On Democracy

Note from the Chudgus Editorial Standards Board: This is possibly the worst post ever submitted to this website or its precursor, Iskra.money. I contemplated issuing the first rejection in the history of the Chudgus publication, but after contemplation, we determined that it was fit for publication as an anthropological study of the creature claiming authorship. But rest assured, if another 3500-word rambling slop submission is received from this contributor in the future, it will be soundly rejected. The original submission follows:

|| 

Fuck this chungus democracy. There’s a sentiment that’s been common as of late in circles outside of Iskra. Of course, within Iskra it’s been the prevailing sentiment since practically inception. Many have since predicted, day after day, the final triumph and victory of the proletariat will be tomorrow. While this may indeed be true, it might be helpful for the unfamiliar reader to reflect on democracy itself, its shortcomings, its successes, and most importantly, its participants.

The participants of democracy can be so fascinating. People of all ages, races, sexes, thoughts, and ideologies step into the political ring together once every so often—some more often than others—to impart their wisdom upon it. And what wisdom they have to offer; it would be a shame to confine it merely to the moment in time it found itself relevant in. No, this diversity of thought should be free and open for all to see, so we may examine its intricacies, and perhaps, derive a bit of wisdom of our own about the way modern democracies function—or at the very least, how its participants manage to.

To avoid the perception of bias, I shall defer to a trusted third-party to make random selections of the population of a democracy, in this case the United States of America, and examine the thoughts of this focus group. Fortunately, the New York Times [Editor’s note: lol] has a column doing exactly this: The Times Opinion Focus Groups. The greatest minds of democracy shall be found here, and so shall we tease out their wisdom. Let’s begin with Paul James Jr., 36, of San Antonio, Texas. Paul is employed as an engineer for an oil and gas company (unspecified) and voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Primary. To the naïve European reader, this may sound like a man who is unabashedly left-wing in his politics and possibly an activist for various causes. He is most certainly a member of the American proletariat—what, then, are his biggest concerns? If you assumed the environment, social justice, labor rights, corporate dominance, or anything else of the sort, you would be entirely wrong. Mr. James voted for Trump in the 2024 election. The change of heart from American far-left to far-right occurred during Trump’s first electoral term between 2017 and 2021, when Paul was won over by Trump’s incredible tax cuts and deregulation. He also supports Trump’s use of tariffs as he believes it will result in more favorable trade terms with overseas nations, the current terms of which he thinks have hurt the working class (and his own pockets). To quote Mr. James shortly after Trump assumed office:

“You cannot tell me that President Trump has not been working hard, we have not seen this level of effectiveness ever.”

This is quite the bold claim, and reflects his deep, enthusiastic support for the Trump administration. To reiterate, Mr. James is placing the current Trump administration above the likes of Lincoln, FDR, Johnson (the 2nd), Kennedy, and Reagan, in its effectiveness. And on top of all that, Trump is ‘working hard’, a very unique thing that was not present among fatass lazy nerds like Obama, Clinton, or any other President of the last century. By ‘working hard’, Trump has earned the highest esteem of Mr. James and validated his support for the President entirely.

I want to take a moment here and ask the reader to reflect on their view of politicians in general. It’s probably very bad, so let’s move on to their opinion in particular. When you support this politician or that politician, you may consider a number of factors consciously or subconsciously, and these factors will influence your choice. Many of these factors may be personal qualities, and I don’t mean to discredit their use even in a system focused on rationality, but be very aware of what personal qualities you allow to influence your decision. If a politician boasts they are a ‘hard worker’, think about what this means, assuming it’s true. Does it really matter that much? Should this be a trait that you, the voter, revere so greatly that it single-handedly wins your support? If you have ever used this justification in the past, consider for me this: I myself am a hard-working individual. I work very hard to squeeze out a fat poo every other day or so. It involves a lot of grunting, a lot of working of the muscles, some shouting, maybe even a good bit of pain, but in the end, I get it done. I put a lot of work into that poo and I didn’t give up mid-way through. Is this evidence of my character? Moreover, does my recently-excreted fecal matter do anything to help you in any substantial way? If the answer is no, then my work ethic is of zero consequence to you and should not factor in any way in your vote. If you disagree, maybe, say that pooping is something everyone does, and so it’s not remarkable, what if I took a shit every ten minutes, every waking hour, every day of the week? My full-time job is now crapping out my ass. I’d be very committed to it, and it’d be a lot of strenuous work.Does this prepare me in any way for public office? Should it influence your choice of vote, my experience of pushing shit out of my anus? I hope this has provided an opportunity of reflection for you, as that is essentially what many politicians do on a daily basis. They work hard, very hard, but many are simply shitting out of their ass, and a lot of the time it’s shitting on you. Now this only applies to a certain group of politicians which we will get to in time, but just keep that thought in mind as we proceed.

