“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” suggested Trump, barely suppressing a giggle at the obviously outrageous understatement. “We desperately want it,” Mamdani replied earnestly. Not, “we desperately want a fair and equitable and safe and prosperous New York”. Not, “we desperately want justice and harmony and security in New York”. No. What New York City’s next mayor desperately wants is peace in the Middle East.

Mamdani then went on, fawningly, to praise Trump — whose termination of foreign aid programs is reckoned to have endangered millions of lives — as being the answer to voters who “wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we had funding the violations of human rights”. But he was at his giddiest when salivating over how “the President and I spoke about the importance of not only building more housing, but also making sure that regulation of housing is something that is manageable to actually get through and not the cause of yet another wait that we see in our city”.

Building housing and sweeping away regulatory protections against profligate construction are certainly causes close to Trump’s heart. He was sued in the Eighties for harassing tenants out of buildings he had bought, and in turn, he himself sued the city for tax abatements for his luxury housing, establishing a framework in which tax dollars supported unaffordable apartments. For both Mamdani and Trump, then, the answer to the housing crisis in New York is: build, build, build. To be sure, they have very different conceptions of building. But the two faux-populist demagogues agree on one thing: real estate is the defining issue of our time.

From the moment the first human grunted “mine”, the principal, and perhaps the only, cause of war has been a struggle over land. It is easy to see why. Moira is the ancient Greek word for your particular portion of fate. Land expands, establishes and concretizes your moira. It is a solid counterpoint to the evanescence of time. You own your life, the good and bad of it; there is no escaping that. When you own land, you are reproducing the basic freedom of your biological existence.

Yet for the first time in history, a powerful world leader sees the world in terms, not of land, but of real estate. The difference between the two is simple: land has an intrinsic value: the place where people, cultures, civilizations establish themselves and grow. Real estate’s value lies in the marketplace: it is determined by how much people will pay for it. People belong to land. Real estate belongs to people.

The idea that the inhabitants of Gaza and Ukraine are fighting for their humble moira, which binds them to their forebears and to a stretch of time that is not, as time essentially is, apathetic, but is part of their memory and senses, is meaningless to Trump. Money is all that matters to Trump, and money is fungible. For land to make money, it must also be fungible. You miss your grandfather’s olive grove, with its sharp heady scents, where your private memories formed and where soulless impersonal apathetic time became stamped with your essence? Don’t be so sentimental. Make room for beachfront towers, shopping malls and gyms. Let history slide, will you? When Trump felt nostalgia for Scotland, his mother’s birthplace, he simply bought it and planted a flag on the links he bulldozed there.

The same coarse vision is iterated in Trump’s new National Security Strategy just released by the Trump administration. America’s former allies, the liberal democracies of Nato, are portrayed, not as rich civilizations bound to the land they grew on, but as depreciated properties whose value has been diminished by undesirable people — immigrants — moving into the neighborhood. Russia and China, also rich civilizations built on land, but which yearn to appropriate more land they believe belongs to them, are now regarded by America as dazzling potential real estate developments. Toynbee is out. Sotheby’s is in.

Now, at first glance, Trump’s efforts to make real estate rather than land the driver of history might seem like a humane innovation. It makes everything so straightforward. Cash incentives replace nuclear deterrence. Immense profits provide an effective alternative to emotional power.

But that is the superficial perspective. If real estate replacing land ever came to be a universal condition, individuals would be reduced to derivatives — mere packages of mortgages and assets. They would lose the concrete embodiment of their biological existence that the ownership of land confers. Everyone would be on the verge of being exchangeable with everyone else.

It is almost poetic, then, that this conflict between land and real estate has now begun to play itself out in New York City, where our soi-disant “democratic socialist” mayor has stumbled into his first political fight.

It involves a privately owned “garden” in New York’s Nolita neighborhood, wedged in between Soho and the Lower East Side. The irony here is that, like Trump, Mamdani wants to turn this land into transferable real estate. Unlike Trump, though, he wants to make the real estate public, and not commercial. That is what socialism is, after all: the conversion of real estate back into land — where you can build the framework of a life for your own values — courtesy of the state.

Known as the Elizabeth Street Garden, the one-acre, lush and eccentric small park, with its wrought-iron chairs and benches, fanciful sculptures, shrubbery, trees, flowers and herbs, has existed since 1991. It was the property of Allan Reiver, who owned an art gallery nearby; now it belongs to his son. Back then it was a private operation; you had to enter the art gallery to gain access to the garden. In 2012, a City Council member proposed that the park be converted into affordable housing for seniors. Reiver promptly and cannily made the park a nonprofit entity and opened the replenishing space to the public, thus retaining ownership. It remained his own land, accompanied by a smile, and a deed, from the state.

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The fight to convert the garden into affordable apartments for seniors continued, however. For over a decade, lawsuits were filed and contested. The current mayor, Eric Adams, had been all set to turn the park over to some nonprofit developers. But when Mamdani promised to do just that the instant he was in office, Adams reversed and declared the garden a public park. It was not for sale. Outgoing mayors, especially in the hardscrabble politics of New York City, often make parting shots to vex their successors. The affordable-housing initiative is now dead. Mamdani’s intention of giving seniors a little piece of land in the cold, commodifying city went nowhere.

