Ultimately, Biden settled on his vice president, Kamala Harris, following through on his post-George Floyd aim to add a nonwhite politician to his ticket. Harris had flamed out as a presidential contender and ended up an ineffectual VP; her struggles in the White House incentivized Biden, despite his senility, to attempt another presidential run. If the physicists are correct, surely there is an alternate universe in which Vice President Big Gretch eased out Biden in early 2024, seized the nomination, and stopped Trump in his tracks.

But we don’t live in that universe. In ours, Whitmer has remained governor of Michigan, where she’s waffled on whether she will run for president come 2028. On paper, she would be viable: a two-term governor from a swing state with a real track record of beating Republicans. If she did take the plunge, she would receive plenty of media attention and wouldn’t struggle to fundraise. Unlike California’s Gavin Newsom, she doesn’t govern a state that produces many unflattering headlines. Opponents couldn’t point to any great homelessness crisis, natural disaster, or affordability crunch occurring on her watch.

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A Whitmer presidential campaign would, however, be a test case for a kind of politics that is growing more alienating by the day: relentless and unapologetic support for artificial intelligence. If Whitmer ran for president, she’d be the pro-AI candidate in whatever pro-AI lane exists. Few governors have catered more to the industry than Whitmer, whether it is championing tax breaks or ramming through massive data-center projects that have drawn local backlash — the kind that, shockingly, hasn’t seemed to rattle Whitmer at all. In 2026, developers have scoped out at least 16 data-center sites in 10 Michigan counties, according to an MLive tally. A massive $16 billion data center in Saline Township, which just broke ground, has been a signature Whitmer project, generating intense grassroots opposition.

Across America, Democratic and Republican politicians are growing more skeptical of AI. Red states like Florida, Utah, and Oklahoma have enacted regulations on energy use for data centers, as have deep-blue ones like California and Washington. New York passed a one-year moratorium on data-center buildouts. Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington now regulate what chatbots can communicate to human users. The polling points the way toward more aggressive regulation: half of all American adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a Pew survey from last year. Merely 10% say they are more excited than concerned.

Yet the term-limited Whitmer has been a tireless AI champion, as has the Democratic frontrunner to replace her in the governor’s mansion, Jocelyn Benson. Read any release from Whitmer’s office, and it is obvious that she views the AI expansion as a job-creating opportunity that can’t be passed up. The Saline Township data center being built by Oracle and Related Digital, she promises, will yield 2,500 union construction jobs, more than 450 ongoing jobs on the site, and 1,500 more across the county. “This investment from Oracle and Related Digital sends a simple message to anyone who wants to build the future — you can build it in Michigan,” she enthused.

Yet there are several intractable problems with data centers that Whitmer has mostly waved away or vaguely promised to address in the future. Electricity bills can surge. The water supply can be endangered. There is the noise and pollution generated from the diesel-powered backup generators. And there is a great risk, too, if AI amounts to a bubble. Hundreds of billions have been spent on a technology that remains unprofitable, and if a reckoning ever comes, towns and rural areas across the country will be left holding the bag: half-built centers, farmland wrecked for no purpose.

Hence, why prominent politicians of the Left and the Right have grown more skeptical of AI.  The likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley — representing the socialist Left and the populist Right, respectively — have positioned themselves as fierce industry opponents. Candidates for office have seen their fortunes rise just on the strength of their willingness to regulate AI. But Whitmer is cut from a different cloth. In some sense, this might be because she represents an older wing of the Democratic Party, one that remains deferential to corporate power. As both Harper’s and the nonprofit news site Bridge Michigan have pointed out, Whitmer has, since taking office in 2019, spent nearly $1 billion in taxpayer cash on corporate incentives that have delivered on only a fifth of the promised jobs. In 2024, she backed legislation to grant total exemptions on sales and use taxes for large-scale data centers, overcoming opposition in the state legislature.

In Michigan, AI companies have forged a close relationship with the dominant utility, DTE Electricity, which is eager to do big business powering the data centers. While Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat like Whitmer, has lambasted DTE for its frequent demands for rate hikes, Whitmer hasn’t been nearly as outspoken. DTE is a prolific donor in the state; Whitmer has been, naturally, a beneficiary of its largesse, bagging at least $550,000, according to Detroit News. Jocelyn Benson — the secretary of state and Whitmer’s likely successor — is married to Ryan Friedrichs, a vice president for Related Companies, not only the firm behind the Saline Township data center, but a major donor to Benson’s campaigns.

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By Michael Lind

Top Michigan Democrats are compromised enough by the data-center and utility lobbies that it fell to Tom Leonard, a former leading contender for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, to speak out against AI’s conquest of the state. Leonard called for an end to tax breaks for data centers, as well as a one-year moratorium on building new facilities. He has since dropped out, and if Michigan experiences a blue wave akin to the 2018 midterm that swept Whitmer to the governor’s mansion, Benson will probably end up the next governor.

And while the next US senator from Michigan will have far less say over the future of data centers than the governor, the fight over AI has divided the Senate primary, too. Abdul El-Sayed, the Sanders-backed progressive candidate, has called for AI companies to be regulated as public utilities and criticized his rival, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, for supporting Whitmer-endorsed data-center tax breaks in the legislature. Meanwhile, Haley Stevens, the congresswoman who is the most conservative of the three Democratic contenders, has generally defended the AI industry in the context of national security and competing with China.

For Democrats nationally, especially those who over the years have fawned over Whitmer and the political operation she’s built in Michigan, there will be the question of what kind of party they want to form. If Whitmer plunges into the presidential race, she will be the Democratic warrior for AI. If she doesn’t, others might take up the cause in the name of innovation. But they would be wise not to ignore actual voters. An AI revolt is brewing in Michigan, and it is headed anywhere else where data centers are proliferating. The AI Democrat, like the AI Republican, may only be able to survive for so long.

So asked Ben Meiselas of the MeidasTouch podcast of Joe Biden in December in a rare one-on-one sit-down, conducted during Biden’s lame-duck period, as he and the nation awaited President Trump’s return to the White House. By then, Biden resembled a shambling zombie from the film 28 Years Later, and he squinted and slurred his way through an incoherent answer that boiled down to: Nope, no regrets.

His rant sounded quite Trumpian in its detachment from reality, including a claim that his term would end with an Israel-Gaza peace deal. Yet the hangdog-faced podcaster didn’t challenge it or follow up. He simply nodded and moved on to the next scripted question he had written down in a notebook. Meiselas looked like a man who had won the lottery to interview a sitting president and didn’t want to blow it. You could almost see affirmation in Meiselas’s eyes: You’re doing great, Mr. President. Keep going.

Welcome to MeidasTouch, the popular “news-influencer” show where every hour feels like amateur hour. It’s essentially a booster club for Democrats disguised as just-the-facts-ma’am independent journalism. Since Hollywood and establishment media failed miserably to help elect Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, the Democrats have been desperately searching for their own Joe Rogan — a charismatic and outsider everyman who resonates with young men and can gently steer them toward Team Blue. What they’ve got instead with MeidasTouch is nearly the polar opposite: it’s anti-Trump infotainment starring three earnest Millennial brothers — Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas — with little charisma and no chill, peddling content that appeals to news-addicted liberals.

The MeidasTouch bros claim that their brand is “pro-democracy,” but somehow that only aligns perfectly with one side. It’s no coincidence that years before they interviewed Biden on their podcast as journalists, the Meiselases were raising money for him. Launched in the spring of 2020, MeidasTouch almost immediately became a DIY SuperPAC helmed by the three Long Island brothers: Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer (Ben), a video editor for the Ellen show (Brett), and a marketing executive (Jordan).

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Their early batch of anti-Trump digital ads spoke the language of outrage fluently, and the brothers positioned themselves not just as commentators, but combatants in an existential bloodsport. The prize: America’s soul. Within months, they’d raised $5 million for the 2020 election cycle. A Rolling Stone investigation concluded that MeidasTouch’s anti-Trump ad campaign “was a huge waste of donor money, and its tweets weren’t persuading swing voters.” MeidasTouch responded by threatening to sue Rolling Stone and demanded that the magazine apologize and pay its legal costs. (The MeidasTouch brothers didn’t respond to UnHerd’s request for comment.)

Their digital network grew steadily over the four years that followed — but exploded once Trump took office for a second term. In the first quarter of 2025, MeidasTouch was the fastest-growing YouTube channel in terms of net new subscribers. It made splashy headlines in February, notching 57.5 million downloads and surpassing Rogan’s 51.5 million for the No. 1 podcast. The bros got there by posting multiple times daily, all rapid response 10-minute segments featuring the search-engine-friendly word “Trump” in the title.

Their success is proof that a media empire can be built almost solely on white-hot Trump hate. To listen to it is to enter a world where the president is a mindless buffoon, an Inspector Clouseau type who destroys democracy like it’s a vase accidentally knocked off a pedestal, but also even more than that: a moral aberration, a threat to civilization itself that must be denounced at every turn lest it be “normalized.”

Every YouTube thumbnail is a scream declaring Donald’s impending downfall — “Trump gets publicly HUMILIATED in the WORST TV appearance of all time” or “Trump LOSES IT as MAGA Burns IT ALL DOWN” — repackaging every political development into content gold. The hyperbolic headlines rarely match reality, but the dopamine loop is deliberate and constant. Play the video. Share the tweet. Feel the rage. Repeat. They’re like the #Resistance’s unholy marriage of the dystopian online-game-show host MrBeast and MSNBC — equal parts law school, cable news, and YouTube reaction video.

MeidasTouch is part of a sprawling digital-media #Resistance ecosystem, in which every news cycle presents a fresh reason to panic and post. The historian Heather Cox Richardson writes Substack essays that feel like bedtime stories for liberals about how history’s lessons all point to Trump trying to wrench America back to the pre-Civil War era. The Bulwark dresses up neocon-friendly centrism in moral urgency against MAGA. Well-dressed progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen condenses news stories into slick TikToks.

These are the town criers for the terminally online, warning us that Trump is coming (again), and only your retweet and subscription can stop him. There’s no room for dissent, no appetite for introspection, no curiosity about voters who drifted from the Democratic Party and why they might have done so. The hate machine needs both conflict and clarity. In a recent video, Brett Meideles said that Trump makes problems worse 99.9% of the time, but then quickly corrected himself. Oh, actually, it was 100% of the time.

Their growing audience has often been dubbed “BlueAnon,” because they’re also prone to conspiratorial thinking — similar to the Right-wing variety, QAnon — when it suits them. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 41% of Democrats still believe Trump didn’t legitimately win in 2024. About a third think the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., might have been staged. They’re also the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners, doomsday preppers more likely to holster their weapons in farmer’s-market tote bags than camo. This isn’t just fringe paranoia; it’s become the dour mood of a base that now sees even The New York Times or NPR as suspiciously neutral. In their eyes, objectivity itself has become complicity. They want media that picks a side, and MeidasTouch is happy to oblige.

The irony, of course, is that the same people who decry disinformation and cultishness on the Right have created a mirrored pathology: an all-consuming fixation on Trump, his every utterance, tweet, and indictment. If Trump is indeed the Boomer ego in human form — a gaudy, narcissistic amalgam of generational hubris — to his critics he remains the gravitational force around which their media diets, anxieties, and identities orbit.

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For many Millennial children of aging liberals, it’s become a running joke; there hasn’t been a family dinner or phone call in years without Trump somehow being invoked. “We’re providing a comforting place where we’re channeling people’s feelings during a real difficult time,” Meiselas told the Times. Still, MeidasTouch is hardly providing comfort — it’s churning out addictive ragebait and telling viewers to “Join the Meidas Mighty,” the podcast’s version of Swifties for Trump haters.

Flattening all Left-of-center commentary into anti-MAGA rants is a copout. Instead of grappling with the real and urgent reasons why Democrats are so unpopular in 2025 — housing costs, health-care failures, stagnant wages — their content is the podcast equivalent of jamming fingers in their ears and yelling “Trump!” at the top of their lungs. It’s red meat for the haters, but it doesn’t build coalitions or expand the base. If anything, it drowns out the figures and institutions that are trying to do the slow, difficult work of organizing around positive policy change. Their brand of algorithmic outrage might rally clicks, but it does not build up alternatives to Trump World.

Once this kind of hyperventilating partisan media was the sole dominion of the Right with the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. Now, sadly, it looks like the future for centrist liberals. America has plenty of legitimate beef with the old, fussy mainstream media. But we’ll miss it when it’s scrapped for parts and replaced by the new algorithmically optimized online media machines.

Where art thou, Brian Williams?

It just goes to show that the Biden-era policies dogging the country now were shaped by a sort of temporary insanity, where even moderate Democrats abandoned long-held beliefs to avoid charges of bigotry or associations with Trumpism.

But there’s a serious danger in attributing Joe Biden’s border chaos more to ideology than cowardice. The Biden administration leaned into immigration as a cultural signifier to rack up virtue signal points and stave off charges of bigotry. The result was a precarious new shadow society of migrants, and few good options to address it.

We know that Biden wasn’t a hardened open-borders ideologue. Nor was his vice president, Kamala Harris, at one point charged with addressing the root causes of the migrant surge (a mission that came to naught). Mainstream Democrats wanted higher levels of immigration, to be sure, but Biden and his more lucid colleagues mostly didn’t expect the border to be flooded like it was after Biden rolled back Trump-era policies like “Remain in Mexico,” under which would-be asylum seekers were required to file their cases in Mexico, rather than make the trek to the US frontier. The Bidenites believed the costs of their anti-Trump virtue signaling would be worth the benefits.

To put the numbers in perspective, net migration during Biden’s tenure exceeded 8 million people. It was the largest surge in American history, and the most rapid since 1850. That means Biden added the entire population of New York City to the United States in just four years; or two Delawares to the country every single year of his presidency. There are fewer residents in my home state of Wisconsin — which has a population of 6 million — than migrants who moved to America under Biden.

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For Democrats who counted on winning re-election in 2024, this was not the plan. The party’s genuine ideologues were surely pleased, but the Biden administration drastically reduced migration as it became clear that a continued surge would harm the party in 2024. The truth is that many key decision makers in the Biden administration legitimately didn’t understand that loosening restrictions on migration would be such a powerful magnet for people to come to America.

That, of course, reflects gross incompetence. During a 2021 reporting trip to northern Mexico, I asked a group of Haitian migrants who’d mostly come from stable lives in places like Argentina and Chile why they left those countries to sleep on the cartel-infested streets of Matamoros, waiting for a chance to cross. They said they wanted the American Dream.

I relayed that story to a prominent Left-wing politician at the time, who seemed dumbfounded. “Do they know what it’s like to be poor in the United States?” the person wondered.

Those migrants knew exactly what it would be like. WhatsApp messages from friends and relatives who came first had convinced them to fork over hefty fees to cartel smugglers, risk life and limb crossing through passages like the Darien Gap, and then live in the shadows of US society on a hope and a prayer that dubious asylum cases would turn out alright in several years. If not, they could always melt into the background of a sanctuary city.

So what does any of this have to do with cancel culture?

Peak Woke was a strange time. Presidential hopefuls swapped out “Latino” for “Latinx,” Aziz Ansari’s mild sexual exploits became national news, and feminists organized a boycott of Tampax over a joke. The consequences were, of course, more serious. From malicious government censorship to grave media blunders, a chill ultimately settled over politics and culture.

This is why, in 2019, Kamala Harris pledged to publicly fund gender transitions for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. It’s why “Scranton Joe” Biden himself supported previously radical trans policies. In Peak Woke, Democrats believed it would be politically worse for them not to back these ideas because interest groups, journalists, and activists were itching to call them bigots.

On immigration, the cynical political calculus of every Democrat running in 2020 was to be positioned as Trump’s antithesis. “Biden Pledges to Dismantle Trump’s Sweeping Immigration Changes,” read an NPR headline. “Biden Will Stop the Border Wall and Loosen Immigration Again,” blared Politico. “Immigrants have always made us stronger as a nation — our diversity has always been our greatest strength. Donald Trump doesn’t get that,” tweeted Biden in October 2019.

As the centrist candidate in the Democratic primary, Biden actively sprinted away from his prior positions on illegal immigration. He had to deal with headlines like this one from CNN: “Joe Biden Once Said a Fence Was Needed to Stop ‘Tons’ of Drugs from Mexico” and this one from Politico: “Biden Under Fire for Mass Deportations Under Obama.”

In December of 2019, Vox noted, “Biden has struggled to answer questions in several recent debates about Obama’s more controversial policies on immigration enforcement, which included record-high levels of deportations and were often criticized by activists.”

At the time, in the fevered days of the #AbolishICE movement, now making a comeback on the Left, virtually no immigration enforcement mechanism was considered humane by activists and outside groups. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” Joe Biden pledged in 2020, commenting on perhaps the most basic piece of infrastructure imaginable. This became a massive pull factor for newcomers. As a Red Cross worker in Mexico explained to me in 2020, migrants heard Biden was not as “drastic” as Trump, and they were taking their chances accordingly.

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David Leonhardt explained what happened after Biden took office in a groundbreaking retrospective for The New York Times last year. “Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office,” he wrote. “Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach.”

“After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States,” reported Leonhardt. “Some have received temporary legal status while their cases [went] through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.” According to numbers tracked by Syracuse University, the asylum backlog at the end of the Biden administration was nearly 4 million active cases, with the average wait time stretching well more than a year long.

Love Trump or hate him, a surge of 8 million migrants in four years is no easy situation to address. And as the Biden-Harris campaign ultimately discovered, voters demanded that the next president address it, Democratic or Republican. So here we are, with a massive new population of aspiring Americans, who are living in precarious conditions legally and socially, and an economy of employers and consumers ever-more tied to their cheap labor.

It should be obvious that Biden and “career prosecutor” Harris weren’t on an ideological crusade to replace the native population of the United States. But elite Democrats also wanted to win elections above all else. This is why when the vibes were anti-Trump, they did everything they could to counter him, both to avoid the minefield of Peak Woke cancel culture and to rack up virtue points. It’s also why Biden’s policies and rhetoric changed as soon as election year rolled around and the polling looked bad.

Democrats painted themselves into a corner on immigration. They feared the fringe to the detriment of the American majority—and ultimately, to their own party’s detriment. The immigration chaos Americans endure now is a direct consequence of cancel culture or Peak Woke, and the way “responsible” Democrats caved into these forces, afraid to look like they cared too much about overseeing an orderly immigration system.

Tariffs come and go; the deal to end all deals with Russia over Ukraine came and went; the vow to end the war in Gaza is as if it had never been made; Canada, Panama, Greenland, an Iran “deal”: whither? Musk is riding high, he’s withdrawing, he’s back, he’s gone; he and Trump are over, the media and social media convulse in sound and fury, all of it signifying… what exactly? Cabinet secretaries prove their authenticity by their lack of merit, then don white coats of anti-expertise and proceed to euthanize the “deep state”.

After months of turbulence, the sensation of being tossed about in a heaving sea gives way to the feeling of being rocked insensate. Behold the new American dynamic: the frenetic-anesthetic. And yet it seems that behind nearly every outrageous policy announcement is one ultra-mundane goal, cruel as its consequences often are: to save money. Has there ever been an autocratic regime whose principal instrument of terror was to withhold funds? Isn’t that what parents do?

Cecil Rhodes declared: “I would annex the planets if I could.” Trump would monetize them. To hell with even the pretext of la mission civilisatrice. Civilization merely gets in the way. So do politics and policy. When Max Weber observed the disenchantment of the modern world, he had no idea a Trump would rob science and reason themselves of their power and replace them with business. Trump’s deals, after all, require little wit, culture, intellect, knowledge. Or politics. Or policy. That’s all liberal elite stuff. The President’s diehard supporters, convinced they have been swindled for generations by puffed-up eggheads with no vitality below the waist, are delighted.

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The only constant in Trump’s scatter-brained reign is his self-promotion as he sells the American presidency off, bit by bit, in cryptocurrency. His face now appears on a giant banner hung over the front of the Department of Agriculture (of all places). More banners, to be draped over other public buildings, are said to be in the works. He posted a picture of himself as Pope. He is throwing a nearly $50 million military parade to celebrate his birthday this month. At a recent Oval Office meeting, the President of the United States was hawking hats that said “Trump Was Right About Everything!” Enthralled by the idea of war, though averse to an actual war, he is, incredibly, sending thousands of troops, spy planes and two warships to the border with Mexico. But don’t generalissimos take land, like Putin, instead of keeping people out of it? Well that’s where Greenland comes in.

And yet it seems that the massive military presence on the border, like the illegal deportation of immigrants to other countries, and the abduction of foreign students off American streets, and the threat to suspend habeas corpus — that it is all simply meant to fascinate Trump’s followers, and to terrify his critics. You could be next, citizen status or not. Thuggery with a policy-face.

Trump straddles America in the manner of an erotic asphyxiation. The choke-release-choke-release rhythm of his tariffs characterizes the dynamic of his regime. He brings the country close to some type of crisis that will bring relief through clarity, releases, then tightens his grasp again. Just when you fear Trump is going to come through on his administration’s threats to suspend habeas corpus, the cornerstone of American liberty, he posts an insult to Taylor Swift, then follows that with a threat to Bruce Springsteen, who had been critical of Trump. What is the word for disgust mixed with relief? There is no word for that. All the cascading historical analogies aside, there has never been, as Trump himself might say, a phenomenon like this: malevolence, ignorance, greed and open corruption moving together in seamless harmony in a still-functioning democracy.

At this point, the question of opposition to Trump is moot. The Democrats hold powerless minorities in Congress. Sanders and AOC rallies attract mere low tens of thousands of the faithful. The civil rights March for Jobs and Freedom on Washington in 1963 drew hundreds of thousands of people; so did the 1967 March on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Today, everyone is on their screens. And the media would rather obsess over the former president’s afflicted prostate than seriously and steadily address the current president’s corrupt and unstable mind.

Something has to give, and it’s this: the Democratic and democratic opposition has to abandon its educated reserve, its decorous outrage. It has to adopt a post-apocalyptic strategy. It has to begin, as Trump began, outside norms, beyond bounds, and from scratch, “lie down where all the ladders start”. Heaven knows, the Democratic Party has unlimited wealth, as Kamala Harris’s candidacy showed. They have the means to start from scratch.

The first thing they can do, then, is act like what they have become, a government-in-exile, and not like a gaggle of atomized, disconnected elected officials. They need to hold a weekly, if not daily, press conference that mirrors the form of those mind-blowing news conferences led by Trump’s fealty-bot, Karoline Leavitt. They need, first of all, a press-secretary-in-exile who will present a perfect counterpoint to Leavitt: earthy, unscripted, independent, funny, honest, open and not on the verge of exploding.

Now, the opposition’s press secretary has to be the face of something. Obviously the Democrats are not about to choose the representative of their party at this juncture. There is too much ambition, too much rivalry. And that’s what primaries are for. Let them, in lieu of that, settle on a quorum of a few figures whose steady presence will establish itself, regular press conference after regular press conference, in the mind of the public. Let them start with Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of red Kentucky, a promising hybrid of (seemingly) true Christian morality, broad and deep liberal sentiments, and almost earthy American rectitude. Bring in Tim Walz, Ruben Gallego (and try to win back Hispanic voters from Trump) and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy.

Naturally our quorum will insist that they would never question the authority of an elected president. This will establish the morality of their challenge to the authority of this American president. The goal is to fascinate, as Trump has fascinated. You do that by making the act of watching you, and listening to you, an original experience.

Jettisoning any association with celebrities will help — how depressing that for liberals the fact that Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at a crowded dinner is the definitive proof of his mental decline. The Left needs ordinary-seeming figures like Trump — but with substance and principle — to outperform Trump’s self-burlesquing swagger and rise to the outsize audacity and originality that celebrities are so good at counterfeiting.

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By Justin H. Vassallo

Most crucial — and controversial — of all: at a time when the least powerful people are in danger of losing access to food, medical care and basic income thanks to the big, beautiful bill, this is no time for empty symbolism. No time for another Kamala Harris. The fact is that Trump and his white MAGA legions are the response to black Obama. It’s almost as simple as that. So, appalling and even repellent as it might sound, in 2025, the Democrats are going to have to steel themselves and keep it, mostly, white. For now. If you want to defeat the MAGA obscenity that regards blacks as inferior, Jews as sinister, immigrants as “vermin”, women as wombs and housekeepers, run circles around it. It’s not pandering. It’s what the Chinese call “Chi Sau”, the trick of using an opponent’s force against them. (They do it surpassingly well, especially when the opponent obliges at almost every turn.)

