In loving memory of The Resistance, 2016-2024

The 2024 American Election, Part II

THE MECHANICS OF DEFEAT are now clear. There should be no arguing with these basic truths. They are not complicated. Democratic support collapsed nationwide. In swing states, Trump got enough of a keybump to put him over the line while Democrats were so profoundly unpopular it took an enormous, billion-dollar effort just to give the illusion of a closer race. “For every 78 votes Donald Trump gained nationally compared to 2020, Kamala Harris lost 100,” a Guardian analysis notes. The Democrats dumped votes in something like 80% of all counties. This campaign was, in short, a howler: a world-historical balls-up.

Just as the past nine years have been a world-historical balls-up. This is how The Resistance shall go down in history, and in the memory: defeated, pulverised, irrelevant. The Grand Opposition set itself a single goal and failed to achieve it. Every last one of their tactics was a bust. Nine years of having their own head repeatedly served back at them taught the party nothing. First they called Trump a racist, an authoritarian, and a serial lech to women. And he is all of these things. But stating the obvious isn’t a strategy; you’re not insulting a racist if you say so to his face. Then they blamed his victory on the covert manipulations of an enemy power, which turned out to be both not true and a dud. Impeachment in a divided congress was doomed. They tried it twice. Legal prosecution, both civil and criminal, proved either too small-fry, too boring, or too slow to stall Trump’s momentum. A New York real estate honcho, probably mobbed-up, was corrupt? It only confirmed by legal fiat what we knew was the case anyway. To treat your nemesis as if he were a criminal yet refuse to pack the Supreme Court – which can and will exonerate him of everything – is the marker of their uselessness, a measure of their stunted imagination.

The Democrats defined themselves against Trump and therefore shackled themselves to him. He spoke, they whined. He acted, they floundered. Every single attack ad they ran (and paid out the nose for) quoted some hideous or stupid thing Trump said, with the predictable effect of giving their foe more of the airtime he craves. They were not for anything beyond making Trump miraculously disappear so as to bring about a Restoration. To return the nation to how it was when nobody sought such a thing – ‘normalcy’, it was called – Democrats had to assert their passion for a stifled democracy, for standards propping up a futile status quo, and institutions no longer fit for purpose. FBI goons, grotesque generals, pallid intelligence chiefs – all of whom made their names during the Reign of Terror – were made into junior deities. Instead of doing real politics – confronting Trumpism as a mass movement – they made their burnt offerings to bureaucrat demigods. Confronted with a fascist, as they believed they were (and still are), the only obligation is to foster a popular front, with the emphasis on popular. Instead, the Democratic party tried to disinter the corpse of Paul von Hindenburg, begging his bones to save us.

“Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” “We choose truth over facts.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women were created by the -- uh -- you know -- the -- you know the thing.” “I got hairy legs!” “Raprock” Obama. “Go to Joe 30330.” It would’ve been good and humane and decent, like a solemn veterinarian with a lame moggy, for Joe Biden’s handlers to totter the old bugger in the direction of pasture in September 2019. Roughly around the time his eye started bleeding on national television. But Uncle Joe, more of his brain leaking from his ears by the hour, was carried into a presidency I’m fairly sure he still isn’t aware of or will remember. But recall the spit sent your direction, the scornful arrogance if you dared suggest the King of the Delaware Shell Corporation already looked like he was entering the pre-stages of decomposition. It was ageist, four years ago, to suggest someone who still had a basic grasp on human speech and some motor function should be topping the Democratic field. Recall how those bigwigs treated you, back then, on behalf of their semi-ambulant mummified pharaoh. And every day since. Every day until it was too late.

A week before election day, Kamala Harris spoke to a rally at the Washington DC site where the gaudy mob received their marching orders on January 6th. “A petty tyrant…out for unchecked power,” she said of Trump. “Unstable…obsessed with revenge…consumed with grievance.” This was the Democratic message, the Democratic pitch – just as it had been in 2016, and in 2020. Trump as an imminent and existential threat to the democratic order. You would need the bravery and bloody-mindedness of an Antarctic explorer to go hunting for anything else in the platform. And still you’d be driven to sacrifice yourself to the ice and snowdrifts like Captain Oates out of exasperation. That was it, zenith and sum: blind opposition to a menace they’d done nothing useful to counter for nearly a decade. And still they asked you to buy the ticket, to drop your cash in the bucket, to send in your penny-cheques, to do your part in bringing about the final downfall of the junta.

They weren’t doing their part, though. They didn’t even believe their own messaging. Because the only reliable measure of how seriously the Democratic leadership regarded the threat was the candidate it chose. And that candidate wasn’t capable of forming full sentences. When the electorate got to see the advanced state of Biden’s decay in June, party leaders persisted in denying it for a month – a whole month, in an election year – before directly appointing someone who hadn’t won a competitive election in eight years, who hadn’t even contested the last open primary. They felt entitled to your money, just as they felt entitled to your vote. Hypocrisy rarely matters in political life, but perhaps it does now. It has consequences. We must live in them, even if they do not.

The View, October 8th:

Sunny Hostin: If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
Kamala Harris: There is not a thing that comes to mind.

A perfect thing to say. Honest, too. Not only did her answer distil the entire Democratic campaign, it revealed exactly what was going on inside Harris’s head, and is precisely how we will regard her in defeat. As the party descends into a postmortem brawl after the election, smarter critics should wield this statement like a mace. But it’s worse than we thought. Immediately before she confessed her own emptiness on The View, Harris used the words “I love our small businesses” twice as if it were the statement of a normal human-style person. Later on, after some time to think, she offered one point of difference with her boss: Kamala Harris made a solemn pledge to appoint a Republican to a Democratic cabinet. Small business, cowardly bipartisanship, tough on ‘the border’, “Yes, I own a Glock”: this medley of callow conservatism was supposed to secure Harris enough mid-rank independents to make a meaningful difference in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and Atlanta. All it gave her was the pen with which to write her resignation speech. Turns out: Republicans vote Republican.

If your grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bike. There is a vinegary tang of futility here in thinking the Democratic party could do or say or be anything than what it is. Yet there was one subject on which they were adamantine. Clear-headed, impressive in their stamina, ruthless to critics. The leadership proved, as they mired everywhere else, its capacity to exercise political will. And that will was exercised daily against the presence and persistence of Palestinian life. On no other subject were they prepared to be so defiant and thereby imperil their own souls. No inch was to be given to fascism at home, meanwhile every State Department standup and presidential address and bomb shipment was a wilful gift of support for fascism in Israel. Again: this is what you get in return for your vote and your money – Vietnam without the Great Society, a muscular liberalism for the far frontier but not for your hometown. Perhaps The Resistance was not totally defeated after all. It fought and failed in so many ways yet still clung to the right it prizes most: the right to inflict massive violence on the blameless.

To be continued…