There’s a further irony surrounding Mamdani’s doomed push. Of course the park, in one of the most expensive urban neighborhoods in the world, is cherished by the people who live in the neighborhood — the sort of well-heeled millennials who overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani. And like it or not, they have dispossessed the people they claim to want to empower. They were supported by celebrated liberals such as Robert De Niro and Patti Smith who were also squarely on the side of the Garden — on the side of privilege and wealth, playing the role of reactionary landowners! Their attitude toward the garden is very much like Trump’s toward his Scottish golf course. Sentimental realtors all.

I am deeply skeptical of Mamdani, whose grand ambitions and vaunting rhetoric will never match the grimy reality of governing New York City. If he sticks to the divisive and opportunistic tactics and sentiments he used to get elected, he will run the city into the ground. But I did admire his valiant plans to convert the garden into desperately-needed affordable housing. They were the first fruit of his ambitions as a democratic socialist. Yet they foundered on the resistance of the wealthy, privileged millennials who supported his democratic socialist ambitions. When push came to shove, they could not sacrifice their individual self-interest to the common good. Perhaps they thought that the utopian Garden of Eden Mamdani spun out in his TikTok campaign would remain just there, on TikTok. The Garden before the fall, if you will. It’s not clear who bit the apple of rebellion — did Mamdani’s base defy his principles, or did he test their sincerity by trying to come through on the promises he made to them?

Either way, Mamdani and his crowd have tumbled out of the cynical fantasy of his campaign and into the real world. The clawing back of private land, even land held under the pretext of being a public park, into state-sponsored real estate for the people is no easy, or straightforward, task. Even less so is the dignified restoration, in a city and a country where just about everything is up for acquisitive grabs, of individual moira.

The unspeakable atrocity of innocent people being shot to death by a deranged mass killer continued last week. Two children were murdered and 18 other people wounded in an attack at a Catholic church in Minneapolis. The media coverage gradually devolved, as it always does, from conscientious reporting and outraged commentary to the usual money-driven spectacle. The Left called, as it always does, for gun control; the Right seized on the fact that the shooter was, apparently, a trans person. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan memorably said that he was returning his “entrance ticket” to God because he could not accept that He would allow the suffering of a single child. In America, the abomination of murdered children is quickly absorbed into helpless routines of commerce and cultural conflict.

And yet no one made the connection between the killing in Minnesota and Trump’s dispatch of the US military to Washington DC for the sake of preserving, he declared, law and order. Trump made it clear that he wasn’t stopping at DC, announcing plans to send the military into other cities, all liberal, as it happened, like Chicago and New York. But aside from sending condolences to the people stricken by the violence in Minnesota, Trump said not a word about mass shootings in America. The street crime Trump claims he wants to extinguish, as he has extinguished illegal border crossings, has been a feature of organized humanity since people began to congregate in numbers larger than two. The mass slaughter of innocent people for no other reason than that someone wanted to slaughter them — that is something new. Isolated detachments of soldiers are not sufficient to stop it. You would need soldiers everywhere.

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Donald Trump’s war on Washington

By Lee Siegel

If Freud was right, and depression is anger turned inward, then the statistics showing that a majority of Americans are clinically depressed might mean that, for some, homicidal rage takes the form of depression turned outward. The simple fact is that the origins of a mass shooting are buried in an individual psyche; they are impossible to prevent. That is perhaps why Trump is deploying American troops to American cities has not met the sort of resistance one might have expected. Rather, there is a feeling, among even the most liberal of us, that in a society where the mass killing of children, of innocents, has become a common occurrence, safety has to come from somewhere. I don’t know a single liberal not horrified by Trump’s profligate use of the American military to do the job of American police. But I don’t know many liberals who are either over the age of 50, or not the product of wealth’s elevations and exceptions (or both), who don’t, on some deep instinctual level, welcome the sight of a soldier in the context of a civil society that has become increasingly unstable.

That doesn’t mean that America has become increasingly violent. As the liberal media is at great pains to point out, and justifiably so, crime rates have declined over the past few years. It just so happens that the regions where they remain elevated are in the West and the rural South. Crime is far higher in MAGA states like Tennessee, or Alabama or Mississippi, than in even the most violent blue cities.

But the reality of crime matters far less than cultural attitudes toward crime. For if violent crime is higher in the South than in the North, the way people think about crime in the two regions is radically different. In the South, antisocial behavior is habitually contrasted with the values of law and order, values rooted in the moral frameworks of family, religion and patriotism. The North, where the causes of crime matter more in terms of policy than crime per se, is regarded by the South as downright libertine. Telling the Right that their own regions experience more crime than the places in the country Trump is portraying as being under siege by criminals is irrelevant. In the eyes of many Republicans, those liberal places are under siege more by their “permissive” attitudes toward crime than crime itself.

If, however, the different parts of the country have different perceptions of their experience of crime, they all share the same condition. America’s rate of violent crime far exceed countries in Western Europe and East Asia. Taken as a whole, the United States is a violent place. All the while, the vast economic displacements of the past 30 years have introduced their own violence, as what remained of a manufacturing economy gave way to an information economy, which has now been subsumed by the digital world. In a situation of rapidly mutating norms, crime is not merely a fact, but the symbolic shadow of a wider malaise.

