i.
Recently, I was required to be somewhere close to D.C. during rush hour, something any sane commuter avoids at all costs, and I noticed the new Express Lanes were essentially wide-open while everyone else remained bumper-to-bumper.
These are two full lanes constructed in the last decade that, while doing little to eliminate the gridlock, could certainly alleviate it. But these lanes are now pay-to-play, with a sliding scale depending on time of day and amount of congestion. On this day, the cost to get ten miles down the road in the Express Lanes was $35.
Thirty-five dollars. And, needless to say, there were more than a handful of cars choosing this option. It occurred to me, with clarity: even as most voters claim traffic, the price of gas and groceries, and health care—for starters—are issues causing ceaseless stress, an entirely separate America is under construction.
There’s a subset of Americans that until rather recently included only the obscenely wealthy, like CEOs, athletes, and celebrities, who were spared the indignity of flying economy class, or entering a grocery store, or sitting in a waiting room for a medical or dental checkup. Today, a certain privileged sector can pay for concierge access to doctors, can offload the shopping and delivery of goods to gig-economy hustlers, and not only fly first class but avoid the lines and security hassles altogether.
This is the other America that used to occasionally inspire political debate and is now largely taken as a given. Of course, instead of focusing on how little relief and support their tax dollars are providing, too many voters have uncritically accepted that the answer for all this is to become rich so they can enjoy the perks of the elite. Any attempts to ameliorate this via policy have been successfully ridiculed as (take your pick) socialism, communism, or good old-fashioned liberalism.
And here’s the thing: I’m not suggesting that paying for convenience is inherently immoral, or that every toll road is a monument to inequality. I’m suggesting that we’ve become remarkably comfortable with a system in which those with sufficient resources can increasingly purchase their way around the problems everyone else is expected to endure.
Which brings us back to messaging. And, inevitably, to the stories we’ve been sold.
ii.
Listen.
Trump, 2024: “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.”
Trump, 2026: “They say, ‘Affordability,’ and everyone says, ‘Oh, that must mean Trump has high prices. No, our prices are coming down tremendously. They have a new word. They always have a hoax. The new word is affordability…”
Check this out.
Trump, 2024: “I will have that war settled between Putin and (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskiy as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled… I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.”
Trump, 2026: “There was no reason that the war with Ukraine and Russia started. It started due to incompetence.”
These are only two of the more egregious, intelligence-insulting promises Trump made on the campaign trail. Naturally, Trump still wants to control the narrative while refusing to acknowledge the distance between his promises and reality (that he’s not routinely called to account on this is another sad commentary on our mainstream media’s death spiral).
It is, nevertheless, still worth unpacking how such ludicrous and empty promises convinced anyone in the first place. It helps to understand his bluster was intended for two distinct audiences: the first, his base, that has come to depend upon such bluster; second, and perhaps more importantly, the marginal percentage of so-called undecideds. Prove to these folks that, however unlikely your claim, you’re willing to say it, to own it, and that might move the relative handful of citizens who determine elections.
So here we are.
The Dems may indeed win. But have they learned anything? Will they be able to make this matter? Will they be able to prevent 2024 (or 2016 and so on) from happening again, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in ways only the Dems can do?
We’ll see.
If they do, it won’t necessarily be because they understand what Americans want, or how to describe why government matters, or any number of welcome, necessary things. It will be because, at long last, they are beginning to grasp what narrative means, how to tell stories, and how to effectively message. I’m not holding my breath.
And this is where the question of messaging becomes considerably more consequential than the latest election cycle. Because a country that can be persuaded government is inherently useless can also be persuaded that the solution to failing public services is not to improve them but to escape them.
If you have the money, of course.
iii.
2016 showed us a lot about who we are, and what we’ve become, and 2024 was equal parts sequel and epitaph. But, for me, it was 2020 and 2021 that illustrated, with painful clarity, how much has changed.
America, fattened up on corn syrup and reality TV (not to mention cheap imported toys), simply did not have the discipline, character, or courage to face a pandemic as a united nation, and demonstrate compassion, teamwork, smarts. In a sense, Trump was literally the worst person to be in charge, and yet he was the consummate distillation of who we have become, the glaring, bloated personification of our corrupted id.
Instead of pushing back, hard, on the babies and whiners and quitters (and irredeemably selfish assholes) who looked at wearing masks in public as the most intolerable affront to their freedoms, we allowed a very cynical right-wing propaganda machine to empower these clowns, helping them to delude themselves that their refusal to practice a modicum of safe measures was in fact an act of bravery, a meaningful gesture of resistance against an oppressive government, etc.
