"The world we knew is gone, but keeping our humanity? That's a choice." -- Dale Horvath, The Walking Dead
I know some of you are not podcast listeners and prefer your words on a page
arranged in neat little rows. So, for you, and for anyone looking for a
much tidied-up version of our last podcast, herewith you will find some of
what my wife and I discussed.
We start with that quote from the character of Dale Horvath, because that
question is the central question of our time, and it comes down
to how we understand two separate ideas.
But first, we need to take a very brief tour of the end of the world as it’s
portrayed in science fiction, beginning with the 1983 made-for-TV movie that
gave people of a certain age nightmares and apparently freaked Ronald Reagan
out so badly that he started talking seriously about nuclear disarmament with
the Soviet Union. That would be “The Day After”, which more than
100 million people watched when it first aired on ABC on November 20, 1983.
and in a 2009 Nielsen TV Ratings list was one of the highest-rated television
films in US history.
[Fun Fact: The film was broadcast on Soviet state television in 1987
during the negotiations on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
And the producers demanded that the Russian translation conform to the
original script and that the broadcast not be interrupted by commentary.]
The film was about nuclear war and its aftermath, which focused much less on
the explosions themselves and more on what happens in the days and weeks that
follow. Communities across Kansas and Missouri are left devastated.
Infrastructure collapses: power grids fail, hospitals are overwhelmed,
communication breaks down, and government authority slowly erodes. The film
portrays how ordinary people like farmers, students, doctors, and families
struggle to understand what’s happened while radiation sickness, shortages of
food and medicine, and social disorganization steadily worsen.
This is what made “The Day After” especially unsettling – its depiction of
slow societal breakdown rather than immediate annihilation. Survivors
initially try to maintain normal routines and institutions, but each passing
day systems and institutions that we largely take for granted -- the medical
profession, the food supply, law and order – starts to fall apart. By focusing
on this gradual unraveling of society, the film emphasizes that the real
horror of nuclear war is not just the blasts but the prolonged collapse of
social order and the suffering that follows.
You’ll find this same plot structure in almost every story, movie or TV
series in the science fiction sub-genre of post-apocalypse/dystopian
fiction.
The Stand. World War Z. Station Eleven. The Last of Us. It's a very long list and every fan of the genre has their favorite. I,
for, one an a big fan of A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which the
inciting incident happened so long ago that no one really remembers what
caused it.
Great book. Highly recommended.
There is always an inciting incident – could be a lab leak, a nuclear
exchange, tainted food, or a virus that comes out of nowhere – followed by
disbelief, followed by panic, followed by attempts at containment that grow
progressively more desperate and violent while at the same time there are
increasingly desperate attempts at finding a way to mitigate the growing
damage or cure the spreading disease.
So, getting back to the quote from The Walking Dead –
"The world we knew is gone, but keeping our humanity? That's a choice." – in every story about post-apocalyptic confusion and panic, some people
begin to figure out that, whatever comes next, the old world is gone for good.
And that is the first question for all of us in the here and now: Do you
accept that the world as we knew it – the political and cultural America we
once knew – is gone? Because if you do, then you’ll arrive at one set of
answers to that question.
But some people just don’t, and those people will arrive at a radically
different set of answers, because they liked the old ways. They
prospered and were respected under the old rules. They can’t adjust to the new
realities, so they metaphorically offer empty prayers in an empty church, as
if, by sheer force of will, they can beg, and bargain and bully the new
reality back into the old ways.
Of course, there has been no nuclear war, and at the moment there is no virus
sweeping across the globe, or meteor impact large enough to topple
governments. But when you think about it, our lived experience as
Liberals is remarkably similar to characters living through a zombie
apocalypse.
So, as a thought experiment, let's see how this metaphor stacks
up.
First, the inciting incident. For those of you who are playing along at
home, you might say The Powell Memo, or Nixon’s Southern Strategy, or Strom
Thurmond switching parties, or the media becoming a Both Sides Do It cult, or
Republicans inviting Conservative evangelicals into the party, and those are
all good answers. But for the moment, let’s call those examples (and
dozens more) the foreshocks of what was to come.
These are moments of escalation that, in a sense, were like retroviruses that
weakened our democracy’s immune system and set the stage for the real Bad
Thing. And in this scenario, the inciting incident was the election of
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000, and even more importantly, the
re-election of Bush and Cheney in 2004.
That was the year that launched 1,000 liberal bloggers.
In their first term, Bush and Cheney showed that they were more than willing
to lie and cheat to win, and crucially, that the base was cool with it.
They proved that Republican concerns about deficits were a lie. That
character didn’t count after all. That they could lie this country into
a catastrophic foreign war…and the Republican base and the legacy media would
go along with it.
And the re-election of Bush and Cheney? Let's turn to the late Dr.
