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Painting a Rotten House

Published Nov 28, 2024, 8:00 AM

Is it time for us to finally accept that the foundation is rotten? Dr. Jonathan Metzl joins Danielle for their first post-election analysis.

Good morning, peeps, and welcome to okate F Daily with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody. Pre recording from the Home Bunker, Folks. On today's show, we get into a conversation with our friend, our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, and we talk to him about the kind of stages of grief that we continue to find ourselves in three weeks removed from this election, and what is it going to take for us to be able to navigate through and to find the strength again to imagine what resistance looks like in the new Trump regime. I think that it's important, and I say this in the interview with Jonathan, that we actually take this time to feel our feelings, that we take this time not to do a series of finger pointing or the ways in which you know, this policy measure wasn't talked about enough, or that policy measure wasn't talked about enough, but actually really feeling the grief and the disappointment and the anger that many feel towards half of this country right now, this kind of disorientation around who we are and who we will be over the next several years under the Trump regime. And you know, how do we find our way back in this moment of darkness, back to the light. What does it mean to do that? And so Jonathan and I, you know, go through this conversation because, as I've said to all of you, I am in the midst of feeling a whole host of things where I feel one that the Democratic Party is as responsible for getting us to this position as the Republican Party is, and that maybe it is time for a multi party system. But do we jump right into the fixing and the doing before we actually move through the feeling. So that conversation with Jonathan is coming up next, folks. You know that whenever we have the opportunity to sit down with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, we are always thrilled for the opportunity to get your analysis. Jonathan. We are three weeks removed from the election, and I'm gonna be honest with you. I can't seem to move in a straight line on this. I am up and down. I'm not in a place of how could this happen? I'm just like, there is just this overwhelming sense of grief around America right now that I have, and also just the desire to really disconnect. I just wanted to ask you, like about kind of this process. Is it like going through and maneuvering through an unexpected death, Like is it like dealing with news that a family member is ailing and they're not going to make it? Like how do you make sense of these feelings?

If you talk to people on the right, they're very energized right now, they're very optimistic, they're very upbeat. They won the game, right and our side loss, and so the question is like, how do you respond to that? I guess I'm seeing a number of different responses. One is, as we've seen a lot of finger pointing. Another is, and I've seen this so widely. This is just me talking as a person, not as a researcher, disengagement or disbelief, like so many people are like, Oh, it's not going to be that bad, it's not going to be that different, Like a kind of acceptance minimizing and then the resistance and that kind of stuff like we saw before, right, And so I find actually the minimize I mean, of course an emotional roll crushure too, because everybody's just tired. Like we had this huge election, and remember the feeling like when you won an election, you feel great, You're like, okay, let's get started. It's energy and that kind of stuff. But now we have the opposite, which is we got our best kicked, and so there's a sense of helplessness. There's a sense of I worked so hard and I have nothing to show for it. There's just a resignation all those things. And I don't know, I mean, there's all seem like normal human responses honestly to the situation we're in right now. But I guess I think I've mentioned this before, but like, I have a colleague who's from a country that was a democracy and turned into a totalitarian regime actually, and a couple of friends from different places, one in Europe when in Asia specifically, I always ask them, like, what's it like when you're thriving democracy became single party rule telleritarian thing and people, you know, both people I've really stuck talked to a length about this said, the scariest thing is not like the resistance was crushed. We kind of saw that happening. It was more that kind of people just kind of accepted it.

It kind of impacted their like was there an apathy would that be the word or not? Apathy?

Like resignation. All of a sudden, people were like different. It wasn't like remember in twenty sixteen when Trump pointed people were like out there in the streets and in march and all these kind of things. But now like many of the things Trump says make kind of sense to people, or people minimize it or they're afraid and they just want the bad stuff not to happen to them. And we hear this a lot, right, We hear this a lot, and so the question is kind of what do you do in the face of that? But I guess, you know, one of my colleagues told me people just accepted it as their daily life. They started to do whatever they needed to survive, and people I never would have expected started telling on their neighbors. And that's kind of what happens. Is people are in this system and then the system changes, and then I don't know, I mean, not related, but I'm thinking, like, for example, about those democracy protesters in Hong Kong right now. For example, ten years ago, who could ever imagine Hong Kong was a thriving democracy and there's no way China would upend that because it was such a great financial boom and China would never commit like economic suicide. That would be totally irrational. And now all those protesters are in trial or in prison or things like that. China's not doing great economically, but that was the price that they paid to enrich certain people and create power for certain people. And Hong Kong is still there, but it's a shell of what it was economically before. And so you know, it's just the logic through which people say, oh, this is never going to happen turns out not to not to be the logic that actually works.