I write — or so I flatter myself — as an Old Left, cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual who would want nothing more than to see a Ras Baraka/Elizabeth Warren — or vice versa — ticket. (Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is, to my mind, the most original and authentic politician in America.) I also write at a time when Harris, who lost both the electoral and the popular vote to Trump is, mind-bogglingly, leading in polls for who should be the Democratic candidate for president in 2028. This will only lead to certain defeat again. So make like the Trojan Horse, and find a white candidate who will empower America’s diversity instead of a token candidate who will pay lip service to the “rainbow” and betray it in the end. See what happens. If the Democrats sweep the midterms, then, by all means, open the doors to politicians of every stripe. Just be sure to elevate the content of character over the self-flattering pieties of identity politics. Harris didn’t lose because she was a woman of color. She lost because that’s all she was.

Liberal pundits repeat, ad nauseam, the cliché that what people want from the Democrats is “ideas” and “vision”. They want to know what Democrats “stand for”. But in this moment, people want nothing of the kind. People want big, baggy, flattering and unthreatening concepts like “make America great again” that they can fit all their ordinary feelings and frustrations and aspirations into. They don’t want “ideas” about what other people “stand for”. If people wanted “ideas” showing what other people “stand for,” they’d be forming human cordons around Harvard and Columbia. They want stories bursting with vivid, clarifying, and, yes, entertaining sentiments. They want people in government they can imagine relaxing with. Give them someone they can relax with who isn’t an unhinged buffoon.

Trump once spoke of his intention to make every day of his presidency an episode in a TV drama. He has succeeded at that, brilliantly. The Democrats must do the same. They must start pouring all their dollars into the one strategy that will save the republic: an ongoing story that will reflect Americans’ ordinary feelings, frustrations and aspirations. A story that will, all at once, refute Trump’s, push it into the margins, and offer a riveting, satisfying alternative.

Here is an idea for a timid time of no ideas: an epic campaign commercial to end all campaign commercials. Something, unfolding in episodes, that will run, day after day, for months. It will have a representative American personality at the heart of it. An everyman for our time. It will tell an ongoing story, episode after episode, about this fictional, exemplary figure as he passes through his days and nights on earth. Screen it on TV, cable, TikTok or somewhere new, and show him suffering from illness, striving to make a living, worrying about his children, sacrificing for his children, confused and concerned about the future, celebrating life’s small triumphs and enduring life’s setbacks. Make the exemplary figure a male because, well, that is now the decisive segment of the American electorate.

Construct this episodic epic the way a great story is constructed: conflict, suspense, resolution. In this mad, unfocused time, give people the inherent rationality of a tale; make them focus intensely on something that will be dear to their own experience; that will gather up and order the loose ends of these chaotic days. In every respect, structure it like a simple, straightforward story. A tale that anyone would tell anyone else at a bar, in a park, on a train.

Amid the narrative arc tell other stories: show Trump boasting, Trump spewing middle-school insults and abuse, Trump hawking Teslas on the White House Lawn; Trump cavorting with the wealthy and the powerful; Trump contradicting himself; Trump barking at Zelensky; Trump’s regime fawning all over him; Trump allowing his insecurity to erupt when asked to respond to the charge that “Trump Always Chickens Out” (the fragility of his ego is breathtaking); Trump golfing, golfing, golfing — all of this as the Main Character struggles, suffers, grieves, endures.

A mortal life is a tale; the opposition has to return to life and tell a simple, undogmatic, non-didactic, existentially gratifying tale.

D.H. Lawrence wrote about the power of novels to tell stories: “They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” Like it or not, a tremulating tale got America into this mess. A better tremulating tale might help get us out of it.

In a new book, The Haves and Have-Yachts, a collection of essays written for The New Yorker over the past decade, Evan Osnos describes Hanley as “a bon vivant, with a fondness for salmon-colored slacks, and a ready checkbook for political ventures”. Hanley inherited, and expanded, a family business in construction supplies and oil. In 1980 he campaigned for Ronald Reagan in Connecticut, developing an approach that, Osnos writes, “uncannily prefigured Trump’s electoral strategy” by assembling “a coalition of conservative elites and the white working class”. Over the next decades he funded numerous organizations and initiatives that promoted a low-tax, small-state conservatism, including publishers, non-profits, and a powerful lobbying firm, Black, Manafort and Stone. (Roger Stone had been one of Reagan’s campaign managers; he would also, along with Paul Manafort, advise Trump.)

Then, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, Hanley commissioned a pollster to look deeper into the underlying mood in the United States. He was informed that “the level of discontent in this country was beyond anything measurable”. Hanley became convinced that Trump was the only politician capable of channeling this energy in a favorable direction, and set about converting other wealthy donors to the cause. It was a canny investment. Even as Trump gave expression to the anger of Bannon’s “hobbits”, his presidency brought immense material rewards for wealthy Americans, most obviously in the form of tax cuts, deregulation, and financial benefits during the Covid pandemic.

Reflecting on the role of figures like Hanley, Osnos concludes: “The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of America’s elite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.” That bargain is still paying off today. Trump’s latest budget, which cleared the House of Representatives last month, pledges to entrench and expand the tax cuts passed during his first term. By some estimates, those earning above $500,000 will receive more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts over the next decade, while a similar amount will be cut from government health insurance and food assistance programs. If we add to this the Trump family’s brazen use of office for self-enrichment, the privileges granted in return for financial contributions, and the political powers given to billionaires such as Elon Musk and David Sacks, then surely all but the most gullible can conclude that America’s regime deserves to be called oligarchy — rule by the wealthy few.

How did the US reach this point? And given the country’s increasingly fragile political and financial position — Trump is adding trillions to an already prolific national debt, even as his policies threaten economic chaos — how sustainable is it? Osnos’ book, subtitled Dispatches on the Ultrarich, provides some important answers to these questions. His starting assumption is that “Trump is a creature of the money-world, and, specifically, of a period of American thinking about greed, fairness, liberty, and dominance”. The essays try, in an almost sociological fashion, to draw back the curtain of this money-world, and “to capture the thinking and behavior of some of the world’s most powerful people”.

What these forays reveal is that, over the past five decades, a section of America’s elite has increasingly rejected constraints on their ability to accrue wealth, disavowing the notion that their great resources entail any special responsibility towards their fellow citizens. They have embraced a libertarian ethos which casts them simply as private individuals, responsible for their own fate, and entitled to enjoy their riches as they see fit. They have not, however, forgone the prerogative of using their money to shape government and society. The resulting pattern, traced in The Haves and Have-Yachts, has been a “simple arithmetic of compounding — of money making money, of lobbyists layering on new exemptions each decade, of the cultural amnesia that makes ideas about wealth come to seem normal, honorable, inevitable”. In 1978, the richest 0.1% of Americans controlled 7% of the country’s wealth; by 2023, their share was two-and-a-half times greater. Over the same period, the average tax rate of the top 0.01% fell by more than half.

The transformation of the American elite is illustrated by Greenwich, the Connecticut town where Osnos grew up. Known as “the hedge fund capital of the world”, Greenwich is home to a cluster of ultra-rich financiers, who cleave to the privacy of their high-walled estates and their superyachts. But it was not ever thus. The town was once the bastion of an older WASP elite, whose patrician culture included the beliefs that “showing off your money was déclassé”, and that wealth should “justify itself” in both private and public life. Typical of this milieu was Prescott Bush, a congressman in the Fifties and Sixties, and patriarch of the dynasty that would produce two presidents. The “ludicrously aristocratic” Prescott required his sons to wear a jacket and tie at the dinner table, while his grandchildren addressed him as “senator”. His political positions, including a higher minimum wage and taxation to fund investment, reflected a paternalistic sense of duty to the less fortunate.

Greenwich changed in part because its residents, already rich, became much richer, thanks to the post-Eighties boom in financial services. But this coincided with an ideological shift, led by figures like Hanley, away from the Country Club Republicanism of Prescott Bush and towards an outlook focused on personal liberty and suspicion of the state. One decisive moment came in 1980, when Hanley chose not to back local son George H.W. Bush in the Republican primary, working instead to ingratiate Reagan with the genteel denizens of Greenwich. Hanley’s wife even sourced an emergency replacement for the Californian senator’s “ghastly” brown tie.

In Osnos’ telling, this revolt of the elites and the subsequent decades of rising inequality would ultimately force conservatives into their volatile tryst with Trump, as they sacrificed their integrity to surf the wave of discontent which they helped to unleash. The basic insight here is that, while liberal democracies are in theory predicated on equality before the state, in practice they require the wealthy to play along. Once capital becomes sufficiently concentrated, there is always a danger that the richest will rig the system in their favor to the extent that they destroy its legitimacy. Such a moment almost arrived in the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century, an era of oligarchic power in the US that saw rising class conflict and political violence. It was the fear of revolution, together with the humbling of capital in the Great Depression, that created the opening for Franklin Roosevelt to construct the class compromises of the New Deal. The state expanded massively, and the rich were squeezed: taxes on estates larger than $50 million reached 77% in 1941. In the decades following the Second World War — the heyday of Prescott Bush — rapid economic growth helped reconcile elites to the claims of government.

This contract is now all but dead, its legal basis steadily chipped away. Wall Street discovered “vast new realms of speculation and financial engineering”, but those realms remained to a large extent unregulated. (At the height of the Gilded Age, during the financial crisis of 1907, America’s leading bankers had still assumed personal responsibility for backstopping the system; in 2008, by contrast, taxpayers were forced to take responsibility for them.) Big money moved into tax havens, prosecutions for white-collar crimes declined, and American states began competing to offer the wealthy the most accommodating terms. A proliferation of loopholes around estate taxes have ensured that — contrary to meritocratic justifications for extraordinary wealth — families can keep their fortunes intact from one generation to the next. In 2010, the Supreme Court lifted limits on political donations by individuals, with the effect that “candidates no longer needed large pools of rich supporters; they only needed small pools of ultrarich supporters”.

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The horizons of this moneyed class are, of course, much wider than the US itself. After the Cold War, the Pax Americana provided American business with opportunities around the world, while the wealthy had their playgrounds from the French Riviera to Dubai. In Osnos’ portrait of Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief almost resembles an imperial administrator, struggling to respond to a genocide being orchestrated through Facebook in faraway Myanmar. And the ultimate symbol of 21st-century wealth is the superyacht, “the most expensive objects our species has ever owned”, an artifact designed to flaunt money but also to enable the purest, most solipsistic enjoyment of it. (The fund manager Edward Lampert named his 288-foot vessel Fountainhead, after the Ayn Rand novel beloved of libertarians and defiant teenagers.)

Osnos’ subjects would doubtless dispute his portrayal of their self-interestedness. Tributes to Lee Hanley, for instance, noted his commitment to employees at his business, and many wealthy Americans devote large sums to philanthropy — though the preference for such personal largesse over tax contributions tells its own story about changing notions of public responsibility. More importantly, by treating Trump as the ultimate expression of oligarchic power, Osnos underplays a salient aspect of oligarchy in the American system: its presence on both sides of the political divide, Republican and Democratic. Wealthy elites wield plenty of influence among Trump’s opponents, as some of Osnos’ own vignettes suggest. In 2017, a raft of eminent liberals aboard the yacht of media executive David Geffen included Barack and Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey. Or consider the Getty family, heirs to mid-century America’s greatest fortune. Gordon Getty has hosted fundraisers for Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom at his mansion in San Francisco, while the “artist-model” Ivy Love Getty had her wedding officiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2021. A number of the Getty clan are now major donors to progressive causes, even as they energetically shield their vast trust from tax. Alexandra S. Getty has suggested that, while taxes are “very important”, the problem is that “if the wrong government is in control, then they all go to stuff I don’t support”.

In other words, America’s super-rich are not united in a single faction. This is not to say that their involvement in politics is balanced: while Forbes reported on the eve of the 2024 election that Harris had more billionaire donors than Trump (83 versus 52), Trump received more funding from billionaires in total thanks to the enormous contributions of Musk and Miriam Adelson. Moreover, an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness claims that, taking last year’s federal elections together, “over two-thirds (70%) of billionaire-family contributions went in support of GOP candidates and conservative causes”. It also reports that billionaire political spending is now an astonishing 160 times higher than in 2010.

Still, while it may be comforting for New Yorker readers to think otherwise, big money alone cannot explain how Trump won two elections — or how the Democrats lost them. Answering that question would require, among other things, a more rounded picture of America’s class system than Osnos provides. By his own admission, he is giving us “the view from the top”, but this creates the illusion of a society that is straightforwardly divided between the many and the few. In fact, private wealth is just one source of elite status in modern society, albeit the most powerful. There are also managerial, political and cultural elites. These divisions matter, because they are central to the aims and methods of Trump’s wealthy supporters.

Many leading MAGA figures have a particular antipathy to the managerial class that runs corporate America and Washington D.C. Musk has taken a slash-and-burn approach to bureaucracy in his companies and now in the federal government. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the leading MAGA think tank, has written of the need to revitalize US capitalism by systematically diminishing the influence of university-educated corporate managers. Another prominent Trump backer, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has touted something called the “iron law of oligarchy”, derived from the political theorist James Burnham. As Andreessen explained, “there’s no actual system of democracy, because you always end up with a small minority in charge of a large majority in basically every society in human history.” He portrays the Trump-supporting oligarchy as a “counter-elite”, whose goal is to save American liberty and economic dynamism from the rule of “expert technocrats” aligned with the Left.

Of course, Andreessen’s own remarks show that there is some role for democracy even in an oligarchic system: he is discussing a presidential election after all. Intra-elite conflicts can be waged by mobilizing popular anger at institutions perceived to be hostile or ideologically corrupt. This brings us to the Trumpian riddle that Osnos sets out at the start of his book: “to understand why a voter could revile ‘the elite’ and revere the billionaire scion of a New York real estate fortune”. One reason is simply that Trump and his allies do not belong to the same parts of the elite as the people this voter reviles. Yes, when wealthy businessmen with Harvard or Stanford credentials attack elites, it is usually self-serving and often cynical; but what matters politically is that there is a considerable audience which thinks they have a point.

In truth, more than one of America’s elite groupings have helped to pave the way for the chaos of Trump’s second term. Since the election, many on the Left have acknowledged their own part in making voters feel frustrated and insecure, whether through the condescending tone of cultural institutions or the dysfunction of Democrat-governed cities. It is possible for an irresponsible and exploitative super-rich class to coexist with wasteful and ineffective governments; in fact, this now seems to be the status quo in much of the Western world. Osnos is right, however, to observe that the disillusionment created by elites is now forcing them to embrace unpredictable forms of populism to maintain their power. Trump will surely not be the final iteration of this process.

While ostensibly addressing an important issue — concentrated wealth and power — Biden ultimately offered a shallow and pettily partisan account in a way that embodied his political failure as he exits the stage of history.

As many have noted, there was plenty of irony to be found in the address. Democrats, not Republicans, have recently been favored — in donations and votes — by corporate America, including Big Tech, a few prominent defectors notwithstanding. But the issue with Biden’s speech wasn’t that it was hypocritical given his party’s fundraising prowess and increasingly upscale base. Ike himself, after all, had overseen the expansion of the very military-industrial complex he decried, but at least he ended his presidency with a memorable articulation of the problem that pointed the finger at an institution with which he was closely associated.

Biden, in contrast, followed up his comments on a real crisis that has been mounting for decades — a rising oligarchy — with some indications that the main such people he’s concerned about aren’t oligarchs writ large, so much as a few in particular: Donald Trump and his cronies. In this respect, he showed little understanding of why his presidency is ending in such lousy fashion: a governing vision that has vacillated between a broad critique of concentrated wealth and a far narrower one focused on the crisis represented by Trump.

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“Never let a good crisis go to waste”: This phrase, attributed to Winston Churchill, was notably repurposed by Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama. Emanuel’s reference was to the 2008 financial crisis, which brought an end to two decades of bipartisan optimism about the US economy. But as former Obama adviser Reed Hundt argued in his 2019 book, A Crisis Wasted, Obama failed to seize on the opportunity to remake the economic order. Infamously, he bailed out the banks but left homeowners underwater; he also initiated quantitative-easing policies that juiced the markets but redounded heavily to the benefit of the asset-rich; and presided over a dramatic worsening of inequality. Trump’s successful defiance of GOP economic orthodoxies around free trade and entitlements and his defeat of Hillary Clinton amounted to a belated verdict on Obama’s inability to deliver real reform.

The Biden presidency, which began amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic, offered the possibility of a do-over. Many saw the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted under two months after Biden’s inauguration, as proof his administration had discarded the excessive caution that got in the way of Obama’s hope to be a transformative president. After campaigning mostly as a moderate with the modest goal of helping lead the nation out of crisis, Biden entered office promising to be the “most progressive president since FDR,” whose portrait he hung above the fireplace in the Oval Office.

If we didn’t know Biden’s party had lost decisively after his ignominious withdrawal from the campaign, his farewell address might have sounded like a victory lap. To be sure, he can’t be faulted for an unwillingness to “go big”, between the stimulus packages, the revival of a trust-busting agenda targeting big corporations, and the industrial policy aimed at, as Biden put it, “creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products”. Congressional progressives are happy to give him credit for all this. So why weren’t working-class voters, who not only didn’t bring back the FDR-era Democratic supermajority, but drifted even further from the party?

Many plausible answers have already been offered to this question: Biden couldn’t overcome the global anti-incumbency wave fed by inflation; he failed to control the border; the industrial and infrastructure projects he subsidized will take too long to come online to generate immediate benefits; his own senility and Kamala Harris’s inept candidacy doomed them; and so on. But Biden’s farewell address highlighted something more fundamental. Despite his administration’s sweeping economic reforms, it remained wedded to the Democratic Party’s main post-2016 sales pitch, which is roughly: whatever we are, at least we aren’t Donald Trump.

Consider the “real dangers” of the “tech-industrial complex” highlighted in Biden’s speech: not, for instance, the immense power wielded over employees by companies such as Uber (whose general counsel, as it happens, served as one of Kamala Harris’s main advisers in the 2024 race), but an “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation”. He went on to lament that “social media is giving up on fact-checking”, an allusion to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he would retire Meta’s fact-checking program in favor of community notes.

The notion that the gravest crisis affecting the country is “misinformation”, to be countered by fact-checking, can be traced back to the frantic postmortems that followed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. That Biden is sticking to this message up to his final day in office suggests his party has hardly evolved since then, even though the misinformation narrative has been widely disputed and the eight-year war on “fake news” utterly failed to achieve its main objective: preventing Trump’s return to office.

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No less than Obama, then, Biden let a crisis go to waste. But part of the reason for this was he and his party, for self-interested reasons, misrecognized what the crisis was. A whole series of threats — Vladimir Putin’s Russia, fake news, authoritarianism, Covid — were conjured up or made to stand in for the crisis ostensibly represented by one man. Yet while Trump has been a crisis for the political class, most of the public hasn’t viewed him that way; even many who didn’t vote for him were unreceptive to the Democrats’ “saving-democracy” messaging. Moreover, in 2024 even more than earlier cycles, many saw his disruptive presence as a necessary response to crises they do care about, and the political class doesn’t: affordability, crime, out-of-control immigration.

The concentrated wealth of a man such as Elon Musk, who has now used it to buy himself a place in the president-elect’s inner circle, is a genuine concern — a crisis, perhaps. But Biden and his party have spent most of the past eight years claiming not that they will confront such influence-peddling, but posturing as the defenders of an establishment we all know was corrupted by the wealthy long before Trump first took control of the GOP.

In his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR could declare that “business and financial monopoly” were “unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred”. In 2024, Kamala Harris could say no such thing — and on the contrary, she regularly cited the plaudits she received from Goldman Sachs and other corporate interests as the ultimate proof of her competence. To anyone who remembers this, Biden’s warnings about oligarchy ring hollow.

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

Marquise S. sat in the driver’s seat of an old black Honda on Oakland’s Foothill Boulevard with white powder spread out over his knees. A slender young black woman sat in the passenger seat; a young black man with braids sat in the back. Marquise, a black man, looks like he’s in his early thirties. Rolling a piece of paper into a straw, he offered me a bump.

I declined, but he was willing to talk to me about the recent election anyway. “I voted for Trump,” he said, before I had the chance to ask.

Across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland is the African-American cultural capital of the West Coast. As the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, its politics are famously Left-wing. Kamala Harris was born here and claims it as her hometown. She even kicked off her 2020 presidential campaign in front of Oakland City Hall.

Yet from what I can tell, among black voters in Oakland, there’s never been an overwhelming sense of loyalty to Harris. I interviewed black Oakland residents both before and after she became the presidential nominee. Since she lost the election, I’ve interviewed several more. The lack of enthusiasm she inspires among black voters speaks to her weakness as a candidate. But more importantly, it indicates the long-growing disillusionment of black Americans with the Democratic Party, which was borne out in Donald Trump’s successful courtship of the working-class black vote during the election. In particular, Trump doubled his support from young black men.

“I don’t care about Kamala. Who’s Kamala? She’s just a woman,” a young woman in West Oakland named Sakai told me. She voted for Trump, and insisted that gas and grocery prices were already going down as a result of the election. “Life is going to go back to what it was before 2020 took place.”

Even the black Oakland residents I spoke to who had voted for Harris had done so without much enthusiasm. Dionne, a middle-aged black woman who works at an OB-GYN clinic in East Oakland, voted for Harris despite aligning more closely with Republican values — especially when it came to abortion. “I feel like [the Democrats are] leaning way in a direction that I’m not ready for,” she told me. When I asked her what issues she had in mind, she spoke of the Democrats allowing biological men to use the women’s restrooms, and how that could open the door for predators to go after kids.

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But the most immediate factor driving black voters away from the Democrats is the one driving voters of all races away: immigration.

Michelle is a 60-year-old black woman who grew up in Harris’s neighbourhood in Berkeley before moving to Oakland at the age of eight. She’s deeply involved in local politics. And over the years, she has gone from being a lifelong Democrat to  a Trump supporter. “We’ve always had a messianic complex,” she said of black American voters and their loyalty to Democrats. “There were always figures who could dazzle us with bullshit.”

The final straw for Michelle was the Democrats’ “insane” policies on immigration. Democratic politicians “blatantly drop like 10 or 15,000 immigrants into a black neighborhood, blatantly giving them resources they don’t give us,” she said. The wave of new immigrants under Biden, she believes, is driving down working-class wages. Moreover, she said, “a lot of the young males are dangerous”. She knows older immigrants who have been in Oakland for decades who feel the same way about the new arrivals.

Marquise felt a similar way. When I asked him why he doesn’t support the Democrats, he replied: “To tell the truth: immigrants.” “There’s too many in California.” He said that there are no jobs available. The woman in the passenger seat agreed, describing overcrowded classrooms filled with immigrant children who weren’t required to be immunised. She complained about teachers “speaking Mexican” in class.

When I asked Marquise what he liked about Trump, he replied that the President-elect would “get rid of all the Mexicans”. He also believed that Trump would let a lot of people out of prison. “He’s an asshole, but not that bad,” he explained.

There’s another, more subtle factor eroding loyalty to the Democrats: the party’s failure to improve economic conditions for working-class black Americans. The Democratic Party’s long history is littered with broken promises to black voters. The disappointments span the decades, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Barack Obama’s promise of Hope.

Michelle’s older brother, Cardell Watkins, doesn’t particularly like Trump. But when he heard Trump speaking in 2016 about how bleak conditions were for black Americans under Democratic governance, his ears pricked up. “You’re living in poverty,” Trump riffed. “Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed.” The speech touched a nerve.

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Watkins, 62, has been a longshoreman for two decades. He currently works at the Port of Oakland. We, longshoremen, he said, “work ourselves to death”. The average longshoreman retires at about 70 years old, he said, and only lives to the age of 73 or 74. His granddaughter is a longshoreman, too. He’s constantly telling her to get out and go to school.

That said, as a union worker, Watkins has done well for himself. He’s been making about $150,000 a year for the better part of the last decade, with only a high-school diploma. He moved out of Oakland and now lives in Fairfield, a Bay Area suburb. “I’m around white people,” he told me. “I’ve never been so happy in my life. The front yards are clean, there’s no constant blaring of sirens.”

“I don’t want my grandchildren growing up in Oakland,” he said. “All the trash on the street, all the undocumented people coming in, all the lies.” He said he understands “white flight” now.

