Again

I spent the last few weeks refusing to comment on how Harris has been doing or to predict what would happen. It wasn’t because I was disappointed. I wasn’t. And it wasn’t because I was superstitious. I’m not. It was that I wasn’t willing to say aloud that I felt that Trump was going to win. I knew it deep down and had for a long time . As early as last winter I was already thinking of it as “America’s Berlusconi Moment” and it wasn’t just “election anxiety,” whatever that is.

Watching what I knew play out in reality last night was uncanny, oddly unemotional. There was only waiting. Not for Harris to win, but for her loss to appear on the screen.

I’ve lived my life in a world unlike—and better—than the world of any previous point in history. Everything about my work and my home life, my strong sense that things get better, become more just, that the world doesn’t work against us, that anything is possible, has been made possible by an economic and political stability that seems miraculous. But it wasn’t. It was an achievement. And like all achievements, it can be abandoned and lost.

I’m no doomsayer. The world will go on, people will go about their lives, but a tipping point has been passed. I don’t know what America or the world looks like going forward. I think it will be very different and that most of us living in North America, regardless of political affiliation, are not going to like what emerges. But I also feel like, now, after last night, it’s possible at least to know what we’re working with. There’s a reality check quality to this election. Government isn’t a game, MAGA isn’t a weird moment. It’s a signal from the ground. Ideological or wishful thinking won’t make it go away and can’t offer much for dealing with it either.

We need to see the world.