the culture war is about to become one of our least or most important concerns

an election Post, sorry about it

One of the tricky things about publishing a book shortly before an extremely consequential election is that I faced a certain amount of pressure to prognosticate in print.¹ About midway through the editing process I was given a note suggesting that I should change course from my proposed topics and write about what would happen in the case of a Trump victory, the Supreme Court banning books, etc. I resisted this note and I’m glad I did, because it would have rendered Dangerous Fictions irrelevant. If the fascists win there’s no point to this book; there's no point to any books. Given sufficient impunity, the fascists will ban books like crazy. The current Supreme Court doesn’t give one single shit about precedent or decency, but they do like robing their decisions in some layer of legal bullshittery; a federal book ban would be a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment, and the court would only feel empowered to do it under a Trump presidency.

And if Trump wins, we’ll have much bigger problems on our hands than book bans. Sorry about it—since fiction is obviously my beat and I care about it a lot—but if the fascists win out then the culture war is the smallest of our concerns. Moms for Liberty cofounder Tiffany Justice (her actual name, look I’m not in the universe’s writing room okay?) is vying for the post of Secretary of Education. If she gets it, that’s the end of the educational system in this country full stop. And we would still have much bigger problems. Trump intends to unleash Stephen Miller on immigration policy again, turning an already brutal bureaucracy into a network of concentration camps. He’ll also let RFK Jr.—Mr. Brainworm himself— take control of the food supply.² He’ll physically help Netanyahu massacre the rest of the Gazans (breaking from the current White House policy of sometimes issuing a feeble “wow don’t do that, here are some guns tho.”) The culture war will likely dwindle in importance: I’m sure some people will still care about books in schools and representation on TV, but all the mass murder in real life will probably be distracting.

For what it’s worth, I think Harris will win tomorrow, possibly by a lot. If you’re interested in my opinion here as a non-expert political junkie, I think all the meaningful numbers are in Harris’ favor, and have been for some time. She’s generally had more money, and has deployed it more wisely in her ground game (rather than wasting tons of it on grifters and cruel incompetents.) Early voting isn’t as reliably a pro-Democratic metric as it used to be, but the large percentage of women among early voters—especially in states with recent draconian abortion bans, such as Georgia³—suggests that lots of women are fired up and eager to vote, which is likely a good sign for Harris. In fact I think it’s reasonable to suspect that an unexpectedly large percentage of the electorate this time around will be women; the Dobbs effect appears to remain very much in play.

The only numbers not obviously in Harris’ favor have been the polls,⁴ but polling is very weird these days, thanks to the fact that most people are so inundated with spam calls that they don’t pick up their phones. Pollsters have attempted to adjust for this, but a lot of their math sounds bogus to me. Everything I’ve read about the legendary Ann Selzer, who has long calibrated her Iowa poll quite differently from everyone else, suggests that she may be one of the few professional pollsters with a decent methodology. (She also avoids “herding,” which is apparently the tendency of most pollsters to adjust their polls to be more like other polls, which begs the question “why do we take these guys seriously?”)

Still, if Harris wins, the hierarchy of important concerns doesn’t really change. The Biden administration has been garbage on life-and-death issues such as immigration and Gaza; the Harris administration will need to be considerably pressured if we hope to see any change in policy there. The culture war, however, will remain much more exciting to talk about and much lower-stakes, so I expect it will assume (practically, if not morally) the position of the Most Important Issue Facing America Today. If Harris wins big thanks to women, there will be no rural diner-type profiles suggesting that we really need to listen to women’s concerns: there will just be subtle and not-so-subtle concern trolling about the horror of female power. Has MeToo once again gone too far? Are there too many strong female characters on TV? Wouldn’t all these career-driven girlbosses be happier if they were just at home having babies? What about men??? Isn’t it time that somebody wrote about masculinity for a change?????? Won’t somebody please think of the men????????????

That being said, I actually do think certain elements of the culture war could change considerably after a Harris victory. I bet that the Moms for Liberty types will continue to lose steam (or, more likely, morph into an advocacy group for another weird issue, like banning allergy medicine or insisting on every American’s right to keep an endangered and unvaxxed predator as a pet.) Historically, book banning tends to come and go as a popular movement, and after some early successes, Moms for Liberty types have largely been defeated on the local level. But even as the moms fade out, I expect the internet fanboy/Gamergate type will remain, if only because it’s physically much easier to be an armchair asshole than a local community pest. (Going to local school board meetings means getting out of bed and putting on pants, a challenge for us all.) Corporate media makers have also recently signaled that they intend to solicit feedback on their movies from “superfans” (i.e., toxic Gamergaters); this may have just been bet-hedging in case of a Trump victory, but if companies choose to go forward with this, it’ll give these shitty superfans a taste of power that will only embolden them into being more annoying online.

To make a riskier and hazier prediction here, I suspect that the vast majority of Gamergate/other loud online MAGA types will be more or less fine with losing. Actual battle is scary, while the culture war is very easy to wage from the safety of a man’s castle (soulless condominium/mom’s house/divorce shed). The culture war is also eternal, and these guys don’t necessarily intend to win. The Nazis had enthusiastic plans for controlling the media, and talented filmmakers willing to help them do it; contemporary fascists are much more invested in simply hating what already exists. Their few cultural products—such as unlikeable cartoons you’ve probably never heard of—are inferior knockoffs of already popular and beloved shows. They can only mock, they cannot make: they’ve produced orc art, and they barely even like it themselves.⁵ Their only cultural enjoyment comes from imagining the injuries that this kind of anti-woke ugliness might inflict on their largely indifferent enemies.⁶

Insofar as the far right in the U.S. has a culture of its own—outside evangelical Christianity at least—it’s a culture of grievance. And grievance is the province of critics, not creators. Much of the American far right doesn’t want to do anything, make anything, change anything. Even getting what they want isn’t actually what they want. They want to feel bad, scared, alone, special, misunderstood. I actually think—in the spirit of bipartisanship—we should give the right what it really wants. Tomorrow, let’s make them feel like absolute shit.

1. Prognosticating in a newsletter is fine because no one cares. And if I end up being wrong, we once again have bigger problems.

2. Along with taking fluoride out of the water, RFK Jr. wants to ban Cheeze-Its. This aggression will not stand, man.

3. I’m calling Blue Georgia right now. Go Dawgs.

4. The betting markets have also not been in Harris’ favor, but if people can’t recognize an obvious pump-and-dump scheme (in this economy???) then I worry about them tying their shoes.

5. You didn’t really think I was going to go a whole post without a Tolkien reference, did you? Fly, you fools.

6. Some months ago, I read a very good essay about these right-wing knockoff cartoons which made this exact point, and I was going to link it here, but Google search sucks now and I can’t find it. Lina Khan, please destroy my enemies.