Hunter S. Thompson for post-2004 debate coverage, because what Hunter Thompson
saw is what we all saw.
Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrolled Bush and left him for roadkill.
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.
Karl Rove, the president's political wizard, felt even worse. There is angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe -- and that is Rove's problem: His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 60 million voters.
And you know what? It didn’t matter in the slightest. If you were
there at the time, you saw what years of the Conservative media calling
anti-war Democrats “traitors and lunatics" with "Bush Derangement
Syndrome” had done. What Andrew Sullivan, calling us “fifth
columnists” had done. And don’t forget this, coming from the highest
office in the land.
From The New York Times,
September 8, 2004:
Cheney Warns of Terror Risk if Kerry WinsStepping up the battle over national security, Vice President Dick Cheney warned on Tuesday that the country would be at risk of a terror attack if it made "the wrong choice" in November, and President Bush accused Senator John Kerry of adopting the antiwar language of his Democratic primary rival Howard Dean...
Oh, and we mustn't forget the gay bashing, or who Bush’s point man was on
slandering gays and lesbians. From Salon,
April 5, 2007:
With Bush as president, [Matthew] Dowd was put on the Republican National Committee payroll and became an intimate participant in White House strategy sessions. Bush and the Republicans now exploited divisive wedge issues and tactics with a vengeance. After Sept. 11, 2001, fear was bundled with loathing, the terrorist threat from abroad conflated with the gay menace within. By 2004, relying on Dowd’s numbers, Republicans made gay marriage the most salient social issue, exceeding abortion and gun control in its inflammatory potential to mobilize conservatives. Dowd prescribed the strategy for targeting Republican base voters’ “anger points,” as GOP consultants called them, for maximum turnout.
And then came the
Swiftboating!
The base of the Republican party sopped all of this poison up with a biscuit
and begged for seconds. Which Fox News and Hate Radio provided non-stop
24 hours a day, while the legacy media rolled right over for it.
And the incompetent dry-drunk halfwit draft dodger and his blood-drunk regent
were reelected, defeating a decent, honorable man and war hero. All of
which and so much more during a time which your Never Trump allies desperately
want you to remember as the good old days, when everyone played it according
to Hoyle.
This is what jump-started the Liberal blogosphere. And this was the true
beginning of the current Republican zombie apocalypse. It was when
Republicans learned they could violate what they’d always claimed were their
core principles, and the base would cheer them on. That they could
attack Democrats every day using the most disgusting lies and most violent,
unhinged rhetoric, and there’d be no consequences. The laws of political
gravity no longer applied to them.
And most importantly, it’s when the base discovered they could unleash their
worst impulses and be rewarded for it. That Conservative media and
Republican elected officials would actually egg them on, while the legacy
media busied itself pretended it wasn’t happening.
And it was all going great until it all fell apart! When the price in
blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s incompetence,
deceit and corruption grew so great that even Fox News screaming at 120
decibels couldn’t drown it out.
This was the moment to stop the Republican zombie plague in its
tracks. To cauterize the infection by holding everyone responsible
accountable, right down to the Republican base who had endorsed all of it with
their vote, and a legacy media which had let war criminals lie to their face
and laugh about it.
But one of the themes you will find running through almost every zombie
apocalypse story is sadness. The loss of the familiar world and the
people who gave it meaning. Unlike many other horror genres, the enemy is
frequently someone who used to be human—a friend, a neighbor, a family
member—now reduced to an unrecognizable shell.
Alongside that sadness runs a strong current of nostalgia, often expressed
through small, almost mundane details. Characters cling to remnants of the old
world—photographs, music, empty streets, half-functioning routines—as a way of
preserving identity that reality is taking away. This nostalgia is both
comforting and bittersweet; it reminds the characters that the apocalypse is
erasing our shared cultural memory and what we believed were our shared
values.
And here in the real world, this is when the “Let’s get back to normal”
caucus leaps into action and insists that the best way to move forward is to
put the past behind us. Because “Let’s get back to normal” is code
for letting the millions of malefactors who created the disaster off the
hook.
A prime example of this is New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who is apparently
running in the 2007 Meet the Press Green Room presidential primary. This
was him on Morning Joe just last week:
Booker: "There are really good people in the Senate on both sides of the aisle, and I have these private conversations with my colleagues about what's wrong. But they're afraid or unwilling to say these things publicly. And that is the crisis that we're in. It's a crisis of conviction."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 24, 2026 at 1:02 PM
[image or embed]
And the reason many of us OG bloggers roll our eyes at people like Senator
Booker is that we’ve already been to this rodeo. We’ve already witnessed
Republicans fuck things up almost beyond repair, then Democrats get voted in
to clean up their mess, and the immediate reaction of the “Let’s get back to
normal” crowd was to put the past behind us.
