Everything Has Changed
On 13 Years Of Huge Change
13 years.
13 long fucking years.
On May 13th, 2008, I realized I was gay, the culmination of a months long process I won't bore you with. 13 years ago today was the day - crying in bed at night, unsure why I was feeling these weird feelings, when it hit me, in one shot. I was 11 at the time, the tail end of my 5th Grade year, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I wrote in a journal I had at the time, and I just remember the deep existential despair I felt that night as clearly as if it was today. I thought my life was over.
This anniversary has not been good to me - it has been a reminder of a moment I do not enjoy, because whatever complicated thoughts I have about the fact of my homosexuality, I remember the pain it caused me. Nearly five years would pass before I would tell a soul I was gay, nearly six would pass before my parents were told, and there are still relatives who do not know - who get a facade when I'm in their presence. My homosexuality is both an intractable part of my life and very much a minimal part of it - I am who I am, I just happen, by some fluke, to be gay. And now, it's been 13 years since I've known.
These 13 years have been hugely remarkable, both in the course of understanding myself, but also understanding the world. I've lived through the Global Financial Crisis and Lehman going bust live on CNN, through four Presidential elections and four serving Presidents, from never having heard of Sarah Palin to knowing far too much about the composition of her state's political geography. I've seen Prop 8 and Obergefell, victories big and small for the causes of liberalism and equality. I've lived through the highs of 3 Democratic Presidential victories, and the Georgia runoffs, and I've also felt like America rejected people like me by electing Donald Trump. Since the last time I believed myself to be straight, the world has changed many times over, sometimes for good, sometimes very much for ill.
What's striking is that our understanding of so many things is different today than it was 13 years ago - Barack Obama still believed marriage to be the union of one man and one woman, California was an anti-gay marriage state, the words Too Big To Fail weren't common lexicon, and the idea of a global pandemic shutting down large parts of the world was a dystopian fantasy writer's least plausible story premise. The list of things that hadn't yet happened that now feel like they happened a million years ago is endless - the BNP, not UKIP, were the threat that had the British political establishment shitting themselves, the Euro was thought of as a solvent currency, Australia was working towards a bipartisan consensus on the need for real action on global warming - and yet, one thing feels very much stuck in 2008.
For all the understanding we now have that we didn't 13 years ago, the way politics is discussed by most places feels stubbornly rooted in the past, much to the detriment of everyone in the present.
…
The last 13 years have seen so many rules of politics broken in America - from the idea of Ohio and Missouri as bellwether states to the idea that US polls mean anything, to the House map that is played on. In 2008, Democrats won a House majority while Barack Obama lost the current edition of the Texas 7th by 19%, which is now a core seat of our majority. By the same measure, Democrats won 5 seats out of Tennessee on route to their majority, whereby the next Democratic majority - whether in 2022, 2024, or 2026 - will have 1, in all likelihood. Frank Wolf, the old incumbent in Virginia 10, never had a margin closer than 16%, and now that seat is Democratic by double digits. The 09-11 Democratic House Majority had three members in Alabama and 8 in North Carolina, and Democrats will be lucky to win 6 seats in those two states combined next year. Things are completely different.
And yet, if you consume any form of content on this from anyone who isn't me, basically, the question is just of the size of the GOP House majority in 2022. That all of these people were the same people who thought Democrats winning the Georgia runoffs would be a miracle does not dissuade, alas. No, according to the Very Smart People who spent two months asking John Cornyn what he thought about Biden's cabinet nominees, sure in the knowledge that his opinion mattered, Democrats have two years before the tide will go out on them, as it did for Obama and Clinton in their first midterms.
Notably, the fact it didn't happen for good ol' W Bush - or even really for HW, honestly - doesn't make people think much, because in some large number of midterms going back to the 1920s the party in the White House loses House seats, as if that matters for 2022. Remember, in 8 of 8 Georgia runoffs, the Georgia GOP had done better than their November general election position until January 5th. How'd that work for the GOP again?
We default to history because it is easy, and it is safe - just as I tried to convince myself that I wasn't actually gay for months and months after I first said the words. Midterms are bad because midterms are bad is as useless a tautology as me trying to convince myself I was actually attracted to women because, well, everyone else I knew was straight. Clearly I was an outlier, and denying the possibility of that outcome stunted my understanding for a long time.
Just as my understanding of who I am was stunted for so long because of a refusal to actually engage with what my homosexuality meant, the refusal of so many to engage with the case - by no means airtight or flawless - that Democrats are poised for a pretty decent 2022 is stunting public understanding of politics. The refusal to understand that the Democratic Party of Joe Biden has some very real advantages that Obama and Clinton didn't have on their sides is pathological at this point, and the refusal to accept that the Democratic Party of 2021 does not have anything resembling the exposure - in either redistricting or red district members - that Clinton or Obama did is infuriating. Blithe denial to engage with the fact that the GOP have traded high propensity, well-off whites with socially liberal views for low propensity, poorer, culturally conservative whites and Hispanics make people with large followings and influential positions believe that the GOP could get Trump-style margins and turnout in ancestrally Democratic Southwest Virginia while getting Romney-era results in NoVa. We know that's not true, because of Australia and the UK - when pro-gay marriage and explicitly socially liberal leaders of conservative governments in those countries were in office, they underperformed in working class, culturally conservative areas while dominating posh areas. When they left, the global trend of leftward moving suburbs and rightward trending working class areas continued anew. And yet, people act like it's possible. It's not.
The problem so many have is that you'll never be too wrong trusting the conventional wisdom. You'll never be out on a limb, you'll never be alone, you'll never be exposed. If you're wrong, it's a shock result and everyone is wrong - you have protection in the crowd, because there will always be people more wrong than you. If your goal is to not be too wrong in public, of course you say the GOP are favoured. But if you're interested in some amount of actual truth, you have to consider the possibility everything has changed.
13 years ago, everything changed for me, and for years I tried to deny it, I tried to fight against it, I tried to desperately believe it was something it wasn't - a phase, a moment, an illness, something I could fix. Saying that now, I both recoil and chuckle - obviously recoiling at the notion of being gay as something needing to be fixed, but also chuckling at how far away all that comes. I am who I am, and there is a liberation from the pain that distance from my past allows. I can see now with clarity things I couldn't in my past, and I see how different the world is than the one that I left behind 13 years ago. Hopefully people will learn my lesson, and not yearn for a past that is no longer possible, but learn that the best thing you can do is understand the world you inhabit now as best you can. Your sanity, and our collective understanding of politics, could be made immensely better for it.