Election night insecurities

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lychee

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Election night insecurities
@lychee writes stuff - blog post #15
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This is a largely unplanned blog post, so I'm diving straight in without any planning! If you don't care about politics, you can safely tune out of this post. :blobxd:

By some measure, I think I'm possibly one of the most political individuals on NUF, and I'll probably end up solidifying that reputation by writing this post.

Nonetheless, election season is something that definitely gives me deep anxiety. I'm not exactly sure how to express this, but I get really randomly emotional during this time of year. I care about it a lot. You could say it is a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the 2016 United States presidential election cycle... which was an extremely divisive election.

I was deeply involved and deeply engrained in the ugliest pits of it.

I blogged / tweeted about what I thought, which candidates I supported, and brawled with people in online chat rooms who were extremely eager to spew venom and all sorts of other nasty stuff.

Incidentally, the worst phase of 2016 (from my perspective) was the democratic primary — the Clinton vs. Sanders nightmare — which was possibly the nastiest thing I've ever been part of. As a Clinton supporter, I actually had far worse inflammatory experiences on the Internet interacting with the so-called "BernieBros" than later on in 2016 when I interacted with Trump supporters during the general election. Part of that is because Sanders has overwhelming online support and popularity with Millennials, and Internet culture in itself can get inherently toxic and nasty. It immediately drew recollections of my early experiences on the Internet with #GamerGate, because my sour experience through both of those were incredibly similar.

The toxicity and divisiveness is extremely painful.

...The intense desire to hate something or someone, or to blame XXXX for your problems.

And it's back! 2020 is here!

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So right now it's 1:30 AM and the Democratic Iowa Primary still has not released results.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with American politics, the Iowa primary is an extremely important state/provincial election because it sets the momentum. The early primaries determine the candidates who will be viable in the later phases, and it helps set a narrative about who has a realistic shot of winning.

I've had deep anxieties about this day for...

Uh....... Weeks.

:notlikeblob::notlikeblob::notlikeblob:

Yeah, I'm a huge political nerd.

Actually the past two weekends, I would think about the election and then get randomly depressed. Like seriously in the bad way. I wouldn't want to do anything else and just crawl into bed and flop under the blankets and be sad.

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There's a few reasons for this "depression".

The first reason is that I think that President Trump has a reasonably good chance of winning the re-election in the Fall of 2020.

There are many reasons why I think this is the case, but I think the best way to illustrate it is to point out that Trump remains 100% uncontested on the Republican side. There is no serious challenger in the Republican primary, which basically means that Republicans are confident that Trump can win 2020. Trump remains incredibly popular among his constituents, which incidentally makes up greater than 50% of the United States by land area (the electoral college). Even the entire impeachment proceedings that occurred the past few weeks had zero impact on the president's approval ratings, and support for the President remains strictly divided by party lines.

In contrast, there hasn't been a strong candidate that most serious analysts feel can wage a strong campaign against the incumbent. Recall that a candidate that simply repeats the electoral math of 2016 cannot win the general election.

Biden lacks energy and probably is going to sag if the preliminary results in Iowa mean anything.

Sanders and Warren are generally felt to not do as well in the general election, in large part because the current flag-bearers for the Democratic party sit further to the left than most of America.

And the remaining candidates are sort of big ????? for most people.

So yeah! There's a lot of deep anxiety for me.

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I've had a lot of respect and affinity for moderates and pragmatists who pursue "incremental change" for a very very long time.

My political alignment is definitely moderate-left, which is also weird because I also consider myself a Social Justice Warriors (SJW). Aren't those two things contradictory?

Well, there are two things.

The first is that I've spent a fair amount of time with people on "ground-zero" who are actually doing things to bring real change to people that matters.

I served on my local school committee for 2-3 years, and I have a lot of respect for "establishment" political institutions, because a lot of the people there do really great things, and they're really great people. I'm also in health sciences and I care a bit about health policy and public health issues. I'm familiar with the amount of work, sweat, and careful thought that goes into something like the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or even your local state/provincial bills.

