Into the Desert

On November 6, 2024, I awoke early in the morning, perhaps around 5:30 or 6am, after only a few hours of sleep. I had gone to bed around 2am Vienna time, when the news was beginning to look bleak, but the results were far from certain. A glance at my phone confirmed the outcome. Sickened, I quickly washed, dressed, and left my room in the middle of the city.

I had a small bag with a change of clothes, a bag of mixed nuts, a half bottle of wine, my laptop and phone, and a few other valuables. I gave everything away to the first destitute person I came across, asking only that he pray for the suffering in return. I took a streetcar to Wien Hauptbahnhof and got on a train heading southwest toward a monastery I had visited a few years earlier. I entered the monastery several hours later, officially as a visitor but hinting at more long-term intentions, and from that moment until now I have not read any news or communicated with the outside world. My days have been filled with physical work and prayer, my mind trained ceaselessly on contemplating the mysteries of the triune LORD. Grieving with rage and disbelief, and following the example of the Desert Fathers and other great hermits and ascetics of the past, I have taken leave of the world.

This is what I fantasized about doing right after learning of the reelection (an especially nauseating prefix) of Donald J. Trump. But of course I did none of this, and no monastery would have taken me in either. (Among other problems, I am married with children, and monasteries don’t work like this anyway.) Instead, I lay in bed trying and failing to fall back asleep for another couple of hours, eventually got up and made my way to my department. After an unproductive day (and some painful conversations with colleagues, my German straining to accommodate my despondency), I taught a three-hour seminar on “political emergencies,” which is close to the last thing on earth I wanted to talk about. Of course, we spent most of our time talking about the emergency unfolding at that precise moment. (The hope was to discuss how a political emergency was avoided by electing Kamala Harris.)

While I do think the election of Trump should be regarded as an emergency—if it was in 2016, it certainly is now—I’m unwilling to care about it the same way I did last time. The one more or less true statement in my opening paragraphs is that I have not read the news since the election. In the weeks (ok, months) before the election, I read almost every New York Times and Washington Post push alert related to the election. I checked Fox News daily to get a sense of how the other side was interpreting the presidential race. I read political newsletters all the time, generally shortly after they came out. (Mike Allen from Axios seemed like an old pen pal by the time the election came around.) And I was constantly on Twitter/X, following every election analyst with even approximate credibility, and inhaling every detail about polls, early voting data, prediction markets, and so on. Don’t even get me started on the podcasts.

I said I’ve been doing this for weeks, and then joked that it’s actually been months. But this isn’t true either: I have been breathlessly consuming political news for years, indeed close to a decade, ever since the “political emergency” occasioned by Trump’s ride down his gilded escalator. To describe these “efforts” as pointless is an understatement, and slander against the great good that can come from doing nothing at all. My time would have been better spent doing virtually anything else—working, reading a book, or doing the dishes, to say nothing of truly meaningful activities like spending time with my family. It would have been better spent attempting to dig a hole to China, one of my core ambitions as a young boy. In short, I should have been focusing on “cultivating my garden,” to borrow a metaphor from Voltaire’s Candide, and deployed to mysteriously comforting effect in a post-election essay that first prompted these reflections.

So, this time I will not be paying attention. It's not that I don't care. In fact, I am as invested in our future as I have ever been. As I mentioned, I have children. And incidentally I am currently working on a grant proposal on “longtermism,” the idea that we need to direct far more energy and resources toward protecting future lives. And I emphatically support the work of people doing grassroots organizing, participating in local politics, and so forth. But for me, unable to do much but observe my home country from afar, there is nothing I can or want to do (apart from offer this public lamentation, which will be about as influential as my “political analysis” during the election). I won’t be following the news, fixated on every development, real or manufactured. I won’t attempt to scrutinize what went wrong. And I certainly won't be arguing with Jill Stein voters like I was in 2016.

(Fine, one word about them: Voting for Jill Stein seems a bit like insisting on Pellegrino when the only options before you are tap water and untreated sewage water. “I’m sick of voting for the lesser of two evils; I want Pellegrino!” Right.)

It's not that I suddenly care less about other people either, although to be honest I do care less about the United States, certainly about its reputation and standing in the world. Any country that elects a person like Trump doesn't deserve to be admired. Obviously Trump supporters don’t care—America first!—and I don’t condemn them, even though I regard their vote as deeply misguided. Judge not lest ye be judged, and surely my faults are at least as great as theirs. But my perception of the country is irrevocably damaged. I have forgotten thee, O Jerusalem, and I don’t care if my right hand loses its skill. One Trump win could be seen as an aberration. But the second confirms that the country—the country whose history, culture, and politics I have intensely studied, and the country I unironically revered—is not what I thought it was.

I suspect this attitude will be greeted with hostility from all sides. Earnest liberals (of which I am loosely one) will say that this is precisely the time to retrench and focus on checking the worst impulses of a second Trump administration. This is the way to protect the country. Those further to the left will say I am a fool for ever venerating the US in the first place. We have always been an evil empire, and electing Trump changes nothing. And the right will say I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, or whatever.

To the first position, I can only say that if the years 2016-2020 are to serve as any guide to the years 2024-2028, my personal rage and “concern for the republic” accomplished nothing. The second position seems more plausible to me than it ever has, although I still think it’s far too simplistic of a story, and fails to acknowledge the obvious progress that has been made (and may shortly be unmade). The third position is too lazy and stupid to think about. 

If I was forced to look for a silver lining, I suppose I would say this, basically in line with what I wrote in an essay before the election: We can’t be entirely sure what is best as an event is happening. For example, given that we ended up with eight years of Trump anyway, it’s reasonable to wonder if it would have been better had Trump been reelected in 2020. Perhaps the covid vaccine wouldn’t have become such a weird partisan flashpoint, and presumably the Supreme Court wouldn’t have issued its presidential immunity decision, the implications of which concern me perhaps more than anything. I would have been devastated to see Trump win, but all things considered it probably would have been better. Maybe similar logic can be deployed four years hence?

The problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is that most fundamentally you want your candidate to win so that he or she can enact policies you prefer, as Joe Biden has largely done over the last four years—by, for example, passing the expanded child tax credit, which halved the number of children living in poverty the year it was in effect, a very great good. You can’t keep banking on a deferment that will ultimately work out in your favor, because this leads to something structurally akin to an infinite regress. (How many years of Republican rule are you willing to tolerate—more specifically, how many years of Trump are you willing to endure, with all the singular dangers that entails—in the hope of a future payout? Life is short, after all.) Still, it’s hard not to wonder if my joy was misplaced in 2020, in light of what just happened. Perhaps the 2028 results, or even the 2026 midterm results, will make such an interpretation of this year’s election possible. But I’m not counting on it.

And more to the point, those are precisely the sort of reflections I am uninterested in pursuing. Better to spend time with my family, read a novel, or even dig a hole to China than to reenter the world of political news and analysis anytime soon. I can’t enter a desert monastery, but I can tend my own garden.