Watkins believes that local politicians, who are almost entirely Democrats, “have failed us”. “The Nancy Pelosis. Do you know how wealthy they are now?” The Democrats inherited San Francisco and Oakland, two cities with thriving maritime industries, he said, and “[ran] them into the ground”.

“They’re not interested in changing, in making America better. They’re interested in power and influence. They can live on Martha’s Vineyard, they can move to Switzerland, where there’s no crime or dirt in the streets. Once you become infinitely wealthy, the whole world is your neighbourhood.”

When he was a kid, Watkins was raised to believe in Democratic leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young, who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. “They were able to tell us who to endorse and support,” he said. “We were in lockstep.”

But over the years, he saw those leaders betray ordinary black Americans, putting their careers before their constituents. “Once they got what they wanted from us, they didn’t have our best interests at heart,” he said. “We were being used.” His sister, Michelle, agrees.

When Obama first came on the scene, the siblings were exuberant. Michelle described Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention as “magic”. But by the end of his presidency, they felt used all over again. By then, “[Obama] didn’t even really believe the shit he was saying no more,” said Michelle.

Michelle recalls the moment she lost faith in the Obama project. It was during the Great Recession, when Michelle was doing loan modifications for a bank called World Savings, trying to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. At the time, Senator Elizabeth Warren favoured a policy called “cramdown”, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce people’s mortgage debts to bring them into line with the reduced values of their homes. “This was going to be a lifeline,” Michelle said. “It could have saved so many people.” She believes that Obama killed it, helping the banks facilitate what she described as “the greatest transfer of black wealth in the history of the country”.

These days she sees Obama as just another condescending politician. “He’s made a cottage industry of always talking down to black people.” “He’s uplifting for every other race. But always kind of negative toward black people.”

This year, both Michelle and her brother thought Kamala Harris was just more of the same. “She doesn’t care about black people,” Watkins told me. “She just wants to be president — another Rolex in her jewellery box.”

Such scepticism was widespread among the voters I spoke to, but it was especially pronounced among the younger ones. Watkins and Michelle’s generation was raised in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Its heroes became elected leaders who basked in history’s heroic glow as they operated the levers of the Democratic machine. Yet the lives of younger black Americans today have been shaped by what that movement failed to reverse: enduring, racialised poverty; urban blight; and endemic violence.

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Michelle’s support for Trump has made her somewhat of a pariah among African Americans of her generation. But she believes that among younger black people the partisan loyalty that was so deeply ingrained in her is entirely absent. “The Democratic Party has lost the young black generation,” she told me. “They’re gone. And that’s in liberal Oakland. They want no part of it.”

Marquise’s views confirm her suspicions. “She full of shit,” Marquise said of Harris. When Harris kicked off her campaign, her team seemed to assume that young voters would flock to her. When Charli XCX tweeted that Harris was “brat”, her campaign revelled in the approval, rebranding her online presence to match the pop artist’s album cover.

But on the topic of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion performing alongside Kamala during her campaign, Marquise said “It’s hella ghetto. Unprofessional.” He marvelled that Kamala Harris would put someone like Cardi B on stage with her while Trump was campaigning with Elon Musk.

The only reason the Democrats selected Harris, Marquise believes, was because she was a “minority”. But for black voters like him, appeals to identity politics are no longer enough to ensure their loyalty. Instead, they want to see real change — Michelle pointed to things like student reading scores, poverty, and crime. She said that the Democrats’ appeal to black voters was always “emotional, never practical”. She was tired of the “paternalistic attitude the party has taken toward black people”.

Nowadays, Watkins said that the workers at the union hiring hall, who are mostly black and Latino, are “flying their colours” for Donald Trump. Like him, they’re tired of being told what to think and who to vote for.

“I don’t have anything against her or anyone else,” Watkins said of Kamala Harris. “Just don’t tell me I have to support her, or that Trump’s been associated with white supremacy so I can’t vote for him. I’m tired of the bullshit. If it takes a white supremacist to get things done, so be it.”

Today, these words ring just as true in late neoliberal America. And it is the Democrats, formerly the party of the people, who occupy the place of the “Tory establishment”, with all the same lordly arrogance but with none of the Old World aristocratic charm.

The Democrats could learn from this comparison as they attempt to rebuild. For just as Disraeli concluded that the Tories should seek to harmonise class differences rather than flattening them, so too can Democratic elites serve ordinary citizens while acknowledging the chasms that exist between them.

But who can possibly assume the part of an American Disraeli? (Certainly not a revived candidate Kamala Harris!) Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, may have been lucky to be passed over as Harris’s vice-presidential pick, for he is now set to be a leading presidential candidate in 2028. With his tailored, tie-less suits, and his too rehearsed “White Obama” speaking style, he represents almost perfectly just the kind of professional managerial elite that has come to dominate the Democratic camp. Yet he has earned the confidence of moderate and working-class voters, precisely the demographics which sank Harris. In 2024, Shapiro increased his national recognition without necessarily being tarred by the Harris campaign’s disastrous performance.

Unlike the flamboyantly folksy Tim Walz, with his camo gear and football coach anecdotes, or Shapiro’s intraparty rival John Fetterman, with his hoodie and shorts, the governor has come far with voters without affecting the aesthetics of a working-class person. Instead, he has attempted to reach the working class through clever policy innovation, notably, his trailblazing first executive order which removed college requirements for 65,000 public service jobs. His fierce mutual antipathy with the pro-Palestine Left, as a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, has also served to establish distance between himself and his party’s noisy activist class; the repair of a collapsed bridge in record time (weeks rather than months) demonstrated a basic competence rarely seen in elected officials.

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This approach of lifting up workers without trying too hard to appear to be like them is a promising avenue. Delivering tangible results while rejecting the tiresome diversions of progressive pet causes could regain the trust of voters. It is, in many ways, the opposite of the patronising and moralising mentality of the Democratic political class, which either looks to make everyone else like them, through the aggressive propagation of the “correct” social values, or else attempts to turn them into another captured client group, to be pandered to with shallow symbolic gestures. Once more, the contrast must be drawn with Walz, whom Darel E. Paul has described as “a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man”.

The Democratic Party’s unfolding identity crisis, a kind of “social class dysphoria” to use a metaphor that would make sense to its gender activists, arises out of the contradiction between its historical — but now grossly outdated — self-conception as the New Deal-era party of the underdogs, and its actual condition as the natural home for college-educated elites. Now, of course, a college diploma by no means guarantees economic success — there are “poorly educated” millionaires in America as well as minimum-wage baristas with PhDs — but, on average, four-year college educations are still a reliable indicator of social mobility, economic advancement, and most of all, cultural prestige.

To resolve this tension, Democrats raised in the meritocratic pieties of the Clinton-Obama era will have to confront a difficult truth. The future of politics will not rest on realising a rational unity between enlightened liberals and working people (“why do they vote against their interests?”), but on acknowledging that there are natural and likely irreconcilable cultural differences between the two classes, which can neither be erased by the “march of progress” nor elided by Obamaesque appeals to a post-partisan America.

Yet again, Disraeli put it best: elites, whether in industrial England or post-industrial America, must embrace the existence of distinct “classes of the realm… equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give strength and variety to our national life”. Thus if, as Adlai Stevenson (who was himself a Disraelian figure) said, the Democrats should be the “party of everyone” — not “everyone” crudely understood as an undifferentiated mass, but as an organic community of variegated and interdependent estates.

Holding society together, in spite of its entrenched moral asymmetries, calls for a settlement of some kind: not a mass conversion of the proles to the “National Church” of the patricians, but rather a social compact in which the latter must serve the former out of duty or noblesse oblige.

Such an effort would amount to an American application of the Disraelian ideal of “Tory Democracy” or “one-nation conservatism”, in which class differences are affirmed but also harnessed and synthesised in the service of national unity, industrial progress, and social order. An analogous “one-nation liberalism” may not strike a chord in a culturally egalitarian and “middle-class” republic like the United States, but it is at least premised on a more realistic account of the starkly bifurcated society America has become. And if the Democrats are indeed the “conservative” faction in this society, Disraeli’s politics of pragmatic inter-class harmony may be a better standard for the party than either the pseudo-revolutionary radicalism of the campus Left or the genteel progressive puritanism of the liberal establishment (which puts one in mind of Disraeli’s rival Gladstone).

In practice, it would call on professional elites to follow the lead of Shapiro’s governorship in finding pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, instead of pursuing grand projects of moral homogenisation. It would seek to help the working class materially — through higher wages, child tax credits, and accessible vocational education — while giving them a greater stake in their government (as both Shapiro and Disraeli did). Yet it would do all this without expecting to initiate them into the same ideological milieu that progressives inhabit, by elevating more non-college-educated Americans to positions of public authority and cultural visibility. A more broadly representative Democratic Party along these lines would have paid more heed to concerns around inflation and immigration than did the Biden-Harris administration.

And just as this settlement would allow working-class citizens “to be themselves”, so to speak, it would also let the members of the professional managerial “estate” inhabit their own rarified niches and lifestyles as private and non-generalisable subcultures. If, as Pennsylvania state senator Jordan A. Harris said, the current Democratic Party is “too much Starbucks and not enough Dunkin’ Donuts”, then a better balance has to be struck. Yet it will nonetheless have to be one which retains and accommodates the sensibilities of both the macchiato-drinker and the Munchkin-eater.

Under such a dispensation, no longer will progressives have to keep searching in vain for “our own Joe Rogan” or “working-class whisperer”. They can instead emulate America’s greatest aristocrat and its greatest democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in speaking freely in the tone and tenor of a patrician elite — but from a place of genuine respect and decency for all fellow citizens, whatever their station. Whether Shapiro, or any Democrat, can embody such an archetype remains to be seen. But, relegated to four long years of opposition, the party should assess the reasons for its repudiation while considering the line uttered by Disraeli’s heroine Sybil: “Power has only one duty — to secure the social welfare of the people.”

I’m talking, of course, about the 1980 election. Though I could mean 2024. For in their Republican triumph and desolate Democratic failure, the contests are remarkably similar. That’s clear wherever you look, from the focus on hostages, variously in Iran or Gaza, to how Trump and Reagan tapped into the concerns of young people and the middle class while Harris, like Carter, relied on exhausted (and exhausting) invective while offering nothing more substantive themselves.

Not, of course, that smart historical dovetail is merely a matter for historians. On the contrary, it offers hints about how the defeated Left-wing of American politics may yet revive. For just as the Democrats absorbed the lessons of 1980, readjusting their message, returning to the White House, and ultimately dominating the political scene until Trump’s first victory in 2016 — so too must their modern successors relearn the practical policies that made their forebears so potent.

That earlier Democratic revival, culminating in the liberal dominance of the Nineties, wasn’t really about any single policy. Rather, to quote former party activist Ted Van Dyke, it was about “being more in tune with the voters’ thinking”. Unlike the miserable Harris campaign, or indeed those waged by Carter, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale, what became the New Democrats focused not on vague appeals to “values” or “joy”, but on winning. With brilliant communicators like Bill Clinton, as well as the early Al Gore or Gary Hart providing youthful energy, they spoke both common sense and empathy, managing to reach New York liberals and hard-nosed Southern bubbas.

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What a contrast with today’s Democratic Party, led by a senile old man, and stalked by progressive mediocrities such as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Living in their own universe, they have little idea of what Main Street thinks, drawing instead on the progressive culture increasingly dominant in classrooms, offices, the media, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Their outreach to the masses consisted largely of tapping hyper-partisan celebrities. It’s a message that fell on fallow ground everywhere from suburbs and exurbs to smaller cities — basically anywhere in America that looks set to grow over the coming decades.

Far more even than Obama, in short, people like Clinton understood Americans in ways reminiscent of Truman and Reagan. That, in turn, was reflected in the post-Eighties policy agenda. Turning away from Carter’s missives about national malaise or arguments for green austerity, they instead embraced economic growth, personal responsibility and colourblind racial policies. Rather than back the policies of green lobbies or civil rights activists, they embraced a kind of Fabian liberalism. As a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute, I witnessed this approach first-hand, as we attacked Democratic Party bromides on issues such as racial quotas, criminal sentencing, trade and education, often to the consternation of traditional party constituencies.

What of Democratic policy in more recent times? Biden’s huge expansion of government did boost some special interests, notably green and race grifters, as well as wealthy stock and property owners. But Bidenomics failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class, even as inflation hit hardest among the least affluent. One-in-four Americans fears losing their job over the next year, even as roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of home ownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

This divergence, of both policy and personnel, has had stark consequences. By shifting to the centre, Clinton undermined Reaganism while once more becoming competitive in parts of the South and Midwest. These days, though, the Democrats are electoral poison across much of the country. That’s clear enough when you consider the success of their opponents. Trump more than doubled his margin among working-class voters, enjoying a lead over Harris of more than 10%. He also gained among other traditional Democratic voters, including Jews, Asians and even some African Americans. Perhaps 45% of Latinos, arguably the most critical voting bloc in the land, stumped for Trump too. That’s a record for a Republican: in 2012 the GOP candidate managed under 30%.

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And if that should make grim reading for liberals, surely the most galling thing is that many Democrats don’t even seem willing to face facts. With their base in the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy and the media, the party now operates with almost Stalinist conformity, using influencers to lambast their opponents with a ferocity even the Man of Steel would have appreciated. Party supporters seem out-of-touch too: a recent poll of urban professionals found their views on everything from meat consumption to freedom of speech differs drastically from those of most Americans.

This Manichean mania has led progressives not to rethink but assail. As Van Jones, a long-time Democratic operative has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Not that the situation is hopeless. Look backwards to the Eighties and contemporary Democrats will find a clear roadmap for the future. First, they should move away from identity politics. To regain primacy, they’ll need to row back on progressive ideas such as transgenderism, reparations and racial quotas, all backed by no more than 30% of Americans. Second, they must focus on economic growth and opportunity. Unlike Biden, Clinton understood that expanding government for the sake of it is pointless. Rather, he favoured tax policies that would spark growth, and poured billions into law enforcement to address the popular concerns over crime.

Whatever one thinks of them, meanwhile, redistribution of income, universal healthcare and higher taxes on the corporate elite are all popular ideas. Especially given Trump will doubtless oppose these measures, they seem like good ways of peeling off his base.

None of this will be easy to achieve in practice. Nowadays, reformers face an ever more strident progressive base — one whose whole raison d’être is destructive identity politics. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, whose inanity epitomises an entire ideology, is already blaming white women for failing Harris. Activist Democratic women, for their part, blame the vice president’s defeat on misogyny among the multi-racial unwashed.

In the first instance, then, the Democrats must find their Clinton, someone who can bridge the gap between more radical progressives and the big money people who fund the party. Fortunately, there are signs that new leaders are emerging, politicians brave enough to break with the progressives on issues such as immigration and fracking. That includes John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro, both Pennsylvania senators, as well as the New York congressman Ritchie Torres. Together with Andy Beshear in Kentucky, they’re far better harbingers of a revived party than rich boy virtue signallers like Gavin Newson (California) or J.B. Pritzker (Illinois), both of whom have done a masterful job of undermining their own economies.

There’s other good news for the Democrats, with much of the country clearly primed for a return to the centre. Los Angeles, Oakland, St Louis, San Francisco, Buffalo, Seattle — in all these cities, far-Left candidates have been squashed by more moderate alternatives. So too were Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two members of the “Squad” decisively beaten by more traditional Democrats. A dozen Soros-funded district attorneys, ominously radical in their approach to criminal justice, were similarly turfed out.

No less important, the Democrats must realise that their Republican rivals are far from invulnerable — this is the first time in 20 years that they have won the popular vote. No less than the Left, the Right is plagued by its own lunatic fringe, particularly on issues like book bans, guns, and abortion, which in different ways tend to alienate independent voters. The record of the cacophonic GOP House majority is hardly enviable.

Trump, being Trump, is bound to make things easier for reasonable Democrats. His grave personal faults will make a repeat of Reagan’s “morning in America” unlikely. More to the point, Trump will struggle, as did Biden, with increasing global instability and the country’s bewildering concentration of wealth. Trump, then, may offer bigger profits and lower taxes, but as the heir to fortune and worshipper of mammon, he remains an unlikely leader of a “people’s party” that reflects what most people actually need and aspire to. As their electoral successes vividly prove, the New Democrats understood just that.

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.

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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.”

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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.

This captures so much of today’s strangeness. A great jolting reality check has once again been delivered to all those who convinced themselves that something else was in store because their gut — or their centrist prophets — had told them so.

Many of us have spent the past few months watching the great American drama play out on our screens, wondering what it was that we were missing in this supposedly transformative figure of Kamala Harris, destined to prosecute Donald Trump out of history — even potentially with a “blowout” victory for the ages.

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Harris was deeply impressive, we were told. She spoke to the soccer moms of America. The suburbs were rallying behind her. Her choice of Tim Walz was inspired. She was brat. The Republicans were weird. Nancy Pelosi was a genius for getting rid of Joe Biden. Biden was a giant who had saved American democracy. Abortion was the issue which would crush Trump. And yet, here we are. Fox has called the election. Donald Trump will be president again — only this time with a new electoral coalition behind him that has the potential to transform American politics not just for a term, but for a generation.

And here’s where I depart from McCarthy. While there certainly seems to have been very little to the story of Kamala Harris, the climax of the Trump show does tell us something about what the world is becoming.

This is not 2016, it is something more seismic. That first Trump election was but a tremor it seems, the disaffected white working class merely the first group to break from the old order before the stampede to come. This time, Latinos, African Americans and the young appear to have followed suit, with as many as one in three minority voters backing Trump. For so long we have been told that demography is destiny and that the Democratic Party was en route to an unbeatable rainbow coalition, as if the policies they were offering did not matter. That narrative should now be put out of its misery, Canadian style.

Harris was a poor candidate with almost no discernable message, parachuted in to save an unpopular administration on the unbelievable basis that she did not offer continuity but, apparently, change. It was a fundamentally bogus offer.

It seems remarkable to say it, but Trump was the substantive candidate in this election offering a critique of the incumbent’s record. What was the Harris message of this election? What was the substance of her trade, immigration or foreign policy? What was it that she offered other than the fact she was not Donald Trump? She was an actor, a cypher. By the end, her offer amounted to a single issue: abortion. It wasn’t enough.

For much of the past decade, Trump stalked his former party with messages about the border, trade and “woke”. The Democrats knew the threat and nominated Joe Biden as a holding figure in 2020 who would see off Trump before passing on the baton to the next generation. And then, it turned out, there was not a new Biden able to assemble the old Democratic coalition. Now an entirely new one needs to be assembled.

Trump is currently on course not just to win the electoral college (a plus 95% chance according to The New York Times) but the popular vote itself, a scenario deemed implausible only yesterday. It looks like he will sweep all the battleground states and more besides. Though this is no Reagan landslide, Trump is making inroads far beyond his 2016 base. He is winning in the New York suburbs and among conservative immigrants.

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Ultimately, Joe Biden was right that his vice president was a weaker candidate than he had been and Obama was before him. Harris was weaker than Hillary Clinton, too. The Democratic Party’s presidential nominees are getting progressively worse. Some Democratic analysts were arguing overnight that Harrris had been denied the time to introduce herself to the American public. But this only reveals the depth of their denial. Biden was no longer fit for the presidency and would surely have lost by an even greater margin, yes. But Harris was only as plausible as she was because she was parachuted in at the last moment. It is surely the case that the emptiness of the drama she offered could only be sustained for the mini-series we got.

Trump on the other hand seems to have improved as a candidate. He has honed his message without abandoning its essential themes. He was no longer promising to ban all Muslims arriving in the US or promising to get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Yet everyone knew that voting Trump meant tighter immigration restrictions, protectionism, anti-wokery and opposition to foreign entanglements: a potent combination in any democracy. It may not be true, but that was the message.

This is important because America means something in the world beyond its borders — and not just because of its power. It acts as a great distorting mirror, offering an image of humanity that can appear grotesque in its violence and inequality and churning, revolutionary individualism. But like any good caricature, it captures something about humanity in its endless, anarchic strife. Trump horrifies many outside the United States, but like Tony Soprano or Walter White, all the more so because they see something in him that they recognise. He is a portent. Harris is little more than her caricature on SNL.

For years, it has been the European Left which has been taking its politics from America, adopting the manners and assumptions of the imperial hegemon, seeking its respect. Now, surely, it will be the Right which is empowered, much as happened in the Eighties. The European Union is already following Trump’s protectionism and immigration instincts. With Giorgia Meloni in power in Italy and Kemi Badenoch stalking Keir Starmer in Britain, expect a coalescing of Western conservatism.

What now for the homeless centrists? What of the podcast kings for the liberal left-behinds who were predicting a Harris sweep — or even for the polling chiefs running 80,000 simulations showing Harris marginally winning in some implausibly precise number? My prediction: they will remain and they will continue to herd.

Even before the results started coming in, Nate Silver was accusing pollsters of “backfitting their data to match the polling averages, regardless of what the survey actually said”. And yet, this is what we all pored over before the election, instead of concentrating on the policies of each candidate and how they will affect the lives of those inside and outside the United States. For the false prophets, there is, of course, the consolation of decline, the idea of history still moving in an ordered direction — with them being on the right side, of course.

For the next four years, though, the great American drama is back with a dark new series. A new story is unfolding. We are back in Trump’s world and we don’t yet know what he is going to do with it.

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

“You worked with [segregationist Senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said in a 2019 debate. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

It was an effective assault, abetted by the element of surprise. Above all because busing had disappeared from the national conversation 50 years ago. Biden, in the one off-the-record moment of his that makes me actually like him, turned to his debate neighbour Pete Buttigieg as soon as the cameras were off and said: “Well, that was some fucking bullshit.”

But Harris’ salvo was indicative of a general schism within the Democratic Party — and it’s telling that, according to a Politico article on the incident, she was willing to sacrifice a future career with a Biden administration in order to make this point. The Seventies revealed fundamentally different strains within the Democratic Party. The past half century may be thought of as a time loop of the Dems rehashing the same debates — not least because so many senior figures in the party were also around at that time. Perhaps Harris’ catastrophic loss in the 2024 election can be thought of as the end of that cycle.

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The march of Kamala's brides

By David Samuels

In the Seventies, the Democrats protected a fraying vision of the Great Society. Courts appeared to cement liberal principles into law, but public confidence in what was essentially a social democratic state was dissipating. The Republicans, in their period of exile at the time, withdrew from that system altogether with the famous formulation “government is the problem”. But the Democrats found themselves pulled in different directions — and continue to be all these years later.

Back then, the progressive wing of the party felt that it was on the cusp of a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung — finally putting to bed the monsters of America’s past and ushering in a more socially equitable society. That narrow success was symbolised by the vanishingly slight margins of victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), which used a somewhat tangential legal argument to close off the abortion debate, and in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which affirmative action survived through the highly ambivalent opinion of a single Supreme Court justice. But the Reagan Revolution and the gradual Rightward turn of the courts meant that progressives have had to fight tooth-and-nail since then for the kinds of social gains that for a brief moment in the Seventies seemed like they might materialise through popular will. Those causes included the long battle for gay and lesbian rights, which finally culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 support of gay marriage; the battle against restrictions on pornography and sexual harassment; and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had at one time seemed a foregone conclusion and then was fought out in a guerrilla campaign before finally being abandoned sometime in the Eighties.

To the extent that the short-lived Kamala Harris movement had a coherent theme, it was about going back to this moment in time in the Seventies, when the momentum stalled for social progressivism, and trying to start the clock up again. It seemed providential that Harris ascended to the top of the party not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that she made abortion rights the sole substantive issue of her presidential campaign. But Harris’ attack on Biden in the 2019 debate is maybe even more revealing. Harris wasn’t actually advocating for busing — which had been deeply divisive among liberals and was essentially a dead letter after a 1974 Supreme Court decision — but she felt that it was crucial to carry the torch. She symbolised the lost progressive cause, which could finally move forward.

Elsewhere on the progressive wing of the party, the focus wasn’t so much on 1973 or 1974 but on 1980. Bernie Sanders ran his two races for the White House on a notion that the United States had made a catastrophically wrong turn with Reagan’s election. That turn pulled the plug on a social democratic system and ushered in an era of runaway capitalism and rampant inequality. Sanders, in various speeches and statements, has been completely explicit about his political chronometry. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. In 2014, in what would become his standard campaign pitch, Sanders said: “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.” The point is that the Scandinavian countries never went down the Reaganite/Thatcherite road.

