In the week since the election, I have read more than my fill of hand-wringing analyses, chilling predictions, and assignments of blame. I’m not going to add to that bleak collection.
But I like what the Irish novelist Joseph O’Neill said in an interview with Daniel Drake published by the New York Review of Books. A lot has gone wrong in America, he thinks, and it’s not just that “an unpleasant encounter with inflation” led the majority to vote against the incumbent party in the White House. Vast networks of far-right ideologues and their bots have created a political environment so toxic, says O’Neill, that it’s hard to imagine any campaign strategy that would have overcome it.
“My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think,” he says. “And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain — and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed.”
The winning campaign in this year’s election painted a picture of a terrifying American hellscape. That’s exactly what authoritarians want — to create a feeling of hopelessness about democracy and truth-seeking so pervasive that people stop reading the actual news and, ultimately, no one is reporting it.
“A successful opposition,” says O’Neill, “will require unusual measures of courage, imagination, adaptability, disruptiveness.” Hope is what is most needed now, because “a hopeless population is more vulnerable to autocracy.”
I can’t help thinking that more people in towns and cities across the country would have doubted that miserable picture of our country if they’d had their own local newspapers to remind them of realities that aren’t so hopeless. The most recent report from the Medill School of Journalism says one-third of U.S. newspapers have shut down.
Take a look at the news in last week’s Indie. The Outer Cape rallied around our Jamaican neighbors to save their church. Ground was broken for 46 new apartments, most of them affordable, in Wellfleet, and down the street the walls went up on four new Habitat for Humanity homes that will house working families. People are making art, music, wreaths, pies, and other things of beauty here. They are getting together to exercise their bodies and minds and plan for the future.
We have plenty of problems here, too. We’re not publishing the Provincetown Pollyanna. But in a real sense, independent local newspapers are the bedrock of democracy because they bring people of all political stripes together on the same page to read about their friends and neighbors and, yes, their adversaries. Community, civility, and common purpose begin on that page.
Courage, imagination, adaptability, and disruptiveness: we have all of them right here. That’s why I still have hope.
