The fascist or the stupid person? Either way, voters are the losers
Has any US presidential election had so many saying, “I can’t wait until this is over”? If the result is close, of course, it won’t be over on Election Day. Both sides have thousands of lawyers on call to litigate any narrow election margin.
It has become conventional wisdom to say the nation’s institutions can survive this maelstrom. Likely that’s true, but the course of this election is cause to wonder. By its end, the 2024 campaign has become a wholly negative event, devoid of substance, descending into non-stop ad-hominem attacks, or garbage.
Donald Trump is a fascist, a Hitler admirer, a dictator from day one. Kamala Harris, by Trump’s description in North Carolina last week, is a “stupid person”. He added: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”
The one institution that should feel insulted by this bottom-of-the-barrel campaign is the American voter, with those supporting Trump a case study in mass political denigration.
Political commentators and others mistakenly conclude that because they think Trump is a fascist, everyone else obviously should. There is an implicit assumption in this belief that the presidential election itself is uninteresting, other than as a confirmation of elite biases about one person.
This compulsion to hyper-personalise our politics is more interesting on the Trump side of the equation because the media has chosen to equate the entirety of the Republican Party and conservatism with Trump. In 2020, 74 million people voted for Trump. About as many will again. That’s millions of Americans. Are these people all potential fascism adopters?
Some substantial numbers may think Trump is a character-challenged jerk, but so many millions don’t vote for a presidential candidate solely on personality but after a complex calculation of how a candidate will help or harm their own interests and beliefs. Indeed, the complexity of that voter decision, across all demographics, is why opinion polling has become so challenging.
As interesting in the attempt to divine who’s going to win this mess of an election are events already forgotten. The Republican nominee, after all, emerged from competitive primaries. By the end, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley held about 20 per cent of the GOP vote, with many of her supporters saying they wouldn’t vote for Trump. Will they in fact leave the presidential line blank?
Also forgotten but impossible to take off the election table is the reality of Harris’s ascendancy. The only reason she’s the Democratic candidate is that the Biden family and his White House aides irresponsibly let him hang on to the presidential nomination until mid-July rather than allow the party to conduct a succession earlier. If the President Biden on view now were indeed the candidate, there’d be no statistical margin of error in Trump’s lead.
The party defaulted to Harris, who is benefiting from the country’s 50-50 polarisation and Trump’s revelry in an anti-politic personality. The moment I started thinking Harris wasn’t going to win was last week during former president Barack Obama’s speech, before her appearance in Georgia.
It was vintage Obama on the stump – droppin’ all his Gs and using pauses to perfect effect. It was a totally partisan stem-winder by a charismatic pol. Then came Harris, whose OK turn onstage forced the conclusion that she just doesn’t have the special magic needed to be a successful presidential candidate. Jimmy Carter had it, or he wouldn’t have won. Harris has a significant enthusiasm gap. Thus the campaign’s need to compensate with a parade of celebrities – Bruce Springsteen, Lizzo, Usher, Tyler Perry, Julia Roberts, Oprah, Spike Lee, Michelle Obama, even Beyonce.
Right behind “I can’t wait until it’s over”, the election’s most memorable catch phrase is “One of them has to lose”. I think that one is going to be Harris. The main reason will be substantive and as predicted from day one – the economy. Household prices went high in 2021, and many have stayed high. For an incumbency that’s fatal, as it was for president Carter.
Still, a caveat. The phenomenon known as Trump derangement syndrome is real, but it may have a successor: Trump exhaustion syndrome. If so, he loses.
Regardless of the winner, this election has produced an emerging political reality: the country is moving to the right, or at least centre-right, and is likely to stay there. I don’t believe this drift is directly attributable to Trump himself. He rode it but didn’t cause a tectonic shift in America’s politics. The highly politicised idea of “wokeness” is in broad decline, a victim of its own unreflective overreaching and intolerance on questions of equity, gender and climate. The US has had enough of its endless “demands”.
This reversal has many moments, but recall one: after anti-Semitic eruptions last year at US campuses, three university presidents testified before congress. It was a time for decisive action, an assertion of leadership. Instead the three said famously that anti-Jewish activity was “context-dependent”. Two lost their jobs.
Every time she speaks, Harris sounds like a university president. She’s context-dependent. Expect the same result.
The Wall Street Journal
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