There are people who’ve gone further than this and said this is the root of why stories exist in the first place— that as a species we think in stories because it means we can see ourselves as the good guys and the people whose food we are stealing as the bad guys. And I think those people are correct, so I am depressed.
I think that in the end, we are capable of real nobility and good, as long as we believe someone is one of the good guys. The idea that humans are purely good or purely bad is a misunderstanding: we are good to those we believe deserve it, and bad to those who we believe do not. Most atrocities are in the end stories of love, because in the end people commit them in the belief we are protecting the things we love.
I think the most grim thing I believe about humanity is that “love always wins” is a warning. I don’t think we want love to win, when it brings its vengeance upon us. It would be nice to believe our enemies act from hate. More than nice, maybe; it would be necessary. But I expect in the end that all of us act out of love
"I think the most grim thing I believe about humanity is that “love always wins” is a warning."
i have a rather untethered spiritual philosophy–i believe in the "chaotic interconnectedness of all things".
when we fail at something, i believe its that someone or something elsewhere wanted/needed it more. some circumstance elsewhere is responsible for our own misfortune. its not personal, in that sense. its cosmic. I suppose that works with in the way you're talking about too, Robert, in terms of love being that energetic thread!
This was great. Virtue ethics is a way of developing a moral system that adapts. I suspect it is similar to your 'exoskeleton.' You don't have to work so hard at proving your virtue, if you simply ARE basically virtuous.
In the US and western society in general, the black experience is very constrictive, almost prison-like sometimes--the expectations, the constant erosion of status, even the fear. That's why this quotation from Solzhenitsyn seems especially pertinent to the black experience. It is the root of all ethics, IMO.
"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts."
It is our job to do that battle on a daily basis, but it becomes so much easier when you learn you already are 'good.' That you've won that battle, essentially. You become more fluid, as ethics change with situations. You begin to trust yourself to know.
Incredible analysis of two opposing things that are actually quite similar Everything (not always) in this complicated world of ours boils down to 1) Who had the better story 2) Who told it first. The fight between light and dark is a story as old as time and as much we think we have evolved as a species, we like these 2 binaries a little too much. Quite enjoyable and educational.
I can’t say that I agree that trump is the better story—he represents a familiar one. in many ways he’s the amalgamation of the american values polite company wants to ignore, people like that he says the quiet part out loud. they like the idea that they can participate in colonization by proxy, domination from the comfort of their living rooms. there is a very real fear of equality (though she didn’t say that) and for people who don’t care about policy and only “the better story” she represents a balancing of scales that people are terrified of. it’s a way of beating back what they perceive to be the inevitable, that one day “the minorities” are going to swallow the “american way of life” whole. trump ran on a much more terrifying platform than before, and did little by way of articulation. he was incoherent the bulk of the campaign and never gave people a strong idea of how he was going to do anything. he had no policy, no story. just white = good and everything else, criminal. he has a community of sycophants who are willing to translate his murmurings into something vaguely coherent and a media ecosystem that sanewashes his most vile ideologies. we also can’t discount the story of american exceptionalism, which treats what he says as bluster and not a threat, thinking that our norms will curtail his darkest impulses. we are finding out in real time that that isn’t true. reducing harris to an inefficient communicator who didn’t play hard enough to the left makes and didn’t articulate her policies feels like the kind of post mortem levied by the new york times. she wasn’t legible because people willfully misunderstood her and made sense of the nonsense that was trump. I get that I may be a more informed voter than most but I viewed her as trying to play it centrist in order to project an image of unity, a safe option for disaffected white voters who felt left behind. was this smart, maybe yeah—she came incredibly close to winning. when she ran with more progressive policies she was bulldozed by biden so I’m sure her team told her to curtail those impulses. on the point of palestine, we should’ve never been sending them weapons in the first place but the question of israel and our support for them was never a question in the mind of the establishment. I found her stance on this reprehensible, but trump had never articulated a more coherent notion about the genocide. he wouldn’t use the words self-determination and she has. idk I just get frustrated with takes like this because it’s positioned as “telling the truth” about a story that is much bigger than the two candidates we had. if dems had put up a white man saying the same things she was saying I don’t think he would’ve won and if he did I don’t think people would’ve spent the post-game wrap up acting like harris was functionally illiterate and never had anything to say.