It is one of the peculiarities of being an American now that you don’t have to live in a city with a high rate of crime, like Washington or Chicago — or Memphis or Birmingham — to feel personally threatened. The presence of predation on the internet; the screen-abetted withdrawal of people into themselves; the dissolution of shared cultural experiences into countless, private streaming niches; the fractures produced by identitarianism; the blurring of fact and fiction, the personalizing and customization of the justice system; the displacements of human experience and human labor by AI — you could live miles away from anyone, yet still feel as as if you were living in an urban crime zone. It is no wonder that “weaponized” has become such a popular expression. When the most disparate experiences become turned into “weapons,” it means that mass murders — soul-murders, psyche-murders, feeling-murders, status-murders, murders by money, trauma, gaslighting, “subtle acts of exclusion” — are happening all around us.

In this sense, Trump’s war on the liberal cultural of negativity toward America might well turn against him if it is successful. Once negativity as a dominant cultural attitude subsides, his appeal starts to fade. The media’s relentless apocalypticism, its “weaponization” of everything under the sun, is what has people cheering, across the political spectrum when Trump sends troops into American cities. When America’s cultural institutions, from the media, to high and popular art, to higher education, constantly cry that the sky is falling, people are going to turn to whatever figure or force promises protection. Imagine that proverbial visitor from another planet, but one who comes with their family, and has a human biology. Within two hours of experiencing the news, our extraterrestrial immigrants would hear that climate change is bringing total destruction, the next terrifying pandemic is right around the corner, the races hate each other, men and women hate each other, something called artificial intelligence is wiping out the quality of being human, and your child’s genitalia are not as permanent as you thought they were back home. And because it is so hard to keep up with all these encroaching terrors, crime — the primordial human fear of being killed or violently assaulted by another human — embodies all of them.

If a few more car accidents than the average was enough for some people in Spain to wish for the return of Franco, violence in America is exponentially more consequential. As the perception of chaos rises, calls for safety, stability and protection will become naked and intense. A mighty state teetering atop a failing society, America cannot exist much longer without the imposition of order; from one side or another. As a parent leads a child across a busy road, American democracy will soon be guided by the firmest hand.

It is more than passing strange. In the Soviet era, so-called socialist realism was enforced in the fine arts, which depicted happy collective farmfolk; academics portrayed the Russian Revolution in lectures and books as the dawn of the world’s first workers’ paradise. The media published one glowing economic report after another; posters depicting radiant construction workers hung everywhere; new composers vied to embed heroic anthems to communism in their symphonies. A few lines critical of Stalin in a poem by Osip Mandelstam that Mandelstam read to a small group of friends resulted in a betrayal, the poet’s arrest and his death in a gulag. “Only in Russia is poetry respected,” Mandelstam had once wryly written. “It gets people killed.”

A drab, Philistine approach to culture is essential to a repressive regime, and for the Philistine Trump and his band of intellectual and cultural mediocrities, attempts to coerce American institutions into an optimistic sameness blend seamlessly with the coarseness of their taste. From universities to the Smithsonian, Trump wants an official American culture that projects only the “greatness” of America, with no flaws or blemishes. He dismisses reporters who criticize him as “scum” or “evil”. He has made it clear that, from government agencies to private banks like Goldman Sachs, he desires economic statistics that report only positive news. Like a dime-store Lenin, his giant portrait now hangs in front of the Department of Agriculture building in Washington.

The official optimism of the Soviet era was the result of a complex ideology that sought to engineer a desired future by reconfiguring the past and lying about the present. Yet Trump’s coercive sunniness has nothing to do with an ideology born from historical conflict and oppression. It is the bright, blinding bluster of a businessman, delivered in the ominous tones of a demagogue. It puts you in mind of the recent trend of “creative” television commercials for insurance companies. They almost always follow the same model: they (other insurance companies) fail in this or that comical way; we give it to you straight, and honest, and effective. The Ur-commercial or advertisement has always depended, whether explicitly or implicitly, on planting in the viewer or reader’s mind the inadequacy and inferiority of the competition.

So when Trump, in a move that might have warmed the heart of Putin, the ex-KGB man, recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to replace her with someone more likely to, in classic Soviet fashion, disseminate statistics favorable to the regime, he wasn’t acting like some modern-day Lenin. Lenin used the concept of “production propaganda” to heroicize workers and exaggerate both the success of Soviet industrialization and its revolutionary effects. That was the product of theory, rooted in history. Trump is marketing reactionary politics as though he were selling a car. As H.G. Wells put it in Tono-Bungay, his visionary novel about the role of commercially created perception in modern society: “the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor’s eye.” Trump is, day after day, filling the American eye.

Trump’s reflex to send the American military into American cities, most recently into Washington D.C., coupled with his expansion of ICE’s deportation and detention activities, should be seen in this light. It is chilling, of course. It is, without doubt, an autocratic spasm, the likes of which are making ordinary Americans from every walk of life careful about what they say or write. But because Trump’s use of the military is rooted in a competitive attempt to manipulate mass feeling, and not in some iron idea or ideology, it comes across as a weird combination of Soviet-style repression and American mercantile ingenuity. “An intellectual hatred is the worst,” wrote W. B. Yeats. But Trump’s crude initiatives are, at bottom, pitches to commercial feeling: Look at their decaying, crime-ridden cities. Now look at our safe and shiny ones. Where would you rather put your money — and your vote?

