TAKING STOCK OF VOTER PARTICIPATION.

Chris "Intellectual Int-ing" Arnade reflects on how much thinking about voting the irregular voters must engage in.

How we highly education news obsessed Front row types think about politics is almost entirely divorced from how most people think about politics. Which is rarely. Most people in the Back row treat elections like most Front row people treat the NFL. As something in the background that doesn’t impact them. Sure they might tune into the Super Bowl, because everyone else does, but they don’t have a huge stake in it. Sure they might have a team they root for, but they are just watching, not playing. So why care too much.

National politics rarely touches them, not in a dramatic way at least, beyond screwing them over. Like the roads still being all messed up, factories still closing, drugs still filling their town, and taxes still going up. Doesn’t matter who is in power. Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Obama. Their life keeps going on, mostly as a series of obstacles and dramas to overcome. So both parties are equally corrupt, equally indifferent to them, and largely inter-changeable.

And thus does Donald Trump win a term as president. The front row types (was I really questioning their authority in 2018?) might have turned out enough middle-row voters to swing the presidency in 2020, and Donald Trump was his own worst enemy in the Georgia runoffs, but business as usual is not turning out so well.  First, the Front Row Kids botched the corona tyranny.

No matter how non political you are, it impacts you. The original closures, flip flopping on masking, then opening again, then closings, then openings again, then closings, then mandates, the masking, then no masking, has been confusing and frustrating as hell.

It also has felt to the Back row, immensely unfair. At almost every level, at almost every decision, the policy seems to have been designed to favor the Front row. The ones with second homes, and laptop jobs. Meanwhile, it has screwed over the Back row. Many who still had to trudge into work, while denying them their local communities, which is their primary source of meaning. As someone quipped, “Keep stuffing those crates at the Amazon warehouse, but don’t you dare BBQ with your friends.”

The Back row knows this, and it has made them angry, even if stuff has gotten better. The whole things hasn’t been the government’s finest hour. At all.

The coot ran on crushing the pandemic, not the economy. Now he owns it.

Second, it's more than those expensive cookies that are crushing the back row.

You go to the pump every few days and now you are paying $40 instead of $20. That is huge. Your grocery bill is also like $40 higher. That also hurts. Sure you got a raise, but you been working hard and have deserved that for a long time, and now man does it ever feel like just when you got your fair share you have to hand it right back. Just treading water, and for what?

Politicians, economist, and the rest of us in the Front row can “well actually” this all we want. Throw stats out saying things are actually better. Blah blah blah. But well actually-ing inflation is a losing strategy. It is denying peoples reality, in a smug and condescending way. But its transitory you say. Perhaps it is transitory (it very well may be!), but a broken arm is also transitory. Doesn’t make it any less annoying.

If you're older, that broken arm might not be transitory, even if your range of motion is almost nominal, and the inflation is not transitory.  And there are limits to the coot being Not Trump.

Biden was elected because he wasn’t Trump. Nobody really cared about him, which worked to his favor. He was a non entity, a boring old man the voters gave a shot. He was a normal dude promising normal stuff. All they asked is he not fuck stuff up.

Now Biden is no longer an empty vessel. He doesn’t have Trump around to not be, and the singular spotlight hasn’t been great. He seems confused, reactive, and often angry. Maybe he is tired. Maybe this is who has been all along and it is finally being exposed without a Trump to compare him to. Maybe the media is being unfair. Regardless, that is the dominant image that has filtered down to the Back row. A somewhat confused and weak guy who at best is unable to bring back the normal he promised. At worst he is kinda fuckin stuff up.

Exactly as his former boss estimated he would.  Perhaps that's why Democrats keep the January 6 pot boiling, and raise the spectre of fascism.  We'll have some fun with that before Christmas, dear reader.