From the jump, Trump did pretty much everything wrong, including politicizing a pandemic. This alone is something he should never have been forgiven for, and the Democrats did a predictably terrible job holding him to account, allowing breathing room for excuses and, worse, blame-shifting. This, in short, was one of those rare historic events where we needed solidarity, a sense of community, even some genuine patriotism.
Trump was anti-vaccine, except when he was for it. Democrats should never have allowed him to weasel back and forth between those stances, especially as it was entirely predictable that this is precisely what he’d do.
What I wouldn’t have paid to have Fauci—or anybody—go on national media, early on, and say: We don’t know exactly where the virus originated; there are competing hypotheses, and the evidence needs to be investigated. But however it arrived, it’s here, and it’s not only America but the entire world that is at risk. Our immediate goal is to figure out the best ways to keep everyone safe.
Even allowing the possibility that figures like Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. might feel vindicated because they entertained a laboratory-origin hypothesis became, in the hands of a polarized media ecosystem, another distraction from the urgent work of responding to the disease. If you had cancer, would you focus more on whether you got it from smoking or exposure to chemicals, or would you busy yourself trying to beat the disease? (Of course the origins matter. Of course accountability matters. But neither changes the immediate obligation to protect people.)
Browbeating people who were selfish, or misinformed, or confused, frightened (or all these things and more), or worse, shutting down dialogue, instead of appealing to people’s pride and patriotism—as opposed to invoking (insert clichés here) the American Fighting Spirit that won World War II or put a man on the moon or beat the Commies or whatever—was another unforgivable messaging fail.
And we’ll never stop paying for it.
We now have, in addition to the generational percentage of morons susceptible to any kind of conspiracy theory (because that’s better than thinking, easier than reading, quicker than learning), a social-media ecosystem that has amplified those impulses in dire fashion. Too much has been happening too quickly for any of us to properly handle the absolute insanity of RFK Jr. being put in charge of anything—I mean, good lord—but the larger problem is how readily public distrust can be exploited and monetized by quacks and cynics.
Same as it ever was, sure, but it’s a lot worse now.
And again, where individuals once endangered themselves by embracing conspiratorial thinking, now people committed to those ideas can occupy positions of considerable public authority, and we are all in the crosshairs. COVID, which could have been utilized, via competent and consistent messaging, to reinforce and underscore what government can, at times, do very well, was appropriated by some of the most cynical operators in American politics.
And we’ll never stop paying for it.
Biden did a great deal of good (including some excellent and necessary things) during his term; it’s unfortunate he was a woeful advocate for his own policies. It’s tragic in the Shakespearean sense.
That his entire team—all the people he appointed or approved of who half-assed or were otherwise incompetent at their jobs, most especially Merrick Garland, one of the more egregious own goals in the annals of American politics—are on him. The buck stops with the boss. Biden, in almost every sense, was his own worst enemy. That there were no other Dems able or worthy to provide assistance until it was way too little, way too late, is a Tragedy with a capital T—in the literal sense.
The people who make careers sowing mistrust and hatred of government and responsible regulation are making coin in direct proportion to how much suffering they propagate. Government, as inefficient and cumbersome as it can often be, when entrusted to competent people with souls, is the last bulwark between us and a less aesthetically pleasing post-Blade Runner dystopia.
And this is the great, self-fulfilling genius of the antigovernment narrative: undermine the institutions people rely upon, then point to their failures as proof that those institutions were never worth supporting. At which point the only remaining question is whether you can afford to live somewhere the consequences are less visible.
iv.
All of which is to say, I was recently reminded of my trip to Mexico in 2023.
America is truly racing toward becoming a surreal combination of broken empire and a country whose wealthiest citizens increasingly inhabit a different world from everyone else.
I would be the last person to describe myself as well-traveled, but I’ve been overseas a few times, and visited places in America where the devastating poverty functions as a rejoinder to the natural beauty of its surrounding landscape. It was the first time I recall being struck by not only the beauty and lack of material wealth, but the ways this dichotomy was compressed into towns like Bimini, which are, of course, designed to attract tourists (and their wallets).
Seeing this, in real time, helps disabuse even the most patriotic American of the fiction that we simply lack the resources to make meaningful changes (in infrastructure, health care, education, etc.); we simply lack the will. Worse, there’s no will because the superwealthy—corporations and the people who run them, traditionally and still mostly white males—have a powerful incentive to resist changes that might impact their bottom line by even a fraction of a percentage point.
Elon Musk has unwittingly become the avatar for so many things (all of them awful), it’s at once difficult and pointless to itemize them. I mean, for anyone sentient, you just watch the guy for a few seconds and it’s all there, laid out unfiltered the way any gifted satirist would die to describe in a novel. Still, the fact that a man possessing such extraordinary wealth could make an enormous difference in the lives of millions, yet devotes so much of his public attention to accumulating influence, fighting ideological battles, and shitposting on the social media platform he overpaid for, is something future students will study in history books, assuming such things are allowed or imaginable a century or decade from now.