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It may seem surprising then that Joe Biden — the stick-in-the-mud villain of Kamala Harris’ framing — ended up, while in office, embracing a great deal of Sanders’ rhetoric and perspective. In announcing his 2021 Executive Order on Competition, Biden’s language was pure Sanders. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.”

Biden’s sudden adherence to a Sandersesque vision of government was comprehensible, according to the antitrust advocate Barry C. Lynn, in terms of generational memory. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.”

And the centrist side of the Democratic Party, which houses Biden, has had its own fraught relations with the national dysfunction of the Seventies. Jimmy Carter, in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of 1979, put into vivid terms the breakdown of the Great Society vision. “We’ve always believed in… progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” Carter said. “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

He knew that the problem was deeper than any individual issue. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence.” But, in terms of policy, what Carter actually did was to begin the dismantling of the Great Society and to pave the way for Reaganism. Historian Richard Aldous has argued that Carter can be considered “the first Reaganite”, introducing the deregulation, focus on supply-side economics, and broad tax cuts that would later be widely associated with Reagan. Carter’s mode of governance can be considered a sort of pastoral mourning for the Great Society as he was in the process of burying it. That approach didn’t work electorally, but it got a new look in the Nineties with Bill Clinton’s Third Way and his sub rosa embrace of Reaganism. The difference between Carter and Clinton was mostly tonal. Carter, for instance, committed adultery “in his heart” while Clinton did it in reality and promiscuously; Clinton buried the Great Society enthusiastically where Carter had done so mournfully.

The centrist side of the Democratic Party can be understood, then, as accepting the Reaganite turn but with a nod to what-might-have-been from a social standpoint. Hillary Clinton largely ran her race for the presidency on the notion of shattering the glass ceiling — a term that was introduced in a speech in 1978 — and that became a brutally vivid metaphor when she unwisely hosted her 2016 election night party under a glass ceiling at the Javits Center. It is a ceiling that has remained unshattered.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who are caught in the squabbles of the Seventies. Senator Mitch McConnell — who has long been the dominant Republican figure on Capitol Hill — has dedicated his career to his “long game” of building a conservative Supreme Court. It’s a quest that has been widely interpreted as a reaction to his formative experiences with the liberal-leaning courts of the Seventies. With a conservative advantage in the Supreme Court, with Roe and Bakke overturned — and now with Donald Trump defeating Harris — the long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close. The conservatives won, totally.

That’s a very bitter pill to swallow on the progressive side of the aisle, but in a way it may be a blessing in disguise. What it means is that the Left no longer has to dedicate itself to propping up a Great Society that has atrophied away; or to advancing progressive causes that, we now know, will never get past a conservative Supreme Court. The Left at least has the advantage of being jolted out of its time-warp and of looking at the political landscape with fresh eyes. However the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself — and it must reconstitute itself — it can do so with new faces and with ideas that speak to a very different era. The Seventies, at long last, are over.

Yet if the South was crushed back in 1865, it now holds America’s destiny in its hands. Certainly, that’s clear enough politically: Donald Trump is expected to win every former Confederate state, with erstwhile battlegrounds such as Georgia and North Carolina now tilting to the Republicans. Even Virginia, increasingly dominated by liberal Washington suburbs, could go red too. It’s a similar story at the local level. Except for Richmond, the GOP controls every state house beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. In South Carolina’s General Assembly, the Republicans hold more than twice as many seats as the Democrats.

And if the South is now crucial to the country’s immediate electoral future, broader demographic trends are on its side too. Based on the last census, Texas gained two seats, while Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Accompanied by losses in places such as New York and California, the South is rapidly becoming the most powerful region in the land. Add to that its burgeoning economic strength, and it could soon be more influential than it has been for generations — a shift likely to transform politics, and political culture, right across the nation.

Through the 18th century, the South was central to the American economy. Charleston, an epicentre of the slave trade, was the most prosperous town south of Philadelphia, while South Carolina was among the richest colonial provinces. That wealth allowed the region’s white population to be the wealthiest of the pre-revolutionary era; and self-proclaimed cotton kings to become Old World aristocrats in the swamps and plantations of the New. Stroll the streets of Charleston and you can still see this legacy today. There are elegant mansions, decorated with art, and with silverware imported from Britain. Yet somewhere nearby, their slaves huddled in windowless rooms, forced to suffer the heat and humidity of the South in chains.

It’s ironic that the war the rebels started at Fort Sumter would ultimately destroy the South. That shot heard around the world, courtesy of the Charleston militia in April 1861, would prove no match for the emerging industrial might of the free states in the North. Under blockade from the vastly superior US Navy, buoyant cities like Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans all shrivelled, as the cotton routes to England slammed shut. In 1865, Charleston fell, alongside Fort Sumter. Columbia, the state capital, was razed.

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Not that things would improve once the guns fell silent. The Civil War left the South in deplorable shape, becoming in the memorable words of one author the “problem child” of America. Deprived of their slaves, the cotton kings were ruined. Meanwhile many normal Southerners, particularly after Reconstruction, worshipped the memory of the Confederacy while embracing its racist ideology. Across the South, Confederate memorials dotted the landscape; as recently as a few decades ago, Stars and Bars flags were common. All the while, Southerners worshipped Robert E. Lee and the “lost cause” while the beneficiaries of Ulysses S. Grant’s victory dominated the country’s economy, cultural and political life from New England to Oregon.

Here’s another irony: it would be the federal government, and the New Deal it promulgated, that ultimately started the South’s recovery. Roosevelt’s funding of roads, bridges and ports finally prodded the region into the 20th century. Often backed by Southern Democrat politicians, the scale of this assistance was monumental: in South Carolina alone, New Dealers created the state park system, hung telephone lines, and worked with farmers on soil conservation. The industrial boom of the Second World War also brought bases and vast manufacturing facilities. In Louisiana, to give one example, upwards of 30,000 New Orleanians worked at the Higgins boatyard, producing the thousands of landing craft needed to start the liberation of Europe on D-Day.

Through the Fifties and Sixties, meanwhile, industry began relocating to the South, where unions were weak and costs lower. An influx of go-getting outsiders helped too, remote as they were from the Old South and its neuroses. One good example is John Paul Rousakis, Savannah’s Greek-American mayor for five terms from 1970. Rousakis played a critical role in reviving Savannah’s waterfront, helping preserve what may well be the most beautiful urban landscape in America. Houston, for its part, enjoyed the services of Bob Lanier, a product of blue collar Baytown. Embracing progressive, pro-business policies, Lanier took full advantage of the city’s burgeoning oil industry.

Another newcomer would transform Charleston. An Irish Catholic, Joseph P. Riley was mayor of the city for four decades. Cultivating the support of newly enfranchised African-Americans, as well as local business elites, he turned a declining, crime-infested city into a model of urban renaissance. Riley improved law and order by appointing Reuben Greenberg as police chief in 1982. Another riposte to the South’s racial cliches — he was a half Jewish, half black Houstonian — Greenberg both reclaimed the streets and beclowned Charleston’s remaining substrate of white nationalists. After personally leading the protection of a Ku Klux Klan march, the men in white pillow cases were sure never to return.

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Change happened at the state level too. From Texas to Florida, many belatedly began mimicking their Northern rivals: bringing minorities into leadership positions; financing the growth of major universities; building first-class industrial parks. “The development model has turned on its head,” noted Christopher Lloyd, president of the Site Selection Guild, adding that they’re borrowing the same Californian model that proved so successful in the second half of the last century.

No less important, this legacy has continued into our own time. From manufacturing to professional services, sectors long centred in California and New York have ventured south. According to a recent analysis by Zen Business, indeed, Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots, while they also attract the most tech workers. That’s unsurprising: from HP Enterprise to Oracle to SpaceX, many of America’s biggest firms have relocated to Texas.

Even finance, practically synonymous with Manhattan, is drifting south. Attracted by hot weather and sandy beaches, many bankers have made their home in Miami, even as Dallas lately dethroned Chicago as the second financial centre in the country. Entrepreneurs have even started raising funds to build a new stock exchange in Texas. Their goal? Replacing Wall Street with Y’all Street.

Beyond the South’s own pro-business policies, the relative decline of places like Chicago is telling in other ways. Between soaring taxes and draconian climate change rules, Democratic strongholds in the North seem desperate to bankrupt themselves. No wonder one recent study found that the best states for industry are generally found in the southeast, even as America’s fastest growing ports are places like Corpus Christi (Texas) and Mobile (Alabama).

Not that Dixie’s economic revival can only be traced through industrial output. For just as Rousakis and Riley reshaped and modernised their cities, millions of other Americans found their land of opportunity in the once-distressed South. In 1861, when Fort Sumter was attacked, the South was home to barely nine million of the country’s 31 million residents, and even that included 3.5 million slaves. Today, though, the former Confederacy boasts 40% of the US population, up from less than a third in 1950. This trend has accelerated since the pandemic. By 2023, population growth across just five Southern states, exceeded that of the other 44 combined.

Once again, the North slumps as the South soars. New Jersey, Illinois and New York have since all lost people since 2000, even as Texas gained three million. This isn’t just a function of internal migration either: three Southern cities — Miami, Dallas and Houston — have seen their foreign-born populations rise more than anywhere else. No less striking, these trends seem set to continue over the years ahead. In a recent survey identifying the five best regions for young job seekers, four were in the South, even as Southerners are more likely to have children than their Northern peers.

Apart from anything else, these demographic shifts are exploding old stereotypes. What started with Reuben Greenberg is just as true today: by some accounts Houston is the most diverse city in the country, while African-Americans are returning to the region their grandparents fled during the Great Migration. Overall, minorities generally enjoy higher incomes and home ownership levels here than elsewhere. And whatever Brooklyn liberals might imagine, the South is now among the least segregated parts of the country. To be sure, class divides exist. But in Charleston, successful African-Americans can be found eating at some of the swankiest restaurants, often with white friends. Like low country cuisine, encompassing African, English and Caribbean influences, this is a city that feels more racially harmonious than Northern towns from Milwaukee to Buffalo.

More to the point, these comings and goings are conjuring a political storm. More people means more representation in Congress, and more electoral votes. And if current trends continue — and the South continues to rise and places like Illinois keep falling — Dixie will have 30 more seats in the House of Representatives than it did in the Seventies. Once that happens, it will again emerge as the country’s strongest political region, a role it hasn’t enjoyed since that long-lost world of frock coats and slave markets.

Not that we need to wait for redistricting to spot the South’s political heft. After all, a second Trump administration would surely draw strength from the region’s ascendancy. Trump himself is now a typical Floridian — from Queens — and J.D. Vance hails from the essentially Southern culture of Appalachia. More to the point, likely boosts in defence and space spending under a Republican president would supercharge the region yet further, as would pro-manufacturing policies using tariffs and tough trade deals to replace foreign products with domestic alternatives. There’ll also be pressure to develop policies that help the less successful Southern states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, not least given they’re such Republican strongholds.

Given her probable plans to bailout profligate Northern states, a Harris presidency would probably be less good for Dixie. Then again, the region’s demographic fortunes offer opportunities to Democrats too: as both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton so vividly proved. In this New South, a dynamic, multicultural region with ample hope for the future, liberals could gain much by opposing strict bans on abortion, especially if they dump unpopular virtue-signalling around things like migration. To put it differently, then, the South’s revival may yet dovetail with a much-needed return to the political centre. Given the region’s turbulent past, that would be the most welcome irony of all.

The MAGA hopeful is Captain Samuel Boaz Brown, a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention and an army veteran from the war in Afghanistan. His face was disfigured by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, making him the personification of the slings and arrows that all-American masculinity must endure. He has been the recipient of $60 million in “dark money” campaign contributions targeting his well-heeled opponent, Jacky Rosen, the only female Jewish member of the Senate, who paid her way through college by working as a waitress at Caesar’s Palace.

In Sin City, the contest is reaching its final frantic stages. Barack Obama recently parachuted in for the cause, declaring that the Nevada race was decisive, and that every vote would count, and that pulling the lever for a woman didn’t automatically qualify you as a cuck. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have each dropped into the state on several occasions to put in the fix, not to mention their running mates, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, and surrogates ranging from Bernie Sanders to Vivek Ramaswamy. Nearly three-quarters of Nevada voters live in Clark County, home of the Vegas Strip and more than 1.7 million voters. Yet the outcome of the Silver State’s last Senate race came down to a mere 7,928 votes. Long division yields a rather startling statistic: control of the upper house of the United States Congress could come down to fewer than five votes per precinct.

With the fate of America on the line, I leaped in a cab to the Las Vegas strip, where desperate ads for half-price lawyers gave way to glimmering billboards for semaglutides and Movado watches. As my cab driver Mohammed steered us through the land of Adele and Donny, he shook his head. “This is a very significant election,” he told me. “This country is at a crossroads.” And then, employing the metaphors of his trade, he added rather ominously: “If you make a wrong turn, you may never find yourself again.”

The words turned out to be an apt metaphor for Vegas, where the zonked-out debris of bachelor parties were zombifying aimlessly among the roulette tables, along with the usual assortment of super-sized aloha-shirted psychotics, ladies in overalls and Birkenstocks, and phlegm-hocking old-timers guiding their electric wheelchairs from slot to slot.

I had expected the epicentre for the heavyweight fight between Captain MAGA and “Wacky Jacky” to be bristling with political antagonism, but there was no sign of the impending American moment of truth anywhere. Earlier that day, I had ventured beyond the strip into honky-tonk nowheresville to find Captain Brown’s HQ, hidden among concrete and metal sheds with dusty signs boasting “Houston TX Hot Chicken” and “NY Pizza and Pasta”. But the front doors were locked, and there was not a soul in sight. The Rosen campaign headquarters, nestled among the wedding chapels of South Las Vegas Boulevard, had also been abandoned — most likely for Reno.

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The only sign of a fight was on television. I soon lost count of the flat-screens silently spewing American football games, but every time a massive lineman fell to yet another spinal cord injury the broadcast turned to a commercial — and the dire political rhetoric: Sam Brown was an extremist. Sam Brown would push to ban abortion. Sam Brown would take away women’s right to choose. None of which appeared to be having much of an impact on the blackjack dealers — that is, the people that lived in Clark County. One of these locals, an Ethiopian immigrant, appeared surprised that I might ask him about the election, and who he might support. “I have not paid enough attention yet,” he said. “I will next week.”

From the Bellagio, I ambled across the outdoor escalators and pedestrian bridges — where quite a few homeless people had passed out to the sounds of the requisite Elvis impersonator — to Caesar’s Palace. I imagined that here I might find some signs of support for their all-star cocktail waitress alumna, Senator Jacky Rosen, but just as the Old Fashioneds and the Gin Fizzes had transmogrified into Basil Cucumber Margaritas and Kimbo Espresso Martinis, the cocktails are no longer delivered by stiffly smiling twenty-somethings in skimpy outfits trying to scrape enough together for state-school tuition. The ambitious youngsters had in all likelihood switched to more remunerative ventures than tips, such as OnlyFans, while Rosen’s old stomping grounds had become the domain of beefy expat Cubans discussing in great detail the nuances of the Dodgers bullpen as compared to the Yankees. Immigration? The wall? Venezuelan gang violence? Transgéneros playing women’s soccer? Not a word.

It was becoming more and more evident that I had made a big mistake, for I had been under the romantic delusion shared by generations of journalists that among the grand hotels of the mobbed-up, sexed-up, and algorithm-ruled Las Vegas Boulevard, one might catch a preview of America’s dark future. There’s plenty to suggest that the apocalypse begins here: as Lake Mead runs dry, as last summer’s temperature hit 120°F, breaking all previous records, and as sex work and gambling and criminal capitalism have become the norm.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed that America’s worst habits all emanate from here. In 1968, two professors from Yale’s Graduate School of Architecture brought 13 of their students here to study the surreal urban landscape. The result was the book, Learning from Las Vegas, which argued that instead of being viewed as a decadent relic of the dusty western dereliction, Vegas was a harbinger of things to come. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, flocks of so-called “new journalists” made a name for themselves by studying the human landscape. Hunter S. Thompson’s epic of gonzo journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, delivered a premonition of the drug culture that was then a matter of national hysteria, but would soon become humdrum. Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” explored the strip’s strange custom of drive-through nuptials, which rocked her establishment sensibilities. And Tom Wolfe’s maniacal essay for Esquire Magazine, “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas !!!!” exposed the casinos as the test-case for ADD years before our national attention span dropped to five-seconds with the advent of smartphones. No doubt, the algorithms of cards and dice were precursors to the digital algorithms that have become our nation’s collective addiction.

But if American Armageddon was indeed looming in the casinos of post-MAGA Vegas, it appeared that nobody cared. The city’s gamblers, croupiers and wannabe stars were far too concerned with their own prospects of fame and fortune to fret about America’s fate.

There was, however, one issue that did resound over the din of the jackpots. Sex. Perhaps it was fitting that in Sin City, both Left and Right are leaning into the politics of sex. As might be expected, Captain Brown has praised Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, framing the restriction on discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools as a necessary measure to prevent the “indoctrination” of children into queerness. He has opposed marriage equality and supported legislation allowing discrimination against same-sex couples. And as president and chairman of the Nevada Faith and Freedom Coalition, he has decried the Respect for Marriage Act which President Biden signed in 2022, declaring the law an assault on religious freedom. That said, Brown cannot come out as 100% anti-abortion, as 76% of Nevadans support abortion rights.

When it comes to sexual politics, the contrast with Rosen could not be more pronounced. The freshman senator introduced the Equality Act to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment and housing. She co-sponsored the Respect for Marriage Act, recognises Pride Month, and has been endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer civil rights organisation.

None of which appeared to matter to the bros at the slot machines, but all of which matters a great deal to Las Vegas’s thriving LGBTQ community. GLAAD estimates that 145,000 LGBTQ people live in Nevada, with more than one in five of them raising children. Nor is it news that if love is love then sex is sex in this neck of the desert, as all the clubs, from high-end Zouk and TAO to cellar dwellers such as the Palomino and Discopussy are as apt to feature gay as straight strippers, and drag show brunches are as prevalent as traditionally cis-gender feathers, leather, and lace.

In this regard, Las Vegas is once again at the forefront of national politics, for the question of LGBTQ rights has come to dominate the American election cycle. The past few years of public outcry over commingling biological males and females in college sports has powered what was once a peripheral issue to the centre of American reaction. So far, various Right-wing PACs have dropped $17 million on more than 30,000 30-second spots attacking Kamala Harris for her stance on transgender athletes, which as National Public Radio noted, were focused on NFL and college football broadcasts.

Sensing liberal weakness on the flashpoint of boys playing with girls, Captain Brown made a point of showing up for a photo-op with the University of Nevada’s Wolf Pack women’s volleyball team, which gained national attention after some members refused to take the court against the San Jose State Spartans, which includes a transgender player. “I stand with them,” declared Brown. “Let’s make sure that this is the fight that we’re in ’til the end.” The issue loomed large over Brown and Rosen’s single debate, impelling the Las Vegas Review to blare the headline: “Transgender sports rift is officially a Nevada election issue.”

Once again, Las Vegas is America’s crystal ball. No doubt, the results in Nevada will provide a peek into the legislative prospects of same-sex marriage, marriage equality, gender-affirming medical treatment, sex education, and various and sundry in-school “Don’t Say Gay” rules and regs all over America. Not to mention the hot-button issue of drag queen story hour for the kiddies, as bans are considered in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma and Utah.

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Forget about climate change and genocide in Sudan. Who cares that the world is teetering on World War Three? In America, where the Dow is up, sex and drugs are cheap, and the cheeseburgers excellent, the question of who will control the nuclear codes has come down to women’s volleyball.

After a while spent contemplating this fact, and four glasses of watered-down Sauvignon Blanc later (the preferred drink of East Coast liberal journalists), I concluded that the most responsible decision would be to head over to the front lines of America’s LGBTQ wars, where multi-millionaire RuPaul, the world’s most famous drag queen, has been running his own franchised version of Trump’s The Apprentice: RuPaul’s Drag Race Live! Las Vegas. As I purchased the $100 ticket, I had no doubt that it was here that America’s most sex-positive city would deliver its referendum as to whether or not the push for LGBTQ rights had gone too far — or not far enough.

RuPaul’s eponymous show was running at The Flamingo, a somewhat down-market hotel and casino across the street from The Bellagio and Caesar’s Palace, which refreshingly offers no pretence of grandeur. The second show of “Queens Are Wild” Drag Race began late, so the alcohol had had plenty of time to achieve its cumulative effects on the tourists, who were boozily cheering each other on at the tables. I waited in line, madly deleting tsunamis of Jacky Rosen fundraising e-mails from my phone, which were now landing at a frantic pace. If she didn’t get her $750,000 by midnight, she’d be cooked.

I’m not a heavy consumer of the drag show, so it came as a surprise that ground zero of the trans menace emanated a rather wholesome vibe, completely lacking in the creepy concupiscence wafting over from the XX strippers on stage a dozen or so steps to the left. I was also delighted to find that RuPaul drag race fans are an intellectual lot, as the two women from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who shared my table held forth on the nuances of every queen going back 16 seasons.

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The lights dimmed and then, for the first time since I’d landed, there was Kamala Harris in her lavender pants suit, flashing her smile on giant twin screens. Quiet engulfed the crowd as her voice filled the room. “We are all in this together,” she said. “Your vote is your power.” The crowd erupted into a spontaneous amen — yes, quite literally, “Amen”. Carried away by religious fervour, the two women from Iowa gleefully shouted: “You better work, Bitch!”

I shouldn’t have been shocked by such an enthusiastic response. After all, the greatest political motivator is victimhood. Trump plays the card all the time, hustling his mugshot t-shirts and bloody-ear coffee mugs, declaring the libs are coming after him endlessly, unfairly, unjustly. So why shouldn’t the LGBTQ community and their allies use their own persecution by anti-gay legislators as a means of rallying the base — even if Kamala’s lavender pants-suit was giving off a strictly asexual Hillary Clinton vibe.

After a Seventies disco number and a cheeky Britney hit, it seemed absolutely normal to see Barack Obama appear on those same gigantic screens, reminding us of the politics of love. In doing so, he cemented the unlikely fact that a drag show at The Flamingo was the one place in Clark County, Nevada that was fully realising our fraught political moment. Who would have expected such political punch from a show featuring sculpted dance boys wearing assless purple chaps? Or that the half-naked crew would reach their writhing climax holding placards with the plea: “Register to Vote.”

It was a refreshing moment: a community under attack was fighting the good fight. There was, perhaps, some hope left for America. Either that, or we were all about to be consumed by terminal victimhood. And so it was back to the chaos of the casino floor, where the future was as secure as craps.

Civil war tends to happen along lines that are regional, as in the American civil war; tribal, as in Sudan; or ideological, as in Spain in the Thirties. None of that is occurring here. Regional? MAGA and liberals are scattered in and across every state in the union. Tribal? There are no actual tribes in America, with the exception of Native American tribes — being black, gay or Catholic is not like belonging to a “tribe” the way being a Hutu or a Tutsi was in the Nineties. Ideological? Harris’s ideology seems to reconfigure itself every day, and far from being steeped in any kind of ism — fascist leaders were nothing if not educated in their world view — it is likely that Trump does not even have a library card. Civil wars are preceded by intense, if sporadic violence. There has been no intense political violence in America — both assassination attempts on Trump were the politically incoherent work of unstable loners. There has been violent rhetoric, which, though disturbing, has not crossed the line into actual calls for violence.

I have yet to meet or talk to anyone, from various walks of life, who is afraid of what will happen after Election Day. And yet we are told that fear is in the air by journalists who interview true believers at political rallies, or solicit answers in surveys conducted over the phone, in which individuals, eager to make a good impression, tell strife-hungry journalists what they want to hear, or simply want to vent.

Before Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden last night, the internet was sizzling with cries that the rally would resemble the Nazi assemblies of yore. But nowhere in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous cinematic account of the Nuremberg spectacle was there a segment where, once the massive gathering ended, workers rushed to convert the rally site to the German equivalent of a Knicks game the following evening. (They are playing the Cleveland Cavaliers — from a former swing state!)

The whole evening was less Nuremberg rally than Trump’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” experience, that eerie moment when a heavily drugged, super-sexualised Marilyn Monroe sang to JFK on the occasion of his 45th birthday at a gala event in Madison Square Garden. But this was Trump singing to himself. He spoke, startlingly, about “if” he wins rather than “when” he wins. This was his last hurrah, and he knew it. He had to give one flamboyant middle finger to the city that rejected him before his middle finger faded into history.

