Stop Holding People to Account
I live in Spain, but this morning I got a text from “The Democrats” that said this:
Jesse, did you see the news? We (The Democrats) are kicking off an all-out organizing blitz this summer, focused on activating supporters like you to be leaders in your community to hold Trump and Republicans accountable, and ensure we are showing up — everywhere.
What is it to be accountable?
There is an odd way in which capitalism has transformed our entire moral universe into some quantitative procedure of settling debts. What account? We strive toward some orgastic future where no one owes anyone anything. That’s when a moral society will be reached.
Let’s start from a different moral premise: Trump is, and will never be, accountable. His whole existence is about debt. In this sense, his rise is synonymous with the past 50 years of American politics since Reagan: don’t take anything seriously; you can have more things with less money; less taxes and more Medicare; you can have everything and have no obligations to anyone.
The true “American Dream”—a phrase that did not exist until Reagan—is just another word for narcissism, freedom without obligation.
In my view, Democrats should not be trying to “hold Trump and Republicans accountable” for their corruption and abuses of power but rather participating in a process of self-transformation. The Democrats should be going to therapy.
If this text read, “We (The Democrats) are kicking off an all-out process of reexamination of our own corruption, elitism, and lack of accountability,” then I’d be interested.
But alas, We (The Democrats) remained embedded in a quantitative and antagonistic moral universe. Trump is bad because he has stolen something of value from the American people. Nowhere is it mentioned that The Democrats stood there and watched him rob the American working class.
No more “accountability” talk until everyone—yes, even the MAGA lunatics—is convinced that The Democrats themselves are accountable to the American public. We The People elected Trump. No more capitalism metaphors. No more accounting. No more debts.
The Democrats should focus on a narrative of self-transformation. Narrativize it. That should be the priority. Don’t fight with the Republicans. Don’t even talk about them. We all know they are small people anyway. We’re doing the real work.
The next era of politics will be made by those who reject Reagan’s American Dream, freedom without obligation. This is because we are the ones that must now navigate the hangover from the supposed “end of history” that came with the fall of the Soviet Union.
It is as if an entire generation of politicians mistook the end of history for the end of a good party, forgot to drink water, went to sleep for twenty years, and now woke up, surprised to see that Russia is invading Europe and that the US is $36,215,818,000,000 in debt, and surprised that a man who played a billionaire on TV was then confused for an actual billionaire, which in turn made him an actual billionaire, thinks he can produce reality TV forever.