we seem to be approaching this topic from two different vantage points, yet a lot of what you’ve said feels like it coincides with my point (or at least, the point I attempted to make when I wrote this).
i understand that you don’t agree that trump is the better story but the fact he represents familiarity is exactly the hallmark of a “great” story. all great stories follow archetypes and structures that we’re all familiar with. that is what makes Trump’s story “better”. nothing you’ve said about his incoherence, his terrifying platform or his lack of policy positions deny the fact that he was a spectacle in America’s greatest pageant, something that you express well in how the media helped monstrously to sell this spectacle.
also bear in mind: i try to go to great lengths in this essay to not speak so much about the political spectrum as much as I can (impossible tbh because it is so binarised) because my essay is not actually about how left Harris was or how right Trump is. my essay is reductionist by design because part of the reason Trump won is that there’s a large proportion of the electorate that are uninformed, who either voted for Trump or abstained.
as much as you said that reducing harris to an inefficient communicator “feels like the kind of post mortem levied by the new york times” — great turn of phrase btw — your view that she “tried to play it centrist” is exactly why i believe her to be an inefficient communicator. centrism, at the best of times, is a profoundly incoherent position; one that the public generally recognises as getting us into this mess, or “the establishment”, incremental changes that have made most people’s lives gradually worse. when fascism is knocking at the door, centrism is a particularly incoherent.
so whether it was a smart choice is a matter of philosophical opinion, i’d argue it’s not smart because she didn’t win. her team told her to curtail those progressive policies and she didn’t win. she took no moral stance on palestine and didn’t win.
harris took very few principled positions that energised people. the times she did take principled positions, it was appeals leaning right (e.g. if someone breaks into her home, they’re “getting shot”).
i don’t really know what to say about your frustration with this take. i’m getting the impression that you feel i’m being particularly unfair to Harris because of her social location as a Black woman but my point isn’t really about Harris losing, that is incidental. this essay is about how Trump won—so the post game wrap up isn’t about Harris’ “functional illiteracy” but Trump’s route to victory and some suggestions of what could’ve—in fact needs to be—done differently. I don’t know what other “people” have written but the fact that I am more concerned with the through-line of Kendrick and Trump leads me to believe that I would’ve written about this regardless of the race/gender of the loser.
I don't think you're being unfair to Harris because she's a black woman, just that her loss has to be understood through the underlying attitude toward black women in this country. misogynoir was absolutely at play here and I think to discuss it separated from that isn't as effective an argument. it's not that she was just not as good as the other guy at communicating but that for harris to be understood she has to try so much harder. the narrative that her message is incoherent is rooted in the willful misunderstanding of black women, no matter what we're saying. even someone like jasmine crockett, an arguably skilled and savvy communicator, would likely have a hard time on the biggest stage. I agree that things need to be done differently but we can't understate the story of black people as the boogeyman even though we've known for centuries that the violence perpetrated by white supremacy is often masked by civility. the wider populace fell over themselves to cast trump's misdeeds as some kind of grand strategy while muddling harris's message when they could've helped it to cohere. instead they leveled the playing field by humbling her and bringing her to heel, criticizing her in ways they didn't criticize him. it's not that she doesn't deserve valid criticism for some of her positions—she does—but there has been a double standard from get. her winning would've been due to people deciding they didn't want to humble black women and black people (they're still not over obama) through their vote paired with her being unimpeachable. trump danced for 45 minutes and babbled incoherently and people still jumped at that. he can do literally anything and people will still stare in awe at his ability to persevere rather than looking outward to the rotting soul of this country and asking why voters willingly put whiteness over their own safety and security.
to your point that we're in a reductionist time-space where anti-intellectualism is the order of the day, we cannot ignore the base instinct of survival and fear, which trump is claiming that black people and other ethnic groups threaten. this go-round it felt like he was less of a spectacle and more of their last attempt at securing whiteness for another generation. personally, i think that nat geo cover was the end of it all for us and they've just been building to it ever since ha. but yeah I'm standing on it being racism—the trump admin is also going to leave people behind in a much more violent and blatant fashion, especially the people that voted for him and people screamed that from every direction. we got the rawest deal because people would rather die white than die free and I don't think kamala could've done anything other than be white. had she done it the way we wanted there's a world where she could've won (I wish we lived in that timeline and that this is true) but there's also a version where she lost bigger and we were all the more devastated.
