• Calls for celebration are not without calls for concern.
• A call for celebration is not above reproach.
• The call for celebration can be made for dubious or questionable reasons, and if used to shut down valid concerns or questions has shown its true colors. Good intentions do not cancel out problematic foundations and misguided views.

Mental health hits me in the most random of times. On the cusp of the 2020 season, the (hopefully) final episode airs. Trump loses the election. I think I got drunk in celebration. But I most likely got drunk to damper the tears of joy from the opposing side.

No amount of suffering, through months of protest, killings, and arrests, or the nation-wide botchin of pandemic relief and care, apparently, can dampen people’s faith in the electoral system.

Trump’s loss was not just one out of a million electoral moments, but the deciding event of the century to the faithful electorate. Everyone played in the pontification that only pundits are egregiously known for. And in the midst of this celebration, I took a minute to think over what was bothering me.

1.

People have truly learned little from this president’s four years in office. A depressing realization, to say the least. The context, and precedent surrounding Trump’s many explicit abuses were lost in the heat of electoral politics. Everyone just wanted to fuck, and it didn’t matter who or what they were fucking.

By no means am I saying we shouldn’t be celebrating Trump’s electoral loss. I for one, am looking forward to worrying about one less thing for the next four years. But how we celebrate Trump’s loss says a lot about what the next four years will look like (or the next fuckin’ decade, for that matter!). Trump’s presidency has lowered the standards for what we expect out of a president. The warmongering of George W. Bush now looks enticing to those who ounce found his presidency apprehensible. We’ll take anything now.

As an anti-fascist, I am excited about confronting the militant aspects of American fascism without a in-your-face fascist mascot in the oval office. The symbolic and rhetorical power Trump gave to American fascists and white supremacist groups was very real. His loss will galvanize our side, and hopefully loosen the power these groups have already grasped.

On the other hand, I’m not expecting the fight against American fascism to be a resounding win. Biden has made his loyalties clear in his willingness to round up “anarchists” and anyone else that takes it upon themselves to disobey the state (as we saw this summer with the George Floyd protests). In that regard, our job might prove just as hard as Biden tries to court the right’s loyalty/time-out by hounding the militant anti-fascists that made their lives hectic. Don’t underestimate how much Biden is aiming for a faux-show of national unity. Nothing makes unifying people easier than getting rid of the annoying dissenters. Dissenters who point out, through action and word, how disjointed and abusive national unity can be.

Our national attention and memory are disturbingly short. They’re more often a barrier than a benefit. Couple that with a narrow understanding of how nations change, and an ignorance of the role mass movements play in said change, and we’ve got a recipe for the refortification of trust in the electoral process. A process that consistently takes credit for the wins mass movements fight for.

The US government has continually shown a willingness to abuse its hold over us. That precedent will continue. And just because you don’t readily see it, doesn’t mean it hasn’t always been there.

Our neoliberal overlords, despite being embarrassed by Trump’s brief ascension, will not soften their touch without serious pushback.

2.

How do you respond when other people refuse to join in the festivities? How do you behave when someone critics your celebration for being unnecessarily misguided or misplaced?

Too many people - many of them white liberals and democrats - showed their true colors those first few days after Trump’s loss was announced. Not only was their celebration centered explicitly or not around their own anxiety, but because they had identified so strongly with their antagonism toward Trump as a President (as opposed to the systems and institutions that gave him the power to explicitly target the other) they took any intrusions on their myopic celebration as a personal attack. “Why can’t you just let us celebrate something for once?” was the accusation of choice from this crowd. Which quickly turned into various forms of gaslighting.

Accusing people of cynicism, an inability to celebrate victories, and being a party-pooper on a subject as nuanced and problematic as electoral politics is peak irrational American optimism.

Obviously we have diverging outlooks on electoral politics (and politics in general). Instead of recognizing this difference, and discussing it, one faction gaslights another for not playing along. “Why can’t you celebrate something for a change?” Um, I celebrate tons of things. I just refuse to go ape-shit happy over one process out of many within a system I have no allegiance or love for.

I don’t expect much from the rank and file democrat and liberal who still can’t say “all cops are bastards,” much less ridicule their friends for being cops. What disturbed me was how many people I thought had a systemic understanding of our national politics immediately forget everything they purported to believe. All Cops are Bastards means the whole system is designed from the ground up to be totalitarian and abusive. This logically includes judges and the court system, career bureaucrats, politicians, and so on. Subsequently, it implies holistic justice will never fully come from these institutions. That to effect lasting and significant change, it must come outside the system.

That hundreds, if not thousands of people celebrated Trump’s loss and Biden/Kamala’s win in the streets of DC, and a few days later let several hundred Proud Boys and other fascists/neo-Nazis rampage through parts of the city with little to no pushback says just how much faith people have in electoral politics to the detriment of everything else. It communicates a dangerous level of disconnect between how they felt about Trump’s presidency, and what they actually did to protest it. In a sense, the loudest celebrators are often the most pernicious internet and armchair activists.

Electoral politics did not create Trump. A swelling of far-right, white supremacist movements and rhetoric, that slowly but surely built up within the republican base, did. The Tea Party was a mass movement. The influence fascists and white supremacists now have on talk radio and the internet is astounding. None of this will be fixed via electoral politics. If anything, it’ll guarantee another “Trump-moment” in four years, and mini-Trumps throughout local races for the forseable future (as we’ve already seen with the election of Marjorie Taylor, a QAnon believer, to the US House; the election of rapist and nazi-sympathizer Madison Cawthorn; and the 27 QAnon believing candidates on the ballot this election season).

At the end of the day, a lot of people were against Trump and what he did. Not anything more. The “Resist” liberal blowhards will have the social peace they’ve always wanted (a social peace that masks the exploitation of everyday life that they live off of; that is, a social peace of their own mental creation).

At what point does your anxiety over Trump become a tell-all on how little the Trump presidency affected you?

At what point does your faith in the electoral politics highlight how little you know about the intricacies of the American system’s exploitation of the Black and brown working and poor classes, and how little it changes from administration to administration? Damage control is true to an extant. But the government inherently serves the interests of the capitalist class/bourgeoisie, which subsists off of the sweat and blood of the aforementioned exploited. Do you actually know and understand how much of it has been baked into the system for decades and centuries?

This is what I mean by how you celebrate electoral victories matters a lot. No one gets a get-out-of-jail-free card for celebrating. We all have a lot of implicit bias and complicitness to unwork. Please don’t gaslight those of us who are trying to help you.