Reflections on the Election...

if you must cut down your tall poppies, at least wear them with pride

As someone who tries, but often fails, to be passionately neutral around political “teams”, I did a remarkably good job of staying emotionally distanced from this particular election cycle. I say remarkably, because the last time I got the news Trump had been elected 2016, I burst into floods of tears in a public restaurant, fully believing the media-riled hype that the effective Antichrist was now the leader of the free world.

This time around… well… just a mellow sense of calm and quiet optimism. No massive joy, but certainly no sadness or distress either. So what changed? That’s an Odyssey way beyond the scope of what’s meant to be a quick and mildly hungover blog, but here’s it boiled down to three reasons:

1. Benefit of Hindsight

Last time around, we had no idea what he’d actually be like in office. Yes, he did some whack things that likely harmed long-term environmental protections, but there are plenty of arguments the world actually got safer in terms of reduced % of geopolitical conflict under his term.

keep your friends close, and presumably your enemies closer…

Here in 2024, we know what to roughly expect: some good, some bad, a lot of cringe, but at least we can rule out a hell-mouth cracking open on the Whitehouse lawn the moment he steps into the Oval Office. That said, he’s still a high volatility personality, and big questions remain about how he handles the transition of power once 2028 rolls around. He was hardly a beacon of sportsmanship last time.

2. More Information About The Other Side

For me, the past eight years has been a painful but unavoidable awakening to just how rotten “my side” (i.e. the left) had become. It was easy to view the 2016 election as an obvious slamdunk for Hillary when I was unaware of the toxic ideology that was slowly poisoning every institution in the left-of-center establishment. If I’m losing you here, I recommend reading this book to get a picture of just how bad this ideology has gotten. But in short: it’s far harder to be upset about one side winning when you believe the other side is also astonishingly awful.

3. Actually Understanding America’s Soul

In 2016, my experience of the U.S. was very surface level: tons of time playing poker in Vegas, or touristing about in major cities and national parks… but I’d never actually *lived* here. Now, as a full-blown greencarded immigrant who spends each day immersed in its delightfully odd culture and reaping the many benefits it offers, I get what the USA is about. America is about capital F Freedom. About living on and expanding the frontier. About celebrating its achievements. About PRIDE. And while these values aren’t exclusive to Americans by any means, the lengths that people embody them here is still quite alien to Brits like me. Yes, we like those things too, but we don’t *talk* about our achievements the way Americans do. After all, we are taught from a young age that humility is a key virtue, and boasting is about the least humble thing one can do.

Now of course, like all things taken to excess, both pride and humility can become poisons. But what I didn’t appreciate before is that not all poisons are equally toxic. Yes, American pride taken too far can be horrendously cringe and tacky, and even lead one into geopolitical hot water. But I’d happily wager that excessive pride is generally less harmful to a nation than excessive humility — pride, for all its vices, is at least an activating emotion for people. It drives one to go out and do more, to make more choices from which you can (hopefully) learn from. But excessive humility is very debilitating. Why? Because its associated emotion is shame.

Now don’t laugh at me but I recently came across a very handwavy school of spirituality that tries to “rank” emotions by some kind of Spirituality Score (units unknown, peer review presumably pending)… and as silly as it sounds at first glance, I gotta say, the ranking kinda makes intuitive sense if you think about it…

even spirituality can be gamified huh

One can quibble about the exact ordering (i.m.o love probably belongs above joy?)… but either way, I very much agree that shame belongs at the bottom of the pile. Why? Because shame, if left to fester, is both negative, AND de-energising. It’s shame that causes people to give up on their dreams. It’s shame that sadly drives many people to suicide. And unlike guilt, which is hatred of an action we’ve done, shame is hatred of the self. And if we hate ourselves, not only do we not trust ourselves to try new shit, but that bottled up energy can spill over into another really nasty emotion (that is strangely absent from this diagram): envy. Envy makes us do really dark stuff, including tall poppy syndroming those who dare build new things.

I realise this is probably not where you expected this blog to go (I did say I’m hungover), so bring it back full circle: Trump won, and I’m quietly content about it. No, it’s not because I’ve gone MAGA. It’s because, despite his many flaws, he ultimately represents America’s core vibes far better than the current instantiation of the Democrats. As much as the old Brit in me cringes at them, his cheesy slogans and self-congratulatory rambling speeches represent a far more productive and inspiring energy state than the woke left’s shame-based morality.

Yes, his Spirituality Score is a long long long way from enlightenment, but at least he’s consistently above a 100 (again, units unknown). And that’s frankly as much as one could have hoped for from this election, but who knows, maybe one day our politics can crack the 400s.