Straight to the point

In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle (“You talkin’ to me?”), a disturbed cabbie who plans to shoot presidential candidate Charles Palantine before chance intervenes to steer him away from irrevocable catastrophe. The film serves as an instance not just of life imitating art but of art prefiguring life. In a strange twist, John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 after seeing the film and developing an obsession with Jodie Foster, tweeted after the Donald Trump shooting, “violence is not the way to go”.

The parallels, however, don’t end there. Trump’s rambling speeches, to which he returned after resuming his campaign, are reminiscent of Bickle’s own paranoid mutterings  while Kamala Harris’s rhetoric sounds every bit like the empty suit Palantine; in fact, her last slogan “Kamala Harris For the People” recalls the equally inane “Palantine — We Are the People.” Real-world politics seemed yet again to be taking its cues from the Taxi Driver script.

Scorsese’s gritty urban epic was born of a decade (comparable to our own) associated with moral decline, traumatic random violence and paralysing elite failure. The anti-hero Bickle, like many then and now, struggled to give meaning to events and circumstances beyond his control. Today, fear and foreboding once again stalk the land. Is there anything Americans can do to avoid being overwhelmed by the senseless and inexplicable character of historical events?

The Seventies may hold clues. Its preceding decade was one of social revolutions, many of which either failed or fell short (not unlike the 2010s); and so, it is remembered as the post-Sixties’ “hangover”. Yet as historian Thomas Borstelmann argued, it was in these years that the changes initiated in the Sixties became mainstream: the shift from industrial liberalism to free markets; the breakdown of traditional authority and the loosening of social mores; the fracturing of modernity into relativism and hyper-individualism. Indeed, the same bleak environment that inspired Taxi Driver, the near-bankrupt New York City of the Seventies, also gave rise to one of 2024’s candidates. Donald Trump was then offering himself as the saviour who could stem the decay, ultimately personifying the bare-knuckle capitalism that prevailed in the next decade.

It was, therefore, a time when old narratives were dying but new ones had yet to take their place: the problem wasn’t so much that terrible things kept occurring on Americans’ television screens, but those watching lacked the ability to integrate them into shared frameworks of meaning. The succeeding narratives, after all, needed time to emerge organically. In hindsight, it is easy to interpret the era’s chaos: gas lines, rising crime, military defeat, and assassination attempts as the trajectory of a society in the midst of a painful but necessary crisis and transition stage while on the way back to renewal. Much harder to do the same when one is living through it, but finding narrative threads to connect events to their potential historical significance may nonetheless prove to be a worthwhile, even necessary, exercise.

Looking at the recent spate of turmoil, one may be tempted, like Bickle, to react with bottomless dread at what seems like a world breaking apart. Or one can, also like Bickle, by the end of the film, find ways of grappling with a grossly imperfect and contingent reality — but with an eye to arriving at larger sources of meaning and moral legitimacy — that is, to do more than just “cope”. It sounds abstract, but it has been done before and can be done again; after all, the malaise of the Seventies didn’t last forever and eventually gave way to “Morning in America” and the optimism of the Nineties. The question is what can fill the present narrative void?

Take the two-week period between the 13 July attempt on Trump’s life and the unification of the Democrats around Harris by 27 July, which will have to go down as one of the most consequential in US politics. Yet much of what happened was largely the product of chance. A lone assassin managed to mount a rifle across from a former president and the target turned his head at just the right time to avoid a headshot. A week later, a frail Joe Biden stepped aside and instantly endorsed his vice president as successor, who had been chosen due to political considerations from the last election year, when fallout from a contingent event, George Floyd’s death, led to “a woman of colour” being in demand. (The distasteful “DEI candidate” accusation should not detract from the connection, freely admitted to by progressives, between the atmosphere of 2020 and Biden’s selection process.)

Both parties made hasty adaptations to the situation by putting the most convenient spin on it. However, these partisan attempts to ascribe meaning to accidents, being much too grounded in the immediacy of the present, suffer from a severe lack of historical perspective. And while these are perhaps understandable as initial reactions, they will not suffice going forward.

In the case of the Republicans, the defects of this approach became clear at their convention, held throughout the week after the attempt: it was naturally suffused with a sense of awe at Trump’s survival. Yet the question of to what end this emotional power and political capital would be expended was buried beneath the exuberance. Consider the contrasting sets of talking points employed by Trump’s vice-presidential pick Ohio Senator J.D. Vance on the one hand; and long-time Congressman Steve Scalise on the other. Embodying his party’s insurgent “New Right” wing, Vance spoke of breaking with ideological dogmas of the Republican past, and of the need for a “leader who fights for the workers in this country”, as opposed to the “Wall Street barons” who “crashed the economy”. Scalise, meanwhile, argued that the Party should look to make the overwhelmingly pro-Wall Street tax cuts they passed in 2017 “permanent”, a view shared by many of his fellow Republican rank-and-file Congress members. Depending on what the policy direction of a second Trump term ends up being, whether it follows Vance’s or Scalise’s divergent wishes, a future historian looking at this convention would probably wonder what the significance of Butler, Pennsylvania might have been.

This historian could ask: Did Trump’s near brush with martyrdom signify a fateful turning in the transformation of the Republican Party — as affirmed by his anointment of Vance days later? Or did the ex-president miraculously cheat death only to return the Right to the nostrums of the Reagan–Bush era, the same elite consensus he sought to overthrow when he first ran in 2016? One need not be looking back in 50 years’ time, however, to be able to retrospectively confer the highest meaning to the incident at Butler. For the ability to deduce and act upon such a logic in real time is the mark of any great statesman.

Likewise, on the Democrats’ side, there is widespread relief that their ticket is no longer saddled with a nominee in cognitive decline, so much so that the establishment has willingly overlooked the many known defects of Harris as a politician. Indeed, the Party seems to have become carried away with how their new nominee checks many of the boxes in the progressive identity wish list. There is now a question of whether the Harris campaign will lean more heavily into identity-centred messaging, similar to how Hillary Clinton ran her failed 2016 campaign, or whether it will tap into the class-centred populist themes that sustained Amtrack Joe’s successful 2020 run and, indeed, the Biden administration’s own “Bidenomics” industrial policy programme.

Once again, the future historian may wonder at which direction history had moved and why the Democrats, after having been given a lifeline, went back to the race-conscious but class-agnostic “Rainbow Coalition” strategy of the neoliberal Nineties rather than build on the recent gains they made in the industrial Midwest, where they were once able to reclaim the populist torch from Trump. As with Republicans, the danger is that Democrats go for a feel-good approach that resonates emotionally in the short term but which dispenses with the larger historical perspective that’s guided the Biden team’s thinking on policy, namely that “the free market at home and globalisation’s effects wrought havoc”. This is a clue that the party should focus on this reckoning with structural forces underlying America’s economy, from which a universalist message of material uplift can be drawn on to appeal to voters across racial and gender lines.

It would help to understand the 2020s as a yet another transitional stage, when the revolutions initiated in the 2010s, representing a reverse pendulum effect from the Taxi Driver decade, are starting to take hold: free markets are giving way to the next economic paradigm just as the excesses of postmodern fragmentation have led to a yearning for new narratives of unity and cohesion. And as with the Seventies, the transition will be turbulent.

What is needed is a fresh script or grand narrative to relate chaotic events back to just such a larger horizon of time and meaning, one which can fuse small-h history with big-H History. It is undoubtedly the Republican candidate who began our revolutionary moment eight years ago, but it is arguably the Democrat running against him who summarised this view of history best: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Indeed, just as the most banal slogans can be entirely accurate, even the most random events can sometimes bear larger truths.

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