“He watched the play with great intensity,” wrote Cormac McCarthy in All the Pretty Horses. “He’d the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not. There was nothing in it at all.”
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.
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.
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.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/