i’d say i write everything with the understanding that anti-Blackness is an omnipresent understructure of western life so in this essay, where i’m considering how storytelling facilitates victory in the court of public opinion, i assume anyone reading is aware of structural oppression enough that i don’t have to state its presence each time. if a Black woman runs for presidency in America, misogynoir is an inevitability, double-standards are a given, the playing field is never going level—my essay isn’t separated from reality but an exploration of what kind of things might have helped Harris transcend the obstacles of that reality.
i also want to stress that her *literal* communication is not what i am criticising here.
any perceived lack of coherence in her message is, in this particular essay, as irrelevant to me as Trump’s message being actually incoherent. i guess that’s what i mean by us seeing this from differing vantage points. all things considered, Harris was a sensible candidate. She still lost. misogynoir was a factor just as male anti-Blackness was a factor when Obama won. If we look at this from the perspective of isms then we’ll conclude that the intersection of Black womanhood is the determining factor. we might be right but that’s an incomplete picture (one that I’m sure other writers have written or are better suited to write about than me) but in an essay about how storytelling governs victory, Obama managed to transcend the “story of black people as the boogeyman” to win. in this essay, if I were to mention him, it would’ve considered how he managed to win through how compellingly he was able to present his story.
there’s a laundry list of circumstances that made it more difficult for Harris than Obama, that people more studious than me are better equipped to document, all my piece is concerned with how storytelling I observed contributed to Kendrick’s and Trump’s victories. Even with this, I’m not saying that Harris would’ve won if she had implemented any of the things I’ve suggested. She always had an uphill battle, she always had to deal with the fact that DEI/affirmative action had been souring in the public perception, always had to deal with the fact people are sick of establishment politicians, always had to deal with the fact that leftism in the west is something the average citizen wants but if you present it like leftism, they turn their heads away like fussy babies. She had to deal with all of that on top of the fact that every single overt and cover license of white supremacy was against her. so yeah, I agree, racism is a massive contributor to her loss but misogynoir is a perpetual obstacle that she had to leap over and she didn’t clear it. rather than just pointing and saying, “america hates Black women and that’s why she lost”, which feels a little bit defeatist, i’d much rather consider how she might’ve been able to clinch a victory because the landscape is the landscape. When you say things in the vein of “the wider populace fell over themselves to cast trump's misdeeds as some kind of grand strategy” yeah! that’s America! you either have to find a strategy and/or candidate to effectively counter that, or lose.
There’s lots more here that I would love to address—a lot of it relates to stuff I’ve written in more recent pieces but the last thing I’ll say is that the reason i boiled it down to the moral bending of storytelling is because we have a tendency to look at the average person with this level of malice or perhaps cognitive awareness that, unfortunately, they simply don’t possess.
that is, i don’t think many white people have ever uttered the sentence, “the last attempt at securing whiteness for another generation”, which strikes me as a particularly naziesque/klanner/overt white supermacist statement. however, i bet a lot of white folks saw trump survive an assassination attempt and thought that he’s protected by god. i can imagine a bunch of evangelical preachers in their white megachurches preached something similar. i’m sure even your average white person thought something like that. this is what i mean by a “more compelling story”. dodging an all american bullet is the stuff of american heroism, the most hollywood story ever that cements the hero. it is why i said, “trump is going to win” as soon as it happened.
perhaps my point with this essay is: we are thinking about these things with too many complications and we should focus on narrative building to win. but if not, and if misogynoir is the determining factor of losing the presidency then we can boil this entire exchange down to one sentence: if they wanted to win, the democrats should’ve never ran a Black woman.
There are people who’ve gone further than this and said this is the root of why stories exist in the first place— that as a species we think in stories because it means we can see ourselves as the good guys and the people whose food we are stealing as the bad guys. And I think those people are correct, so I am depressed.