Sometimes I'm wondering, is it's never going to happen or it's not going to be that bad? Is that self protection? Is it disassociation? Given that history is in fact, like a really good guide in this place. And again, I'm not saying that things will dramatically, to your point, change in twelve months, but they will this slow, this creeping fascism that I think has been creeping for the last nine years. Is it self protection, the disassociation, the belief that it couldn't possibly or it won't be that bad. Is that a form that people are taking in order to kind of steal themselves.

Well, I think there are two ways to think about that. I mean, of course people feel defeated, and they feel resigned, and they feel exhausted. The answer that I find frustration with is like people thinking that this is going to be the same as what happened in twenty sixteen, and it ain't.

It is not.

We're going We're in a different world right now. And so you know, I've had talked to numerous people who are like, oh, it's just the same as twenty sixteen and we got through it and stuff like that. I'm like, yeah, but the challenge is really different right now. This is a much different entity than Trump taking over while all of the guardrails were still in place in twenty sixteen. And that's not the case now. I mean, if you look just at what the Supreme Court by itself, Alito and on down are aiming to do with many core foundations of education, reproductive rates, guns, all those kind of things. Is this is not twenty sixteen. And so I've been trying to explain to people, hey, look, man, it's a lot different right now. But I think the other thing is we have to look at ourselves. I think that, you know, I'm just thinking of Jason Stanley's book about the rise of authoritarianism, and one of the most important things for that to rise is a fractured opposition. And so I think it's really a time also for us to really look at our if you're not in the governing party right now, look at ways. You know, we have to rebuild a coherent, almost monolithic opposition or we're just going to keep getting fragmented. And so I think that there's also a chance to reflect on ourselves, because I think strategy going forward is really important.

You know what's really funny is that no one that I am talking to is in strategy mode. They're in shock, they're in protection mode, they're in cya mode. There is not a lot of forward thinking. And I think that there is just this place of emotional and physical haze that has come from the last hundred and some odd days of like utter exhaustion. And I do think that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon's strategy of flooding the zone has been like a tsunami. Even as we're going through each and every single appointment and each person that's coming up. I did a video yesterday and I said, you know, I'm going to be honest I actually don't care. I am in a place of like he could appoint Daffy Duck at this point, and I actually don't give a fuck. And for me, it is a genuine numbness, like I'm like, what is the point of following each and every single one of these appointments? What's the point in following every single bouncing ball that Donald Trump and this administration is going to be putting out? Where's the end? And so I think that obviously there are people that are doing a lot of protectionism, particularly those in the nonprofit arena, given that you know, their entire organizations could potentially be shut down and name this terrorist organizations and then just go from there and what happens to those people and those entities and then the people that they were trying to help and protect. But I don't know, there isn't a lot of forward thinking, And I think that that both worries me and I also completely understand it because I think that a lot of people, particularly black women, are just like, well, you wanted this, so go ahead, you know, Like I'm not engaging at the level or with the intensity that I did in twenty sixteen or that I did in twenty twenty, Like, I don't have it.

It's so delicate right now, you know, honestly, because the Democrats lost for a number of reasons. I mean, Trump didn't overperform, We underperformed. And so the question is how did our coalition fall apart? And was that the end of the coalition or not? And so I think there's a lot of reckoning that will happen. I also think that as the impact of what's going to happen on people's daily lives becomes more real, people hopefully will become more energized. But maybe that's not the case. Maybe people are afraid and exhausted and resigned, and that's the case. But I just think something has to happen, and maybe now is not the time. And you know, it's the holidays. People are tired. We lost. I hope we rebuilt. I really knew. But I would love it if he appointed Daffy Duck to me. That would be a game changer. I would actually about that. So if Daffy Ducks are the cards to me, that would change everything.

You know. I will say this though, you know, to your point, like Democrats were not shellacked in this election. It is the narrowest margin of a win in modern times. He's under fifty percent in the popular vote, like it was such a narrow win. So I will push back on the coalition collapsing, because that would have been like if this had been a title wave. It wasn't. There were a number of people, millions of people that did not engage at all in this election, and I think that that is for a number of reasons, as is the case with every presidential election, where everyone that has the ability to vote does not vote.