Trump spoke for his customary 90 minutes. Some people started leaving 20 minutes into his speech; the rest cheered and laughed as though they were at a music festival, not a political rally. The yardstick for excellence in just about every realm of American life now is individual pleasure and satisfaction. For all Trump’s darkness about “enemies from within”, and murderous immigrants, and soaring crime rates, and mass deportations, you felt he was playing not to a burning desire for revenge, but to a good-old American Saturday night fever. It was jarring to watch him sway to the rally music before he spoke, then to abruptly swing into talk of American carnage, almost as jarring as it is to watch Harris amateurishly readjust the expression of her face from indignation to a broad grin in the space of a nanosecond. Both figures are the phoniest presidential candidates in modern American history. The difference is that the obviously unstable Trump is a first-rate monstrosity. Harris is a second-rate mediocrity.

No one believes Trump when he summons a vision of America as being overrun by barbaric immigrant hordes, or so ridden by crime that a person cannot walk across the street to buy a loaf of — barely affordable! — bread without being murdered or raped. That is a super-charged version of Trump’s depiction of “American carnage” in 2016 — it is so yesterday. No one knows what he is talking about when he talks about America as if it were Sudan, with the exception of his most isolated and narrowly parochial supporters, who think they know.

As for Harris’s toothless charge that Trump is a fascist — that is also so 2016. The term disappeared from the liberal vocabulary for a while, only to be revived in these desperate final days of campaigning. The ordinary American has no more idea of what it means to be a fascist than they have the experience of watching their neighbours being slaughtered on their way to the grocery store.

No, the fears being marketed by the candidates, the way they are marketing impossible promises, are more like pacifying lozenges for the electorate to suck on while the real terrors of history gather. Immigration, crime, economic collapse, cultural outrage — this is the rhetorical stuff of every political campaign since the beginning of the last century. The fact that the language in which they are being delivered has become more strident and explicit only accentuates their familiarity. They are known terrors, standard and consoling because they are so familiar to hear. But behind Trump’s murderous hordes and Harris’s legions of fascists are the fears that few people will face or acknowledge. Yet they are an open secret.

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By Lee Siegel

There is the fear of Elon Musk. Not the Musk who is so ham-fistedly trying to interfere in the election process by promising money to people who sign a petition as registered Republican voters. But the Musk whose Space X and Starlink capabilities are precious to America’s generals. You cannot have a fascist coup or any kind of coup without the complicity of the generals. Up until now, Trump has alienated America’s military and its intelligence agencies. But if he were to be elected, he might well have the generals, who would do anything to keep Musk’s technology in America, eating out of his hand. Already Jeff Bezos, the motto of whose newspaper, the Washington Post, is “democracy dies in darkness”, has refused to allow his newspaper to endorse Harris, for fear, so people say, of losing precious contracts he has with the federal government.

And there is the fear, not of civil war, but of an accelerating withdrawal from reality, regardless of who wins the election. If it were to be Trump, then the institutions of American civil society, all of which are in liberal hands, would rise up and make the woke revolution look like a Girl Scout cookie drive; Trump is the greatest gift to the morally ravenous liberal ego since Watergate. If Harris wins, then MAGA alienation and MAGA fantastical conspiracy theories would accelerate to the point where their criterion of truth is simply the opposite of what liberals believe. It is hard to have a civil war when people on both sides keep checking their phones. But self-contained screen-worlds are perfect for fomenting mental and spiritual chaos. Neighbour does not need to fight neighbour when neither really registers the other’s existence except to deny it. Strife then becomes numbed into ever more advanced forms of social atomisation.

Finally, there is the most hidden fear of all; the fear of nuclear war. Trump likes to blurt it out as just another on the laundry list of catastrophes that will befall the country should he not win back the White House. It is not clear whether nuclear war horrifies or fascinates him. Harris does not bring up the subject at all.

In Volume V of A History of Private Life, published in 1991, Gerard Vincent observes that although nuclear capabilities are now able to destroy the planet many times over, there is no cultural “obsession” with nuclear annihilation. At this point, there is not even a cultural preoccupation with that possibility. In past times, writes Vincent, when vast numbers of people died in various pandemics, “impressive works of art emerged from the collective imagination”. In our time, the possibility of catching Covid was our obsession, while the chance that we will be wiped out by nuclear war is no longer even the subject of art of entertainment. Annie Jacobsen’s scrupulous, brilliant, terrifying book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, became a bestseller, but it failed to lead to a sense of historical crisis.

And yet Putin has threatened to unleash nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the Middle East is hurtling toward a final reckoning. No one doubts that Israel would use its nuclear arsenal were its existence threatened; once Iran has a similar capability, no one doubts it would resort to the same. But instead of urging Americans to confront the possibility of nuclear horror, some politicians and journalists in America like to play chicken, fatuously reminding America’s leaders of their obligations to Taiwan, for example, no matter what such obligations would entail, if China invaded.

There is no doubt that a mentally unstable Trump, should he be president again, poses a threat to America and to the world, just as a mentally unstable Biden would have had he run and prevailed. Harris, on the other hand, if she comes out on top, will be operated by committee, along more or less rational lines. And there is no doubt that whatever side wins, there will be people left feeling angry, unhappy and betrayed. But civil war? Social apocalypse? Conflict over who won lasting tense, agonising weeks after the polls close next Tuesday? Not likely. By Thanksgiving, the country will have returned to its routine go-go stupefaction, continuing to sleepwalk toward the fears that dare not speak their name.

To an American living through the election season, things look very different. There’s nothing secret about the American psyche these days. Kamala Harris describes former president Donald Trump as “unstable and unhinged”, and compares him to Hitler. And he describes her as having “the mental faculties of a child”.

Enright’s worry that voters are not listening to politicians marks her as a Harris person; Trump people tend to see the problem as politicians not listening to voters. The American elections pit a party of the System (Harris’s Democrats) against a party of the Electorate (Trump’s Republicans). Naturally, worried foreigners will rally to Harris’s side. They know the American system, depend on it, and get all their news from it. They don’t generally know the American electorate and don’t think they depend on it. They might be about to discover they are wrong. Recently there were hopes for a reconciliation between the country’s raging electorate and the elites who run its sputtering system. With less than two weeks to go before Americans count their ballots, those hopes are likely to be dashed.

Time will tell whether Kamala Harris was an adequate pick to replace Joe Biden, once his age-related incapacity could no longer be concealed. But the method of her selection sealed the public’s understanding of Democrats as the party of monied elites — not a good thing to be this year. Concealing Biden’s condition required the collusion of the whole party, Harris included. It wrested the choice of Democrats’ 2024 candidate from rank-and-file voters and delivered it to the party’s billionaire backers in finance, entertainment and tech. The party is taking on a fat-cat profile. It has relied on ruses to hand-pick its presidential candidate in the past three elections. In 2016, the officially neutral chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, worked behind the scenes to see off the socialist Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton. In 2020, donors and strategists, desperate to unify the party factions against Trump and (again) to thwart Sanders, rescued Joe Biden’s failing candidacy by purging other moderates. Biden’s win was a vindication of their tactics. But they damaged the US — because the factions that made way for Biden would all have to be paid off when Democrats took power. The Biden administration was a junta of special interests — Black Lives Matter, immigrant and transgender activists, green-energy moguls, neoconservatives — without, we now realise, any guiding intelligence at its centre. Keeping these special interests together has cost money. That is how the American debt has rocketed to historic highs.

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As a president is supposedly powerful, it was assumed that ousting Biden would require his assent. It didn’t. Once Biden stumbled in a debate last June, a funding strike called by the entertainment and finance billionaires did the trick. Cartoon heiress Abigail Disney, cryptocurrency billionaire Mike Novogratz, Netflix founder Reed Hoffman cut the party off until it agreed to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. In a sense it doesn’t matter which politician the system chooses. The party belongs not to voters but to interest groups, as it did between the Gilded Age and the reforms that democratised the nominating process in the early Seventies.

Donald Trump has turned that into a liability for Democrats. Working people remember fondly the economy as Trump ran it in the three years before the Covid emergency. It was not perfect: growth was lower than under Obama. But it was better distributed. The lowest quarter of workers saw their real wages rise by 5% under Trump, the first sustained improvement for the working poor since the 20th century. The great polling surprise of the 2024 election — the highest Republican support among black males since 1960 — is more plausibly explained by concrete economic achievements than by the intangible factors that pundits usually adduce, from Trump’s “ghetto” ostentation to his troubles with the legal system.

Gains for the working class proved unsustainable under the Biden Administration, amid a flood of 7.5 million illegal immigrants. If one episode could sum up the whole campaign season, it would be the exchange between Trump and Harris, during their televised debate in September, over allegations that Haitian immigrants were — in the Trumpian phrase that launched a thousand remixes — “eating the pets of the people that live there”.

Judged as a contest, the debate was an outright victory for Harris: a drubbing, a shutout. Trump is lazy (he obviously did not even outline a closing statement), ignorant (he did not seem to know what a “bill” is), inarticulate (there were moments when he was nearly as woolly as Joe Biden was in the embarrassing debate performance that drove him from the race).

But Harris’s victory was Pyrrhic. The issues Trump raised, however inarticulately and inaccurately, cut in his favour. Many American swing voters understand that the opening of the country’s Southern border was brought about by concrete actions urged by the immigrant-activist wing of the Biden “junta” and undertaken by executive order in the very first days of the administration in 2021.

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But most Americans had no idea until Trump started going on about eating cats and dogs that there were so many places like Springfield, Ohio, a withering industrial city of 58,000 people that has received 12,000-15,000 Haitians in the last year or so. That sounds like a “minority” problem, but as Germans discovered after Angela Merkel’s invitation to refugees from the Syrian war in 2015, such newcomers are disproportionately young and male. They can become a majority in the public spaces during business hours. They can wind up laying down the law. This does not mean they are violent or even rude. They just have the force that cohesive groups of men naturally possess in the prime of life.

Many of the Springfield newcomers have rent subsidies and food stamps, and — this being the United States — a heavy carapace of rights and protections that derive from civil rights law. When you inject a federally subsidised population of 15,000 people into a small city that has not seen new housing construction in many years, natives’ rents get driven through the roof. American workers have reason to fear competition from workers who were formed in a country where the per capita income is barely $1,600.

Distant people in positions of authority sometimes accuse voters in places like Springfield of grumbling. You can see why: no one ever sets out actively to screw the natives. It’s just something “the market” does to them while the mayor and the federal government are busy patting themselves on the back for their generosity. Under such circumstances, the besieged-feeling viewers of the Trump-Harris debate might well have preferred the guy who sputtered and turned red at the very thought of Springfield to the lady who read her lines and kept her composure.

Regardless of whether he wins the presidency, Trump has won a victory in the argument about immigration that he introduced on the day he announced his candidacy in 2015. It is also a loss for elite-led campaigns of shaming and ostracism. Clearly “Woke” — that set of moral proscriptions about diversity, backed up by the power granted by civil-rights law to harass and disgrace refractory citizens in the courts — has lost much of its power to intimidate. The Trump campaign’s single most powerful television ad shows Harris passionately telling a transgender interviewer that she would back publicly funded sex-change operations for prison inmates. “Kamala is for they/them,” the ad closes. “President Trump is for you.” The Pew Center recently reported that there are more registered Republicans than Democrats for the first time since it started tallying these numbers in 1992. In the closing days of this campaign, three Democratic senators in tight races who had voted to impeach Trump twice — Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania — hurriedly cut TV ads implying that their own positions on immigration were the same as Trump’s. Those who lived by the sword of woke are now dying by it.

We are getting a better idea now of why half the country is willing to be led by a man whose personality would have unfitted him for leadership at almost any previous juncture of American history. Trump’s seeming indifference to policy, a sign of unseriousness at other times, looks like a savvy refusal to be taken in. His vulgarity can look like a post-modern kind of authenticity. After making a crude joke about Kamala Harris’s husband at a Catholic gala in New York, he stared down at his printed speech and admitted others had prepared it for him — something an American politician never does. “That’s a nasty one,” he muttered. “That’s nasty. I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.” Bizarrely, at times like these, Trump seems like the only sincere political figure in an otherwise rigidly scripted system.

Pandering politicians often assign a set of policy opinions to the citizenry, and then take a bunch of phoney positions to match them. Harris, discovering that swing-state voters like cars and guns, has presented herself in the campaign’s final days as a Formula 1 enthusiast (a backer of Sir Lewis Hamilton) and a gun owner — a gun fanatic, even. “If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” she told Oprah Winfrey. After not holding a single press conference in the first two months of her campaign, the teleprompter — which she used even at such traditionally impromptu occasions as voter town halls — became a symbol of her campaign.

And Trump’s strange sincerity may be why the various attempts to prosecute him have not been fatal. On the contrary. Harris commonly calls him a “convicted felon”, but what has he been convicted of? A business misdeed so small, so obscure, and brought to a verdict by a process so partisan, that it would be more accurate to say Trump had been designated a criminal than proved one. No Trump opponent has ever managed to explain his offence in a convincing way.

One factor both in blunting the propaganda effect of criminal prosecutions against Trump and allowing the enemies of Woke to rally together has been the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk two years ago. It is not that Musk is in Trump’s corner, although he (stridently) is. It is that, in this election cycle at least, Democrat-aligned tech executives have been unable to slow the movement of narrative-disrupting stories through the news ecosystem — as they were able to do in 2020 with stories concerning the laptop of wayward presidential son Hunter Biden. Under heightened scrutiny American elites are finding it harder to stick together than they did back then.

The question arises of whether these same elites can hold the country together well enough to continue to exercise what they like to call “global leadership”. The answer appears to be no. If the world has become a much more dangerous place under Biden, it owes partly to how he was nominated. Among the interest groups that won a free hand in the 2020 coalition of anti-Trump forces was a bipartisan group of neoconservatives — foreign-policy thinkers who rose through the system under the “democracy promotion” agenda that led Bill Clinton into Kosovo and George W. Bush into Iraq.

They have drawn the United States (and its allies) into a proxy war in Ukraine that the West cannot win without an active Nato military involvement that would be reckless in the extreme. Reckless because, at the core of the Western military/diplomatic system, the American public is too badly divided ideologically to commit to a war anywhere. In January, it is true, President Biden gave a State of the Union address in which he likened both Vladimir Putin and the Republican opposition to the fascists who were on the march on the eve of the Second World War, and yet, with the help of Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, he passed a $60 billion aid bill for Ukraine.

But such bipartisanship is unlikely in the future. As things now stand, Johnson would pay with his career for any future collaboration. Harris is less connected to pre-Trumpian hawks than Biden was, even if she has received the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Trump’s vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a stalwart opponent of the Ukraine war. And Trump’s own bizarre reminiscences at a late October rally of threats he allegedly made to Putin are neither believable nor the basis for a bipartisan foreign policy.

This is especially since the parties, one representing the raging electorate and the other the sputtering elite, have not been so at odds in a long while. Americans may yet have a future as leaders of the free world. But that will have to await an end to the conflict between Republican populists and Democratic elitists, a conflict that 5 November is more likely to exacerbate than resolve.

The idea of working at McDonald’s generally carries this meaning in American culture. It’s one option of a tough choice, part of a bargain that’ll probably be a bummer either way. It’s McDonald’s or unemployment. McDonald’s or welfare. McDonald’s or getting kicked out of your mom’s house. Ice T’s depiction of this bargain is extreme in its terms, but it captures something that, even when the choices aren’t so stark, often attaches to the McDonald’s option — a hint of shame, because you’ve tumbled into the unhappy trope. You’re workin’ at Mickey D’s. It’s not really the worst job you can have, but, when people think of the worst job you can have, a lot of them think of McDonald’s. The idea of working in the back flipping burgers and dunking fries in spattering grease is pretty bad. But, especially for someone like Ice T’s ghetto hustler, working in front has to be much worse. Standing at a cash register when your boys roll in, wearing a brown uniform and a paper hat and mouthing an obsequious question scripted in a distant office, must be something like the existential death Hegel imagined in his master-slave dialectic, when the man who values survival over status surrenders himself to the man who values status over survival.

Given all this, it’s wild to see a campaign battle between America’s two presidential candidates over which of them can more believably claim the exalted mantle of having worked at McDonald’s. In case you haven’t kept up with the drama, it grows from a claim by Kamala Harris that, during the summer of 1983, she worked at one in Alameda, California, where, she’s said, she “did fries”. Harris first mentioned her McDonald’s job in 2019, and has brought it up several times this year. Alas, no one has produced reliable evidence to confirm this item from her work history, and Trump has seized on this tiny epistemic void, her McDonald’s job hovering in its limbo of unconfirmability, to mount his own much splashier, much Trumpier claim: Harris is lying about having worked at McDonald’s. And then, to more fully exploit this moment of uncertainty, Trump visited a closed McDonald’s in the small town of Feasterville, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, and exuberantly pretended to work there for 15 minutes. The crowds outside, Trump said as he dunked sliced potatoes in boiling grease, were huge. His very brief McDonald’s stint was a big success.

Now, the first question to clear up, the question Ice T’s hustler would probably want answered, is why the hell anyone would pretend to work at McDonald’s, or lie about having worked there, or brag about it at all, however honestly. In Harris’s case, there are two slightly different answers. In 2019, it would have made sense as a way of appealing to the progressive voters she thought controlled her path to the Democratic presidential nomination. Working at McDonald’s would be a badge of low or oppressed status, especially for a female or uterus-having candidate of colour, and badges of low or oppressed status were valued highly by progressives of the time, especially when worn by people who are also, in the more conventional terms of education and employment and cultural refinement, undeniably high status. In October 2024, the calculation is slightly different. Instead of advertising her erstwhile low status as a fast-food worker, as a way of cementing her claim to high status as a progressive politician, Harris would like her former job at McDonald’s to endear her to the working-class voters she needs in crucial swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. (That “working class” in Pennsylvania is now signified by a french-fryer job at a rural McDonald’s rather than unionised work in a Pittsburgh steel factory is something to pause over, I suppose.)

Trump’s calculations were more straightforward. The uncertainty around that 1983 summer job gave him enough (for him) latitude to accuse his opponent of lying, and Trump, a prolific liar himself, really likes to accuse his opponents of lying. Indeed, one suspects that Trump staged his 15 minutes of french-fry making fame entirely as a set-up for the punchline he delivered when he was finished — “I’ve now worked [at McDonald’s] for 15 minutes more than Kamala.” Several times, while speaking out the drive-through window to friendly reporters, he repeated that Kamala had lied about her McDonald’s job, while also lying about McDonald’s confirming his claim that Harris was lying. It hadn’t confirmed this.

For me, Trump calling Harris a liar on this seemingly trivial point is irresponsible. I think you should have solid proof before you accuse someone of lying. Then again, I’m sort of pathologically credulous, dangerously slow to suspect the person I’m talking to might not be as childishly earnest in conversation as I am. Lying is destructive of communicative trust, but so is accusing people of lying.

Yet Trump’s accusation does have a little behind it. Reporters friendly to the Harris campaign have produced one person who backs up Harris’s claim, but only third-hand. That is, an old friend of Harris’s when they were teenagers remembers Harris’s mother later saying something about Kamala having worked at McDonald’s. Media have treated this bit of hearsay as serious evidence, but you only have to imagine the tables being turned to see how little evidentiary work it really does. If it were Trump, in other words, reporters would roll their eyes. And the Washington Free Beacon provides a big enough stack of circumstantial evidence that Kamala haters can keep believing what they believe already, and others with more open minds can reasonably wonder if this might be a case of stolen fast-food valour after all.

For example, a job at McDonald’s seems like something Harris would have eagerly discussed in her two autobiographical books, which strain to present her as a plucky product of a humble upbringing. But neither book mentions it, even though, as the Free Beacon notes, her 2019 campaign biography These Truths We Hold “devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working-class and assails the service industry’s ‘starvation wages'”. Not brandishing such a shiny autobiographical nugget in this discussion does seem uncommonly modest for a presidential candidate.

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And why have we heard nothing from Harris’s sister Maya, the Stanford-trained lawyer who earlier worked on Harris’s campaign, and who’d have been a teenager when Kamala was supposedly working at Mickey D’s? Smells generate some of the strongest memories, and making fast-food french fries is notorious for how it leaves people smelling. One of my best friends in high school worked at our town’s A&W, the chain of drive-in hamburger joints famous for its root beer. I remember him smelling exactly like french fries when he got off work. Does Maya Harris remember her big sister smelling like french fries when she got home from her summer job at McDonald’s?

No one seems to have asked her, which points to a depressing side-issue. Uncertainty around Harris’s summer job in 1983 has presented a sort of test to elite media, and they have failed. With Trump rushing in to exploit this uncertainty and rake in a huge pile of free and favourable publicity, while littering the ground with his own lies and partial-truths, they’ve responded in a way that exhibits, as if in pathological symptoms and uncontrollable tics, a chronic syndrome in their journalism. A New York Times article from last Sunday is a prominent example. Its sub-headline says: “Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain. Her campaign and a friend say she did.” This is echoed in the body of the piece: “Lacking a shred of proof, he has charged that she never actually worked under the golden arches.” In these formulations, a political campaign’s mere assertion and one woman’s memory of something Harris’s mother told her at some unspecified time count as proof, while all the circumstantial evidence amassed by the Washington Free Beacon doesn’t even count as evidence.

And you can see the Times trying to sculpt their one piece of substantiating evidence so that it looks more solid and imposing than it really is. The article states that “Waanda Kagan, a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal, said she recalled Ms. Harris having worked at McDonald’s around that time.” This makes it sound as if Ms Kagan has conveyed a direct contemporaneous memory of Harris and her job. But in the next paragraph we read, “Ms. Kagan said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago.” So, Harris’s close friend Wanda Kagan knows that Harris worked at McDonald’s because, at some later date, Harris’s mother told her? Not Harris herself? This seems like the sort of curious, murky account of a live issue that a self-respecting reporter would try to clarify a little further, but the Times presents the Wanda Kagan story as if it settles things, as if there’s no journalistic need to corroborate that story by, say, contacting Maya Harris and probing her olfactory memories, asking whether she remembers a smell of french fries from the summer of 1983.

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In a long thread on X, conservative media reporter Drew Holden includes this article among a startling number of examples of news outlets giving snide, niggling, gratuitously skeptical commentary as they reported on Trump’s McDonald’s performance. Holden portrays these as “outrage porn”, but, with a few exceptions, it’s not really outrage we’re seeing. It’s fretfulness and worry. It’s helplessness. As I said above, it’s panic.

Theoretically at least, there was a journalistic balance to strike when Trump pulled his McDonald’s stunt. The press could have done its reporting from the sidelines, quoting Trump’s accusation that Harris lied about working at McDonald’s while noting that such a strong accusation should be backed up by something like proof. They could have, as they have done, reported that Trump himself openly lied when he said that McDonald’s has confirmed his claim about Harris. They could even have reported some of Trump’s odd behaviour has he pretended to fry those sliced potatoes. They might have described his awkward movements, his odd and yet familiar fixation, before all that boiling grease, with the size of the adoring crowds surrounding the humble restaurant. They might have related how he made a big, germaphobic deal about the special technology McDonald’s has for making sure those sacred potatoes are never touched, never despoiled, by “the human hand”.

They could have done this while also conceding that Harris’s claim about working at McDonald’s is indeed light on corroboration. Instead, they’ve seemed desperate to put themselves in the action, to undo Trump’s (sleazy and undeserved, if also enviable and impressive) PR triumph through sarcasm and bad framing, while pretending that obvious questions about Kamala Harris’s McDonald’s story have been answered, when they haven’t. The media have, thus, looked like they’re trying to weaken Trump and protect Harris. They’ve looked, in other words, like they’re a little freaked out, a little scared that a faithful telling of this McDonald’s story might help him win. It’s not exactly the Hunter Biden laptop story, but it kind of feels like the Hunter Biden laptop story.

I have my own suspicions about Harris’s claim, and I’m obviously a little disgusted with how the press has handled it. But I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She had no way to foresee the Trumpian Kung Fu she was opening herself up to when, truthfully or not, she claimed she once had a low-status fast food job. The most clairvoyant politician or political strategist could not have anticipated what Donald Trump, with his greasy and smelly methods, would make of the greasy and smelly mythos of the lowly job at McDonald’s.