I think that in the end, we are capable of real nobility and good, as long as we believe someone is one of the good guys. The idea that humans are purely good or purely bad is a misunderstanding: we are good to those we believe deserve it, and bad to those who we believe do not. Most atrocities are in the end stories of love, because in the end people commit them in the belief we are protecting the things we love.
I think the most grim thing I believe about humanity is that “love always wins” is a warning. I don’t think we want love to win, when it brings its vengeance upon us. It would be nice to believe our enemies act from hate. More than nice, maybe; it would be necessary. But I expect in the end that all of us act out of love
"I think the most grim thing I believe about humanity is that “love always wins” is a warning."
i have a rather untethered spiritual philosophy–i believe in the "chaotic interconnectedness of all things".
when we fail at something, i believe its that someone or something elsewhere wanted/needed it more. some circumstance elsewhere is responsible for our own misfortune. its not personal, in that sense. its cosmic. I suppose that works with in the way you're talking about too, Robert, in terms of love being that energetic thread!
This was great. Virtue ethics is a way of developing a moral system that adapts. I suspect it is similar to your 'exoskeleton.' You don't have to work so hard at proving your virtue, if you simply ARE basically virtuous.
In the US and western society in general, the black experience is very constrictive, almost prison-like sometimes--the expectations, the constant erosion of status, even the fear. That's why this quotation from Solzhenitsyn seems especially pertinent to the black experience. It is the root of all ethics, IMO.
"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts."
It is our job to do that battle on a daily basis, but it becomes so much easier when you learn you already are 'good.' That you've won that battle, essentially. You become more fluid, as ethics change with situations. You begin to trust yourself to know.
yoooo! thank you for sharing this, always great to understand certain concepts within the context of Blackness. 🙏🏾
It's so sad that morality is used as a weapon, but it's very true. I wish more people actually wanted to be good.
Great piece, my friend.
ahh appreciate you greatly!
Incredible analysis of two opposing things that are actually quite similar Everything (not always) in this complicated world of ours boils down to 1) Who had the better story 2) Who told it first. The fight between light and dark is a story as old as time and as much we think we have evolved as a species, we like these 2 binaries a little too much. Quite enjoyable and educational.
🫶🏾🫶🏾
This was beautiful. Thank you.
thank you for reading, darling
Great piece. It reminded me a lot of the book The Righteous Mind by Jonathon Haidt. Have you read it?
It talks all about morality, specifically, morality within politics and religion.
I wish I could include the diagram in this comment that shows the moral foundations theory, but a simple google search would suffice.
looks fascinating, i'll have to check it out! thank you for the recommendation!
I can’t say that I agree that trump is the better story—he represents a familiar one. in many ways he’s the amalgamation of the american values polite company wants to ignore, people like that he says the quiet part out loud. they like the idea that they can participate in colonization by proxy, domination from the comfort of their living rooms. there is a very real fear of equality (though she didn’t say that) and for people who don’t care about policy and only “the better story” she represents a balancing of scales that people are terrified of. it’s a way of beating back what they perceive to be the inevitable, that one day “the minorities” are going to swallow the “american way of life” whole. trump ran on a much more terrifying platform than before, and did little by way of articulation. he was incoherent the bulk of the campaign and never gave people a strong idea of how he was going to do anything. he had no policy, no story. just white = good and everything else, criminal. he has a community of sycophants who are willing to translate his murmurings into something vaguely coherent and a media ecosystem that sanewashes his most vile ideologies. we also can’t discount the story of american exceptionalism, which treats what he says as bluster and not a threat, thinking that our norms will curtail his darkest impulses. we are finding out in real time that that isn’t true. reducing harris to an inefficient communicator who didn’t play hard enough to the left makes and didn’t articulate her policies feels like the kind of post mortem levied by the new york times. she wasn’t legible because people willfully misunderstood her and made sense of the nonsense that was trump. I get that I may be a more informed voter than most but I viewed her as trying to play it centrist in order to project an image of unity, a safe option for disaffected white voters who felt left behind. was this smart, maybe yeah—she came incredibly close to winning. when she ran with more progressive policies she was bulldozed by biden so I’m sure her team told her to curtail those impulses. on the point of palestine, we should’ve never been sending them weapons in the first place but the question of israel and our support for them was never a question in the mind of the establishment. I found her stance on this reprehensible, but trump had never articulated a more coherent notion about the genocide. he wouldn’t use the words self-determination and she has. idk I just get frustrated with takes like this because it’s positioned as “telling the truth” about a story that is much bigger than the two candidates we had. if dems had put up a white man saying the same things she was saying I don’t think he would’ve won and if he did I don’t think people would’ve spent the post-game wrap up acting like harris was functionally illiterate and never had anything to say.
