“How about a champagne post mortem dinner here tomorrow?” a friend emailed me election day afternoon. I readily accepted with this caveat. “Let’s just hope that morphine isn’t more applicable.”
Turns out that it was if you cast your ballot for Kamala Harris. I contacted him Wednesday morning wondering if he might be sitting shiva for democracy and giving him the opportunity to cancel. He didn’t take it. “I need a hug,” he said.
My wife was in no mood to party but I convinced her we needed to go. There were few obvious health benefits to sitting at home and tuning into the disoriented hosts on MSNBC or CNN.
We made the right choice. The mood at our friend’s house wasn’t buoyant by any means but the food was good, an 18-year-old single malt served as an excellent anesthetic, and the companionship of our hosts and fellow guests felt like a warm blanket against the cold of coming political winter.
Being something of an amateur survivalist, I’ve long contemplated the possibility of a Trump restoration. Like many others I was cautiously optimistic about a Harris/Walz victory — especially after that misguided Iowa poll that showed her beating Trump in a deep red state. But I also gamed out the biblical proportions of the problem that a Trump victory would trigger were Project 2025’s blueprint to be put into action. “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together…MASS HYSTERIA,” Bill Murray explained to the mayor of New York about its impending ghost problem. That seems to apply here.
It remains to be seen whether the former reality TV star’s second term lives up to the hype but I don’t think you’d lose any money taking him literally and figuratively. On election night I took frequent trips outdoors to both clear my head and because men of a certain age need to answer nature’s call more often. That’s one of the perks of living in the middle of the woods. I found the planets and stars transiting the sky on a cloudless night reassuring. The stars have no incentive to lie. In their cold yet somehow affectionate indifference they merely are. The real loser on this evening was truth. The American people had proudly green-lighted disinformation, lies and criminality.
The blame game was well under way among the liberal pundits on the New York Times website when I popped a sleeping pill around 11 p.m.; it was the best decision I’d made since that morning when I accompanied my daughters and toddler granddaughters to the playground after we voted on another in a long succession of flawless autumn days. It’s them I fear for more than myself. I’ve had my shot at liberty and freedom. They deserve theirs.
Right wing governments have been on the rise around the globe. The fault can’t be laid exclusively at Kamala Harris’s or Democrats’ feet. Nor can it be at those who have fallen for a consummate con artist. This country has a problem that’s grown over my lifetime, but especially since the Reagan eighties. The gaping, growing wealth disparity.
Occasionally, I perform an experiment when I’m at parties with fellow members of what are commonly referred to these days as elites. I listen to their conversations and try to gauge how they’d sound to those who can't feed their families working two jobs. The #1 topic of conversation isn’t family, culture or even politics. It’s where you last went on vacation and where and when you’re going next.
Some of the shock of Tuesday’s election results, I suspect, is that people who are largely immune to inflation can’t understand why it constitutes such a potent issue when democracy itself is at stake. Donald Trump does, if for all the wrong reasons. It’s not as if he sympathizes with those less fortunate than him — he seems mostly to enjoy hanging out with fellow plutocrats — it’s just that his grievances (I doubt I’d have the chutzpah to complain if I’d inherited several hundred million dollars, but maybe that’s just me) neatly coincide with those of his base. Rather than fruitlessly psychoanalyze him can’t we just stipulate that he’s a spoiled rich kid grown to monstrous proportions?
The main problem I have at the moment is figuring out what to do with all my free time. I’ve spent much of the last few months alternately doom scrolling and hope scrolling when it looked as if Kamala Harris might be elected to lead us into a prosperous, safer, saner future. Watching the second Trump dynasty turn the federal government into a branch of the Trump Organization, replace experts with apparatchiks, deport millions, grow the deficit, sabotage social security, kill Obamacare — I’m almost done — slap on tariffs that spark inflation, connive with Russia, and pass a national abortion ban isn’t my idea of a good time.
The problem is that doom scrolling is addictive. I don’t have my wife’s talent for burying herself in a book or as many books as necessary until the threat environment of the moment subsides. Another four years is an exhaustingly long time. “Gents,” my friend Howard emailed a few of us on a text thread on a recent post-election morning, “while I am reading, in the wake of this calamity, many calls for resistance, activism, fighting back, etc. I am reluctantly concluding that the only appropriate response is to settle into a Voltarian cultivation of one’s own garden and be done with politics. Is this a reprehensible stance?”
I responded that it wasn’t. Let’s be guided by Trump’s actions. But based on past performance we’re probably in for a bumpy ride. For the moment the only sensible reaction seems to be to hug your friends and family more closely and find a hobby.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
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