The progress is extremely slow, but that's also because the real world operates really slow. Systems don't get dismantled and reassembled overnight. Change is incremental because that's how operations work. Policies get added slowly, and they get modified if the data shows it's not working. There's so many billions of considerations that make most issues more complex than they're often presented in politics.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is for your boss (e.g. recently elected politician), comes to you and says that tomorrow we're going to ban all diesel trucks and instead they all need to be electric. Electric trucks, electric trains, electric planes, and also electric buses.

—Yes, we are working that. We were working on that before you came and told us. We have thousands of published research articles and hundreds of different policy groups of various experts in the field actively working on a detailed plan on how we can get this done in maybe fifty years.

It's frustrating because maybe your boss politician then passes a law that inadvertently dismantles everything that you've worked on for the past ten years, and then their new plan that they send to Congress gets gutted because apparently there's no money to fund it, or the opposite political party hates it so much they want it repealed, and then ultimately you've moved nowhere because of politics. :facepalm:

It's really frustrating.

And also why I'm especially distrustful of campaign promises that I perceive as unrealistic or ungrounded or pandering.

And I generally trust candidates that look like somebody pragmatic people on "ground zero" can work with, because realistically speaking those "pragmatic" people are actually the ones being the fire-fighters or mailmen or school principals or CDC officials or school teachers or librarians or hospital directors or police chiefs — and each of them is pushing for change and growth in their own way. You can't carry out effective change unless you have all the people actually doing the change on board (unless you plan on firing all your city clerks and school teachers and nurses and police officers and everything else).

Nonetheless, I'm still a SJW because there are many issues that I care very strongly about.

I think it's important continue pushing for change and influence the way that society perceives various issues.

But I also recognize that things don't happen overnight.

No amount of shouting or tweeting or Internet debating is going to make NASA landing a man on Mars in the next 4 years possible. Rather, there's a dozen different things that need to come into place in order to make that objective feasible, and a more realistic timeline is like maybe 20 years.

And I think that's a key distinction.

Many issues that we are dealing with sit in a similar boat.

Legislation needs to pass Congress and it needs to stay passed without getting repealed the next time control of the government flips to another party.

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I think I'm most afraid of a liberal bubble.

We assume that because everyone who lives around us loves Bernie (or hates Trump), therefore the election will be easy, or the answer is obvious.

I really don't think it is.

I grew up in a town that perfectly saddled the line between Trump and Clinton in 2016.

My parents are generally independent/apolitical, and the community that I grew up in is deeply distrustful of the far left (which Sanders/Warren is tied to). They voted for Obama in 2008 and simply didn't vote in 2016.

And I'm really worried for 2020.

:blobsad::blobsad::blobsad: Okay, I'm done here! Sorry for the thoughtless dump of things you don't care about!

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Comments

    1. 25th bamm Feb 15, 2020
      Oh gosh, please take this a sincere question out of ignorance, I'm still really new to politics and am trying to understand it.
      I understand why you would have anxiety. You care about what happens to your country. Sometimes it will directly affect you. but don't we have an indirect democracy? Voting for a certain president is just for the popular vote, it won't do much, right?? Or are you talking about supporting representatives or donating to and helping with presidential campaigns?
    2. kkgoh Feb 5, 2020
      Wait ... I thought you were a UK med-school student :blobsweat_2:

      Clinton can be somewhat divisive :blobpeek:
      I know a lot of Wellesley students and faculty who really supported her in 2016, partially because she's an alum and they wanna hang the "My-Alum-Is-Prez!" plaque on their historic hallways, which is understandable. I also know quite a few Wellesley alum who can't stand her. It's interesting hearing their perspectives.
      Gotta give her credit for paving the road for Warren though.

      And as of 30 mins ago, looks like Buttigieg and Sanders are leading Iowa.