Returning to our subject, Mr. James, I wonder what he now feels months after Trump’s ascension to office. Back then, he was already claiming Trump was the most effective President ever, and this was when Trump was signing (crapping) a hundred executive orders (poop) per day! A vast majority of these orders did nothing to actually change anything, were stopped up in lower courts, or straight up nullified. Even his tariffs were halted almost as soon as they were announced (though, in fairness, this was somewhat on Trump’s own orders, but he still was declared to have no authority to place tariffs under the emergency powers act he was citing). So to Mr. James, a President who signs a bunch of do-nothing, illegal, or impossible executive orders is an effective President. A President who declares tariffs which he has no authority over, and so are not ever put in place, is fighting really hard for fair trade terms between the foremost economic and military power and semi-undisputed hegemon of the world and every other country on the planet. Because that was completely and totally necessary in the first place. So much for Mr. James.

Our next subject will be a focus group of Trump voters the New York Times interviewed last December. I want to highlight a few individuals I think have particular wisdom—Seneca, 28, of Arizona working as a charge specialist, and Kathi, 57, of Ohio, working in property management. When asked to explain why they voted for Trump, Seneca replied: “I voted for him because I thought he was really smart and really good with money. And then also health care. I think it’s really cool that he’s going to take on fighting the big health care corporations that are charging insane amounts and hopefully get that under control.” Now, not to nitpick on random people for not having encyclopedic knowledge of everything, but after eight years of being in the public political arena, I think it’s safe to say most Americans are aware of Trump and his past exploits. He was a TV celebrity before then after all. So Seneca is no doubt aware that Trump has filed for bankruptcy no less than six times, started and run at least as many businesses into the ground, and is a man who was described by one of his professors as “the dumbest goddamn student I’ve ever had”. And she believes he is really smart and good with money despite all of that. Oh, he also ballooned the deficit under his first Presidency. As for healthcare, Trump famously tried and failed to repeal, multiple times, many crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act, his predecessors achievement, and replace it with a far inferior coverage that was so inferior, so utterly terrible, that he couldn’t even muster all of his own party to vote for it. To top it all off for Seneca, about a month ago Trump enacted one of the largest health care cuts in history, making millions of Americans uninsured, and leaving millions more with massively increased premiums due to shortage of funding. Really showed those big health care corporations. So much for Seneca.

Kathi, on the other hand, is much more of a misanthrope. She believes illegal immigrants are a problem, to be certain, but takes a far greater issue with regular, legal immigrants. She also insinuates she does not even believe the electoral process is free and fair. But throughout the interview she is also the most level-headed and fair person in the focus group. It is a mystery, then, why she voted for Trump over Harris. She did not take particular issue with Biden’s pardoning of his son, saying she needed details for each case to decide if it was just (which here is the correct conclusion, as Hunter’s case was thoroughly mishandled by courts and the prosecution sought an obscenely grave sentence for him despite others with his same record not being given such sentences, reflecting a clear bias on part of the prosecution simply because Hunter was the son of a politically powerful figure of the opposite stripe, but moving on), and commenting no further on the issue. She supports restricted legal immigration, which Biden was also quick to clamp down on, as many of his predecessors were, what with the quota system and byzantine bureaucracy the United States forces upon every would-be immigrant; she supports the right to abortion—which Trump himself brags about overturning, not to mention, he appointed the very justices which overturned that right—and doesn’t believe any level of government should have any say in the process. If Kathi were voting rationally, she probably would have chosen Harris over Trump. But rationality clearly hasn’t been in abundance here. So much for Kathi.