Well, let me let me be clear, then I agree with you. I think that going forward, what's going to happen is that people are going to have different stakes in what's happening, and so people who are wealthy are gonna do better, people who are white are potentially going to do better. As these immigration crackdowns start happening, people are going to either think I'm out there, I'm gonna take a risk, or it's not happening to me. I'm going to stay home, and that kind of thing. And so I guess I would hold by the fact that there were fault lines that helped contribute to our underperformance in this election, even though we was again a close election. We didn't win the election, and we didn't win a bunch of congressional and Senate seats that we probably should have, and so I do think that there were fault lines that we just don't have the luxury of having anymore, like either we're on the same team or we're not. And so creating a narrative about that, I think is going to be important because I just again, I just don't think we have a luxury of hashtag dismantle anything at this point. And agree, I agree with you, it's close, But I'm saying that as the effects of NBC potentially going away and squashing the Department of Education and then doing all these things in a way, it's just going to be harder to build that coalition, and so the fracturing is going to you know, we just have to be careful that the fracturing is not just about self interest but is about mobilization, which I think is going to be the challenge.

So here's my thing. One of the things that I have been kind of reframing myself around these systems don't work, and they've never worked for black people, for people of color, for women. We've taken incremental changes and growth and have made them bigger than they are. When we look at the institutions that are going to be destroyed, I'm kind of sitting here Jonathan these days, and I'm just like, well, if your life expectancy, your viability, economic viability can all be determined by your zip code, by what elementary school and high school you went to, by your geographical location, and that continues to be a serious determining factor, then like the systems that were put in place to lift people up haven't when I look at like the difference in terms of education just in blocks in Brooklyn alone, right, depending on what area, what neighborhood in Brooklyn you are, if your child was able to get into a Magnet school, if you're you know, or you're in a regular public school, whatever determines everything. So in a way, I'm at a place where I'm just like, well, he's going to destroy everything. And we've been painting a rotten house for generations and haven't seen the racial wealth gap, haven't seen the gender gap, haven't seen any of these things decrease with any significance. And so I think that for some of the people that did stay home, they're taking some not all. Some just didn't give a fuck at all, but some were looking at this and saying, tell me what the serious differences have been. And at some point, maybe things just do need to be destroyed. Unfortunately, maybe there does need to be a significant loss of life for there to be a jarring out of like this complacency, out of this malaise of incrementalization.

You and I have talked about this before, Like, I think the frustration is something that you and I can both see, right. I mean, it wasn't just that people stayed home. Plenty of working less people and people of color voted for Trump, and so that frustration is something that he really tapped into well by and spent a long time telling everybody the economy was great and it wasn't great for them. And so I think part of that issue is you and I talked about like the politics of joy, but I don't know the Republicans one hundred percent attack ADS and so we were on the defense the entire time, and so what you're talking about is real, of course is real. But again, I just I'm so wary of the politics of burning everything down because that imagines that we're going to build back a better system.

No, no, no. What I'm saying is that we are not going to build back a better system. Somebody will. And it isn't our politics of burning things down. It's the politics that has now been elected whose plans are and strategy is to burn everything down. So if you have no mechanism of power, not in the House, not in the Senate, the people themselves are tired and exhausted. It is not the mentality of like, oh, let us get into like this is what their plan is. And so my thing is like, no, we this generation that is here right now is not going to be a part of the rebuild because there's going to be decades a generation of destruction and darkness that is coming. But at some point, as waters recede, there is a billback phase. But what I'm saying is that the majority of us won't be here for that.

I mean, I need Daffie Duck, honestly, right, I need that again, Like this is our moment. It just feels like crap. And then honestly, man, we need a narrative, like we need a unifying narrative. So I don't know, we have to figure out study what other people have done. I don't know, we need a narrative that kind of brings it back together. If the Democrats are not the party of the mainstream or the working class or people who are. I mean, we just don't have a narrative right now. So we need a narrative. And often narratives are defined in opposition. And so if Trump overplays his hand, it's easier to have a resistance narrative than when we just don't have a narrative right now. And so we're scrambling and terrified. And as you say, the issues for which you and I and many other people have fought for lives are serious risk right now. We've got to figure something out. We've got to figure something out.

Yeah, And I think that at some point something will be figured out. But I think that what I encourage people to do is kind of move through their feelings and emotions at this point, because that's really all there is to do. And I think that where our problem comes is consistently in this rush to you know, build the plane while flying it. And I think that I'm at a point at least today, this week and this month where I'm just like, yeah, I don't feel like doing both, and like I actually just feel like sitting in this and seeing how it unfolds before I spring into action. And I think that there needs to be a deeper analysis and reflection before there is a new strategy and a message.

I'm with you there. It's Thanksgiving. Everybody, take a breath, and then we can figure it out.

We will as always, my friend, Jonathan, thank you for making the time for wokf appreciate you.

Hang in there, We'll get back on our feet. It's just going to take a minute kind of realizing what's happening right now. One hundred.

That is it for me today. Here folks on wokef as always. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.

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