I don’t mean to make light of what Trump is doing. He is destroying the fabric of American creativity and freedom — they are the same thing — in everything he does. Like a lot of people who define themselves by the money they accumulate, Trump seems mortally offended by qualities that are non-transactional and non-quantitative. More than one avid and earnest young person, speaking their heart out in an uninhibited moment, has looked up to see someone staring at them with daggers in the eyes, riven by envy of their inner freedom. It’s why Iago hates Othello. It’s why John Claggart hates Billy Budd in Herman Melville’s great story of the unfathomable, implacable hatred harbored by coarseness of fineness. It’s why Iago-Trump hates Obama-Othello beyond all reason or explanation. 

It is no wonder, then, that Trump is pushing a government initiative to pour nearly $100 billion private dollars into AI. That is how business replaces independent thought — how Claggart replaces Billy. The official sunny culture of the Soviet regime sought to replace independent thought with a kind of production-propaganda AI. Its algorithm of an inexorable march to utopia did the thinking for its citizens. In America, an AI washed and rinsed of all original insight, which is born out of original experience, is now doing the thinking — quantitatively, aggregately — for American citizens. America is not on the verge of totalitarianism. It is in the throes of businesstarianism. 

It would not be prudent to take with a grain of salt Trump sending the military into Washington to keep order as if the city were in flames. But it would be paralyzing to see it as an irreversible step toward authoritarianism. Rather it is Trump gussying up his Right-wing showroom in advance of the 2026 fall retail season — I mean, the midterm elections. They want the police to be engaged in “brokering and enforcing social cooperation”, in the words of Brandon del Pozo, a Rawlsian former chief of police and now assistant professor of public health at Brown University. We just want to put the bad guys in jail, where they can’t hurt you. You get a lot more miles per gallon with us.

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The new Cold War will divide the West

By Philip Cunliffe

It is not quite what Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini or any modern dictator pursuing the merciless logic of an historical equation had in mind. This American moment is the product of democracy’s meltdown, not of a rival political system to democracy. The old distinction between negative liberty (the state limits itself to protecting rights and ensuring safety)  and positive liberty (the state helps individuals realize their potential) has broken down. The social justice movement, well meaning as it is, has been indulging its own autocratic spasm in almost entirely drowning out negative with positive liberty. In a society where people are going to “realize their potential” — i.e. get what they want, any way they can —  a state that helps certain groups but not others to achieve that goal is going to be perceived as an oppression to everyone else. In a super-mega-hyper competitive society like America, social justice is seen by many as just another way for someone to get a leg up.

And in an American society where the idea of community never extended beyond where you lived, where religion has receded even where its rituals are observed, where the screen both causes and sanctions increasingly anti-social, or even incomprehensible, behavior, a lot of people respond to news of the military on American streets with shouts of “It’s about time!” As for Trump’s custom Italian-made heel on the neck of universities, the media, low and high culture, plenty of people don’t perceive it so much in its particulars as revel in its aggregate. Finally, they say, at a time when democratic freedoms have, in so many ways, tipped over into the type of freedom that alarms and threatens rather than inspires and transports, here is someone — true, a sociopathic and vindictive clown, but hey, he’s our sociopath — addressing the problem.

For these people, Make America Great Again means make America simple and safe again. On some fundamental level, that is a non-partisan desire. After all, echt-liberal democrat Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, also sent the National Guard into New York, specifically its subways. On Friday, Putin won’t be interested in negotiating about Ukraine; he only cares about what he wants. What he might wish to talk about, but wouldn’t dare to, is how Trump is bringing back Soviet-style conformism, but in Russia’s great rival, and combined with a spirit of American entrepreneurial chaos and greed.

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 closing of the Democratic mind

By Lee Siegel

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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Can middle-aged white guys save the Dems?

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.

At around the same time, Kash Patel, the new director of the FBI, met with the bureau’s agents and employees for the first time since he was confirmed as director by Congress. Along with explaining to the several thousand people attending the Zoom session that, unprecedented in the bureau’s history, he would be working mostly out of Las Vegas, and not Washington DC, he announced that he would be establishing a partnership between the FBI and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) an extreme martial arts entertainment behemoth. Which just happens to have its headquarters in Las Vegas, and whose CEO, Dana White, just happened to be a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign.

But the opening act, as it were, for Trump’s and Vance’s humiliation of Zelensky, was Musk’s presence at the first gathering of Trump’s cabinet. Musk held forth, standing over the seated cabinet, talking more than anyone else at the meeting, including Trump, as the assembled cabinet secretaries remained mute. When a particular secretary did talk, they preceded their remarks by praising Trump with ritualistic submission. It was unlike anything any Americans had ever seen.

But just about everything that has happened in the five weeks since Trump was inaugurated is unlike anything we have ever seen. Yet a society changing for the worst, without violence at the beginning, changes without much opposition because the new conditions blend seamlessly, like spies, into the old conditions. Humans have a great stake in keeping a bright outlook and not rocking the boat they have to sail in every day. And Americans, numbed by screens, psychiatric drugs, pornography and infinite niches of fantasy and entertainment, have become passive and inert.

