Post-Election ‘I’m Over It’ Claims Are A Trauma Response
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
When Trump was elected, there was a flood of posts from people claiming they were done with US politics: “I’m done with America now. It deserves everything it has coming to it,” comments one user on threads.
“Feeling betrayed by increased minority support for Trump, Black women say they’re stepping back,” runs an AP headline.
“Let me say this: I cried all yesterday [November 5th], but today I woke up and got me some Starbucks,” one person commented in response to abandoning Palestinian activism in the wake of the 2024 election. “Fuck yall, we’re done. For the next four years, we don’t give a fuck about anyone else’s problems. Cheers, ladies.”
I understand the emotion behind these statements, at least in part, but I also don’t believe those who claim such things are deciding to detach themselves from their surroundings. Many are using such rhetoric to socially and psychologically distance themselves from how badly hurt they are by this country, and it’s a familiar feeling.
The idea that one can distance oneself from society has existed for a long time, and it is usually unhelpful in actually protecting oneself.
I Don’t Care Much
The first thing I thought about upon seeing these comments was the 1998 revival of the musical Cabaret, which is about the fictitious Kit Kat Klub in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. The viewer sees the rise of fascism reflected in people who attend this club, particularly through its performances, which become increasingly more anti-semitic and hateful. “But if you could see her through my eyes,” chillingly sings the Kit Kat Klub’s emcee in the second act of the play, “she wouldn’t look Jewish at all” (see If You Could See Her).
For our purposes, I want to fixate on the song I Don’t Care Much. The emcee also sings the lyrics of this song, which are about social and emotional distancing from Germany’s deteriorating political situation. The emcee sings: “So if you kiss me. If we touch. Warning’s fair. I don’t care. Very much.”
He’s trying to present himself as someone cool and detached.
Yet the pain in the emcee’s voice makes it very clear that he does care, because he knows, if only subconsciously, that as a queer man, he is on the Nazi regime’s chopping block. The play ends with the emcee revealing he’s wearing the striped clothing of a concentration camp victim. In other adaptations, you can hear the whistle of a train and see the emcee wearing an upside pink triangle (the symbol nazis had LGBT people wear).
The emcee’s nihilism was an attempt to psychologically protect himself, but that strategy didn’t work out, either for his character or the many queer people who attempted to assimilate unsuccessfully during the fall of the Weimar Republic.
There was a vibrant queer scene in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis. Berlin was arguably at the forefront (at least in Europe) of scientific research on sexuality and gender expression. Media censorship and sodomy laws were also less enforceable, which meant that Berlin was the place to be for queers who wanted to live, if not entirely openly, at least more than they could in much of Europe.
Then, as the Nazis scapegoated homosexuality in no small part due to the personal agenda of Heinrich Himmler as well as a public scandal surrounding the head of the SA, Ernst Röhm, that community was violently suppressed. Sodomy laws under Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code were strengthened, and this subculture that had once been the jewel of Queer Europe was rather quickly shattered.
What did the queers who lived during that transition do?
There was no uniform response. Some fled. Others went underground. A few bravely fought, both openly and covertly.
Many were proud members of the Nazi party and thought their commitment to nationalism was in some ways compatible with their homosexuality (see “Männerbund” ideology). As Christopher Isherwood (whose semi-autobiographical novel Berlin Stories was the inspiration for the musical Cabaret) disparaged in a later book: “Misled by their own erotic vision of a New Sparta, they fondly supposed that Germany was entering an era of military man-love, with all women excluded.”
And some, as we have already mentioned, responded to the rise of Nazism with detachment. A good example of this in Berlin Stories is Isherwood’s landlord (a character who also made it into the musical), someone who is willing to keep her head down, no matter the cost. As Isherwood writes:
Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatising herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatising themselves.
After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.”
Yet, many German Queers did not have the privilege of keeping their heads down. Even before the shuttering of queer bars and other gathering places, the police had begun adding potential violators of Paragraph 175 to private lists. Many of these lists were then utilized by the Nazi regime. Queer men and women found themselves sent off to concentration camps by the thousands in the years to come — doomed not to live in this town but die by it.
There is no safety here
And yet Frl. Schroeder’s ‘keeping-her-head-down’ outlook is a common sentiment in marginalized communities whenever hope has been momentarily crushed.
In a more modern example, when some perceived the AIDS epidemic as a death sentence victims must simply endure, the Bay Area Reporter editor Paul Lorch encouraged a type of queer nihilism, asserting that suicide was a perfectly rational response to an AIDS diagnosis. As he wrote in a Bay Area Reporter article (that came my way via Am J Public Health) about the epidemic: “Each man owns his body [and] the way he wants to die, [including, perhaps, a] one way walk into the Pacific surf.”
However, this perspective was perceived by some as infantilizing, as it turned those who had HIV/AIDS into objects who lacked the agency to advocate for themselves. Activists were immediately critical of Lorch’s nihilism and not only penned a response letter but created an AIDS patients-only group so those who had the disease could lobby on behalf of themselves. As activist Bobbi Campbell told a rival paper of this newly formed group: “It’s time we stopped being so passive. This group of AIDS patients will be more political, more social…”
It was this shift in perspective that reframed the narrative around HIV/AIDS from one of victims and patients (people predestined to social death before their physiological death) into active participants in a struggle for liberation — people who were deserving of empathy and respect/ People who were fighting a battle they could potentially win.
This mindset shift would ultimately win this community material and political gains in the coming years (see ACT UP, HIV/AIDS destigmatization, etc.).
It’s hard to see how such advocacy would have even been possible if Lorch’s nihilism had won the day, any more than queers keeping their heads down in 1930s Berlin would have avoided the concentration camps of the Nazi regime simply by pretending everything was okay.
Detachment doesn’t protect you if you are already on the chopping block.
A hopeful? conclusion
As we can see, retreating inward does not provide safety. It doesn’t matter if you are attacked or discarded by the state; responding to its cruelty with disconnection doesn’t protect you. It, at best, dulls your senses until the danger passes (a big if) and, at worst, leads you straight into the fire.
Anger and sadness are perfectly rational emotional responses to our society’s cruelties. I am not a fan of America (see The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending). I do not believe that America’s ideals were ever that great to begin with (see America Has Always Been A Pretty Unrealistic Utopia).
Yet, I also recognize that no one has the luxury of genuinely disconnecting from it. Empires thrive on taking advantage of whole swaths of a population. In our case, America not only relies on a racialized and economically impoverished under-caste but also the billions in resources our firms extract from the Global South. That exploitation does not go away because one is tired or wishes it to.
Sadly, being “fucking done” does not prevent the boot of empire from crushing you beneath its feet.