In October of 2023, I was sitting at a hotel bar in downtown Calgary. I turned my attention from the television to the extremely drunk woman talking to two younger men sitting about six feet away from me. I was very tired and planning on going to bed within the hour. I was responsible for helping to organize a fairly large event that was due to start the following morning and my day had been taken up with travel, meetings, a technical walk-through, a pre-event reception, and checking into my hotel room later than expected. A meal, a whiskey, and then I’ll be gone, I said to myself.
I watched the two younger men depart, and the woman sat down on a stool with a man to my left, and I realized that they were a couple. Sort of. They immediately got into an argument. My impression was that they were resuming an older argument, and that there was, in the core of that couple’s relationship, a major problem. I think the woman was married to another man. Yet the man sitting closely at her side clearly had a quite intimate knowledge of her. He was dispensing advice as to how she should conduct herself once they returned to their routine life in Texas.
I will admit there is something a little intoxicating about travel. As I eavesdropped on the couple’s argument, I felt a little giddy. The man wanted to go to the restaurant across the street. “Fine,” the woman replied. “Go find us a seat. I’ll catch up with you later.” The man didn’t seem persuaded but he left anyway. I had a hunch that the woman was going to switch her focus to me. And so she did.
She told me that what she loved about her home city, Galveston, was the feeling of space. I told her I enjoy densely packed cities, like New York. “Oh, I don’t like New York, I can’t put a solar farm there,” she replied. Her job involved something rather complicated related to legal liabilities for large-scale clean energy projects. At another point in the conversation she said, “I’m not going to say I didn’t vote for Donald Trump!” and she laughed mischievously. She told me that one of the highlights of her life was being invited to write for Saturday Night Live. She had turned the offer down because the money wasn’t good enough, she said.
She had a daughter back home who had some kind of disability. She showed me a photo. I got the impression that, because of her travel schedule, the Texan often spent days being unable keep in touch with her daughter except for through Facetime. She showed me a picture of a cute blond girl wearing a fancy, pink dress on the occasion of her sixth birthday. In exchange, I showed the Texan a picture of my cute girls. This seemed to have some kind of effect on her heart, as her hand flitted to her chest, and she murmured something about how the love a parent has for a child is like nothing else. Then she noticed I had finished my whiskey and she offered to pay for the next one. Things became awkward as I told the barman on no account to let the Texan woman pay for anything on my behalf. I would pay for my second whiskey on my own, I declared.
Her bill, in contrast to mine, was on its way to becoming very high. It was probably going to go well over two hundred dollars or more. She was ordering cocktails in pint glasses. I’ve never seen someone drink so much liquor so quickly. I feared a situation in which she fell off a stool, requiring some kind of intervention from hotel staff. And in this imagined horrorshow, I would possibly have to pay both bills. No thanks.
If you had passed this woman in an airport, she would have not stood out as particularly noteworthy in any way, except perhaps for the word TEXAS printed in large letters across her white sweater. Yet I found myself with a host of questions about her life. Who was the man that was waiting for her in a restaurant across the street? Was she really married? She worked in renewables and yet she was a Trump fan?
The anecote she told me that really stood out was about a longstanding affair she had carried on with a very rich and powerful businessman. From the way her eyes lit up when she talked about this man, you could tell she had been deeply smitten. This man was a genius, she said. He was the smartest man she had ever met. This man’s real wife had become ill with cancer, she told me, and this Texan woman from Galveston—she had helped fundraise for treatment. I’ll admit, at this point, certain things weren’t adding up. Why was fundraising necessary if the real wife (RW) was married to a rich and powerful businessman? But I didn’t question her story. I kept listening.
The highlight of her affair, from what I could glean, was a long weekend that this Texan woman had spent with her rich and powerful businessman in Colorado. They had gone to a bar close to Boulder, and begun drinking heavily. Hours passed, and there was a sudden snowstorm. They were going to become trapped if they didn’t leave. And so they left—the rich businessman taking the wheel of the car. Competely and utterly drunk. By some miracle the couple made it through twisty mountain roads, back to their hotel, and they survived—and she was there, sitting at this Calgary bar, telling me about it, glowing, as if she had been saved by God.
That woman is the only Trump voter I have ever met.
As Sam Kriss wrote about the 2024 election yesterday: “while the winner in an election doesn’t usually deserve to win, the loser always deserves to lose.”
In the wake of this defeat for the Democrats, I find myself yearning for something very old-fashioned.
I find myself yearning for a politics that does not seek to look into my soul. I want a politics that does not want to examine my use of language. I want a politics that doesn’t want to shut down a conversation before it has even started. I want a politics that doesn’t deploy the thought police. I want a politics free of denouncements and cheap name calling. I want a politics of rigorously contested primaries—you know, the kind the Republicans still have.
And it would be nice for so-called progressives to start earning the votes of women like that woman from Galveston. That’s the job of politics: not to judge people, not to denounce heretics, not to cancel wrong thinkers, not to be the thought police, but to get out and earn every single vote. Get out the votes from the deplorables and the decent, the rich and poor, the educated and uneducated, the mischief-makers and the civic leaders, no matter the colour of their skin, no matter what they read or watch, no matter what private thoughts they harbour, or the terrible things they might have said or done. Present a vision of the future that everyone can see themselves living in.
Yesterday evening I decided to tune into the Joe Rogan Experience—the most popular podcast in the world. Rogan was discussing the election with a comedian. He and the comedian agreed that the Democrats should have talked about real issues affecting Americans—such as healthcare and early childhood education. I personally found it very interesting they named those exact issues because, while I am not American, I happen to think that healthcare and early childhood education are two of the most important political issues of them all, in America or in any other country. In about 10 minutes, there was more insight into why the Democrats lost than in all the newsletters I am subscribed to from the New Yorker, New York Times, and so on.
Instead of talking about healthcare and early childhood education, Democrats comported themselves as if they were a party of prefects. The majority of Americans fell short of the conduct expected of them.
Now is the moment for this current version of progressive politics, masquerading as a new religion, to be thrown into the dustbin of history.
Today, I find myself thinking of all the different workers it has taken to fix our house—many different skillsets and people of many different languages. It’s obviously going to take a much larger set of people to fix our politics. I hope everyone will be welcomed in. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of time.
NOTES
This is a good take on the election.
“I told you so,” Sam Kriss, November 6, 2024.
Very insightful writing, Laurence. I am finding it is all somehow so much clearer what went wrong than it was before the election and the Democrats pour performance with the voters.
A nice story about your meeting with a woman from Texas in a Calgary bar. And maybe you're right about the 'thought police' and the denouncements of things people have said or done' and your yearning for 'old-timey' politics. Maybe LBJ should never have pushed Kennedy's Civil Rights Act to Congress and then pressed the House to pass it in 1964. Maybe the US Supreme Court should have gone the other way on Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka ten years earlier. Hell, maybe Lincoln should have found a 'common ground' on slavery in 1861. You've got a pretty naive take here my dude.