The establishment, watching, simply does not know how to combat Trump. The late-night comedians, bedtime storytellers for liberals, soften his unprecedented assault on American government, on old international alliances, on the dignity and decorum of democratic statesmanship with laughter. Oh, that Trump, you chuckle to yourself before turning off the light and pulling the blanket over your head.

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The media attempt to oppose him by describing his aberrations in rational prose, which only normalizes his dizzying about-faces and casual bombshells. Rather than consider how appalling Trump and Vance’s outburst against Zelensky was, for days it swirled the following conundrum around its navel: was Zelensky’s humiliation by Trump and Vance planned or spontaneous? As if that mattered in the slightest. And so his most bizarre actions are analogized into familiar gestures. They are historicized into normalcy. He is Nixon, sort of, kind of like Reagan, maybe, a throwback to McKinley and Andrew Jackson for sure; he is using Putin’s “playbook”. Some of this might be true, some of it might be illuminating, but none of it thwarts him to the slightest degree.

Meanwhile, bored, Trump can only rouse his own interest by falling back on the one activity he excels in, which is making deals. But the thing about a deal is that it happens in isolation. No one on any side of a deal is thinking about a larger context outside the deal. If you are negotiating building a shopping mall, you are not thinking of the history of shopping malls, the effect of the shopping mall on social relations, the effect that particular shopping mall will have on the surrounding area in 50 years. If you are about to “screw” — to use one of Trump’s favorite words — someone in the course of making the deal, you are not thinking of that person retaliating, of that person’s allies turning against you, of whether you will ever talk to that person again. Everyone in on the deal moves on upon the completion of the deal, after which everyone is ready to come together again to make another deal. Trump doesn’t have the political imagination to consider the complicated long-term ramifications of the actions he takes, or says he is going to take.

And this jumping from isolated deal to isolated deal has caused a dramatic change in the country’s atmosphere. Each episode is discussed, critiqued, condemned in isolation from everything else he does. Few people seem to have the will to connect one new fact with another. And here are the unprecedented facts: the military lawyers who keep the military from violating the Constitution have all been fired by the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Trump is installing flunkies as generals and admirals. The Pentagon has been ordered to stop offensive cyberoperations against Russia. Trump has put the government in the hands of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, whose $500 billion is able to generate currents of persuasion that can set in motion generals, admirals, politicians and judges. Either the lunatics are running the asylum, or the criminals have taken charge of the justice system. Or both.

In his classic book about the 1968 Democratic and Republican presidential conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer described the “goons” Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had surrounded himself with: “Some of them had eyes like drills; others, noses like plows; jaws like amputated knees.” Daly himself “from up close had a red skin with many veins and hair which looked like dirty gray silk combed out straight”. After Obama’s taut, vain, self-consciously sculpted gym body, and all the polished prettiness of the liberal mandarins here is the opposite number: Trump’s garish orange hair and skin, his bulging stomach and spindly legs; RFK’s lizard eyes and dying frog voice; Steven Cheung’s siloed, eyeless head and Costco bulk; Bannon, MAGA’s intellectual giant, an unwashed homunculus who seems to have absorbed culture in the manner of a partying banker, uncomprehendingly, through the nose.

Just as in Mailer’s telling, today’s grotesques are in a rage, not just against the liberal and neoliberal sham of “merit” — liberalese for “the fix is in” — but furious at anything that doesn’t respect them. It’s just like the anger amid the regime in Fritz Lang’s 1943 Hangmen Also Die. Watch any member of Trump’s new rank being interviewed. They are absolute paragons of politeness until they are challenged. Then they explode. No one has ever found themselves in a situation like this, and no one knows how to react.

Instead, in Congress during Trump’s speech, having being chastised by House Speaker Johnson for booing Trump — for sounding, in other words, like the far more robust House of Commons — the Democrats sat in submissive silence, holding circular signs saying things like “False” and “Save Medicaid”. The writing on the little signs was so neat! While the Republicans screamed and roared and chanted “USA! USA!” the Democrats behaved like the good little girls and boys they had been all their lives. They had never been put in a situation where the delinquents and cut-ups took over the school.

Paralyzed by losing the working class, by being shunned as “elites”, by being accused of lacking the ordinary person’s “common sense”, the Democrats can’t seem to find a way to strike back at Trump without appearing to be “out of touch”. So even as they agonize over Musk gutting the federal bureaucracy that has always stood between people and a rapacious marketplace — the bureaucracy, for all its maddening flaws, is a vital sliver of civil society within the government — the liberals mechanically intone the need to tame the bureaucracy.

The leaden, Manchurian-Candidate mantra that is deployed by the Right to justify Trump has been “the system is broken”. Adjunct to that is: “behold all the waste and fraud.” But the “system” is no more broken than “systemic” racism pervaded every nook and cranny of American life. There is no one “system”. The “system” is made up of countless realms — health, education, welfare, law, environment, economy and so on — each of which constitutes its own special world. None could possibly be “broken” in the same way, and none could be “fixed” in the same way. They fail to function here and there, sometimes miserably, but America functions in all those realms, every day. Life, for most Americans, is ok. Syria is broken. Sudan is broken. Gaza is broken. To say that the American “system” is broken is to not understand the meaning of what is being said.

