The Faux-Sophistication of Doomer Despair

You call it “doomerism” in a social media context, but there’s a common thread in strains of the political left in the US right now that basically counsels giving up. Everything is bad, everything is hopeless, nothing can be done, the authoritarians have won and there’s no point in denying it, and any victory we can claim is either false or ephemeral. The regime will just crack down, use its infinite power, inevitably win. To state otherwise, to point out the ways the regime is losing and is likely to continue to lose , even if they cause grave harm along the way, is to be naive. Un-clued-in. Stupid. A sort of unworldly political bumpkin.

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Now, there’s nothing wrong with feeling despair. Things aren’t great. They suck. Lots of people are getting hurt, and lots more will, and the institutions of a free society are as degraded, in the United States, as they ever have been in living memory. The bad guys could still win in that they could still destroy those institutions completely, with no hope of recovery. To the doomer, saying this—or asserting it loudly in the face of those who think that this could happen, yes, they could win, but it’s unlikely, and becoming less likely—isn’t (just) an expression of emotional pain, but a sign that you, the doomer, are intellectually sophisticated in a way the non-doomer isn’t.

And if you push back, as I did above, the doomers come at you harder, because not only have you said you don’t buy their relentless despair as an accurate assessment of the state of things (even if things are quite bad), but you’re tone policing them. You’re telling them it’s not okay to feel what they’re feeling, and it’s not even okay to say you’re not feeling it, because by not feeling it, you’re rejecting the epistemic grounding of their own despair.

But the fact is, the doomers have it wrong. They’ll say things (over and over again) like how the Trump regime won’t let November’s elections happen. Obviously. They’ll say the Trump regime will try to steal all those important congressional races. But they’ll assume—because they’re doomers and they’ve given up and what’s the point in anything but despair?—that the regime trying is the regime succeeding. If you ask them how, given the way elections work, given the numbers the regime would need, given the way everything heavy-handed the regime does provokes a larger backlash, they’ll tell you you’re being stupid, or they’ll restate their initial claim. Because it’s the doom that matters.

Their whole thing is complying in advance, and getting angry at you for not. And getting even angrier when you point out that the reasons they’re complying, the reasons they’ve given up entirely, don’t stand up to scrutiny. Don’t map to the world as it is, and events as they are, even if the world is, in fact, quite bad and even if events are, in fact, horrific.

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Fortunately, the doomers mostly spend their days dooming on social media, while people who have hope, and have reason for hope, are out fighting back. Those people express their deep dismay, too. They express their pain, and their suffering, and their pain for the suffering of others in this awful moment. They find solidarity in that shared dismay, and even in shared despair, occasionally. But unlike the doomers, they don’t stop there. They don’t take that pain as reason to give up, or reason to assess every move and every event and every tactic as already failed. Instead, they let that pain motivate them to do something about it. We should look to them as our inspiration—and leave the doomers to their pointless and unsophisticated misery.