Joe Chu-Hiden
The last time Donald Trump was on the ballot I got laid off the next morning. I dodged that bullet this time by being unemployed by the time election night came around.
I’ve been thinking about those twin capstones now as we all sit and anticipate what looks like a painfully close victory where Biden limps past the finish line without a Democratic senate majority behind him. In 2016 I went into election night disappointed by the previous eight years of Democratic leadership -- an initial few years of having majorities across government and failing to do anything meaningful with it, followed up by a long constipated denouement of divided government in which Obama was content to try nothing more ambitious than becoming deporter-in-chief and kind of intervening in a series of uprisings in the Middle East and maybe kind of inducing the collapse of Libya as well as the Syrian Civil War. The successor the party had chosen for him was even less promising, but I rationalized at the time that getting her into office would be preferable to the alternative, plus it would make her more liable to be pushed leftward in her policies. (yes I seriously believed this in 2016)
Four years later there are less illusions. Rather than being on the cusp of having my reverie of gainful employment and relative stability ruptured, the rupture already happened months ago. A lethal pandemic has literally shut down most of the world and collapsed the American economy for the better part of a year with no end in sight. The heir apparent to the White House is a septuagenarian who co-authored the Crime Bill and has said that he’d veto a Medicare for All bill if it ever reached his desk. (the likelihood of that now being nonexistent, thankfully) There’s no illusion that I’ll be “swaying” anything unless you define swaying as hurling my proverbial ape feces from the proverbial trees.
What’s funny is that in the intervening years between 2016 and now a number of my friends and family have made out relatively well, all things considered. Few if any of them are Trump supporters in the slightest either. Hell, I count myself among their ranks. After that layoff in 2016 I was able to bounce back and get another job with pay bump in 2017, a job where I was able to eke out several subsequent pay hikes for a variety of reasons as well as just dumb luck. From that job I was able to jump to another one where I doubled my base salary before getting laid off 11 months later, but still. At risk of sounding like a metaphysical huckster or worse, maudlin, I feel like part of that unexpected upward trajectory was an indirect effect of the Trump era. The fact of who the president was and the disjointed layers of low cunning and BS he employed to secure that position was a kind of psychic backwash that rolled over everyone’s daily lives. If he can use the sheer power of capitalist malfeasance to lift himself from a position of weakness into a new position of unimaginably greater power then why can’t I?
Of course it feels like it’s all coming to a reckoning of sorts now. I find myself in the uncomfortable position of feeling like my fortunes are somehow linked to those of Trump. It’s as if the karmic polarity in November 2016 was in inverse alignment like a AAA battery slotted into a remote control, got distorted in the intervening four years, and now I’m stuck on the same polarity as the president, losing juice in time with his own fading star.
The likelihood of meaningful improvement of almost anything in the next 2-4 years seems remote. Whereas I and other laid off coworkers were able to bounce back in 2017, 2021 will open to a resurgent COVID virus, an ongoing worse-than-2008 recession, and millions of devastated Trumpists in every state who may or may not respond to the occlusion of their Hidden Imam with despondent acts of reprisal towards their perceived enemies. Moreover it’s looking like the Democrats won’t be taking control of the Senate. That means a rerun of the Obama-era divided government at the height of a Great Depression-level crisis with no meaningful organized labor movement or left political coalition to exert pressure. That means Mitch McConnell (congrats on reelection) turning over in bed, farting, and halting all legislation so that the country can burn for two years until it’s time for midterms and the blame can be dumped on the Democrats. (and they deserve blame, but not for the reasons Republicans will sell to the rubes)
That said the threat of Democrats being unable to govern for the next four years isn’t nearly as disturbing as it was back in 2012. Biden has made it clear he doesn’t really plan to govern in the first place, unless you count platitudes about American goodness, decency, and “restoring power abroad” as governance. It’s the final transition of American politics away from anything having to do with economic outcomes and into the realm of pure culture war, identity politics, and making your cultural enemies absolutely furious/miserable. Not to say that culture and identity aren’t important, but when they’re divorced from any connection to economic justice, dollars and cents, all the sweet victories of representation you’ll win will invariably turn to ash in your mouth because you get home and realize you’re still poor. And that’s because American politics are a duopoly, and both political parties agree that the current American capitalist system is not up for debate. So why stress when they’ve already told you that “you get nothing”?
If anything, restoring power abroad is the part that’s keeping me up at night.
For some reason soju fucks with my system in a way unlike any other alcoholic substance I’ve imbibed. It doesn’t get me sick or anything, but when it hits it wraps around my brain like a diaphanous gauze, exerting no pressure but restraining me in a numb floaty haze. It makes for some very messed up semi-waking dreams. This is the state I’ve found myself throughout most of this week fucked up on homemade chu-hi cocktails.