As for waste and fraud, so be it. They should not be used as excuses to break the “system” under the pretext of “fixing” it. They are the collateral nuisances of a democracy. Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes erase “waste and fraud” from their societies along with freedom. In those regimes, instead of waste and fraud in society, corruption and deceit thrive in politics. But now you have liberal bien pensants nodding their heads and stroking their chins and saying, “Yes, well, harrumph, of course, we too want fix, harrumph, a broken system and to rid America of, harrumph, waste and fraud… But, please, let’s not get carried away!”

America has now changed, irrevocably. It will never be the same again. The challenge is to keep the change from becoming cataclysmic. “Political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links,” said Lenin, who advised grabbing hold of the link “that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain”. For all the mewling about the broken system, no one seems to have any idea of how to leap beyond addressing isolated moments and to go beyond theorizing about opposition, to actually doing it. In The New York Times, James Carville, the liberal establishment’s not quite adequate answer to Steve Bannon, did connect some of the links—only to advise not doing anything at all and simply allowing Trump to implode before the country does. What a brilliant idea.

The only force, the vital link, that will stop the unstoppable force of Trump is something equally original, astonishing, daring and uninhibited. Someone, as they say across the Southern border, needs the cojones to stand up to Trump and the cadres of craven careerists and flunkies the Republican party has become. Is there no one, in this unbound, uninhibited, wildly unpredictable place who can do that?

There is not a single disaster the country has faced in recent years that has not, sometimes within hours of it happening, resulted in driving Americans apart rather than bringing them together. Mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks, people were accusing each other of war-mongering, or appeasement, or anti-Muslim prejudice, or complacency about “fifth columns”, or an unforgivable lack of preparedness before the attacks. Hurricane Katrina was followed by bitter debates over the rapidity, fairness and the adequacy of the federal response.

As for the country’s response to Covid, it hardly seems an overstatement to say that the 19th-century debate over slavery was no less vitriolic than the strife, often vicious, incited by masks, lockdowns and vaccines. The proverbial visitor from another planet would have thought that this argument over a health crisis — it killed over a million Americans, after all — was in fact an argument over an election. Maybe the contestations around Covid created the atmosphere for the contestation of an election.

In one perspective, of course, even the most heated differences signify a democracy’s health. Authoritarian regimes don’t tolerate altercations in the name of freedom. But disaster is different. There was hot debate in Britain over the Munich Agreement, but there was no debate over how to respond to Germany’s invasion of Poland one year later. In a crisis, healthy civilizations respond to the crisis. They don’t turn on themselves.

It took no time at all for the recriminations to start flying after the worst wildfires in the history of California broke out in Los Angeles. Within hours of the flames taking hold, the New York Times ran, in short order, articles accusing the LA mayor, Karen Bass, of not having had dry brush near houses cleared away, and of not having sufficient water to fight the fires. The newly minted firefighting experts at the newspaper even accused the LA fire department of not having updated its tactics for fighting fires. This was followed shortly afterward, with a sort of mechanical cluelessness, by an article titled “When Disaster Hits, Trump is the Blamer in Chief”.

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The problem here was twofold. First, these articles appeared while people were being burned alive, while people were watching their houses, their possessions and their memories being destroyed, while LA firefighters were working 24-hour shifts in horrific conditions to save people’s lives and property. The “gotcha” style of American journalism — it wasn’t just the Times — that has prevailed since Watergate surely could have been restrained until the catastrophe had come to an end.

The second problem with the predictable banquet of accusation was that it wasn’t strictly accurate. What the media was covering was not the result of any kind of impartial investigation. It was the result of the usual infighting among a municipality’s politicians and their surrogates. The media were reporting on a political quarrel over who was to blame, not on who was actually to blame. Apparently, the fire chief, Kristin Crowley, had protested Bass cutting the fire department’s budget in some areas (in fact the 2025 budget ended up rising by over 7%). But city officials fighting with a mayor over how much money they will get for their agencies and departments is hardly a scandal. It’s never anything but murky, either.

It’s a time-honored convention for newspapers, in America anyway, to end their news articles with a quote from an expert, or some figure of authority, with which to delicately insinuate a moral judgment. The New York Times does this to a fare-thee-well. Its article critical of Bass’s response ended with the customary authority figure, who delivered his, and the article’s, stern judgment of Bass’s performance. “’This is a massive failure of epic proportions,’ he said.”

It was an impressive way to finish, firm with reassuring finality. There was one problem, though. The authority figure was Rick Caruso, whom Bass had defeated in the 2022 mayoral election. To say that he had an axe to grind with regard to Bass would be an understatement.

To make matters worse, the Times had already quoted Caruso, a billionaire real-estate developer, dramatically lamenting the shortage of water, the Times adding, with nary a sliver of critical distance — the Times’ news articles have always been artfully choreographed — that Caruso himself had hired his very own team of private firefighters. The Times writes: “All night, [Caruso] said, [the private firefighters] were telling him that water was in short supply.” In other words, the great liberal newspaper, almost singlehandedly responsible for the woke divisions that have helped rip American society apart, relied on the testimony of a politically embittered billionaire to discredit the efforts of a publicly elected official. The paper didn’t even inform its readers whether Caruso’s private team had enough water in the end or not.

