Kamala Harris never stood a chance She was only ever a liberal prop

Anyone who doubts the robustness of American democracy need only dip a toe in the rolling seas of commentary following Donald Trump’s mind-numbing recapture of the presidency. Freedom of speech has burst its seams. But then, far from being American democracy’s nemesis, Trump is its cruel, absurd consummation. He is antic, unstable, selfish, unfocused, uncultivated, vindictive, sybaritic, seditious and socially and morally aberrant. And he is what my beautiful, shining promise of a land has come to deserve.

Let’s be clear about why Harris lost. She was an incumbent vice president who did not have the spine to separate herself from America’s unpopular recumbent president. The Recumbent did not have the character to help his incumbent vice president stake her own space. Harris was a mediocrity flung by fate into water way over her head.

As it happens, about two months before Biden was finally pushed aside as the Democratic nominee, Vice President Harris’s motorcade passed by my family and me as we sat before a red light at an intersection in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. It was clear that Harris was set to take Biden’s place as nominee, and she was returning from a fundraiser in Provincetown, a few miles up the highway. As her black SUV, preceded by state police on roaring motorcycles, slowed down to be allowed through the red light we caught a glimpse of her. She was sitting motionless, like a stone, staring without expression, straight ahead. She looked like a stage prop in the process of being moved from a regional production to Broadway. And that is all she ever was. A prop.

At a time when America is gripped by fear, Harris was precisely the wrong person to aspire to the presidency. Americans do not fear civil war; they fear a country with, as Americans are fond of saying, “no guardrails”. They fear, simultaneously, constraints on their personal freedom, and they fear other people doing whatever they want. They fear science telling them what they don’t want to hear, and they fear science being unable protect them when what they hear frightens them. They fear school shootings, and they fear having their guns taken away from them. They fear censorship, and they fear speech they don’t like. They fear government telling them what to do and how to act, and they fear government unable or unwilling to act at their behest.

They fear American entanglement in wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that no politician has bothered to explain to them. They fear nuclear war, which no politician or public figure will ever even allude to, with the exception of the logorrheic Trump, who may or may not have a rational fear of it. Harris sure did nothing to allay fears of total annihilation when she declaimed in her stump speech on the trail that America had an obligation to defend the liberty of other countries. That was the mechanical groupthink of liberal idealists who send other people’s children off to die. Trump got five military deferments during the Vietnam War, liberals mock. So did Biden. Nobody wants to fight a war, except for those who don’t have to, or whose children don’t have to. Like all people, Americans want a peaceful existence. It is beyond pathetic that the best Harris could do in her concession speech was to call on Americans to “fight”. But “fight” was Trump’s motto! In either case, fight for what? This is not 1861, or 1941. Americans want to live comfortably, fulfillingly and safely. They don’t want to “fight”.

In the lead-up to the election, Democrats tried to use a clip, from 2021, of Vance calling Harris, among other Democratic figures, a “childless cat lady” to prove Vance’s misogyny. It was indeed a ludicrous, callous, foolish thing to say about any woman, especially a woman as driven and accomplished and intelligent as Harris. But it was diabolically shrewd. At a time when America is under threat internally and externally, a woman was always going to be a hard sell. Especially at a time when men are feeling disempowered. Especially a short woman. And an unpopular incumbent. And a woman of not one, but two colours. And a woman with no charm or passion or original presence. But a woman who had no children of her own? At a moment when America’s children fear being shot in school, when American parents fear their children will die from an opioid overdose, or fear their children will not be able to hold their own in American society because college is so expensive, because college is so competitive, because every job is so competitive, because children’s neurological development seems to be slowing, because the internet poses countless threats and terrors to children, because the country is in a dangerous proxy war in Ukraine… In this atmosphere, a woman candidate for president who has no biological children of her own is not, in the eyes of most Americans, sharing their daily and nightly terrors.

It was painful to watch Harris, so far out of her depth, manically readjusting, in full public view, her public persona. It recalled Samuel Butler’s remark that life is like learning to play the violin and having to give concerts at the same time. But a politician’s persona should not be like that. Harris tinkered with her accent, suddenly dropping the home-girl intonations. The “y’all” disappeared. That dislocated grin slid around her face, now here, now gone, now back again, like a house guest who refused to leave. By the end of her campaign, she had hit her stride by imitating the oratorical style of Obama, sometimes so closely that it made you wince. It made you long for Obama himself, until you remembered that it was Obama who had stoked the fires of racialism in national politics in the first place, thus giving birth to Trump. You still longed for Obama.

The liberal establishment’s disconnection from American reality is breathtaking. Liberal pundits were shocked that Latinos came out for Trump in great numbers after a comedian’s slur about Puerto Ricans at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But Latin culture is among the most traditional, the most macho, cultures in the world. They don’t do transgender. Nor do they like the Democratic Party’s fetishising of black people. Black people don’t like it either. That’s why so many black men voted for Trump. They don’t like being white fetish objects; see American Fiction. But you cannot talk in this way about the reality of American life with the high priests of liberal piety politics. For them, all Latinos, from every Spanish-speaking country, feel solidarity not just with every other Latino but with people of colour everywhere. And if you are black, well, you think and act black like every black person. But these priests of piety need to plunge into ordinary American life and allow human imperfection in the form of “prejudice” to be, and attend to changing the material conditions that allow prejudice to thrive and become toxic. Liberals like to say that after the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, conservatives have put themselves into Americans’ bedrooms, but liberals themselves have been policing the insides of American heads. Come on into the ocean of American life! The water is warm! And getting warmer every day, even unto boiling.