It’s a sorry episode all around, but maybe it’ll have an upside. Maybe all the political bragging about having a job at McDonald’s will kill the stigma that attaches to this essential work. And maybe, in the future, on their way to higher education and better jobs and happy lives as successful adults, some larger number of young men will end up flippin’ burgers and dunkin’ fries at Mickey D’s, instead of trying their finite luck as ghetto hustlers.

It’s all too easy to miss the early warnings of an impending disaster. Today’s culture wars are often interpreted as the symptoms of an ephemeral fad. Most can feel the tremors — restrictions on free speech, public shaming of those with unfashionable views, regressive identity politics masquerading as “progress” — but there is a widespread sense that if we ignore the problems, they will simply disappear. But what if these rumblings presage something far worse to come? What if, like the people of Pompeii, we are at risk of civilisational collapse but are misinterpreting the signs?

Further tremors have reverberated recently with renewed attacks on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, perhaps the final bastion of free speech in the West. Speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, former Secretary of State John Kerry argued that when it comes to “disinformation”, the “First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”.

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The First Amendment codifies a “negative liberty”, not a licence for certain behaviour but rather a protection from government interference. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It can function as a kind of barrier to the worst excesses of the illiberal Left, even at a time when their party of choice occupies the White House.

Such challenges to the First Amendment began around 10 years ago with the emergence of the Critical Social Justice (or “woke”) movement, which sought to promote equity according to group identity through authoritarian means. In March 2018, an article appeared on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which noted that by this point it was “common” for Leftist activists “to call for lower legal protections for speech”. The writer concluded that such calls were misguided, describing the First Amendment as “our most powerful tool to keep the government from regulating the conversations that spark change in the world”.

But other activists took a different view from the ACLU. In 2018, two of the founders of Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, republished their 1997 book Must We Defend Nazis?: Hate Speech, Pornography, and the New First Amendment. This version of the book was modified according to the shift in activists’ demands, and the subtitle was now Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy. In that same year, activist and legal scholar Justin Hansford argued in the Yale Law Journal Forum that, when it comes to race, the “marketplace of ideas” does not apply. “When ideas on race that would disrupt the racial hierarchy of white over Black emerge,” wrote Hansford, “the First Amendment is disproportionately applied to trample that dissent”.

The “woke” movement had always taken a pro-censorship stance, but by 2018 the First Amendment was clearly identified as the key obstacle to their aims. This was developed further in The Cult of the Constitution (2019), in which legal scholar Mary Anne Franks took aim at “First Amendment fundamentalism”. An entire chapter was devoted to what Franks calls “the cult of free speech”, a chilling phrase that recalls Labour MP Nadia Whittome’s belief that “we must not fetishise ‘debate’ as though debate is itself an innocuous, neutral act”. Authoritarians frequently resort to this kind of sophistry rather than admit outright that they find the concept of free speech inherently rebarbative.

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In October 2019, former editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel continued this disturbing trend with an article for the Washington Post entitled “Why America needs a hate speech law”. Stengel rehashed the typical concerns about “false narratives” and “lies”, as though any kind of speech regulator could possibly be immune from deceptive or misleading behaviour. He also repeated the “direct effects theory” which posits that people act on cue from social media posts, even though more than six decades of research into media impact on public behaviour has seen such notions fully discredited. The First Amendment, Stengel argued, “should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw”.

A snobbish mistrust of the masses lies at the heart of the opposition to the First Amendment, a feature that we can trace to the Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists of the Sixties, two groups that have substantially influenced the philosophy behind Critical Social Justice. According to this view, popular culture has created a society of unthinking clones. What Herbert Marcuse described as the “one-dimensional man” is irredeemably blind to his own subjugation and reacts mechanically according to decrees from above. According to this perspective, “hate speech” has the power to rile up one group against another, even though the evidence for this claim is scant.

Those of us familiar with the concept of the “long march through the institutions” will be aware that these theories take time to percolate and to infect the mainstream. John Kerry’s recent remarks would suggest that First Amendment scepticism has finally made the leap from academic activism into the political sphere. Whether it gains traction in its new home should trouble us all.

The signs are not promising. This week, Hillary Clinton weighed into the debate during an interview with CNN. “We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230,” she argued, referring to the section of the Communications Decency Act introduced in 1996 that protects online platforms from liability for comments posted by users. Without these protections, big tech would have little choice but to implement draconian censorship measures. The consequences for free speech, in the de facto public square of our digital age, would be catastrophic.

Clinton stopped short of a call for a ban on “hate speech”, but how long before other mainstream politicians are echoing Kerry’s assessment of the First Amendment as a “major block”? There was a telling moment in the recent vice-presidential debate, in which Tim Walz interjected to claim that “hate speech” is excluded from First Amendment protections. The remark was so fleeting that it was not even included in the official CBS News transcript, but it was perhaps the most significant moment of the evening. If the Democrats are triumphant in the election, Americans will be governed by an administration that does not believe the First Amendment is fit for purpose.

History teaches us that legal proscriptions against offensive viewpoints do not have a mitigating effect; bad ideas that are driven underground tend to fester and multiply. We also know that laws against offensive speech soon become expanded to incorporate any viewpoints that are not approved by those in power. In 1644, John Milton published his Areopagitica, a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643 which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. In this essential defence of liberty, he pointed out that censors do not “stay in matters heretical” but inevitably broaden their remit to “any subject that is not to their palate”.

Once a state has been empowered to set the limits of speech, to introduce legislation against vague and indefinable concepts such as “hate” or “offence”, the groundwork for future tyranny is firmly established. One thinks of Juvenal’s famous question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchmen?). Kerry, Clinton, Walz et al seem to believe that those in authority can be trusted to distinguish between fact and fiction, but this was roundly disproved during the Covid pandemic when the lab-leak theories, now widely accepted as credible, were censored as “disinformation”.

Any attempt to carve out exceptions to the First Amendment for “hate speech” will inevitably empower the state to curb freedom of expression at will. The hopelessly subjective notion of “hate” means that this will be tantamount to a censor’s charter, a means by which political opposition can be stifled with the backing of the Constitution. As more and more political figures are willing to openly question the validity of the First Amendment, the threat to free speech in the West is now palpable. The tremors are becoming more frequent, and we ignore them at our peril.

A generation ago, party affiliation played almost no role in American relationships. Today, only half of Republicans and one-third of Democrats report having a friend from the opposite party. What is true for platonic relations is even clear in love. In the Fifties, 10% of Americans expressed a partisan preference for their daughter’s spouse. That figure has since climbed to 60%. Parents need not be concerned: only 4% of marriages are now between a Republican and a Democrat. 

No longer friends or partners, liberals and conservatives instead eye one another warily. Nearly three of every four Republicans, and two-thirds of all Democrats, regard their political opposites as “immoral”. 

Jody Carlucci is not surprised. The 51-year-old Trump supporter refuses to put a GOP sticker on her Jeep Rubicon out of fear that someone would “throw a brick” at it. She’s surely right to be afraid: making her home in Erie, Pennsylvania, Carlucci lives in 2024 election’s political ground zero. 

Even amateur psephologists understand that as Erie goes, so goes Pennsylvania — and as the Keystone State goes, the nation goes too. Ethan Kibbe, a local reporter, puts it well: “Candidates learn quickly that they can’t win Pennsylvania without Erie County. If you want to appeal to the average Pennsylvanian, you have to appeal to the average Erieite.” 

The bellwether county of the bellwether state, Erie has voted for the winner in statewide races 23 of 25 times since 2008. In presidential races, meanwhile, the county has voted for the winner in all-but-one presidential race since the Second World War. 

In practice, then, Erie is America’s political no man’s land, as bitter and contested as anywhere in the republic. I should know. I live in Erie, and over the past four years have watched my lakeside home tear itself apart. 

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Why rural America doesn't trust Joe Biden

By Jeff Bloodworth

In 2020, the Ku Klux Klan left flyers on the lawns of Erieites with Biden signs. On election day, armed poll-watchers patrolled the neighbourhoods. Now, these tensions have returned. Joyce Mallet, an 81-year-old Erie resident, has a Trump sign in her yard. Passersby regularly give her the middle finger. Mallet’s husband seems unconcerned: “She gives it right back to them.” Yet if Mallet can handle it, this greying Rust Belt town remains the place in America where, borrowing Lincoln, the bonds of our affection are closest to breaking.

Of course, I have my own opinions here. The Trump phenomenon has always left me gobsmacked, and a second Trump term would ravage both Nato and my sanity. But if I can’t control who wins in November, what I can at least do is try and understand that other half of Erie that disagrees with me. 

Legacy journalists regularly don Safari hats and venture into Red America to categorise “The Five Types of Trump Voters”. But in Erie, I found that the 74 million Americans who last voted for Trump can’t be characterised, and instead run the gamut of class and education and race.

Before 2016, Carlucci was so apolitical she’d never voted before. As the self-described political cynic put it: “Why would I trust a politician, especially when they are all talking like the teachers, ‘wah, wah, wah,’ from the Peanuts cartoon?” In 2016, though, she finally registered to vote, believing it was time for a change. “Trump was different,” she says. “It was interesting to see a businessman. He says the things they all say. But it was how he said it.” 

Carlucci isn’t alone. For just as she revels in Trump’s pugilistic style, others agree. “Trump does go off on tangents. But they [his supporters] like this because he is unpredictable,” explains one journalist, who came to Erie to cover a Trump rally for a MAGA-friendly news site. “They like it that he jabs back and does the name-calling. They see it as an instinctual sign of strength. There is a real person under the blue suit and red tie.”  

For a generation, authenticity and tangible results have been missing ingredients in American politics. “I’m frustrated with electoral politics that are not responsive to the American people,” says Eva Posner, a liberal political strategist. “The Democratic Party should know better and do better. If you talk to most Democratic officials, they care. But the lack of political courage is astounding.” 

Certainly, Trump has made strange political hay out of this mistrust. Fewer than a third of Pennsylvania voters deem him a person of “strong moral character”. Yet polls also reveal that a majority of Republicans, like Carlucci, interpret his crassness as “tells-it-like-it-is” honesty. And this has real world consequences both in Erie and across the Commonwealth. Today, Pennsylvania Republicans now trust Trump more than the traditional media.

Beyond poking a pudgy finger into the liberal establishment’s eye, though, people like Carlucci also seem to admire Trump for his economic achievements — or anyway what she perceives as the failings of his successors.

A single mom who works as an administrative assistant at a local university, she plans to vote with her wallet. “I couldn’t rob Peter to pay Paul,” she says, “because Peter is broke too.” 

For similar reasons, Carlucci looks back to the Trump years with nostalgia. Spiralling rent and grocery prices means she struggles in a way she didn’t four years ago. This year, a relative paid her 11-year-old son’s Catholic school tuition. “Those four years under Trump my life was better, and I felt safe,” she says. “When you work at a great job you shouldn’t have to have a second or third job. That’s not fair to my kid.” 

Her memory isn’t faulty. Before Covid, the Trump economy featured steady 2.5% economic growth, low 1.9% inflation, a robust 2.1% spike in real wages, and the lowest unemployment rate since the mid-Sixties. Bookended by the Great Recession and post-pandemic inflation, the Trump years in hindsight feel remarkably prosperous, especially for the working and lower-middle classes hit hardest by price jumps.

As Posner adds, that explains a key reason for Trump’s enduring popularity. He may lie as easily as most people breathe, but for voters like Carlucci, his presidency improved their lives in tangible ways. “He is pompous and arrogant,” she concedes. “But he accomplished what he set out to accomplish.”

Perhaps. But in a town as divided as Erie, you have to be careful. In Carlucci’s neighbourhood, where Trump signs are common, partisans roll down their windows and hurl abuse from their cars. Carlucci rolls her eyes. “You aren’t changing anyone’s mind acting like that.” Yet out of caution, she’s advised her 74-year-old mother against putting out a political sign herself. 

At work, meanwhile, Carlucci keeps her politics quiet. The same cannot be said of others. Professors regularly waltz into her office to cuss and gripe about the former president. Wholly unaware that others may see the world differently, they force her, and a furtive set of MAGA fellow travellers, onto a secret Microsoft Teams chat. At church, my 81-year-old mom has the opposite experience. A Mississippi native and life-long Republican, she nonetheless dismisses Trump as “gross”. Yet she dares not share her true views and upset the congregation.  

Not everyone in Erie is quite so diffident. Consider Doug King. A Shakespeare scholar and English professor at Gannon University, a youthful conversion to Catholicism prodded him toward an inchoate conservatism, dovetailed by profound pro-life principles. 

These days, King dismisses most Republicans as “idiots.” But he rejects the Democrats too, disgusted by their support for abortion and foreign adventures like the Iraq War. “When we poke our nose into others’ affairs,” he says, “you need a clear mission of when you get in or get out.” 

A funky-dressing sometime actor and musician, who works in liberal academia, King freely agrees that he doesn’t fit the MAGA stereotypes. When his fellow professors discover he supports Trump “their jaws drop”.

Like Carlucci, meanwhile, King is far from insensible to Trump’s flaws. “He is not pro-life,” he concedes, but he will “do less harm”. As someone who has always run against the grain — before entering academia, he spent his 20s following the Maharishi Yogi — King is another Erieite drawn to Trump’s counter-cultural status. “I tend,” he says, “to root for the underdog.”  

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Pennsylvania is slipping out of Trump's reach

By Jeff Bloodworth

Here, the professor shares much with Tecumseh Brown-Eagle. An Erie native and Trump enthusiast, the 67-year-old accountant was born to a black family but changed his name to reflect his Native American ancestry. “It is definitely the underdog thing,” stresses Brown-Eagle, a former Democrat, of the real estate baron. “He is an underdog for a stupid reason: he is successful.” 

Like King, Brown-Eagle is a searcher. A Muslim convert who studied Judaism, he travelled the world as a member of the US karate team. Seeing a kindred spirit in Trump, he calls him a “black sheep” who has the courage to say what everyone else is thinking. “They are on his ass so hard,” he says. “He can’t be a fake dude. We feel that he is being bullied.”

King makes a similar point. “He’s this bull in the China shop. It’s not that Fox News loves him, or Republicans love him. It is that the establishment hates him.” 

That seems to be enough for this trio of Erie voters. But politics also has its limits. Whatever the signs she sticks in her front yard, Carlucci equally notes that she and her “very Democratic” mother have decided not to have political discussions at home. “It is stupid,” she laughs, “to not talk to one another over two people we have never met.” It seems Joy Division’s mantra does have limits after all.

“More or less, more or less,” said Trump, a little timidly.

It could have been any eager kid explaining a new technology to someone almost four times his age, but what Trump said next encapsulated so much of what he has brought to American politics. “It’s the new wave,” he said, to which Ross enthusiastically agreed.

Trump’s podcast blitz over the last few months — on Kick with Ross, on X with Elon Musk, on YouTube with Lex Fridman and Theo Von, and most recently on Ben Shapiro’s podcast — showcased his ability to adapt to new media forms. This started in the Nineties, when he rose to political prominence as a regular guest on talk radio. He then became a nationwide celebrity through his starring role on reality TV’s The Apprentice. He ran for president in 2016 largely through his Twitter account and, when that was disabled in 2021, switched to his own social media platform, Truth Social. His 2024 campaign strategy hinges on his ability to reach low-information voters who wouldn’t normally pay attention to politics. (Von is a comedian and Ross an online gamer.) From the standpoint of communications, his approach has been astonishingly successful and may well return him to the White House. Really, the entire Trump phenomenon is just media studies — but why, with Kamala Harris only just appearing podcasts now, have his political opponents been so slow to learn its lessons?

Every time I try to understand our era, I find myself — like the kind of person who pulls out their pocket Bible on any occasion to check the relevant verse — reaching for Martin Gurri’s 2014 text, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned media theorist, outlined the dominant dynamic of our time: it is “an episode in the primordial contest between Centre and Border” but with a new array of weapons made available to the Border. “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” he wrote.

In the past, the Border had to make do with penny presses, alternative weeklies, late-night radio stations or, simply, the power of “word-of-mouth”. But, with the public-to-public traffic of social media, the Border developed an ability to communicate with itself at a staggering volume and to change the underlying dynamics of political discourse. For Gurri, 2012 was the watershed year, in which the two-way traffic of social media became a social force of its own, eclipsing the standard establishment media organs and creating an entirely different communicative discourse that was ripe for political exploitation. Gurri self-published The Revolt of the Public and the book passed largely unnoticed, but after Trump’s 2016 victory Gurri’s now-dug-up thesis was the only explanation that really fit.

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Trump had said as much in a 2013 meeting with Republican supporters — a meeting reported on years later by Politico — in which he laid out his playbook for his longshot presidential campaign. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” Trump said. When told by an attendee that the only possible way to run was through lavish spending on paid advertisements, Trump said, “I think you’re wrong” — he would reach a “mass audience” entirely through the new possibilities afforded by earned media.

Initially denied the obvious entry points to airtime in his presidential run — he lacked endorsements and funding, and was far behind rivals like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in access to conservative media — Trump made adroit use of the new technology. Twitter seemed juvenile for a presidential candidate — nobody else was really using it — but it allowed Trump both to make himself relatable and to take his case directly to voters. He became the protagonist of the election, and, when the establishment did what it could to sideline him, he turned the establishment into the foil of his story, attacking Megyn Kelly for her coverage of him.

Trump’s use of Twitter (and Truth Social) is, of course, well known. What’s vastly underappreciated, though, is the extent to which he’s consistently been ahead of his political rivals when it comes to social media and been able to use that playbook for other forms of new media. As a centrepiece of his 2024 campaign, Trump has, as The New York Times somewhat disparagingly put it, “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews”, appearing on podcasts, live streams, and basically any form of new media he can access.

That really shouldn’t be such a big deal. 360 million people use Twitter. 540 million people listen to podcasts. The only ones who don’t, it seems, are the grandees of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden never made effective use of social media — up until Biden’s announcement of not seeking a second term — and, even Kamala Harris, who is closer in age to digital nativity, has been a less-than-enthusiastic adopter. Meanwhile, Trump’s streamed conversations over the last month brought somewhere on the order of 100 million views.

In that same time period, when Trump was embarked on his “calvacade”, Harris made one — count it — large-audience media appearance, in front of the friendly audience of CNN. She appeared in person at a large number of rallies and was also interviewed by comedian Rickey Smiley, an ABC affiliate, and a Phoenix Univision station — none of those with anything like the reach of the podcasters Trump appeared with. The YouTube stream of the Rickey Smiley interview, for instance, has attracted a pitiful 7,000 views. Her paid ads have been saturating the airwaves, she can rely on near-universal support from establishment print media and favourable coverage from network TV, with the exception of Fox. She has an army of surrogates pushing out the campaign’s messages across a variety of media sources. And her debate performance, unlike Trump’s, only proves her confidence with established media forms.

The problem is that none of this messaging takes advantage of the unique resources of new media. New media — whether podcasts or social media — is all about casual, easygoing, personality-driven conversation. In Gurri’s terms, what is happening is that the entire society is going through an emperor-has-no-clothes realisation. The immediacy of digital resources makes social media users — who are also voters — highly sceptical of anybody who over-ceremoniously cloaks themselves in the mantle of authority. In the Twitter era, everyone — the world’s richest man, world leaders, sports stars, celebrities, whatever — is reduced in the end to a common denominator: they are individuals sitting behind a device and tapping into it, just like anybody else. From the perspective of “authority”, that’s something close to an existential threat — a difficulty in reestablishing the lineaments of majesty. But, from the perspective of a democratic politician who relies on popularity and relatability for legitimacy, it should be a golden opportunity. And, for every day that Harris doesn’t appear on general-interest podcasts, she is, essentially, leaving votes on the table. The Harris campaign seems finally, belatedly, to be recognising what should have been obvious a month ago, with Harris appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and with the campaign announcing a media blitz which included an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it may be already be too late. For every day that Harris hasn’t made a new media appearance, she has missed a chance to set the narrative for the campaign.

There is nothing whatsoever that Trump does that digital media users can’t do as well. Anybody under 40 or so can do it in their sleep. But the Democratic Party still hasn’t managed a generational handoff from the Clinton era. They both don’t recognise the power of the new modes of communication and don’t know how to exploit it. Those who do — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have a vast leg-up compared with the rest of the party. And, really, that is the entire explanation of the AOC phenomenon. She tweets like a pro, she’s relatable, and she makes herself the protagonist of her story. It’s not a hard playbook to emulate, but you need to be digital media-conversant to emulate it.

Instead, though, the Dems have moved in the other direction. They have come to rely on their stranglehold over traditional media. They have newspapers, network TV, public radio. They have a war chest that gives them an advantage in all traditional ad markets. And none of that is to be underestimated — that arsenal of communicative technology has enabled them to make inroads particularly with seniors, a traditionally Republican bloc.

What the Democrats, like some red-coated, overly regimented colonial army, fail to recognise, however, is that this is asymmetrical warfare. None of their preferred modes of communication make inroads into the younger or low-information voters who are, at this stage, most likely to swing the election. The Republicans already have talk radio and Fox-world. Through Trump’s media dexterity, they have done very well in social media and, now, on podcasts.

When we assess the results of this election, what we likely will assess isn’t issues or even messaging but modalities of communication. The parties have swerved into very different communications bubbles. This has been the case at least since the era of media revolutionary Rush Limbaugh and talk radio’s shift towards conservatism, while print media and network television tended to skew more liberal. But now, with media ever-more-siloed, those distinctions are only exacerbated across a variety of forms. What the Democrats are still failing to get through their heads is that it’s the newer, more dynamic communications technologies where the more effective persuasion can take place — and which require an aggressive, personable, let-it-all-hang-out approach. Harris should be more than able to hold her own in those formats. But if she doesn’t visit them, she’ll effectively be passing over undecided votes — and those votes will cost her the election.

Democratic presidents Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were all hunters who were open about owning a gun. Before he was elected president, Harry Truman proudly posed for a photograph holding two pistols he had bought that once belonged to Jesse James. And though FDR was the first president to try to pass national legislation restricting the ownership of weapons, Eleanor Roosevelt was said to often be packing a pistol in her purse.

Still, just as few people are as opposed to war as soldiers who have fought in them, owning and using a gun hasn’t stood in the way of a Democratic politician passionately opposing the wanton possession of firearms. No one hated what he referred to as the “extreme” policies of the NRA more than Carter, who at one time claimed to own “a handgun, four shotguns, and two rifles”. And it’s not as if the other side corresponded to the caricatures of political positions that abound today. Nixon was caught on tape saying, “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house.” Reagan, a firm defender of the NRA, alleged to sometimes carry a handgun in his briefcase, was a powerful advocate for the Brady Bill, which requires extensive background checks for prospective gun purchasers. He also supported a ban on owning assault weapons, a policy proposal which is anathema to just about every Republican now.

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How political violence lost its power

By Lee Siegel

It’s a platitude to say that guns occupy a prominent place in the American psyche. But they are the most explicit dysfunction of American life. As our freedoms expand, so do our fears and insecurities; as freedom gets big in one dimension, people tend to feel small in another. As anyone knows who has sat basking in the sun on an American beach, only to have someone else plant themselves down a few feet away with a large incursive dog and a speaker blaring loud music, one person’s freedom is often another person’s misery. I have a suspicion that as the American sense of entitlement has trampled the sense of American responsibility, and as larger freedoms have resulted in feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy, sedans have been overtaken by SUVs, fast food portions have grown freakishly large, empty displays of personal virtue have grown bigger and bigger — and handguns have come to be seen as hopelessly inferior to semiautomatic rifles.

Harris’s openness about owning a handgun — it’s a Glock, she told 60 Minutes — is probably the most dramatically symbolic step she is taking towards the way people live rather than how they ought to live. If I had my druthers, the next president would pass a national law requiring every gun owner to keep their guns locked up at gun clubs, as they do in Norway, Anders Breivik’s slaughter being a monstrous anomaly in that country. But that is no more likely to happen than Utopia itself. What is within legislative reach is the shaming and ostracising of Republican lawmakers who oppose a ban on killing machines such as semiautomatic rifles. The country needs to return to the days of gun-loving liberal politicians leading the charge against the insanity of private citizens owning weapons of war. To the days when a liberal president could lay claim to common values, thus making it possible for a sense of shared community to push back the boundaries of radical individualism, inch by inch. Walz, a proud gun-owner and hunter, is squarely in this tradition. But he’s not running for president, and his presence on the ticket is too transparently expedient and ornamental for it to represent a positive step forward in this respect. Plus, marksman that he claims to be, he spends much of his time shooting himself in the foot.