That was the “gotcha” response to the catastrophe. The political response was even more irresponsible. What was the true cause of the LA apocalypse, according to a chorus of ideologically motivated voices? An unusually heavy season of rain, which created an abundance of foliage, which then dried into an enormous tinderbox during a long drought? The powerful gusts of high wind known as the Santa Ana winds? Gusts reaching 100mph capable of driving embers in countless wild directions at once? The historically unprecedented event of six wildfires raging in California at the same time, which would have exhausted the water supply no matter how full it was? Winds fanning fires into a conflagration that no firefighter could enter, and that no planes or helicopters bearing water and retardant could fly through?

Nope. According to experts, such as the conservative commentator Scott Jennings on CNN (where reporters like Nick Watt and Natasha Chen were risking their lives to report on the fires), it was all the fault of “woke”: “We have DEI… and… I’m wondering now, if your house was burning down, how much do you care what color the firefighters are?”

Jennings, and others like him, including an increasingly deranged Elon Musk, were responding to a sentence on the LA Fire Department’s website that described a commitment to hiring more black firefighters. Even David Mamet, stunning screenwriter and America’s greatest living playwright, whose moral imagination is the product of some sort of divine spark, was swept up in these pages into the anti-DEI groupthink that is now the default response to DEI groupthink.

Like many people, I think DEI has been a poisonous and divisive plague on true fairness and opportunity. But it is hard to see how a conscientious commitment to diversifying LA’s Fire Department, which would require more, not less money, in the budget, could have caused the LA fires, or made them worse once they had begun. Unless Bass had been moving large sums of money away from basic firefighting needs into creating and enforcing DEI policies, which no one has said she did, it is hard to see how her declared commitment to DEI — often boilerplate without meaning anyway — could have affected the city’s response to the wildfires one bit.

So much for how America — or, rather, the people Americans permit to represent reality to them — responded to the fires in LA. We are left with the wildfires themselves. As I write, they are threatening to grow and spread again in a resurgence of high wind. Now is not the time for a literary interpretation of an event that has torn lives apart, and taken lives. But one fact, and one image, beg to be understood in a different key.

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The stark fact is that — and I gratefully get this information from the Times — so far as one can see, most, if not all the people who have been killed in the fires, have been poor, or of modest means, and most have been black. The stark image is of gorgeous mansions burning in isolation, on cliffs overlooking the ocean. They are images of the zenith of American success, which is the consummation of the American Dream, which is to rise above your fellow Americans, your fellow humans, your community; to ascend beyond all those less fortunate, or not fortunate at all, who are the first to suffer and die, down below, and to live in magnificent isolation. I don’t begrudge the magnificence to anyone. I wish it for my children. And my heart breaks for all that the people in those beautiful houses, the fruit (often) of beautiful achievements, have lost.

But the media does their customary thing, breaking the tragedy down to individual stories, stories that you can identify yourself with and thus use to control the inexplicable and incomprehensible by fitting them into the safe confines of your life. You are left with individual stories, cut off from each other, and from a shared reality with each other. You are left thinking what you would do in that situation, how you would feel.

And you wonder if, amid all the unspeakable destruction, an illusion is also being destroyed, and a reality revealed. The illusion is of American happiness as an invincible solitude. The reality is wholly different. Blame comes easily to Americans because we are all alone. Because there is no “we”. Because our isolation from each other is allowing ghouls to waltz into our midst. And this isolation is allowing us to burn, and to watch each other burn. It is allowing some to relish the conflagration. It is compelling the rest of us — but there is no “us”, only “me”, and “them” — to point fingers instead of, as moist as it may sound, linking arms.

Consider New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who wrote in December 2017, not even a year into Trump’s presidency: “As this hideous, discombobulating year comes to an end, the Resistance offers one reason for optimism… Trump became president despite the will of a majority of the American people… Inasmuch as Trump is able to force his agenda on an unwilling nation, it’s because of a breakdown in democracy…”

That’s strong stuff. It’s the language of an extreme political crisis, in which a criminal figure exploits weak political structures, seizing power in order to establish an authoritarian regime. The only hope is what Goldberg calls “the Resistance”, a brave collection of private citizens and public officials who strive together to “hold the line against authoritarianism”. You think of Mandela and Navalny, men whose willingness to sacrifice their lives for truth and for their societies offers a light at the end of history’s dark tunnel.

And here is Goldberg just last week writing about the various public officials Trump and his nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, have said they intend to investigate and prosecute once Trump is in the White House. Goldberg writes that “Biden should pardon them all, along with pretty much everyone else Patel has singled out by name and those who worked on the Jan. 6 committee”. Goldberg isn’t alone in making this argument. Even as people are being liberated from Assad’s prisons after years of torture and isolation, imposed upon them for standing up to the regime. Biden’s aides, and Biden himself, are considering granting immunity from Trump to some of the most powerful and richest individuals in America, a consideration that would be inconceivable if many of these people had not made it clear that immunity was what they desired.

Whatever happened to the Resistance? To the rows upon rows of lawn signs that sprang up in besieged and beleaguered liberal enclaves, signs exhorting their well-heeled, super-insulated residents to stand up to Trump? Where is the deafening clamour that rang out of every nook and cranny of the Left-liberal establishment, right up until the moment when Trump won back the White House, resoundingly and conclusively, last November? Did the “existential threat”— a phrase used ad nauseam by liberals since 2016 — Trump posed to democracy suddenly become downgraded from “existential” to a mere threat, just at the moment Trump’s Republicans took both the White House and the Senate?

