no peanuts in church…

No hot takes. Everybody does hot takes in this, the Age of the Feuilleton. Any of my ‘hot takes’ were made, casually, in real time, on Threads or Bsky. I’ll confess to about 18 hours of “huh…?” and hoping for audit data. Initial results weren’t consistent with reports of record numbers of new registrations and early voting. (Call it Numerical Intuition. If it had been an engineering task, I’d have checked my math, is all I’m saying).

But, no. Detailed exit polls told otherwise. It looks like it was a mix of (1) A general, global anti-incumbent trend; (2) Dems stayed home (fewer voters than Biden got in 2020) and (3) A seriously Mal-informed electorate. IMO Category (2) probably included quite a few higher-income Dems leery of tax increases who stayed home (or left that top line blank). Oh well.

That said, it was a very narrow victory, and if “he” hadn’t been in it, this would have been just another typical razor-close American election (not unlike 2004). Post-election polls tell us that very few T-voters seem to understand exactly what it was they elected. The 2025ers will, of course, start their “Crusade to Deconstruct the Administrative State”, but they sort of tried that already, back in 1981. USG still got BIGGER, over time. So… how far will they get before there’s serious pushback?

This numbness could just be trauma response, but at this point I am just morbidly curious how this will all play out. The USG was too clunky, multi-federated and inefficient (by design) to fall on Jan6th. (In most countries, you take over one building, and, Congratulations! You’re the government, now! America doesn’t really work that way). Even if there were a way to order it to efficiently deconstruct itself, what about all the other layers? Accounts will need to be settled. Stop work orders documented. “Why, Sir, the paperwork alone might take us three to seven years!”

They’ve spent 44 years making sure the USG was never powerful or strong enough to help its own citizens, or to even know who funds their candidates. And now, some think they can convert this into a full Theo-fascist State in the space of a couple of years? A National Government that didn’t seem very interested in defending itself from a known felon, much less the rest of us?

Good luck with that one, kids. Fascism is EXPENSIVE. (Just ask the old DDR about that one). “Why, Sir, the paperwork alone…!”

But… they’ll try. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