we seem to be approaching this topic from two different vantage points, yet a lot of what you’ve said feels like it coincides with my point (or at least, the point I attempted to make when I wrote this).
i understand that you don’t agree that trump is the better story but the fact he represents familiarity is exactly the hallmark of a “great” story. all great stories follow archetypes and structures that we’re all familiar with. that is what makes Trump’s story “better”. nothing you’ve said about his incoherence, his terrifying platform or his lack of policy positions deny the fact that he was a spectacle in America’s greatest pageant, something that you express well in how the media helped monstrously to sell this spectacle.
also bear in mind: i try to go to great lengths in this essay to not speak so much about the political spectrum as much as I can (impossible tbh because it is so binarised) because my essay is not actually about how left Harris was or how right Trump is. my essay is reductionist by design because part of the reason Trump won is that there’s a large proportion of the electorate that are uninformed, who either voted for Trump or abstained.
as much as you said that reducing harris to an inefficient communicator “feels like the kind of post mortem levied by the new york times” — great turn of phrase btw — your view that she “tried to play it centrist” is exactly why i believe her to be an inefficient communicator. centrism, at the best of times, is a profoundly incoherent position; one that the public generally recognises as getting us into this mess, or “the establishment”, incremental changes that have made most people’s lives gradually worse. when fascism is knocking at the door, centrism is a particularly incoherent.
so whether it was a smart choice is a matter of philosophical opinion, i’d argue it’s not smart because she didn’t win. her team told her to curtail those progressive policies and she didn’t win. she took no moral stance on palestine and didn’t win.
harris took very few principled positions that energised people. the times she did take principled positions, it was appeals leaning right (e.g. if someone breaks into her home, they’re “getting shot”).
i don’t really know what to say about your frustration with this take. i’m getting the impression that you feel i’m being particularly unfair to Harris because of her social location as a Black woman but my point isn’t really about Harris losing, that is incidental. this essay is about how Trump won—so the post game wrap up isn’t about Harris’ “functional illiteracy” but Trump’s route to victory and some suggestions of what could’ve—in fact needs to be—done differently. I don’t know what other “people” have written but the fact that I am more concerned with the through-line of Kendrick and Trump leads me to believe that I would’ve written about this regardless of the race/gender of the loser.
I don't think you're being unfair to Harris because she's a black woman, just that her loss has to be understood through the underlying attitude toward black women in this country. misogynoir was absolutely at play here and I think to discuss it separated from that isn't as effective an argument. it's not that she was just not as good as the other guy at communicating but that for harris to be understood she has to try so much harder. the narrative that her message is incoherent is rooted in the willful misunderstanding of black women, no matter what we're saying. even someone like jasmine crockett, an arguably skilled and savvy communicator, would likely have a hard time on the biggest stage. I agree that things need to be done differently but we can't understate the story of black people as the boogeyman even though we've known for centuries that the violence perpetrated by white supremacy is often masked by civility. the wider populace fell over themselves to cast trump's misdeeds as some kind of grand strategy while muddling harris's message when they could've helped it to cohere. instead they leveled the playing field by humbling her and bringing her to heel, criticizing her in ways they didn't criticize him. it's not that she doesn't deserve valid criticism for some of her positions—she does—but there has been a double standard from get. her winning would've been due to people deciding they didn't want to humble black women and black people (they're still not over obama) through their vote paired with her being unimpeachable. trump danced for 45 minutes and babbled incoherently and people still jumped at that. he can do literally anything and people will still stare in awe at his ability to persevere rather than looking outward to the rotting soul of this country and asking why voters willingly put whiteness over their own safety and security.