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It was, most likely, Obama, for all his political shrewdness often too comfortable lolling in rarefied liberal sentiments, who made the Democrats the party of anti-gun fantasy. That created an opportunity for Republicans to turn the Second Amendment into a matter of constitutional Armageddon. Obama’s remark, uttered in 2008, that people in red states “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…” hangs over the Democratic party to this day. Hillary Clinton, his political rival at the time, pounced on that as an instance of unforgivable “elitism”, only to exhibit an identical elitism when she referred to the same segment of Americans as a “basket of deplorables” four years later. By 2016, when Obama blithely declared on CNN that he had never owned a gun, thus strikingly distancing himself from liberal gun-owning presidents who fought for gun control laws, a new generation of young liberal voters had complacently, and childishly, assimilated the idea that gun ownership tout court was a moral anathema.

In this sense, Harris owning up to possessing a gun bodes well for a Democratic party that has become more and more cut off from the way most Americans — decent, commonsensical Americans, not the small contingent of hard-Right fanatics — live their lives. Horrified by police murders of innocent blacks, they want the police to protect them from violence; whether it’s committed by blacks or whites, they don’t care. They are confused by the initiative to introduce young children to the option to radically alter their genders. And even though alarmed by the effects of climate change, they cannot understand why they have been hectored and shamed into buying electric cars they cannot afford.

The acknowledgment, by Harris, that you can own a handgun and, by extension, a hunting rifle, and at the same time want to make semiautomatic rifles illegal, should be about as controversial as someone claiming to be an atheist and suddenly praying to God in a time of trouble. That’s not to say that Harris’s avowal doesn’t also serve several other purposes.

The conventional interpretation of Harris’s “politics of joy” is that she and her handlers mean to contrast that with Trump’s vindictive dark vision of America. But the slogan also tries, on a subtler level, to appeal to people who might be drawn to Trump as the alternative to a repressive liberalism. The woke political revolution of the past eight or so years, now sinking in as an everyday social and cultural style is hardly less dark, in its comparatively understated way, than Trump’s American carnage. In Trump’s vision, ordinary Americans are being chased in the streets by immigrants and criminals. In the woke vision, ordinary Americans are chasing down non-ordinary Americans, group by group. The politics of joy is meant to cry Halt! to both destructive cartoons of American life. (Having invented “woke”, liberals have now made the term embarrassingly unfashionable to use; I demur. You’re stuck with it.)

And what better way to enforce an injunction against the two competing darknesses than the good, old-fashioned American figure of the new sheriff in town, this time sporting, not the six-shooters of Jesse James, but a Glock, the preferred weapon of regular and elite military organisations throughout the world? You’re a criminal or the wrong sort of undocumented immigrant? Hands up. You want to indoctrinate children to feel like racists? Say hello to my little friend. Language in America has become, on the one hand, so extreme, and on the other, thanks to the internet, so much like grunts or graffiti, that words have started to lose their function as vessels of meaning. A gun, on the other hand, has a clear, irreducible meaning.

Finally, and maybe most important of all, the person bearing arms, in this case Kamala Harris, is a short female, part black and part of South Asian descent. In the kingdom of Ends, in the kingdom of God, in the classless society, in the well-ordered society, in Shangri-La, none of that would matter. In America, in 2024, it matters. She also comes across as shallow, thin-skinned, super-entitled, phony and mediocre. That matters. None of this is nice or decent or easy to say. But it is the truth. A torrent of coercive pieties made the impuissant Biden choose Harris as his vice president; Biden’s hubris and lack of character made her their party’s presidential hope. If you had to choose the person least appropriate as Democratic nominee, when the deranged Trump, and the corrupt, craven enablers in his party, simply have to be expunged from the American scene, it would be Kamala Harris.

And so. Here is Harris and her Glock and her embrace of the American normal and the gun as olive branch. It is the gun of the maverick sheriff, of the lone cop inventing their own conformity, of the private eye fighting their way through an existential fog. In American culture, the terrible reality of a gun gets transfigured into the means to a happy ending. As such it might well allow the breathtakingly improbable figure of Kamala Harris to attempt two national salvations: to clean up the insular, self-serving infantilism of woke politics, and to present concrete proof of affinity and respect to alienated people — and who can blame them for their alienation, to a degree? — excited by Trump into a condition tilting on the brink of national suicide.

The shrewd strategic moves began early. As soon as the doddery Joe Biden was evicted from his party’s ticket, the Democrats immediately rallied around his successor, with Biden himself endorsing his vice president as he shuffled to the door. Making Harris the candidate by acclamation, instead of having a “mini-primary” served several purposes. It demonstrated the unity of the party behind the new candidate, even as the nomination of a woman who is of black and Asian descent ticked off multiple boxes in identity politics, minimising the risk of defections by the identity-obsessed Left.

Was the last-minute swap of Harris for Biden — after the latter’s disastrous performance in his debate with Donald Trump — a coup by powerful Democratic donors and power brokers such as former president Barack Obama? Perhaps. But as the old saying goes, “politics ain’t beanbag”. The complaint by Republicans that the Democrats should have indulged a chaotic convention was so blatantly self-serving that nobody took it seriously, least of all Republicans themselves.

The switch, at any rate, had an immediate effect, reversing Trump’s erstwhile advantage in the polls and putting Harris comfortably ahead, a lead she’s retained. The presidential race was transformed from one between a vigorous if obnoxious candidate (Trump), and one who is demonstrably incapable (Biden). It’s now a fight in which the 78-year-old Trump is the flailing maniac and Harris the younger and relatively normal politician.

It’s true that Harris is famously inarticulate, whipping up word salads with the skill of a master chef. But even that reinforces her relative normalcy. So far, the Harris campaign has shown that it has learned from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. The former California senator has not yet dismissed a quarter of voters as “a basket of deplorables”, as Clinton did in her infamous speech eight years ago. And unlike Clinton, Harris hasn’t neglected the Midwest, with its swing votes in the electoral college.

The widely ridiculed phrase “the politics of joy” to describe Harris’s banal and conventional campaign was rapidly abandoned. But the opposite of the politics of joy is the politics of fear, which Biden had made central to his floundering campaign. And unlike Biden, Harris has not made saving democracy a major issue of her campaign. Nor has she gratuitously offended millions of Republican voters by describing them as “quasi-fascist”.

Politics 101, in its American guise anyway, teaches that during general elections nominees should compete to win the political centre. Ever since her installation as the Democratic Party’s substitute presidential candidate, Harris, despite her long record of far-Left positions on social and cultural issues, has been sprinting to the Right as fast as she can. Consider guns. Rebutting accusations that she’s soft on crime and hostile to the Second Amendment, Harris has highlighted her own gun ownership, telling Oprah: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”

Another lesson of Politics 101 is that parties should try to win over independents and split the opposition. The disciplined, professional Harris campaign has been following the book in both respects.

To appeal to independents, Harris has been emphasising her support for abortion rights. And to win over disgruntled Bush Republican voters, dismayed by the rise of Trump and the populist Right, Harris has gone so far as to praise Dick Cheney. Despite being denounced by many Democrats as a war criminal, Cheney announced he would vote for her instead of Trump. Harris, for her part, was quick to thank the former vice president, praising him for “what he has done to serve our country”.

Not since the Nazi-Soviet Pact have so many Leftist heads exploded. But the cliché about politics and strange bedfellows remains as true as ever.

The competence of the Harris campaign is also evident from what she’s left unsaid. In her earlier political career, and as a product of the Left-wing San Francisco Democratic machine, Harris had been identified with hard-edged racial identity politics. Before dropping out in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris attacked Biden for his erstwhile opposition to busing, common in the Seventies to achieve quota-based racial balance in public schools. It was a policy so unpopular that even progressive Democrats stopped talking about it years ago.

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In her presidential campaign, however, Harris wisely has taken care to distance herself from identity politics. Her campaign has not emphasised her black and Asian ancestry, nor has she made breaking the gender glass ceiling central to her campaign. In this, again she’s repudiated the example of Hillary Clinton.

Have Kamala Harris and her aides run the perfect campaign? Even though she has done an interview with tough questions on 60 Minutes in addition to being interviewed by friendlier hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast, some in the media fault her for not doing more interviews with major media organisations. But then they would, wouldn’t they? To date, the interviews apparently have not hurt or helped in the polls, and as long as she has a respectable lead over Trump, Harris would be foolish to risk open-ended interviews in which something she said could be used against her. In any event, anyone who still hasn’t decided between Harris and Trump are probably “low-information voters” who pay little attention to politics — and so are unlikely to be swayed by wonkish proposals on tax benefits.

If, moreover, the Harris campaign has been a masterclass in how to run a presidential campaign at short notice, the opposition offers lessons in how to blow a lead. When it became clear that Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee for the third time running, many Republicans hoped that America and the world would see a “new Trump” — more disciplined and less abrasive.

In the event, their hopes were dashed. The wheels came off the Trump campaign bus during his speech at the Republican convention, when he squandered much of the goodwill he had gained after the assassination attempt, characteristically launching into a rambling and self-centred diatribe. Since then, Trump has thrashed about without gaining traction, as it has become clear that his lead over the deposed Biden reflected Biden’s unpopularity, not support for him.

In his televised debate with Harris, for instance, Trump engaged in bizarrely anachronistic red-baiting: “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.” On his Truth Social account, and channelling Joe McCarthy, Trump riffed on the same theme. “Comrade Kamala Harris is terrible for our country,” he said. “She is a communist, has always been a communist, and will always be a communist.” It goes without saying that this kind of stuff may play well with the lunatic fringe. But when Trump should be appealing to undecided moderates, it counts as political malpractice, especially when Harris herself is totally at home on the corporate wing of the Democratic party alongside Hillary Clinton and Wall Street.

Nor did Trump stop there. An even greater example of political ineptitude was his questioning of Harris’s race — “Is she Indian or is she black?” — in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. This rhetorical incontinence is all the more self-defeating, of course, given that growing numbers of black and Hispanic voters have been casting their ballots for Republicans, though majorities of each group still support the Democrats.

With Trump as their standard-bearer, the Republicans cannot take advantage of Harris’s inanity. Trump himself seems unable to make a coherent case for his own candidacy. Quite apart from his own foibles, meanwhile, Trump’s choice of running mate also illustrates his failings as a candidate. J.D. Vance may impress even his opponents with his mastery of detail — but much of that comes by comparing the Ohio senator with Trump himself.

Will their different styles of campaigning translate into similar personal styles of governing? Probably not. In the case of Kamala Harris, who has hastily sought to reinvent herself as a bland and uncontroversial centrist during the campaign, pressure from progressive interest groups along with her own instincts would probably cause her to move to the Left on policies like immigration and climate change if elected.  In the case of Trump, his shambolic first term suggests that in a second term he would be as undisciplined as a chief executive as he has been as a candidate.

If presidential campaigning were an Olympic sport, then, the Harris campaign would bring home the gold. But in spite of her competence, she could still lose in November. As always, swing states are key. And though she’ll almost certainly win the popular vote, as the Democrats have done in every election bar one since 1992, a handful of voters in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin could yet deny Harris her prize.

One factor here is the “shy Trump voters” — and who knows how many there are. But a more important factor may be the burden of the last four years. Harris has had to signal that her presidency would be different, without criticising the Biden administration in which she served as vice president. The most effective criticism the Trump campaign has made against Harris is therefore this: if you propose doing this or that now, why didn’t you push for it as vice president over the last four years?

And then there’s the fickleness of voters, which can defeat even the most professional of campaigns. American political operatives are fond of the fable of the dog food company whose executives held an urgent meeting to discuss why an advertising campaign to sell their newest product had failed. After a number of senior executives had proposed various possible explanations, a junior executive speculated: “Maybe the dogs just don’t like the dog food.” In just a few weeks, the Harris campaign will discover whether America’s electoral canines are fans of what they’re offered.

Call it the Y2k debate, after the supposed “Y2k” computer bug that people feared would cause computers to crash when the clock struck midnight on the last night of 1999, causing widespread chaos and destruction. In the event, it was just another New Year. It was supposed to showcase pugilism and fireworks as the two embodiments of the countries’ enmities and divisions finally met face to face and lunged at each other for the glory of the respective tops of their tickets. But the match was so anticlimactic that Walz lightly scratching his nose — an old Method-acting technique — took on the proportions of a political event.

And, indeed, the seemingly spontaneous bit of being human was a refreshing break from Walz sticking so closely to what he had been told to say that he didn’t seem to have had time to work through and fully comprehend what he was saying. Repeating his oft-told account of meeting with the parents of children who had been killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, Walz said, “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters. I’ve seen it.” He didn’t come across as a huggable Midwestern dad so much as someone, like Kamala Harris herself, who had been caught in one of the most improbable rip tides in American history and swept out into water far over his head. Again and again, as Vance talked, Walz stared at him in a kind of panic over how he was going to respond. And when he did respond, he seemed astonished at the fact that he was actually speaking himself.

For all Vance’s porcelain poise, in contrast to Walz’s near hysteria, Vance stumbled in the opposite direction, toward a sort of Ivy-League passive-aggressive self-consciousness about his manners. He suddenly turned ingratiating toward his opponent, whom he had been maligning on the campaign trail for months. Walz: “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here.” Vance: “Me too, man.”

The sudden lurch from campaign-hustings vitriol to two playground adversaries making nice in the principal’s office should not have been a surprise. What used to be called “woke”, and now is a treacly national style, is really nothing more than a super-Darwinian society adapting to ever more virulent forms of competition and one-upmanship by turning the display of virtue — in this case, a fireworks display of reasonableness and respect — into a lethal social weapon.

Or to couch it in psychological terms, it is the political form of narcissistic mirroring. That occurs when someone who is unable to relate to another person on an intuitive, emotional level simply reflects back to the other person the latter’s own identity. Since such mirroring is the result of calculation rather than connection, it usually masks intense hostility, even hatred. This is why, in America for the past couple of decades, “empathy” has become sort of a celebrity emotion, as opposed to sympathy. If you feel sympathy toward someone, you both understand them and feel concern for them. Being empathetic is merely knowing how to impersonate someone. Last night, Walz and Vance oozed toxic empathy.

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And yet, such a mental process might well represent a glimmer of hope for a divided country. Politicians on each side live a double life. They feed their egos by roaring out to their followers just what they want to hear. But once on the national stage, the moment their opponent’s position becomes more popular than theirs, they assimilate it, no matter how much at odds it is with the sentiments they display to the faithful. After all, the faithful will understand. They do the same thing every day themselves. And there was Vance, right after the debate ended, rushing over to shake Walz’s hand just as Harris had rushed over to Trump to shake his hand right before their debate had started, thus establishing her dominance and authority.

Both candidates said they had much in common with each other so many times that you wondered whether the country was divided at all. Since running mates are famously assigned the role of Shakespearean assassin — you know what to do, just don’t tell me you did it — you wondered if this was simply a failure of nerve on the part of both men, a sudden surrender to the pious illusions of self-effacing harmony that seem to be the only glue, sanctimonious as it is, holding American society together.

But the phoney bonhomie was really a strategy shared, oddly, by both campaigns. Not in recent memory has the country been offered a choice between, in Harris, a vapid mediocrity, and in Trump, an unbalanced malignity. And not in recent memory have the running mates of the two presidential candidates been clearly more qualified than the latter — though barely so — to sit in the White House  The only difference between them is that Vance lies and gets away with it and Walz lies and gets caught. A bravura performance by either man would have only put the profoundly flawed tops of their tickets into greater relief.

One thing is for sure. If it turns out that Walz was telling another lie when he said that his son witnessed a shooting at a community center — Vance’s ears perked up at a possible opportunity before he quickly faked caring and concern — then he is finished as a viable vice-presidential candidate. Yet it would hardly matter. The debate began with a question posed by the moderators: Iran is two weeks away from making a nuclear bomb. Would you support an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear reactors? Neither Walz nor Vance answered the question. The tragedy in the pathetic comedy of last night was this anti-debate’s revelation of the vacuum at the heart of American power, and of the country’s growing helplessness to protect itself as history rushes to fill it.

While Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are both frequently described as “charismatic”, they clearly have very different sorts of charismatic appeal. And this “charisma divide” helps explain why Harris, despite her almost flawless performance since replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee — uniting the party behind her, staging a close-to-perfect convention, and besting Trump in the 10 September debate — has had such difficulty pulling ahead in a presidential race that still stands on a knife edge. A comparison with Barack Obama’s victorious 2008 campaign is illuminating in this regard: a part of the electorate that saw Obama as charismatic and attractive in 2008 does not feel the same way about Harris 16 years later.

This difference is not just a matter of the candidates, for charisma is not just a personality trait — the ability to attract, charm and inspire others. It is more properly understood as a social relationship, an intense emotional bond forged between an individual and a community of admirers. Different communities find different things charismatic, and, depending on their political and cultural leanings, often dismiss as “fake” in one person the qualities they find deeply attractive and inspiring in another. Between 2008 and 2024, it is not just the candidates who have changed. So has the electorate.

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Donald Trump, love him or hate him, has by any measure succeeded in forging the most intense charismatic bond with his supporters of any American politician in recent memory — perhaps, of any in history. Part of the reason is that he projects an image of strength — even if it is the strength of a bully, and mostly false. He also knows, instinctively, how to reach supporters in their own language. Elite commentators mock Trump for his garbled syntax and spelling, for his love of crude insults, for his language of “us versus them”. They compare him with the proverbial drunk uncle ranting at the holiday table. But, of course, many people have ranting relatives. You may not take them seriously, but they are still family. And social media only heightens the sense of familiarity that Trump instils — and that is crucial to the charismatic bond — because their feeds deliberately mix posts from politicians with ones from family members and friends. Trump fits right into the feed in a way that most Democratic politicians have failed to do. Harris sounds like a politician on social media. Trump does not.

Most important — and this is a point that elite commentators generally miss — Trump’s charismatic bond with his supporters is reinforced, rather than shaken, by his constant outrages: his lying, his law-breaking, his racism, his threats of violence. The point is not whether his supporters believe him, take him seriously, or are ready to follow him in an attack on democracy. The point is that he so flagrantly, and joyfully, breaks the rules of American society and politics, again and again. For men and women who believe that those rules are rigged against them by corrupt and feckless elites, this behaviour is thrilling. The fact that Trump is transgressing matters far more than the particular rules being transgressed.

Of course, the hard core of MAGA supporters who feel the bond most intensely amounts only to a minority of the electorate, concentrated among whites with non-elite educations — although not just struggling ones (if one paradigmatic Trump voter is an unemployed factory worker on disability, another is a successful car dealer). But the elections of 2016 and 2020 have both shown that plenty of other Americans are sufficiently tolerant of Trump and receptive to his message to keep the presidential election agonisingly close.

Which brings us to Kamala Harris, and her brand of charisma. In most ways, it is much more conventional than Trump’s, in line with that of Democratic politicians going back to John F. Kennedy. Harris is unquestionably glamorous: a beautiful woman who dresses elegantly if not extravagantly and has a 500-watt smile. She speaks passionately and inspiringly about the subjects she cares about the most. During her debate with Trump, she was hesitant, even floundering for the first 15 minutes, and then came a question about abortion. In a moment, her voice grew stronger, her sentences more fluid, her emotions came to the fore. And as she gained confidence, she began to needle Trump more effectively, bringing the ranting uncle to the surface. Among her supporters, her gender and racial background are also, inescapably, central to her charismatic appeal. For voters who appreciate the continuing power of sexism and racism in American society, Harris’s story is naturally seen as that most instinctively appealing of narratives: the triumph of the underdog. But at the same time, most voters see Harris, with her long career in politics, as a member of the American elite — far more than Trump, the perennial angry outsider despite his vast fortune.

Harris has done an excellent job of exciting her base of supporters, but, overall, her support remains softer than Trump’s. Trump’s charismatic appeal has, by this point, turned the MAGA movement into a cult. He can do and say virtually anything, and his supporters will not desert him. The Democratic Party is a more normal political party. Members of its progressive wing support Harris, but also distrust her recent shifts towards the centre on economic policy, on immigration, on foreign policy in general (where she is hawkish in a way reminiscent of Hillary Clinton), and especially on Israel-Palestine. Put simply, Harris’s support is less stable than Trump’s. She has the tricky job of holding onto her base, while convincing the small number of centrist swing voters left in the swing states that she is not a madly woke socialist. This is what will decide the election. So far, she has accomplished the first task (thanks to the perceived danger of Trump and the lack of credible Left-wing alternatives) but not the second.

Harris’s challenge is similar to that of the only other person of colour to have received a presidential nomination (and another unquestioned member of the American elite): Barack Obama. Her charismatic appeal is also similar to his, as a (relatively) young, fresh, inspiring person of colour who has overcome great odds to rise to the top of the American political system. Obama is a far better orator than Harris, but Harris does better than Obama in personal interactions with voters. She has an instinctive ease and sympathy that Obama often seems to lack (he moves too easily into lecture mode). If I have one serious criticism of the Harris campaign so far, it is that it has not done nearly enough to highlight this side of the candidate, most likely out of fear that a verbal flub or mistake might go viral — and Harris is indeed prone to such moments. She has been criticised as well for her changes of position over the years, and her lack of specific policy proposals, but these are charges that could be levelled against most American politicians, and, in any case, Trump is far worse on both scores. But Harris should be doing town halls, and sit-downs with ordinary voters at every possible opportunity, and she is not.

This is not the only reason why Harris, despite everything she has done right, has been unable to reach beyond her base and pull ahead of Trump in the polls. Many things have changed in America since 2008, and there are simply no longer many white swing voters left who might be swayed by Harris’s charisma — almost certainly fewer than was the case with Obama.

The problem, then, is not Harris’s lack of charisma, but a change in her audience. For one thing, populist distrust and resentment has grown far stronger than it was in 2008, turning many more voters against any candidate perceived as elite. In 2008, Obama carried Ohio, Indiana and Iowa, three midwestern states whose white working-class populations had already suffered strongly from the loss of factory jobs. These jobs have mostly not returned. In addition, Republicans have worked hard to present immigration as the principal cause of social decline and as a threat. In Indiana and Iowa, the percentage of foreign-born residents has doubled, or close to it, since 2008. In Ohio — where Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have lied about Haitian immigrants eating household pets — it has gone up by 50%. Perhaps not surprisingly, all three states are now firmly in the Republican column. A large number of white voters in these states — even those without elite education — still saw Obama as charismatic 16 years ago. They don’t see Kamala Harris in the same way. The same factors challenge her in other swing states, especially all-crucial Pennsylvania (a state which, as a friend of mine quips, consists of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and “Pennsyltucky”).

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Secondly, the partisan political divide in the US has petrified to an almost unbelievable extent, not only because of Trump, but because of the Republican Party more generally, and also a changed media environment. Soon after Obama’s inauguration in 2009, anger at Washington for not punishing the finance industry for the previous year’s financial crisis led to the birth of the “Tea Party”: the direct ancestor of Trumpism in its conservative nationalist populism, and its scorn for the niceties of American political life. In the House of Representatives, Tea Party members adopted scorched-earth policies towards the Obama administration, exciting their supporters, defeating perceived “RINOs” (“Republicans in Name Only”) in primary elections, and forcing the entire party to double down on the obstructionist brand of political total warfare first pioneered by Newt Gingrich in the Nineties. Meanwhile, Fox News expanded its influence and inspired imitators (notably the Sinclair group of local TV stations). Social media, still in its infancy in 2008 (Facebook was four years old that year; Twitter, two) grew into a behemoth. More than ever, today, Americans live in media bubbles, reading only heavily partisan stories that reinforce their existing opinions. For this reason as well, there are simply far fewer white voters than in 2008 who can be swayed by the charismatic appeal of a candidate like Obama or Harris, and these are the voters Harris needs to win.

And finally, Obama had one massive advantage that Harris lacks: he was running as the insurgent, against a Republican Party that had presided over a disastrous war and, in the fall of 2008, a terrifying economic collapse. His very simple campaign message — “change” — met the moment and drew enough swing voters to give him a powerful victory.