Lord Acton said that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, near-absolute freedom inevitably tips and shatters into a billion degradations of freedom.

Why Trump? Because people drive murderously large vehicles without regard to red lights, stop signs or speed limits, even as other people cross busy streets so engrossed in their phones they don’t look to see if a car is coming. Because people are allowed to smoke potent forms of marijuana. Because you cannot get a human on the phone when you call anywhere. Because, as a black public school principal told me: “They wave kids through with high grades for the sake of equity which makes everyone feel good and keeps the test scores high for the real-estate market. Then the kids get to college, flunk out, and come back home with no future.”

Why Trump? Because literature, theatre, art, opera, film have been both flattened into the bottom line, and at the same time coerced into being mere tabulators of social justice issues. Because everyone is withdrawn into screens, into the emotionally numbing penumbra of psychiatric drugs, into their own customised reality. Because everyone is “kind” and “caring” to everyone else, all smiles the size of Manifest Destiny, until they feel they are not getting what they are super-entitled to. Because from the workplace to the highest echelons of politics, what people say means more than who they are and what they do. Because litigation, from the aggrieved citizen to the slippery Trump, has ritualised social disorder. Because there is a stronger sense of community and responsibility in the most remote Chinese village than in the entire US of A. Because instant gratification has become a right, and responsibility a repression.

Why Trump? Because the country is not, as liberals are saying now, turning authoritarian. In the falling debris of neoliberalism, each side yearns for an authority it can tolerate, even as it deplores the slightest exertion of authority on the other side. The Right wants government to enforce personal liberty at the expense of collective freedom. The Left wants to impose an idea of collective freedom at the expense of personal liberty. Both sides, and everyone in between, is God-bereft, meaning-starved, longing for connection and bedevilled by it.

After the dazing election, CNN put up a revelatory map showing, on a granular level, where Trump’s votes came from. They largely came from rural and semi-rural areas. I would think that was the same for my own state, New Jersey, which has voted for a Democratic president for 32 years but this year went for Harris by only five points. Pascal’s line sprang to mind: “The eternal silence of these infinite space frightens me.” He was speaking of the seeming implacable indifference of the universe. But that fear falls far more heavily in sparsely populated places.

The liberal strongholds are mostly in the densely populated urban centres and their environs. People can walk, bike or drive a short distance to grocery stores, schools, doctors, and other necessary places. In the rest of the country, people sometimes have to drive hours to buy food or clothes or to see a doctor. Liberals seem stunned that Trump’s three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan apparently had such a catalysing effect on the election. They shouldn’t be. Three-quarters of the people who listen to podcasts listen while driving. The long, changeless road and the long, intimate conversation depend upon intimate, unchanging patterns of living. The super-accelerating trends of contemporary America life, celebrated by liberals, who wish to shame everyone else into accepting cherished solidities melting into air, have a palpably alienating effect on people outside the liberal bastions.

Although the liberal media, having established woke culture, have now declared it played little or no role in Trump’s astounding victory, they are lying. Following the dissolution of American small towns in the Fifties, the disenfranchised young in those towns — like the disenfranchised blacks in the cities — were sent off to the charnel house in Vietnam. Now, in this second dissolution of small-town America, in which mind, not just body, is wrecked, young people are being sent off into virtual, psychological space, driven deep into their screens and themselves. Why not vote for Trump? He has captured the attention of the ones who ignore you. More important, he frustrates, enrages, and frightens the ones who frustrate and enrage you and do nothing to soothe your fears. Why Trump? Because he both fills the eternal silence of infinite spaces with the projection of indomitable power, and he drowns out all the condescending, proscriptive — woke — chatter that excludes you.

Americans believe in solutions. It is a blessing and a curse. Here is my suggestion, to my liberal friends, not for a solution, but for a workable modus operandi. Give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Do not, as you did four years ago, pounce on everything he says as evidence of impending political disaster. Do not impeach him. Drop the ridiculous, pointless alarmism. Do not get all middle school and retreat into the cool corner of the cafeteria and preen yourself, personally and professionally, on every instance of this monstrosity’s inevitable folly.

Save the attacks for the important moments, and then keep them dignified and rational and proportionate to the occasion. Be Trump’s friend. Stroke his ego. Oversized and fragile as his ego is, Trump will, as he did in his first term, fling away anyone who makes him feel small. Already, Trump’s son, Donald Jr., who says that he is “heavily involved” in his father’s transition into power, has declared that he does not want people in the new administration “who think that they know better than the duly elected president of the United States”. I give Musk six months. Robert F. Kennedy four months. Then, if Trump considers you his friend, he will come to you to have his faltering imperial ego re-stroked.

Above all, make no mistake about it. Trump arose from the deepest regions of American life. You want to rid the country of this Groundhog Day affliction? Start with self-control, self-denial, tolerance, and a workable idea of what is good for all. Then work your way up.

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