Last week I was paying a lot of attention to a recent virtual YouTuber controversy involving Hololive/Cover, two of their most popular streamers, and China’s One-China policy. Without going into too much detail, said controversy led to a 3-week suspension for both streamers following a fusilade of death threats and harassment from mainland Chinese trolls and antis. This wasn’t the end though as anti retaliation continued throughout the suspension period. Subscriber counts on Hololive’s already-tenuous CN stable plummeted dramatically, culminating in the closing of Hololive CN and cutting loose of all associated vtubers.
In an effort to distract myself from the ongoing debacle of this week I went back in the middle of a chu-hi delirium to review this debacle. What struck me this time around was the abundance of comments sections on Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and other notable outlets for yokels going off about how this was all because of the uniquely rapacious nationalism of China and the CCP.
Similar shit has been flying around the same forums in response to the censoring of “Hong Kong” and “Taiwan” in the player chat for recent gacha game megahit Genshin Impact, including the hoary old chestnut that, as a “communist state” (lol) all private enterprises in China are owned by the government so supporting a Chinese game developer is tacit support of the CCP.
While the PRC’s undying wigging out over Taiwan and Hong Kong is indeed sad and ridiculous, it’s hardly unique and not at all something that could only be spawned from China’s form of government or the collective Chinese psyche. For argument’s sake imagine if Gawr Gura from Hololive EN did a stream looking at her subscriber numbers broken down by nationality and the chart happened to say “Mandatory Palestine” instead of Israel. Could you honestly argue that it wouldn’t go viral, get picked up by western antis, and lead to all the forms of troll/anti harassment that Coco and Haachama suffered for their incident? Look at the recent dismissal of Jeremy Corbyn from the UK Labour Party over the alleged “antisemitism” of some comments critical of Israel. Powerful countries having irrational violent fixations on the national status or lack thereof of certain small regions of the world isn’t limited to China.
No, online people using social media to lambaste Chinese censorship in this way in these niche media isn’t saying anything meaningful about world affairs, and it certainly isn’t praxis. It’s just more cope. It’s cope for the fact that in spite of all the harsh authoritarianism of this Other’d Chinese state, we ourselves live in a society where we are profoundly powerless. Never have we felt further from the levers of anything resembling real control over our destinies or the mechanisms that determine where our societies goes and how they get there.
The last thing to hit me in this soju flowstate was that this is all a pale, nerdy harbinger of our immediate future. The future of restoring American power abroad. Because if corporate capitalism and defending the state of Israel to the last man are two immovable pieces of the track our society runs on now, a third plank will be conflict with China. Both American political parties have heat up the broth, the media has seasoned the stew, and moreover there’s just this general malaise beginning to simmer up to the surface like pork scum.
It feels more and more like an inevitability because they want it to feel that way. They want it to feel like we were induced into it by Chinese soft power aggression, the same way the real Cold War was supposedly induced by Stalin’s territorial aggression. And you know what? I think it’s working. It’s certainly bleeding into the culture. People are souring on China, mostly because of gacha games and vtubers in nerd circles and mostly because of COVID for normal people, but it’s happening albeit slowly. First people were pissed about the “China flu,” but now that the originator of said flu has, using its ever-repressive mechanisms of top-down control, eliminated the virus and is having pool parties in the province where it started, some of that malaise is latent inferiority. If COVID was a Sputnik-style moment in the opening days of this cold war then we just got our fucking asses kicked.
A non-shooting war with China would be the ultimate cope. It allows us to redirect all of our frustration and anger at our own condition onto an Other. Right now for many Americans that Other is illegal immigrants, or liberal elites, or conservative chuds, but imagine being able to recreate that post-9/11 pre-Iraq magic of uniting everyone in fear and hatred of an enemy who has an actual tangible country and spooky authoritarian government. Never mind that almost all of the brutalities we will condemn that enemy for will have direct analogs in the West -- that’s really quite irrelevant when it comes to this stuff.
The best/worst part is that it won’t even be a showdown between capitalist democracy and Marxist-Leninism the way the real Cold War was. As Matt Christman put it in his post-election night vlog, it will be capitalism with Chinese characteristics vs. capitalism with Atlantic characteristics. And right now, in the wake of COVID, Atlantic capitalism is getting owned.
We’ll all get pulled into the trap. We’ll all be expected to say the line: “while our society is far from perfect it’s ridiculous to say it’s not preferable to that of [country]” as if there meaningful differences other than the private or public vectors from which control is exercised over you. We’ll all be expected to no longer think about Bong Joon-Ho’s statement that essentially we all live in the same country called Capitalism.
This will get worse. We’re slouching towards bedlam and you’ll be a problematic panda hugger if you deny it or try to say it could’ve been avoided. I’ll drink a chu-hi to that!