Kamala Harris cannot exactly run a “change” campaign. Yes, her core supporters hate Donald Trump even more than they hated George W. Bush. Trump’s own record in office — despite his absurd and mendacious boasts — was marked above all by his disastrous handling of the worst American health emergency in a century. Democrats don’t want him back and will turn out in large numbers to say so on 5 November, and this matters. But in the country at large, memories of the Trump administration’s failures have faded, and Joe Biden’s apparent inability to contain inflation has cast Trump’s good luck with the economy in a retrospective golden glow (in fact, the Biden administration dealt with what was a world-wide post-pandemic phenomenon far better than almost any other nation, but no matter — Americans don’t pay attention to foreign news).

And so, in an America where membership of “the elite” has become more politically toxic than ever, where Trump’s rule-breaking gains a sneaking sympathy from more people than ever, and where the political divide seems set in granite, Kamala Harris’s smile, passion and inspiring story may not be enough to get her over the top. It is Donald Trump’s brand of charisma that may yet win the day.

Critics from the centre-left may be right to fault Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for “creating stories”, but they are yet to articulate how they would improve the flailing status quo. Kamala Harris may assert that Trump “doesn’t have a plan”, but it is the Democrats who have fallen short in this respect, despite their best efforts to pivot to the Right on the issue. It begs the question: what can Harris do, beyond her usual rhetorical acrobatics, to reclaim the border issue from Republicans once and for all?

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The solution has to go beyond the realm of policy to win over voters. Rather than simply coming up with yet another wonkish 10-point plan, Democrats must figure out a way to convince both the American public and themselves that the border must be defended, that ordinary citizens are right to be concerned, and that order and predictability in the immigration system are positive goods.

First, it is important to establish an honest account of what’s gone wrong over the last eight years. For there can be no resolution to the border crisis without acknowledging that Trump and Biden together share the blame. But where to begin? There can be no hiding from the fact that the Biden era witnessed the worst upticks in irregular migration in recent history, with more than 10 million encounters at the southern border according to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This amounts to a 1,240% increase since 2021 and a backlog of more than 591,000 individuals in the shambolic CBP app’s mass parole programme. All the while, a misguided strategy of documenting those crossing the border — or “managing the flow” — as opposed to trying to halt the flow of irregular arrivals has resulted in a virtual open invitation to economic migrants from Central America and elsewhere to crowd the US asylum system.

Harris should start by admitting the failures of her own party. In 2021, she was made Biden’s spokesperson on the border. But she was hardly the “border czar” the GOP make her out to be. The role gave her little to no actual responsibility over policymaking, which remained in the hands of DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. So rather than pretending her stint in the job was a success, she could admit that the present course is wrong and unsustainable. This would go a long way toward distancing herself from the Biden record — something she has already begun to do in other policy areas. 

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Indeed, given the Republican’s consistent failings on immigration, Harris does not have to stay on the defensive. The most remarkable aspect of tracing the volume and trajectory of irregular migration flows to the US is not the cleavages but rather the continuities between the Biden and Trump administrations. Contrary to the former president’s claims of presiding over the “lowest illegal immigration in recorded history”, Trump’s four years in office saw an effective decrease in deportations from the Obama era according to data collected by Pew Research. As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2020, near the end of the Trump era: “Barack Obama’s ICE arrested and deported more than twice as many people during his first term in office.”

What’s more, both Trump and Biden failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation despite their respective party’s control of Congress for their first two years in office. To the extent that both presidents did see dips in border activity, it was as a result of acting belatedly near the close of their time in office: in Trump’s case during the pandemic, with Title 42 restrictions, while in Biden’s case, the ongoing decline in border encounters resulted in “the lowest border numbers of [this] presidency”. Both were instances of improvised responses coming in “too little, too late”.

The most damning piece of dishonesty was presented by Trump himself during the Butler, Pennsylvania rally in which he nearly died. The big chart which he turned to look at as a bullet whizzed past his ear may have saved his life, but it was still chock full of lies. Most notably, an arrow on the X-axis of the graph indicates January 2020 as the point at which Trump left office, which precedes an uptick of irregular crossings — yet Trump left office in January 2021. It slipped beneath the news of an otherwise important day, but according to the same chart, the latest increase in illegal migration actually began under Trump and simply continued unabated under Biden.

Looking at Trump’s deeply mediocre record on immigration control, we get the impression of a president who does not really care about fixing the problem so much as drumming up support from it, ergo the enthusiasm for horror stories about Haitian migrants. The Trump era, after all, produced a parade of failed immigration bills, which illustrated the gap between GOP rhetoric and results. These included the 2017 Raise Act that would have deemphasised family reunification and established a Canadian-style points system; and then the two 2018 Goodlatte bills, which between them would have funded the wall and brought in mandatory E-Verify. Yet these proposals were defeated not by Democrats but by the then-Republican majority. Alongside these legislative duds was Trump’s own reluctance to support mandatory E-Verify in the White House budget, just as reports of illegal immigrants being hired at Trump Organization properties came to the fore in 2019.

A clever Harris counterattack on immigration would highlight these myriad Republican failures and hypocrisies before throwing the gauntlet back at Trump. Just as the former president mocked his opponent at the end of the recent debate, asking of the Vice President’s pledges “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and half years…” so too could Harris retort “Why hasn’t he done it? Where is that ‘big, beautiful’ wall that Mexico was going to pay for?” But an even more important objective for any progressive realignment on the issue would be for Harris to catalyse a genuine transformation of attitudes from within the Democratic Party.

For this to happen, the issue has to be reframed away from the emotive narratives that have so far dominated the discourse; instead, the discussion could be centred around the material realities and economic costs of runaway migration. It’s a debate that’s already happening in places such as the UK, Western Europe, and Canada where the centre-left is trending toward a pragmatic restrictionism.

However, this is harder to pull off in the US, where entrenched donor elites in both major parties are committed to the open borders status quo. Realignment-minded Democrats must therefore find a countervailing set of interests to combat the influence of the professional elites who run their party, who generally combine material reliance on the undocumented serf class with moralistic views around immigration maximalism. This intra-party bloc could be assembled from unions and working-class minorities, who would be among the first to benefit from any tightening of the labour market that would come with a crackdown on illegal migration, through higher wages, more jobs and greater bargaining power.

A novel wing of “Border Democrats” could then emerge to take up the pro-immigration control arguments of heterodox Democratic leaders such as Bernie Sanders, Vicente Gonzalez, and late civil rights icon Barbara Jordan. After this, the policy momentum will be sure to follow: a progressive agenda could include the aforementioned mandatory E-Verify (far more effective than a wall), and a new “Alliance for Progress” that combines strong border security with generous developmental assistance. If Harris intends not just to defeat Trump but to diffuse many of the factors that gave rise to his movement, she would be wise to follow such a course. It would empower Democrats, humble Republicans, and restore the broad patriotic appeal of progressivism in an era of economic populism. 

But what, one might ask, about Harris the Progressive? For months, the American Right has gleefully painted the Democrat as a “woke” warrioress, a liberal campaigner who cares more about “kindness” than keeping America safe. Yet the truth couldn’t be more different. In fact, on the global stage, Harris’s progressive pedigree is precisely what makes her so dangerous.

One of the ways the US has traditionally justified its foreign interventions, especially after the Cold War, is through appeals to humanitarianism and morality. This represents in many respects the ideological foundation of liberal interventionism, which advocates for the use of military force, regime change or economic-diplomatic pressure to secure the “rules-based international order”. In reality, these lofty ideals have often served as the pretext for the advancement of US economic and geopolitical interests.

In 2022, the international relations scholar Christopher Mott coined the term “woke imperium” to describe the most recent iteration of this mode of government, which doesn’t just seek to overthrow foreign rivals, “but [to] engineer their very cultures according to the Western progressive model”. Its real aim, he explained, is to “advance the foreign policy objectives of the liberal Atlanticist Blob”.

Harris’s advocacy for progressive issues — from climate change to democratic governance in developing countries — perfectly fits this pattern. Like Biden, she has often framed the tensions resulting from the emerging multipolar order as a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and championed human rights as a cornerstone of US foreign policy. As America’s first female president, and a multiracial one at that, she would be uniquely qualified to double down on this agenda.

To understand what this might entail, we need only look back at the past four years. From its role in provoking and escalating the war in Ukraine to its near-unconditional support for Israel and aggressive approach to China, it is no exaggeration to say that Biden’s Democratic Party has become the official heir to the neocon agenda. Read again the Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992, which asserted that “America’s political and military mission in the post-Cold War era would be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia, or the territory of the former Soviet Union”. The only difference now is that the US is no longer fighting to prevent the emergence of systemic challengers to its hegemony but, much more perilously, to contain and suppress new powers that have already emerged, first and foremost China and Russia. This was perhaps best captured by a classified report approved in March by the Biden Administration, and recently disclosed by The New York Times, advocating that the US must prepare for a simultaneous nuclear war against China, Russia and North Korea.

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Harris played an important role in cementing this posture. In her speeches as Vice President, she repeatedly underscored the importance of maintaining American military superiority and reaffirming the US’s central role in Nato and other military alliances. She dealt extensively with Ukraine, for example, meeting Volodymyr Zelensky six times since the beginning of Russia’s invasion. On several occasions, she reiterated America’s unwavering commitment to Ukraine. Harris also made numerous trips to Asia, meeting with US allies in the region to bolster Washington’s various anti-China military-security alliances, as well as pushing important legislation targeting China for human rights violations.

Since assuming the role of Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has made it amply clear that her approach to foreign policy will remain rooted in Wolfowitzian principles. At the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”. She also vowed to “never waver in defence of America’s security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs”. This might sound relatively benign, but it betrays a deeply Manichean worldview — one which openly rejects the idea of civilisational distinctiveness as the foundation of an international order based on sovereign equality between nations, but rather divides the world in legitimate (“good”) and illegitimate (“evil”) states.

Harris also made it clear that she would maintain the status quo on Ukraine: continuing — and possibly escalating — Washington’s proxy war against Russia. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Harris hasn’t been involved in the White House’s recent discussions about allowing Kyiv to use American and British-made long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory, even as far as Moscow itself — something that Putin has warned would draw Nato into a direct conflict with Russia.

We can expect Harris to pursue a similar line of continuity over China and the Middle East. Her manifesto, for example, claims that “she will always stand up for American interests in the face of China’s threats” — whereby “threats” should be understood as America’s declining hegemonic status resulting from China’s rise, not as a direct military or security threat to the US. Meanwhile, as far as Israel is concerned, despite Harris placing more emphasis on the humanitarian suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, she has done little to actually rein in Israel — nor has she provided any intention of doing so in the future. Indeed, in her campaign manifesto, she vows that she will “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself”.

This follows reports from Harris’s current and former staff members that she will not only reject any cuts or conditions on military aid to Israel, but will also refuse to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal as a means of reducing tensions in the region. According to The Times of Israel, congressman Brad Schneider stated that Harris’s Jewish outreach liaison informed him that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee would oppose re-entering the nuclear agreement — even though the unravelling of the deal allowed Iran to massively advance its nuclear programme, while incentivising it to strengthen its ties to its proxies in the region, including Russia.

On all major foreign policy issues, then, we can expect Harris to toe the Democratic Party’s imperial line. Especially when considering that her national security advisor, Philip Gordon, is a “dyed-in-the-wool transatlanticist” who played a key role in devising Obama’s disastrous attempt at toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

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Nor is it surprising that, despite her progressive credentials, Harris has been collecting heavyweight endorsements from hardcore neocons and Republican foreign policy hawks. Indeed, none other than Dick Cheney — lifelong Republican über-hawk, mastermind of the post-9/11 “forever wars”, and notorious advocate of torture — recently announced that he will be voting for Harris, who said she was “honoured” to have Cheney’s endorsement. Cheney’s daughter, Liz, a former Republican congresswoman, has also given her backing to Harris. Referring to Harris’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, she said: “It is a speech Ronald Reagan could have given. It is a speech George Bush could have given. It’s very much an embrace and an understanding of the exceptional nature of this great nation… [If you care] about America’s leadership role in the world, a vote for Vice President Harris is the right vote to make this time around.”

As an intervention, it was as revealing as it was remarkable. The fact that ultra-conservatives are now endorsing Harris is reminder that the “culture wars” are, ultimately, little more than a sideshow: when it comes to the issues that truly matter — first and foremost foreign policy — elites will happily join forces with peers who share opposing views on “cultural” issues. Indeed, the Cheneys are merely part of a growing list of Republicans who have come out to endorse Harris, including Roberto Gonzales, attorney general in the Bush Jr Administration, where he was an architect of some of the early War on Terror’s worst legal offences; Larry R. Ellis, a retired general who also served under George W. Bush; and more than 200 former Republican staffers. The establishment media has been fawning over Harris for very much the same reason. Jennifer Rubin recently wrote a glowing analysis of Harris’s foreign policy in The Washington Post, approvingly describing it as “Reaganesque”.

Meanwhile, as the US establishment lines up to celebrate the prospect of a Harris presidency, the rest of the world could be forgiven for being more wary. After all, for the billions of people around the world who are deeply concerned about the prospect of global war, this kind of zero-sum Cold War mentality only spells bad news. Under Harris, the “woke imperium” will have found its emperor. And with a smile, she will deliver more of the same: intervention in the name of democracy, and war in the name of peace.

Eight years later, the Republicans are suffering from the same mistake, although this time the fatal phrase emerged years before the campaign. In 2021, J.D. Vance (then a Republican candidate for the Senate) gave an interview to Tucker Carlson (then a Fox News host), in which he attacked what he had described as the “childless Left”. The USA, Vance told Carlson, was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.

Childless cat ladies. Regrettably for Vance and the Republicans in general, it is a great phrase: pointed, memorable — and ripe for the reclaiming. Which is why, when Taylor Swift declared her backing for the Democrats on Tuesday, she did it by posting a picture to Instagram of herself holding one of her three cats (the cat in question is Benjamin Button, a ragdoll). And she signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” Elon Musk responded on X with a gallant offer to impregnate her, which will do little to diminish accusations that Trump supporters are weird.

Her announcement was hardly surprising. Swift backed Biden/Harris in 2020 and has previously lent her support to liberal causes including gun control and abortion rights. But it was an anxiously awaited one. Other pop stars had declared their affiliation long ago: Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat” almost as soon as the vice-president declared her run for the White House. And hours before Swift’s post, The Guardian published “Is Taylor Swift a secret Trump supporter?” The evidence for this was a photograph of her hugging a friend who had liked a Trump post on Instagram. (McCarthyism, apparently, can change its shape but never die.)

And it is a significant move. Swift’s cultural heft makes her a fearsome political force. When she shared a link to a voter registration site in 2023, there were 35,252 new registrations that day; notably, this included a 115% increase in 18-year-olds, who are more likely to vote Democrat. Swift’s audience also skews female, which is significant for an election held in the shadow of the Dodds Supreme Court decision which undid Roe vs Wade. Bluntly, the more women vote, the harder it becomes for Trump to win.

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But even though Swift has embraced her electoral power now, she’s historically been cautious. As a young singer-songwriter on the Nashville scene, she cultivated an apolitical stance. One of the country acts she had first been inspired by as a child were the Dixie Chicks (now simply called the Chicks): in 2003, their career was all but destroyed after a member of the band criticised George W. Bush during a concert. “They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what,’” said Swift in 2019.

Five years on, Swift is much more comfortable pinning her colours to the mast. But she still carries some of the burden of being — as the title of her 2020 film tagged her — Miss Americana. Nashville may be behind her now, but the similarly conservative-leaning National Football League is firmly in her present. That’s thanks to her boyfriend, the footballer Travis Kelce, who has become more established in her public life than any of her previous partners. They are a formidable team: between them, they cover the worlds of sports and pop music, male and female, Right-coded and Left-coded. A homecoming king and queen for the nation.

But Swift is more than an individual. She’s a business. Michael Jordan’s truism that Republicans still buy sneakers holds in the music industry too: Republicans stream songs and buy concert tickets and merch as well. For Swift, the art is to cultivate her own positions without alienating half her potential US market. It’s a problem that other, more explicitly political artists have been learning to navigate since Swift’s own political coming-out. Chappell Roan, for example, is all-in for LGBTQ causes. But in interviews, she has stressed her Midwest roots and compassion for people with opposing views: “I know where they’re coming from. It’s just not that black-and-white.”

For Swift, a crack along the lines of “basket of deplorables” would probably be even more calamitous than it was for Clinton — and absolutely devastating for her other half. Hence what looks like the careful orchestration of the announcement. That hug with her problematically pro-Trump friend, fellow NFL WAG Brittany Mahomes? The rune readers were wrong to see it as an endorsement of Mahomes’s politics, but probably right to see it as a deliberate announcement of something. The message of the hug is that friendship comes before partisanship. In Swiftworld, you can have your beliefs without needing to cancel people from life for having different ones.

I hesitate to read too much into a paparazzi shot, but maybe this is a good sign for American democracy. Back in Swift’s days of silence, there wasn’t much pressure for her to speak out on politics, because there wasn’t a strong expectation in the Noughties and early Tens that a teen pop star would have any politics to speak of. Their job was to look pretty and be air-headedly inoffensive: nobody expected to know how Britney Spears was going to vote.

That changed with the great politicising of everything that happened in the mid-tens. First, “feminist” went from suggesting an alarmingly confrontational woman to sounding new, exciting, even sexy: Beyoncé danced in front of the word in 2013. Slogans like “silence is violence” came into popular use, insisting that anything less than outright campaigning amounted to complicity with evil. More importantly, social media meant that silence had become perilously easy to detect. Lending your support to the Black Lives Matter cause, for example, was as simple as posting a black square to your grid — so how much of a closet racist would you have to be if you couldn’t even do that much?

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Personal relationships began to be treated as a battleground. Patronising Left-wing guides on how to handle Thanksgiving began to proliferate after Trump was elected: “It’s our responsibility to go home and have the hard conversations with our family members, because, in many cases, only we have the power to reach them and begin the long work of rooting out bigotry in our communities,” said one cringingly solemn article on the website Mic. But these had their match from the Right: the Daily Signal, an offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, offered tips on “how to be persuasive about politics with your liberal relatives”.

As strongly as Swift’s history had compelled her to hold her tongue, the new order dictated that she should speak out. She described herself as a feminist for the first time in 2014. Just two years earlier, she’d answered a question about whether she was a feminist by saying “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls”; perhaps significantly, between those two points, she was sexually assaulted by a DJ, against whom she later won a civil suit. From there, her political evolution evolved steadily, bringing us to the present day, when a Swift endorsement was coveted enough for Trump to share fake images implying he had her backing.

Vance’s jibe at “childless cat ladies” is the nonsensical endpoint of the era in which everything was politicised by default — even pet ownership, even whether or not you have procreated. Anti-feminist claplines might play well to a tame audience such as Tucker Carlson, but in the wild, a lot of women are going to hear this as the Republicans rejecting them: if being a “childless cat lady” makes them liberal, then so be it — they will cast their vote accordingly.

Swift’s response is mindful and demure and resolute. It shows a grasp of political messaging that Vance and co. have failed to get anywhere close to: pop stars have learned the power of the big tent, while right-wing politicians flail around for the pleasure of their fandoms. This is, of course, the opposite way round to how it ought to be, but there’s hope for the US in Swiftian politics. Maybe, it’s time to stop putting people into baskets.

There has been a lot of talk about imminent civil war in America, and the internet sizzles with violent discord. It’s true that whichever side wins, the other side will feel either cheated or bereft, and feelings will run high. But neither candidate stands for anything ideologically galvanising. Kamala Harris tries to be nice. Donald Trump strives for an intimidating autocratic effect, but he lacks a cohesive vision, of the sort you might find in Mein Kampf or in Mussolini’s fiery speeches, a vision that would impel millions towards self-immolation for the sake of an idea. His formerly sharp demagogic instincts running on empty, Trump seemed at least to grasp the need to fill an urgent ideological need as he desperately sought last night to get the country worked up over what he claimed was undocumented immigrants eating the pets of American citizens in Springfield, Ohio. But immigrants feasting on cats and dogs would be a poor centrepiece of, say, imperialism or antisemitism; it does not an origin of totalitarianism make. Instead, the unhinged quality of Trump’s groundless claim might well have lost him the election.

Gravely serious matters were at stake at the debate: abortion, immigration, the rule of law. But America has adapted and will adapt to permutations in policy for the first two, and the country is too stable for Trump’s most virulent autocratic fantasies to become reality. No one as obsessed with the bottom financial line as Trump is would ever risk creating anything more than rhetorical chaos. Business people hate real chaos. And unlike the Chicken Littles of the liberal media, they know fantastical bluster when they see it.

Still, after the uncertain first few minutes of the debate, the mysterious air of profound consequentiality intensified. The expectation, of course, was that a live debate without an audience, with the microphone of whoever was not speaking turned off, would be some sort of freakish Zoom meeting to end all Zoom meetings. From pandemic isolation to general post-pandemic anomie, all organised under the strict control of the debate’s moderators. The first televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy had also taken place without an audience, but that was just at the dawn of television, and the faces on the screen had not yet detached themselves from actual social interactions. (The handsome Kennedy won the TV debate, they say, while Nixon prevailed among those who listened to it on the radio.) As Harris and Trump walked onto the stage, Harris striding forward to shake Trump’s hand, you settled in for just another pleasurable diversion, compliments of the ubiquitous and omnipotent Screen.

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I was once at a party in Manhattan that began as a disjointed assemblage of people and then suddenly became a living organism. “Now it’s a party,” someone said to me. At the instant that Harris grasped Trump’s hand, the disconnected event started to become a debate. The note of “once upon a time” was struck. By asserting herself with a surprised Trump, who clearly had not wanted to shake her hand but had no choice but to do so once she extended it, Harris established control over her adversary. It was a fateful bookend to that fateful moment in the 2016 debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, when Trump circled around Clinton, finally standing behind her and towering over her in order to establish his own authority and control.

The optics were remarkable. Americans don’t like short presidents; the country hasn’t had a short president in modern times. And here was Harris, short by, as it were, any measure, even with heels, deliberately making a physical contrast between herself and the much taller Trump. And, lo and behold, the bigness of offering her hand had the effect, in one stroke, of making Trump look small.

You realised then that what was at stake was not social, economic or foreign policy, not the fate of culture or the future of industrial relations. Never mind the question of whether America retains its preeminent power in the world. What was at stake last night was the question of whether the American personality still has power in its own land. Amid all the screens, and chips, and algorithms and AI, amid all the opioids and the psychiatric drugs, can the sheer force of being a particular person carry the day? And what sort of person, what type of personality, will it be?

Psychiatrists speak of narcissists who have their personal myth of greatness challenged by exploding into a rage response, and this is precisely what Harris achieved when she referred to the small size of Trump’s rallies, belittling him by talking about all the people who leave them early out of “boredom and exhaustion”. Trump combusted. From then on, he sputtered and raged and danced with his demons. He circled back to the menace of illegal immigration again and again, no matter what the subject was, despite the fact that Harris had observed, at the beginning of the debate, that he would return to immigration again and again in just that way. By the time Trump warned Americans about the wholly fictional “transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison” — why that would bother him remained a mystery — it became clear that he will never inhabit the White House again.

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Harris, however, brought to the event a softly riveting novelty that served the purpose of replacing the bonkers, electrifying novelty of Trump in 2016. She began as a cipher, nervously clearing her throat, her voice trembling at moments, and ended as figure of character and principle. The pundits had all complained, as if to tutor her, that the country needed to know her. Well, by the time of the debate, she was still blank and unknown. She was still someone who seemed to want to be president only to be president, as if she had nothing better to do. But then something happened.

As Trump blustered and came apart, Harris’s mediocrity fell away. As he wrecked himself on the rocks of his obsessions, her shallows became depths. She stopped clearing her throat, her trembling voice grew strong, expressions of patient affliction, alternating with a certain narrow-eyed, seething incredulity, began to flow naturally across her face. Lacking originality and charm, she drew vitality from Trump’s bile and rage. In 2016, enough Americans were mesmerised by the utter newness of Trump’s brazen iconoclasm and insults to make him president. In 2024, after a pandemic, racial convulsions, revolutions in patterns of work and in mores, Americans watched rapt last night as perhaps the most ordinary human to ever run for president responded to lies, and menace, and insults by pulling herself together into a recognisable personality. People didn’t need to know who Harris was. They watched as she became Kamala Harris.

Politics, said Lenin, is Kto-Kvo, “Who-Whom”. Last night, Americans who were pummelled by radical change over the last eight years watched a fellow “Whom” replace the dominant “Who”. Nothing is so consequential, and so riveting, in American politics, not war or peace or taxes, as the drama of becoming a person. Harris won the debate hands down. She will win the White House, too.