These past eleven months of working and slowly recovering from the PhD have altered my stress responses a great deal.
Literally for years, I was in a constant state of such anxiety that it interfered every day with both productivity and sleep. During the worst parts, all I could do was alternate between trying to focus on other things and jumping back to the news to see if there had been an act of mass violence.
Today’s US election is as stressful a thing as has ever happened in my life, perhaps more so because literally all of the predictions I have heard (from political experts to my brother Mica who is much better at handicapping elections than me) have been for a Trump win.
It’s staggering, distressing, and disturbing to me that this election could even be close, given Trump’s obvious incompetence and the danger he poses. The January 6th insurrection left me with a terrific fear that the forces tearing America apart are stronger than those holding it together. If America makes another sociopathic and self-destructive choice today, that breakdown will accelerate.
I fear that the dynamic which now dominates the democratic world is this: as our fossil fuel addiction keeps damaging the climate, more and more societal systems which were previously able to cope will begin to fail instead. As people notice this breakdown, they give up on conventional political candidates willing to do the slow incremental work of changing policy in favour of ideological blowhards who promise drastic changes for the benefit of the masses but who are really controlled by self-interested cadres of extremists and the ultra-wealthy. While all this is happening, there is too much drama and emotional turmoil to properly diagnose what is putting society under such strain, along with no willingness to act on abolishing fossil fuels. Our broken politics are breaking the world.
None of these worries are new, and I suppose what is striking me most right now is how subjectively OK I feel despite my extreme anxiety and terror. I think perhaps it’s the difference between confronting a potential tragedy after being awake 24 hours on a forced march versus on a day after decent sleep. The fear is just as intense, but with at least the stability of housing and employment it seems less like a constant personal catastrophe than it did during the PhD.
Good luck to us all tonight.
Trump’s campaign to retain power after losing the 2020 election only collapsed because Vice President Mike Pence proved more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump’s cult of personality. But for 2024, Trump has a vice presidential candidate who appears even less committed to the democratic process than he is. J.D. Vance is a protégé and plaything of the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has written that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”
A second administration will not feature advisers in the mold of former Chief of Staff John Kelly, or Defense Secretary Mark Esper — establishment Republicans with a stake in keeping Trump constitutionally in bounds. “These are going to be all MAGA people,” says Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor and an expert in executive power. “Some of them are much more ideologically committed to the agenda than Trump is,” he says, listing deputies like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, as well as masterminds of the Heritage Foundation’s extreme policy agenda, Project 2025.
More dangerous, Trump would reenter the Oval Office with powers that have been supercharged by the ultraconservative Supreme Court, which Trump helped build as president. A partisan 6-3 decision in July placed the presidency beyond the reach of criminal punishment for any acts that can be couched as “official.” The once-outrageous Nixonian maxim “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal” is today a statement of fact, leading Justice Sonia Sotomayor to warn in a fiery dissent: “In every use of official power the president is now a king above the law.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/if-trump-wins-2024-election-1235096091/
Given the possibly existential ramifications of a Donald Trump victory—a purge of the civil service, the deportation of millions, the weaponization of government against his imagined enemies—the tightness of the 2024 race is causing blood pressures to spike among Kamala Harris’s supporters. It’s also the source of bafflement, considering Trump’s increasingly batshit behavior on the campaign trail: How could an election between a sane vice president and an insane fascist be this close?
But there’s another way of looking at it: The fact that this race is essentially a coin flip is a miracle. Had Joe Biden not stepped aside and endorsed Harris in late July, he would have lost reelection. I don’t even feel compelled to explain why, as Biden’s certain defeat to Trump may be the one thing that everyone in Washington agrees on. Instead, Democrats now have an even shot at stopping him—and, by extension, halting the rise of American authoritarianism. In the excruciating hours ahead, that should be a source of comfort, if not relief.
https://newrepublic.com/article/187906/kamala-harris-2024-election-trump-miracle