Francisissy Hypno November

While the inclination to keep this blog more of a personal thing - for letting friends know how we are doing, experiences foreign and familiar, etc - remains strong, unfortunately the United States is very important and powerful and unreasonably close geographically to Canada, so there is no avoiding talking about the election.

Canadians cover US news. They have to cover US news. Especially if the winner of the election has promised to fuck their economy up with a massive tariff.

I think at this point most people are past the question of "how did this happen" [[1]] and are now contending with the harder question of "what happens now?"

I do not know what is going to happen. What I can say is that I don't believe a "Resistance 2.0" will succeed, because it clearly - unambiguously - failed the first time. And I think everyone knows it.

I was among those in 2016 that wanted to channel their energy, their opposition, into the immediate and obvious instrument on hand - the Democratic Party. Writing then, in my personal journal:

But I want to fight! I’m interested in trying to fix the Democratic party. It’s not feasible to start a new one in the United States, but it’s entirely possible to change the existing ones. It can start personal and local. It HAS to be local...

What I didn't realize at the time is that the Democratic party is a machine finely tuned for dispersing popular energy to no effect.

My education came rapidly.

I went to the very next local Democratic Party meeting after the election and I was far from alone. People crammed into the room designed for maybe 50 and spilled into the hallway. It was the first meeting for almost everyone I talked to. It was a critical moment, undoubtedly happening elsewhere too. Properly organized, those hundreds that showed up that night could bring thousands next time. I had even dragged along a good friend who would otherwise describe themselves as an anarchist. Everyone was there because they wanted to do something.

The very first thing the existing members did was restrict voting within the group to persons that had come to the previous meetings.

Then they carried on with their agenda. Revising bylaws. Choosing someone to go to a larger meeting somewhere. I don't remember. Absolutely nothing that mattered was discussed in that meeting. I didn't go back.

You can name any left-of-center popular movement in the last two decades - the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, opposing a literal ongoing genocide of Palestinians - and watch Democrats either briefly embrace then extinguish the matter or just violently oppose it.

I'll put one prediction in here - no form of opposition to Trumpism that comes from the Democratic party or is embraced by them will succeed in the long term because the goals of a popular movement are incompatible with a group that wants to return to 1995. [[2]] They might win an election here or there - a random high charisma individual could roll in like Obama or they could be propelled by specific events like COVID or an economic crash - but this kind of centralism is dead. What is being sold is a managed decline in living standards, health, equality, and planetary habitability. Fewer and fewer people are buying.

Already too long of a post and I didn't even talk about anything that has happened to me personally, like how the Quebec Minister for Immigration and Francisation[[3]] showed up to our class, or some wild Québécois improv we went to, or the incredible fact that it hasn't yet snowed. I will at least post the pumpkins I carved for Halloween because (1) it was the first time I did so in like 20 years and (2) it would be even weirder to post them in December.

[[1]]: It happened just like the first time. You have a institutions-based market liberal managerial edifice that principally makes up one party and their voting block - the Democrats - and a wild, ignorant upstart that represents almost everything that opposes that order - Trump. The former has been running the show more or less for a 40 year span that involved a gradual decline in the standard of living, health, happiness, and (with the internet) sanity of a lot of the population. They praise institutions like the Supreme Court and the voting procedures of the Senate, regardless of their merit or the limitations these place on their goals. They believe their conservative opposition is valid and insist there needs to be a strong Republican party. They campaign with Liz Cheney and count George W. Bush as a friend. They watch West Wing and believe it is how politics should work. They believe Israel is an indispensable part of the international order they have built and thus must be defended regardless of the circumstances. In the face of Trump, they have been entirely reactionary - we merely need to go back to when politics was good and we could make deals with reasonable conservatives. The choice of Biden in 2020 and the choices of the Harris campaign in 2024 exemplify this reasoning. The fact they won in 2020 is frankly more likely the result of COVID than any other factor

[[2]]: Imagine - it's 1995 again but this time you get to be both the Republican and Democratic party at the same time and play a kabuki theater of compromising with yourselves; every man a Joe Manchin. You could even just call it the Democratic-Republican party. Oh what's this? A racist populist piece of shit just show up and wrecked your asses collectively? How could this have happened? Again? Well, nevertheless..

[[3]]: Yes that's right. I'm actually in a Francisation class, being francisified. They are doing Francisissy hypno on me