      I'm not a US citizen, so politics is somewhat out of reach.
      But here's an interesting article if you wanna spread it to any friends who are non-residents and still want to participate.
      https://www.npr.org/2019/11/22/782132264/episode-954-what-is-foreign-interference-anyway
    3. AliceShiki Feb 4, 2020
      @Momoyuki While I understand your view, I think that making an uninformed vote is worse than not voting in the first place. Like... If you vote for someone when you don't know much about their agendas and what they intend to do, you can be shooting yourself on the foot.

      Which is why I only vote if I'm 100% sure I absolutely don't want a certain person to win the elections, because no matter how bad the other party is, it can't be as bad as the person I don't want to win.

      If I bothered to learn more about the politicians, their goals and what they want to do, then I would probably vote properly... But well, I never did that, and I honestly don't even know how to find this info (I tried once, it was surprisingly hard, so I gave up midway), so... I prefer to not vote.
      lychee likes this.
    4. Snowbun Feb 4, 2020
      >A< Don't mind me, but I know a lot of people like AliceShiki so I'm just going to be babbling a lot:

      Well, one of the problems in our home country is that a lot of the population usually has little to absolute zero political education. As in, they don't understand the social and power structures, and how everything, from voting to how parties work. That leads us to "Nazis are from far-left", "Social Justice is Communist terror" and other series of bizarre things that were publicized in SNS (With, of course, nefarious rumours about how US moguls interfered and invested money on it). Also, major income discrepancies and therefore access to higher education, lead us into very concentrated bubbles of political views. Lately, there has been a lot of small publications analyzing why the political scene has turned out so ugly lately there too. But the fact that remains is the distrust of people in politics has always been based on the lack of results it brings into everyday life.
      There are many community leaders that rise from the depths of that despair and try to involve their peers into things, IMHO, politics should really be about: representing the will of the living people and managing the advance of our society. Sadly, they clash with the most well-established (and in most cases, terribly corrupt) political parties and families. And honestly, the number of them that have been cold and ruthless assassinated (without resulting in any arrests or decent investigation) is enough to make the very best of us to rethink if it's even possible to ever change anything.

      Now, that being said, I am aware that I grew up in a blessed mid-class environment, in which, I had access to good opportunities and have met people that challenged my views. One thing that became obvious while I was in Architecture School is that a lot of what we learn isn't implemented simply because our power structures won't allow people working under the municipal development agency to propose better city plans because they're not in "public interest" (=they're not huge enough to serve as political propaganda or they will cost a lot and people "won't see the difference immediately"). Which made a LOT of my classmates rethink their career and job paths. Possibly, half of the 150 students of my year didn't go into that, taking easier and more profitable jobs (in IT, Graphic Design, etc., myself included) but some of my close friends have landed jobs in the Public Administration Offices (and sometimes it's absolutely terrible and frustrating from what they told me. Exactly like [celleit] commented before. One of my friends resigned from her job at the end of 2019 because it was just affecting her mental health so much. It didn't help her father was absolutely disappointed that she quit such a stable career). Others, like my husband (same case as my older brother in Electrical Engineering), can't find opportunities to develop their interests and research so they're almost forced to pledge to international scholarships (none of them got funding from our government) and move abroad.

      Why am I even saying that? Well, architects and urban planners take an oath at our school because our responsibility largely lies in the improvement of the way of living. It's more than simply "building collapses, people die, it's your fault". It's "social disadvantage in our country has made people's lives so dreadful we need to use anything in our scope to correct it" (We joke that it's one of the things that makes us different from the Engineering department). We are, since the first moment we step in there, forced to be "political". And that made a lot of people I met there, frown and hate discussing it. And I understand that. Why can't you just attend School and dream of being the next Starchitect? Where's your freedom? If I'm hired by a rich person to design their vacation home, did I sell my soul to the devil?

      But you know... from all of that pressure, there was a significant change I saw in the group I was the closest with during the years I spent there. Most of them, until the end of high school, never dabbled in politics or chose to vote before the compulsory age. But soon they realized that there was indeed something wrong with how things were run and how our influence in the cityscape is not just from what we build but what we, as citizens, express as our ideal living with others. Even if we weren't as vocal as other people, we all took it to our hearts that at least we trusted each one of us would go out and vote always for the lesser of two evils and never annulled our right to choose.

