Grief and the 2024 Presidential Election
What the Presidential Debate Revealed about the Coming U.S. Dictatorship
I’ve been in a grief hole since watching the Biden-Trump debate. Grief because I’m watching the end of my country. I’ve never loved this country, but it is my country. Trump looks likely to be elected, he’ll implement Project 2025, and I’ll be living in a white nationalist dictatorship. I’m afraid the Left will talk about it, protest about it, but do little to galvanize until after it happens. After it’s too late. Grief, because I can’t stop it, and I can’t escape it. I’m a convicted felon, so the chances of getting a residency visa in another country feel slim. Grief, because 73 million Americans watched the same debate as I did. They heard Trump say that he tried to convince Washington DC to let him send the National Guard in on January 6 to keep order. Perhaps they understand that had Washington DC’s mayor accepted Trump’s offer, we would be living in a white nationalist dictatorship today.
They heard Trump answer the abortion question in three parts. Between each part, he said, “You have to get elected, you have to get elected.” At one point he said, “You have to get elected because that has to do with other things.” Perhaps the public understands that Trump is telling his supporters that he’s lying to win, to get elected so they can accomplish other things. Other things: Project 2025, the conservative agenda developed by the Heritage Foundation to consolidate power in the executive branch in service to “taking back” America from non-white people. The conservative agenda that seeks to “dismantle the bureaucratic state,” the white nationalist movement that even now is training everyone who will hold a key position in Trump’s government about what the law is and how to interpret the law. Perhaps Americans realize that the reason the January 6 attempted coup failed was because people in key positions refused to break the law. Trump’s camp has learned from that failure; there will be no one in the next administration who doesn’t interpret the law the way Trump wants them to interpret it.
My grief is deep because I fear that even if Americans understand that Trump has all his ducks lined up to transform the US into a white nationalist dictatorship, and even if they understand that it absolutely CAN and IS happening in America, I have no experience of them actually caring. Most Americans are white, and when I look at the lack of dialogue in our country about the pending overthrow of our Democracy, I can’t help but think that white America believes they’ll do well in a white nationalist nation. Not every white American believes that. I know many who know they will not do well. But they’re tired. Like me, they don’t know what to do. Perhaps now they know what they should have done after January 6th. Put a pin in that thought.
My oldest brother is still in prison. Before I left prison, we talked as we walked circles around the yard. He should’ve gotten out of prison a couple years after I did, but we knew that wasn’t going to happen because he regularly received rules violation reports for pissing off correctional officers with self-righteousness demands. I asked him what it would take for him to swallow his pride and lay low. He shook his head. He didn’t see the point in swallowing his pride. He had so many rules violation reports that he believed it would take another decade for the prison to let him go. I empathized. When I first came to prison, I experienced something similar.
On your first day in prison, a correctional officer assigns you a number of points that represent your risk to security and order. I’d committed a capital offense, so I received a lot of points for that. I also received points for my young age, my shallow employment history, and my marital status. I think I had over 80 point, and I could only lose two points a year for good behavior. It took me 15 years to lower my points enough to go to San Quentin State Prison, and at the beginning of that journey, I was a 20-year-old that didn’t see the point in trying. But I had to realize that if I ever wanted to change my life, I had to start the journey. Refusing the journey wouldn’t change that the journey was my only way forward; refusing it could only add years to the already daunting task. I told my brother this; he had to start at some point or die in prison. He looked at me, tired, and said he’d die in prison. That’s hopelessness. It’s powerful.
It’s not just white Americans who believe in Democracy for all races that are tired. People of color are tired too. We’re all tired, just like my brother, and the specter of hopelessness has either paralyzed us or almost paralyzed us. It’s almost paralyzed me. I almost avoided writing this piece because no matter what I write, the reality is that this problem, this twilight of American Democracy, grows from a cultural problem we’ve failed to fix. And we can’t fix it in an election cycle.
What should we have done after January 6th? It was naive to think that the threat January 6th represented would just go away, that its failure was somehow a triumph of our Democratic system. People in the US and overseas have been saying as much for the past three years. The Democratic Party has been well aware of this threat, but one look at Biden in the debates hemming and hawing around the threat that Trump poses to Democracy, and it’s clear that Democrats were afraid to make this a public debate. Scared because it would have played to the same tired strategy they’ve deployed every election: better to support the Democratic Party who continually betrays its promises to people of color than endure a Republican administration. They’ve cried wolf too many times, and now when that rally cry to Democracy is the only thing that should matter to Americans who believe in Democracy, the Democratic Party has no credibility to move the nation. They’ve been outmaneuvered. We’ve been outmaneuvered. I think the Democrats were also scared to explicitly expose Trump’s agenda because they know Trump can still win even if the whole country knows what he’s doing, and if Trump did win under those conditions, everyone who opposed him would be at the mercy of his dictatorship.
I empathize. I’m scared. And I watch entirely too much anime: no matter how hopeless it feels, the answer is to fight, fight, fight. I want us to have a more expansive view of fighting. What fighting looks like now before the election may look very different from how we should fight after the election. My prayer for what we can do now is the same thing we should’ve done after January 6th. Drop everything, drop our pet projects — climate change, prison abolition, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights — and focus on stopping Trump’s election. We do that by making Project 2025 the biggest and most ever-present conversation that exists between now and November. Project 2025 was almost nowhere in the news in January and coverage has just marginally increased today, so we must find our own platforms community to community.
My prayer is that we swallow our well-earned resentment of the Democratic Party and get them elected, not because we support them but because we’re strategic. We need a third (and fourth) party. We’ll need ranked choice voting to build alternative parties, but we cannot build that power during the 2024 Presidential election. What we need now more than anything is time to do that, and a Trump presidency will end that clock.
How should we fight if Trump wins and creates a dictatorship? Run. Trump plans to pull US resources out of world affairs so he can consolidate American power at home and deal with dissenters. He will be ready for a fight. Which means it’s the wrong time to fight against overwhelming military power. From a strategic standpoint, retreat is also fighting. My ancestors retreated thousands of years ago in Africa when European colonialists destroyed their culture. While community after community converted to Christianity, they admitted defeat, retreated, and planted the seeds that would later grow and manifest in me and others. The seeds should contain the culture and ideologies that will eventually replace the culture and ideologies that brought Trump to power. Retreat, find the safety you can, and plant the seeds that will save our descendants from another thousand years of white supremacy.
Whatever happens, whatever we do, it will be a long road to recovery. Long enough perhaps to feel pointless. Long enough for us to feel as hopeless as my brother. What I will remind myself every day is that the journey, no matter how long, has to begin. The alternative is condemning our descendants to do the work for us.
I share your despair, Emile. It is so much worse for younger generations than mine. I wish you had a way to get to another country.
This is so so good.