But back to Mexico. Todos Santos is everything I figured it would be, only more so.
It’s beautiful, it is very much off the grid, and it’s near the Pacific Ocean. I was awakened by a family of roosters, every morning at approximately 4:00, all of whom sounded like they lived only to continue an argument that never ended. These were not proud beasts strutting and announcing the arrival of another day; they sounded like petty, angry, inconsolable toddlers screaming just to be heard. I had no choice but to admire their commitment to the role.
The streets in and around the town were scarcely paved, and all the side streets were dirt (the dust that accumulated, everywhere, was at once impressive and onerous, a metaphor for the effort, time, and money involved in man’s ceaseless attempt to tame the wilderness or, more accurately, impose order on nature that otherwise operates on its own ancient, immutable logic).
The highlight of the week was my daily excursion to the ocean—a four-mile round trip that provided exercise and views of the unfiltered, mostly unchanged countryside. This involved traversing a sandy road shared by cars, pedestrians, and animals (I saw wild horses, chickens, a donkey, and many dogs). There were also the occasional compounds, which were quite literally hidden fortresses, surrounded on all sides by immense concrete barriers.
Needless to say, it hits differently, seeing this kind of arrangement not in a posh suburban neighborhood or a picture from the Hollywood Hills; to behold such sequestered opulence—paranoid, necessary, or perhaps both—in the midst of bucolic wilderness. It was jarring, on aesthetic and logical levels, but the message was unmistakable: such measures would not be taken if it was not considered imperative to separate those with (on the inside) from those without.
I felt perfectly safe during daylight hours, although I’d been warned (by a cab driver, the shop owner where I got my morning cups of joe, and the dude who ran the diner where I ate fresh seafood for lunch every day) to avoid going anywhere alone—inside and definitely beyond the outskirts—after dark. I never felt unduly threatened, keenly aware of my status as a white man with means, but smart enough to know this made me a potential target.
Nevertheless, seeing the dozen or so mansions encircled by walls (in some instances augmented by barbed wire), it was impossible to deny what was in front of my face, and what is happening just about everywhere in the world, all the time, though great pains are made to deflect, distract, or deny open acknowledgment of it.
Here’s what I thought, revisiting these photos from 2023: This is where America is headed, at light speed. A place where wealth is steadily concentrated in an increasingly exclusive, grotesquely privileged portion of the population. A new and not great country where the American Dream—that rusty, well-traveled jalopy that has taken us from catastrophe to triumph, weathering the beatings of recessions and a Big Depression, but at least ostensibly tracking toward some destination at once forever in the future and the present tense that promised: you can have all this, too; you too can be wealthy and free from the shackles of idiotic employers, meddling government, overreaching regulations, etc.—is breaking down.
By design.
v.
This was always a work in progress, hence Grover Norquist’s infamous mission statement about shrinking government until it could be drowned in a bathtub. A lot of Republican voters have signed on for this, except during global-warming-induced states of emergency, and when they need the government services they rely on. But with the disparity between the upper one percentile and the vast majority of Americans (not even getting to those below the poverty line) having gone from ridiculous to farcical, another, more grim development has come into sharper focus.
The rich don’t merely possess more. They increasingly possess the ability to live somewhere else, even when they occupy the same physical space as everyone around them.
A different airport. A different doctor’s office. A different neighborhood. A different road.
America, punch-drunk and hijacked by maniacal stewards of late-stage capitalism, is being steered into a ditch, figurative, certainly, but also, inconceivably, literal—particularly in states most in need of the services their elected representatives have been eager to slash and burn.
And at a certain point, as with all empires, the obvious fictions finally fall away and reveal the reality: you’re not only never, ever going to acquire what TV and media sold you, you’d better keep quiet and remain content with whatever you still can get your filthy fingers on. And hold on tight because even that’s only on loan, until someone decides they want it more than you.
If you can’t do what you’re told, there will be consequences. There will be walls. You will never see the inside; you will remain where you’re meant to be: on the outside, considered too dangerous or insignificant even to stare longingly through the windows. At the mercy of a world that is and always has been a jungle, and everything that lives there spends every second of its existence either killing or trying to avoid being killed.
It’s the Heart of Darkness, and it’s the Dark Heart of where America, by the slimmest of margins, voted to head in November 2024. Are enough people, now officially entering the “find out” phase, going to wake up, make some noise, help the rest of us tap the brakes before a chainsaw-wielding sociopath slices up our country, discarding large chunks of it to starve and rot in the sun?
We shall see.
