Pointing Fingers is Pointless

It was a surprise.

Polling was mixed, but polling has become increasingly unreliable in an era where it's as much modeling as data because nobody picks up a strange phone call.

And the vibes were impeccable! If you looked at rally attendance, at donation dollars and volunteer hours, if you looked at ground game and raw enthusiasm, it seemed impossible for Kamala to lose. Trump was giving perhaps one appearance a week; even he didn't want to be there.

So how, then, is this the reality we find ourselves in? There is already a world of writing  trying to explain what happened and why. All of it is wrong.

History is a complex tapestry of hundreds or thousands of strands, and no one thread can explain the whole of it. And in any event how we got here doesn't matter half so much as where we go now.

Still, it's human nature to want to pin the responsibility on something concrete. It's an attempt to bring order into chaos. To force a sense of — not control, exactly, but a sense that things happen for reasons, and those reasons are knowable. And, of course, to avoid the same things from happening again in the future.

So, so many fingers are being pointed: we are falling into fascism, says one hot take, and this is the fault of Latino men. It is the fault of rural voters, or of business owners. In these cases, the alleged fault accrues to a group of people, some of whom are Trump voters, but many of whom are not.

There are other, more specific fingers, too. It's the fault of Biden for not stepping down sooner, it's the fault of the DNC for not forcing a new primary, or else the fault of Harris for not being more progressive, or for being too progressive, or for somehow not explaining to the people what she stands for.

Unpleasantly often, it's the fault of that one person or group someone kind of didn't like already, for not doing the one thing that someone really wished they were doing all along (or for continuing to do the one thing someone had been wishing they would stop.) Sometimes at the expense of reality — I'm thinking here of Bernie Sanders blaming Biden for "abandoning the working class," when Biden is easily the most pro-union president in decades and saw unprecedented wage growth for the lower tier of workers.

Quit it. Quit looking for someone to blame, and especially quit looking to scapegoat people who are trying to go pretty much the same place as you. Because this is only a warm-up exercise, to get you used to attacking the wrong people.

Victim blaming is baked into the grotesque ideology we must now throw off (she should have kept her knees together, he shouldn't have gone to that dangerous place, they should have known enough to conceal their true self, they had it coming) and did you know? It's so much easier and less scary to punch at your almost-allies than at your oppressors.

The actions of a fascist regime are the responsibility of that regime, not of the people who tried to stop them and failed. Write this on your heart and take it out to look at it every once in a while. They're going to try to make you forget that.

Yes, fine, it's true that things might have gone differently if things had gone differently. Sure. But they didn't. Sometimes you do everything right, sometimes you give it your all, and sometimes that still isn't enough. We're going to have to live with that.