This is what was on offer in 2008 when Barack Obama ran for president.
In the face of the huge disasters which Republicans had left in their
wake, Obama offered decency, competence and a forgive-and-forget forbearance,
inviting Republicans to roll up their sleeves and help him fix what was
broken.
Except Republicans are not wired that way. They do not learn the lessons
that every child is supposed to know. Lessons about admitting you were
wrong when you were wrong. Lessons about apologizing when you were wrong
to the people you have wronged. Lessons about cleaning up the mess you
made.
Instead, the Republican ethos is the opposite of all of that in every
way.
First, never admit you were wrong.
From Time Magazine, June 25, 2014
Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday stood by the Bush Administration’s decision to wage war in Iraq, saying he has never second-guessed the decision even with Iraq once again descending into chaos.“I was a strong advocate of going into Iraq,” Cheney told PBS in an interview, a week after launching a new political group designed to boost his foreign policy and national-security policies. “I think that was the right decision then, and I still believe that today.”
Second, obviously never apologize…because you’re never wrong.
And third, there is no mess to be cleaned up because either they just refuse
to acknowledge it, or they try to blame it on some Democrat.
And now here we are again. 2006 all over again, but vastly worse with
exponentially higher stakes. If this were an actual zombie apocalypse,
the title would be “26 Years Later. “
The inciting incident that changed the world has already happened and now we
are living in a post-apocalypse Republican zombie future.
So what can we say about this ugly new world?
We can say that the nostalgia-drunk forgive-and-forget caucus is once again
ascendant – led by recently-former Republicans like the Bulwark Crew – because
they tell the story that the hapless Sensible Centrists want to believe and
the “Let’s get back to normal” legacy media desperately wants its dwindling
readership and viewership to believe.
That the people who clawed their way to power casually slandering us in the
most despicable language imaginable – the “Fuck Your Feelings” meatheads –
must now be treated by us like delicate Faberge eggs that might break and flee
back into the waiting arms of the American Fascist Party at any hint of
criticism or judgment.
We can say that many of us are infuriated by what-might-have-been. How
could those responsible have allowed this to happen? How could they not
have seen the danger in what they were doing. We can also say that many
of us are depressed because we’re pretty damn sure we know why those
responsible allowed this to happen, and it was for the pettiest and stupidest
of reasons.
We can say that perhaps the majority of Republican politicians – the ones
Senator Booker insisted were good people – have metaphorically adopted the
Walking Dead method of safely moving through a herd of walkers without being
torn to pieces. And that is to smear rotting zombie remains all over
themselves, affect a slow, undead shamble and join the party. Sure,
you'll probably puke and, sure, a random cloudburst can ruin your disguise and
turn you into lunch for MAGA purists. But MAGA zombies are stupid, so
with a little luck you’ll look and smell enough like one of the undead to be
able to make your way to the head of the herd safely.
Let’s call this the "Zombie Dance of JD Vance Zombie".
Then, of course, there are the billionaires and party leaders who
believe they can harness the zombies or keep them as pets. Put them as a
defensive perimeter around their schemes, or launch them as offensive weapons
against the opposition. Yes, a herd of mindless biting monsters can come
in very handy, especially during “Republican Primary Elections”. Except
every now and then the camouflage wears off and a Republican who built their
career appeasing zombies forgets that they’re dealing zombies and tries to
appeal to them as thinking, adult human beings who care about democracy.
--- That’s when they get eaten.
Let’s call this “Liz Cheney’s August 16, 2022, Republican primary ass
whoopin’” - where she lost to outright lunatic and pro-Trump zombie named
Harriet Hageman, with 28.9% of the vote to Hageman's 66.3%. Her margin of
defeat was the second-worst for a House incumbent in the last 60 years.
So let’s get back to the second half of Dale Horvath’s question, because that's the big one. If you accept that the world we knew is, in a very real
sense, gone, what does our common humanity require of us?
Well that’s a damn good question.
And for the answer we have to travel all the way back to the Year of Our Lord
2016. The closing months of that campaign. Very painful, we
know.
According to our thought experiment, in 2016 we were well over a decade into a
full-blown Republican zombie post-apocalypse world, divided among Donald Trump
who was the now the undisputed leader of the rabid, bitey-bitey Republican
zombie horde, Hillary Clinton who was trying everything she could think of to
peel away some fraction of the zombie horde, and the legacy media, which had
chucked all sense of proportion and fairness and were beating Hillary like a
rented mule every day because they believed she could not possibly lose, so
what’s the harm of pretending that Both Sides are blah blah blah.