to your point that we're in a reductionist time-space where anti-intellectualism is the order of the day, we cannot ignore the base instinct of survival and fear, which trump is claiming that black people and other ethnic groups threaten. this go-round it felt like he was less of a spectacle and more of their last attempt at securing whiteness for another generation. personally, i think that nat geo cover was the end of it all for us and they've just been building to it ever since ha. but yeah I'm standing on it being racism—the trump admin is also going to leave people behind in a much more violent and blatant fashion, especially the people that voted for him and people screamed that from every direction. we got the rawest deal because people would rather die white than die free and I don't think kamala could've done anything other than be white. had she done it the way we wanted there's a world where she could've won (I wish we lived in that timeline and that this is true) but there's also a version where she lost bigger and we were all the more devastated.
i’d say i write everything with the understanding that anti-Blackness is an omnipresent understructure of western life so in this essay, where i’m considering how storytelling facilitates victory in the court of public opinion, i assume anyone reading is aware of structural oppression enough that i don’t have to state its presence each time. if a Black woman runs for presidency in America, misogynoir is an inevitability, double-standards are a given, the playing field is never going level—my essay isn’t separated from reality but an exploration of what kind of things might have helped Harris transcend the obstacles of that reality.
i also want to stress that her *literal* communication is not what i am criticising here.
any perceived lack of coherence in her message is, in this particular essay, as irrelevant to me as Trump’s message being actually incoherent. i guess that’s what i mean by us seeing this from differing vantage points. all things considered, Harris was a sensible candidate. She still lost. misogynoir was a factor just as male anti-Blackness was a factor when Obama won. If we look at this from the perspective of isms then we’ll conclude that the intersection of Black womanhood is the determining factor. we might be right but that’s an incomplete picture (one that I’m sure other writers have written or are better suited to write about than me) but in an essay about how storytelling governs victory, Obama managed to transcend the “story of black people as the boogeyman” to win. in this essay, if I were to mention him, it would’ve considered how he managed to win through how compellingly he was able to present his story.
there’s a laundry list of circumstances that made it more difficult for Harris than Obama, that people more studious than me are better equipped to document, all my piece is concerned with how storytelling I observed contributed to Kendrick’s and Trump’s victories. Even with this, I’m not saying that Harris would’ve won if she had implemented any of the things I’ve suggested. She always had an uphill battle, she always had to deal with the fact that DEI/affirmative action had been souring in the public perception, always had to deal with the fact people are sick of establishment politicians, always had to deal with the fact that leftism in the west is something the average citizen wants but if you present it like leftism, they turn their heads away like fussy babies. She had to deal with all of that on top of the fact that every single overt and cover license of white supremacy was against her. so yeah, I agree, racism is a massive contributor to her loss but misogynoir is a perpetual obstacle that she had to leap over and she didn’t clear it. rather than just pointing and saying, “america hates Black women and that’s why she lost”, which feels a little bit defeatist, i’d much rather consider how she might’ve been able to clinch a victory because the landscape is the landscape. When you say things in the vein of “the wider populace fell over themselves to cast trump's misdeeds as some kind of grand strategy” yeah! that’s America! you either have to find a strategy and/or candidate to effectively counter that, or lose.
There’s lots more here that I would love to address—a lot of it relates to stuff I’ve written in more recent pieces but the last thing I’ll say is that the reason i boiled it down to the moral bending of storytelling is because we have a tendency to look at the average person with this level of malice or perhaps cognitive awareness that, unfortunately, they simply don’t possess.
that is, i don’t think many white people have ever uttered the sentence, “the last attempt at securing whiteness for another generation”, which strikes me as a particularly naziesque/klanner/overt white supermacist statement. however, i bet a lot of white folks saw trump survive an assassination attempt and thought that he’s protected by god. i can imagine a bunch of evangelical preachers in their white megachurches preached something similar. i’m sure even your average white person thought something like that. this is what i mean by a “more compelling story”. dodging an all american bullet is the stuff of american heroism, the most hollywood story ever that cements the hero. it is why i said, “trump is going to win” as soon as it happened.
perhaps my point with this essay is: we are thinking about these things with too many complications and we should focus on narrative building to win. but if not, and if misogynoir is the determining factor of losing the presidency then we can boil this entire exchange down to one sentence: if they wanted to win, the democrats should’ve never ran a Black woman.
fire writeup dude
thanks for tuning in, brother! 🫡