve rambled on too long. I just wanted to try to explain to the three people still listening why people you know might be sad in a way that doesn’t make sense to you and seems dumb. I understand why it seems dumb. But I want you to know that it’s not just people overreacting or being overly dramatic. For those of us on this side of the aisle, the two Trump elections feel different. I think they should feel different to any other human being, and I think across the globe they do feel different to most human beings. But not apparently for half of the voters in this country.
Well said, John. Well said.
