As I’ve mentioned before, political doomerism is part of what cost us the country.  But even now, when fascism is flying its freak flag unimpeded down Main Street, when so many shitty things are going to happen, political doomerism is wrong, and it can cost us more than we’ve already lost.

To the doomer, nothing can ever be changed so don’t even bother.  Smoke ’em if you got ’em and learn to laugh at horror.  Like eco-fascism, it’s something with a compelling ounce of truth, but taken in a bad wrong direction.  And so easy too.  So easy I’d characterize it as fucking lazy.  If you think the world is coming to an end, find something more interesting to do than sit there, c’mon.

The element of truth in environmental doomerism is that we are well past the point where the beautiful world we were born into can be preserved in anything like its current form.  Vast swathes of species will go extinct, including much of the “charismatic megafauna.”  Places that are right now beautiful forests will become inhospitable wastelands.  Plastic and pesticide and biotic interchanges that never should have happened, and now we have politicians even more eager to accelerate us into that future.

BUT.  Life has survived worse, and no organism in the history of the world has had the problem-solving powers of a human mind.  We may be able to get through all that.  But we’ll never know if we don’t try, right?  And those efforts have short-term benefits galore.  Environmental doomerism keeps people inert, coasting on a deadly momentum, fulfilling its own bullshit prophecy.

Political doomerism is the same.  The true aspect is that the federal government is far more powerful than it should be in the USA, and that has been lost wholesale to fascists right now.  But there are still reasonable people who are in there, able to sometimes, some ways, fuck up the program for the jerks.  The fash will get away with doing an awful lot of damage, but some of it will be blocked, one way or another.

And Washington DC isn’t where the rubber meets the road on legislation.  This stuff needs states to enforce it, and while some are hijacked by the worst tyrants this side of Mecca, many states are going to work around or even fully block the effects of bad laws.  They can’t stop all the bleeding, but they can stop an awful lot, if they put their minds and resources to it.  If you’ve got a blue or even purple government, press your politicians to do whatever it takes to keep their constituents safe.

And government isn’t the end-all be-all of politics.  Street level, we can kinda do whatever the fuck we want?  As long as we’re willing and able to face the consequences.  The multifarious US right wing terrorists live by that credo; no reason we can’t too.  Ideally, to be doing things like helping humans survive, making love not war, but still.  You could literally do anything you are physically capable of, if you want to.

This election was lost by blue voters not showing up.  Culturally GOP people actually improved, with many of them staying home, and I thank them.  It was too much to hope for that many would switch to blue, like those prominent few did.*  It is people who might have voted blue that tossed this thing.  Some were misogynists, which is still a problem so much more pervasive and deep than most understand.  Some were single-issue voters who hated dem heel-dragging on Palestine, somehow too dense to realize this can do nothing but make things worse for the muslim world as a whole.  But I suspect, having seen endless rounds of the “it’s cool to not vote” discourse on social media from ostensible leftists, that a great many had just given up hope.

Political doomerism, like all doomerism, makes doom happen.  Resisting that is crucial to salvaging anything good in the future, and very importantly – and very possibly – to making good things happen in the present.  Fight doom!

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*as it turned out, the number of trump voters was almost exactly the same as it was last time.  the cult is devoted, what can we say?