      Alas, now we have a horrendous individual running the country and the same fear that this is a global trend, and people won't dare to change makes me anxious. I do rely on my lil'bubble to survive. We tried to at least make our own families more aware of our ethics regarding this but some of my friends and juniors got into huge family feuds too and were really heartbroken by it. My husband decided to ignore his aunt because she just wouldn't listen to any other opinion and became a "fake news" spammer *facepalm*.

      I don't want to tag anyone because huge rant is huge but TL,DR is I basically I think "Politics = Social Engagement" so voting is always better than not voting.
      lychee likes this.
    5. AliceShiki Feb 4, 2020
      Yeah, I'm totally different from you in that regard, like... I'm really apathetic to politics.

      Usually speaking, I just vote null (since vote is compulsory over here, I'm forced to go vote, only to say "I vote for no one.") since I don't care... If there is a candidate I really don't want to win, I vote on anybody else instead though.

      That's about it for me and politics, so I can't understand most of your anxiety... However, I can understand a small bit of it at least, because like... When people start discussing politics near me, I get very annoyed and very tired very fast, it's a topic that really takes a huge toll on me, like... People are so vocal about it often while knowing nothing about what they're talking about and just spewing nonsense... And everyone has some sort of opinion on it and it's basically impossible to change anyone's mind on the matter of politics as well, so when you have an opinion that is different from the people near you, you only get frustration when talking politics... I hate it.

      So... It's a very stressful topic for me, but rather than letting it stress me, I just avoid it like plague... Which is not what you want to do I guess, so it's not a solution, so uhn... Good luck! I hope you get rid of all this stress soon! >.<
      lychee, Momoyuki and Osamaru like this.
    6. Osamaru Feb 4, 2020
      Political Tribalism is one of the flawed and dangerous aspects of the Democratic Process.
      Supporting someone is fine. But when people start to feel persoanlly attacked when others don't agree, or people support someone because of their party, and not the issues they represent, THAT is when we start to see problems.

      Political Tribalism says "Its US vrs THEM!" instead of "What needs fixed, and who can do it?"
      Political Tribalism says "I'm totally right, and you're totally wrong" instead of "How can we work together?"
      Political Tribalism say " This is what's best for ME, and nothing else matters" instead of "What is the best for the nation as a whole?"

      Having your own Political views and Ideology is all fine and good. That's the whole Point of Democracy.
      But when We start to focus on the health of the Leaves and ignore the rest of the Tree, then Rot starts to settle in, and before we know it, everything is Sick.

      If we REALLY want to make a Difference, we as a Voter need to sit down and instead of yelling and screaming at people who we think are voting wrong (or voting for the "enemy" as some see it), we need to look at WHY they are voting for those people.
      What is the appeal? what does change, and who does it affect.

      Once we start looking through other peoples eyes and not our own filters, we start to see solutions to problems we didn't even know existed.
      celleit, lychee, Woho0 and 1 other person like this.
    7. Anra7777 Feb 4, 2020
      I voted for Sanders in the primary because he was the candidate whose ideals I believed in most. I did so knowing that he likely wouldn’t win, and when he didn’t, I stepped up and voted for Hilary. I even have a “Nasty Woman” shirt that describes nasty women as intelligent, etc. I knew people who ended up voting for Jill Stein, and it made me mad, as it was basically throwing away their vote. I don’t think my husband (fiancé at the time) ended up voting, since he felt his vote didn’t matter as we live in a solid blue state.

      For the primary, I’ll vote for Warren, as she’s the candidate I believe in most. But for the general election, I’ll vote for whoever wins the democratic primary.
      celleit, lychee and Momoyuki like this.
    8. Woho0 Feb 4, 2020
      I wish my nation had such a great president... :aww:
      Vote Trump 2020! :blob_pompom:
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