And then the “deplorables” thing happened. And from the safe distance of
five years later, the Washington Post had this retrospective. From The Washington Post, August 31, 2021:
Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ speech shocked voters five years ago — but some feel it was prescientHillary Clinton said those three words in the final months of her 2016 presidential campaign, making rhetorical and political history. There were two kinds of Donald Trump supporters, she explained: Voters who feel abandoned and desperate, who she placed in one metaphorical basket, and those she called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic” — her “basket of deplorables.”“I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse,” Clinton told the cheering crowd. She launched into all the things she found “deplorable” about Trump: He threatened marriage equality, cozied up to white supremacists, made racist and sexist remarks — all things she found “so personally offensive.”She warned there were two months left in the race and no one should assume he wouldn’t be elected anyway.The people in this basket, emboldened by Trump’s tweets, were “irredeemable,” she said. But there was another basket: Trump supporters who just felt the government had let them down and wanted change — and Democrats had to empathize to win these voters.
Clinton’s remarks spread like a prairie fire mainly because it threw
pundits and Centrists and elite Conservatives a life preserver. Yay! Instead
of reporting on the dire threat the Republican party had become, they could
keep the Both Sides Do It lie stoked for another few weeks!
It was all over Politico. It was in Time magazine.
It was in Bustle, PolitiFact Vox, segment after segment on CNN.
The NPR Tone Police made a five-course meal out of it.
David Brooks wallowed in it, both on PBS and in The New York Times.
This is what Jonathan Allen said about it in his 2017 book “Shattered:
Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign”.
It’s very hard to say you have a message of civility and then turn around and talk about how essentially a quarter of the country is, in your view, a basket of deplorables. That is a screeching conflict of her overall message, which is we have a civilized country and we need to be stronger together — that this should be a kinder, gentler, unified country.
You can practically hear this asshole chortling over the chance to use the word "screeching" in a book about Hillary Clinton.
But we Democrats tried all this, didn’t we? Barack Obama’s
administration was an eight-year lab experiment in continuous and nearly
superhuman efforts to reach out to Republicans. Find common ground with
Republicans. Compromise with Republicans. And Republicans fucking
hated him for it. Back then, all of your favorite Never Trumpers were
making their living relentlessly slagging Obama and counseling lockstep
obstruction and sabotage. To this day, you will hear Republicans like Chris
Christie and Nikki Haley blaming Obama for the divisions in the country.
So, five years later, please note what the very same Jonathan Allen
said about the very same subject in that Washington Post retrospective:
When asked about “deplorables,” Nick Merrill, Clinton’s spokesman, said she was never afraid to denounce racism — just two weeks earlier, she gave a significant speech deconstructing the alt-right and the “quest to preserve white maleness” in America. “The deplorable comment may have been politically less than ideal, but it has been proven right again and again over the last five years.”...Now, many of her fans believe she was prescient about “half” of Trump’s base.“After four years of President Trump,” Jonathan Allen said. “I think that there are a lot of Democrats and some Republicans who would say that was an undercount.”
So back to the question, if we really care about a viable future for
our country, what does our humanity demand of us?
We tried running competent public servants and Republicans hated us for
it. And what happened?
They only got worse.
We tried open-handedness, decency and olive branches, and Republicans didn’t
just reject that out of hand. Because Republicans are wired differently than
normal people, they coded all of that as weakness and naivete and used it as a
signal to go on an eight-year berserker attack on the Obama administration.
And they only got worse.
Then they nominated and elected the King of the Birthers. Who fucked up
everything he touched.
And Republicans only got worse. Dug in even deeper just like they did
during the Bush administration as the wheels were coming off.
Then they renominated Trump. He lost. Then they tried to overthrow
the government.
And they only got worse.
Then they renominated Trump again. He promised he’d pardon the J6
traitors.
He won. Again. And here we are.
And check the clock, because this insistence that the Liberals need to
shut up and sit down and deplorables need to be ouchlessly absolved has been
the Never Trumper’s First Commandment of the Resistance for a decade
now. And as you may have noticed, the Republicans have only gotten
worse.
Yes, some of them are hurting now. Feeling some pain at the pump, some
pain as Trumpflation eats away at their paycheck, some pain at all the things
they voted for come back to bite ‘em. Then there is Iran.
And, of course, the Epstein files. Sure they voted for it all, over and
over and over again. And, sure, they cheered when their Dear Leader made
Liberals cry. But, see, somehow they believe it really wasn’t their
fault. They were just, y’know, going along with the crowd.
So have they seen the light? Learned their lesson?
Of course not. History has shown again and again that they aren’t
built that way. They just want someone to step in and ease their
self-inflicted suffering until they’re back on their feet enough to go back to
hating Liberals and voting for monsters.
Our humanity and concern for our country demands that we do everything that is
in our power to break the “We can get away with anything” mindset of
Republican voters -- whose rage and racism and stupidity brought these
calamities down on us. That these lifetime members of the Party of
Personal Responsibility be held civically and socially responsible for what
they have done to us.
Burn The Lifeboats
