A depressingly large number of Twitter liberals' automatic response was (natch) to blame the left. The name “Jill Stein” was trotted out yet again as a reason for why the world sucks (much like Nader back during the Bush years), because instead of actually, you know, interrogating why people don't trust a party that has walked back every attempt at economic justice it's made by cozying up to Wall Street. Because if there's one thing you need in an election year, apparently it's by wagging fingers and alienating potential allies. If Trump is reelected, I'm fully expecting the Blame Bernie Brigade to come back in full force, and I'm expecting to be nagged for my lack of party loyalty.
And of course there were weird, angry takes (second stage of grief and all that). One that struck me as particularly bizarre was a seemingly widespread finger-wag against people using the phrase “rest in power” for white people. If you believe this, you have a stupid opinion. I hold you in a certain measure of contempt for having that opinion. Your entertaining this opinion and other associated flavors of histrionics and umbrage is a symptom of a broader problem with the American left. You might still be a lovely dinner guest though.
But ultimately, the depressing fact is that the Supreme Court was already lost for a generation ever since Brett Kavanaugh slithered his way into the chamber.
I also had to ask myself what Justice Ginsburg really did for the left, and I suspect many of her most ardent supporters would be hard-pressed to name actual policies she pushed through during her tenure (there were some of note, but they were relatively few). Rather, people are more familiar with her jeremiad dissents, which while eloquently phrased statements of purpose, are at the end of the day the rallying cry of the defeated.
And this is perhaps mirrored by the fact that, given the recalcitrant American right, the center left's response has been to less eloquently screech “THAT'S NOT FAIR!” at every repugnant thing McConnell and Co. do.
At the end of the day this is another reduction of politics to bien-pensant aesthetics. Lacking real victories, nice American liberals have simply been content over the past 20 years to rest on their own smugness. I remember the feeling of paralytic horror at watching The Daily Show in my teens, during the Iraq War, and the general attitude of “Well, look at THOSE dumbasses” towards the local yokels baying for Arab blood while ignoring the fact that the New York Times editorial staff and their colleagues (Frum, Friedman, and the rest) attempted to provide intellectual scaffolding for imperialist idiocy. At my most cynical moments, it's an attitude that seems to represent an almost Weimar-level phobia of and disgust towards mass politics, with results that invariably bite liberalism in its ass.
Putting one's faith in an unelected court is cheering on your champions rather than taking part in the process of mass politics (not that I'm a model, I just do my best to fund where I can when I can... oh, and join the DSA, folks). Indeed, Ginsburg herself was critical of the process of Roe v. Wade, pointing out that by settling the matter of abortion in the courts during a time of liberalizing abortion laws rather than in the democratic sphere, a backlash was invited without sufficient public consensus to act as a counterbalance. Unsurprisingly, Jacobin published a fair amount of good analysis on this subject.
But to be a leftist is, unfortunately, by and large, setting yourself up for disappointments. Consistently. As someone who believes that working towards a socialist society is the necessary fulfillment of the mission of the Enlightenment, I have to accept that I will be unhappy more often than I am happy with the world at large, and it's because I know how much better it could be.
Political
engagement is, to a certain degree, an utterly quixotic mission that
will drive you fucking insane. Even those conservatives who have
scored so many global victories over the past several years can't
escape. Their worldview is fraught with a wild loathing of the world
as it has become, as it has transformed into something that deviates
from their myopic perspectives. At the ground level, American conservatives seem in
particular seem far more occupied with stomping their feet at the
perceived transgressions of liberals and socialists (and being
completely unable to differentiate the two) than actually forming
anything like a coherent perspective.
A sheriff, spitting through his mustache: “You know if you'd told me 20 years ago I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair, bones in their noses, I just flat out wouldn't have believed you.”
Tommy Lee Jones: “Signs and wonders.”
And so my conclusion is that an old lady who worked hard and did some good things has died. She will doubtless be replaced by some cross-clutching fuckwad who in any decent society would be stripped of their judicial power and forced to walk the streets wearing a barrel with shoulder straps holding up a sign saying “Will adjudicate for food.” But I can't perceive it as the apocalyptic event that so many liberals perceive it to be.
At this particularly stupid time in history, that baseline annoyance is to a certain degree something I expect. I had thought Trump and Hillary were the two worst presidential candidates of my lifetime. Nope, Trump and Biden. It can always get worse. I know that I will have a materially worse life than my parents. That sucks. But as it is something I have no control over, I accept it.
My only irrational hope left is that things will get better before the seas rise... too much... and that I can leave the world with it pointed in a different direction. Somewhat.