The next focus group was interviewed in mid-April, after the election and Trump’s inauguration. They are a little more pessimistic than the previous bunch, now with a taste ofTrump’s second term, but still quite optimistic. Jordan, 38, a homemaker from Utah, said she feels “hopeful” about the way the country is going “these days”. Her reasoning? “I may not like everything that Trump is doing. But I will say that he is following through on the things that he actually did say he was going to do and exactly what the people who voted for him wanted.” This to some extent is true, in fairness, in that Trump has followed through with some of his most absurd promises. He has done a 180 on quite a few other topics, but that is not the core issue with Jordan’s comment here. Far more relevant is the fact that she feels hope when a politician follows through on promises, regardless of what those promises may be. She sets aside her personal political thoughts and focuses on the process of things, allowing it to take precedence. If you’ll pardon the analogy—should I run for office, and should I make the promise that three times a week, I will sit down on the porcelain throne and make manifest the foulest, toilet-clogging, nose-pinching, acrimonious mound of feces, and should I thus do so, I will have won the heart, if not mind, of Ms. Jordan of Utah, and more than that, I will have given her hope. For you see, I would be a man who lives up to my promises, a man who gets things done. Personally, I find no seedling of hope here in fulfillment of such a promise. Some may call my example bad faith, but consider that the actions which Trump has taken thus far to make good on his promises to the American people, the very actions that have given Ms. Jordan so much hope, have included: Cessation of USAID and the subsequent starvation of millions of children, cuts on Medicaid which did leave millions of Americans uninsured, restrictions on federal emergency aid and cuts to funding of local broadcasters (which has ensured the deaths of thousands due to natural disasters), arbitrary detainment of US citizens and migrants inside concentration camps across the country, suspension of funding to pediatric cancer research and utter annihilation of science grants and jobs nationwide, to name a few. He did promise these things in his campaign, and he did follow through with those promises. The deaths of a few million being the price is of no cause for concern for Ms. Jordan, because at least now politicians are saying what they mean. I wonder how she would’ve responded to the rise of Adolf Hitler were she alive in that time. I suppose I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

Diana, 39, a finance manager hailing from California, is likewise hopeful despite the circumstances. She comments that though the tariffs have been, short-term, “a shot in the foot”, in the long-term, she has already picked up the RNC-distributed talking point that it will be good for the nation. No pain, no gain, as they say. That was a specific example, but more generally shesays she’s hopeful because she sees “action”. People doing things. Things hadn’t been done in the previous years, she says, but now they are. She “at least sees things happening”, and that is good whether the actual things happening are substantial or not, good or not, agreeable or not. I find it hard to believe that Diana actually disagrees with much of Trump’s policy if she so agrees that him simply doing things is good in itself. She says she thinks “a lot of changes have been happening”, and readily admits she doesn’t know if they are good but just hopes they are, after all, things getting done must mean good things, no? In fairness to Diana, some of the biggest provisions of Biden’s infrastructure acts haven’t been completed, or won’t yet kick in. And many construction projects have been held up by red states awaiting a more favorable President to give credit to. But I do not believe that is what she means by “things happening”. Because if we apply the same lens to Trump, he has only passed one major piece of legislation, which in April had not yet been passed, and that legislation cut funding for many of the infrastructure projects Biden sought to promote. That very same legislation enacted sweeping tax cuts for the corporate and the rich, comparatively small ones for the poorer classes, and, as an insult to injury, completely negated those tax gains by obliterating healthcare coverage for the nations poorest and raising premiums for the middle-class. Diana has not once in her life, apparently, ever seen such an amount of “things happening”. Not when Biden surpassed the number of 100-day executive orders record, not when he rushed COVID assistance and UBI through Congress, not when he passed the infrastructure act and not when he passed the CHIPS act, no, these things were inconsequential to her, not enough to be counted as things getting done. Now, instead of a check for a two thousand dollars arriving to her in the mail, courtesy of Biden and the Democrats, she receives a bill of twelve thousand dollars in insurance premiums, and her first conclusion is that the present situation is better, because this administration is actually getting things done.

Sid, 36, a warehouse supervisor in Ohio, says he feels “lied to”. Finally, a truthful sentiment that reflects what must be going through the minds of so much of the populace after being promised economic growth, money beyond dreams, and a golden age of America. I dare not hope, so what, pray tell, does Sid feel lied to about in particular? Who did this lying? Thankfully, the NYT asked these questions for us.

“A majority of the Democrats are just doing a Hail Mary of lying about pretty much everything Trump’s doing, and the news has, too. I’ve seen Trump say and do and sign executiveorders. I work the graveyard shift. So on YouTube, I’m watching this stuff live. They really started attacking him with the deportation stuff. And they said that he was caging people up and doing stuff like that. And they had live news coverage on that border, and nothing like that was happening. They were certainly deporting people. They really were. But they weren’t caging people up like they said that they were.”

The Democrats, Sid says. He feels lied to by the Democrats. That’s what’s got him down and broken his trust. The party that’s not even in power, the party that did not promise him a golden age, unfathomable riches, a plentiful job market, no. Not only that, he thinks the quarrel over tariffs, the threats against neighboring countries, are distractions, from a “private civil war” Democrats are waging with Republicans in Congress. Clearly, he believes the Democrats deserve the lion’s share of the blame, though they have no majority in Congress, and a Republican President sits in office. But perhaps the most damning part of Sid’s comment is that he is entirely wrong. He wasn’t being lied to, there is quite literally a concentration camp for migrant detainees in Florida called “Alligator Alcatraz”, yet he claims Trump isn’t caging people up like animals? Perhaps he is just ignorant. According to himself though, he’s quite tuned in, watch YouTube during the night shift, following things live, despite Trump not being up at two in the morning signing executive orders. Perhaps Sid just isn’t exposed to that information, maybe the administration has been working really hard to keep the true conditions of these camps a secret. It’s not like they’re selling merchandise advertising the existence of this so-called “Alligator Alcatraz”, that’s probably something the media nicknamed it an—oh, they are selling merchandise? You can get hats and T-shirts? They’ve shared multiple photos of the facility on social media like truth social and other conservative outlets? It would appear that Sid is more than just ignorant.

I’m going to close off this group with John, 29, a construction manager from Texas. John apparently voted for Trump in the election but isn’t so hot on the way he’s been managing things so far. He feels bad about the way things are going in the country today, but he remains tepid about the consequences of Trump’s actions. It’s too early to tell, and it’s not like we can predict the future. Surely, nobody could have predicted Trump would actually follow through with his promises, nobody could have predicted that he would use ICE and federal law enforcement agencies to detain journalists, political enemies, and US citizens; surely, nobody could havepredicted that he would deploy the US military against the very citizens he swore an oath to protect. Nobody except the entire Democratic party and their Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, of course. It’s just not possible. If you think I’m being too harsh on John, consider that despite all this, he remains really glad that Trump kept his promise about fixing the illegal immigrant issue. In his own words, “Yeah, I’m happy about that. Although these are some hard decisions — a couple of friends that have been deported, stuff like that. So I’m sad at the same time.” You know, a couple of friends got deported, that’s kinda sad. But the politician kept his word that he would deport them, that is absolutely tremendous news, and John is very happy about that.

John is identified as an independent, along with all of the others interviewed in this focus group. He is a member of the ever elusive “median voter” group. He is no Republican sycophant, no die hard extremist. Even the destruction of personal relationships as his friends were ripped away from him and exiled to some foreign country was not enough to sway John’s support for Trump. It wasn’t even enough to dour his mood. John is the median, the milquetoast, the silent majority. He is close to the center of the distribution that is the political spectrum of the American populace. Of all of the people reviewed so far, statistically, John may be the best representative of the majority of the American voting-age population. This is the character of the people who decide our elections. This is how they react when policy decisions come home to roost. This is the kind of person many on the left expect to be “changed” by the ravages of the Trump administration over the next four years, the kind of person they have convinced themselves they can convince to their side. “When the consequences of their choice begin hurting them directly,” they proclaim “the voters will come around.”

Well, the consequences have. The voters have not.

Your Friend and Humble Servant,

Shartence Poogood