In 2016, Trump won by a hair. By December 2017, he was “authoritarian” only in the hollow rhetoric of an ugly temperament. A plaything of laws, customs, rites, and politics that he did not understand, Trump had struggled to gain any kind of stable footing as president. He had not signed into law a single piece of legislation seriously undercutting the liberal agenda.

On the other hand, by December 2017, the woke revolution, existing only by virtue of its fiction of standing up to Trump’s “existential threat”, was on the verge of taking over the country’s major cultural institutions, as well as its educational establishment, from kindergarten on up. So gratifying and rewarding was the “opposition” to Trump that Goldberg could actually make the false claim, in the New York Times no less, that Trump had become president “despite the will of a majority of the American people”. In fact, Trump had won a legitimate US presidential election. And far from forcing themselves on “an unwilling nation”, as Goldberg wrote, the Republicans retained control of both Houses of Congress, giving them both Congress and the presidency for the first time in 12 years.

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Trump's conviction is an assault on democracy

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Leave aside Goldberg, whose husband, a longtime paid political consultant to Democratic political campaigns, only stands to gain professionally from the apocalyptic political fantasies his wife gins up in her columns. Why, when Trump posed no actual threat to democracy in 2017, but when, in the alarmist liberal perspective that has reigned for eight years, he does in fact pose a threat to democracy now, do Goldberg and other liberals cry “Run for cover!” instead of “Resist!”

Why, from 2016-2020, did liberals compare Trump to Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Pinochet and Juan Peron, when he had done nothing to remotely justify the comparison, but now that Trump has truly consolidated his power and, by way of certain Cabinet choices, made clear his autocratic intentions, why does his mere blustering about revenge provoke calls for immunity rather than calls for heroic “resistance”? Was it easier to “resist” Trump when he posed no threat than it is now, when, having the support of the country’s majority, tech titans, the banking and finance sectors and even widening swathes of the media, he — again, along the lines of the erstwhile “resistance” — poses a true threat? Doesn’t more power mean the greater threat, which would require the greater “resistance”? Or is it the very fact that Trump has so much power now that has cowed the liberals, who worship power, into submission?

“Resistance” really shouldn’t be that hard. Trump’s threats to prosecute his enemies have no real basis in any plausible reality, any more than his threats to deport millions of people are within the realm of logistical and legal possibility, any more than he can get Putin to leave Ukraine before he takes office, any more than he can “make America healthy again” by putting a man who has no medical or scientific background, and who is opposed to vaccines, in charge of Americans’ health. But all Trump has to do is say “Boo!” and the former members of the “Resistance” begin to tremble. Perhaps it is the overwhelming nature of Trump’s victory in November. Liberals, who pride themselves on knowing how to please by playing by the rules even as they break the rules, simply cannot bear being unpopular.

It’s not just the liberals. Olivia Troye, who worked as an advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, ran to the New York Times to inform them that she had received a letter from Kash Patel’s lawyer threatening to sue her if she did not retract criticism she made of Patel on television. “I haven’t committed a crime,” she told the Times. But, she said, “these are very different times. Is [a pardon] something that we’ve considered and are concerned about? Yes… I have not done anything wrong, and I haven’t committed any crimes, and that’s where it’s a complicated issue. These are unprecedented times.”

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It’s hard to fathom what exactly Troye, Cheney, Romney, Adam Schiff and all the others on Patel’s list have to fear to begin with. In Troye’s case, Patel is a public figure; short of libelling or slandering him anyone can criticise him in any way they want, in any venue they want. Troye needs to loosen up. Cheney herself has stated that “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” exists for an investigation of the January 6 congressional committee. At the same time, she pointedly has not said that she would not accept a pardon, or blanket immunity, unlike Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman turned Trump adversary, who has said flat out that he would refuse Biden’s protection.

As for the other reason Trump’s putative targets say they fear being investigated, which is that such investigations would entail expensive legal representation, these are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. You would think that for the sake of the “Resistance” they would welcome high-profile investigations, even lawsuits; that is, if there is a single judge who would not dismiss such a lawsuit as frivolous. The example of their persecutions would indict Trump in the eyes of most Americans, and their standing up to Trump would serve as an inspiration. Look what standing up to and defying his liberal persecutors did for Trump. It returned him to the presidency.

Surely Liz Cheney, a war-profiteer’s daughter, who enabled the horrendously destructive lies her father told that dragged America into an invasion of Iraq, has the grit not to run when the going gets unpleasant. It was Liz who bravely jumped to her father’s defence when Nancy Pelosi criticised Cheney pere’s support of torture. “Mrs. Pelosi’s problem,” Cheney heroically intoned at the time, “is that her spine doesn’t seem to reach her brain.”

At first glance, it is baffling that such powerful people, always so eager to brandish their principles, especially before a camera, would allow the possibility of immunity to be raised with Biden rather than choose to inspire their fellow Americans by defying Trump. It is bewildering because, in doing so, they make it unnecessary for Trump to actually go after them. By opening themselves to a pardon that would protect them from Trump, they make it seem like Trump has already brought them to heel. He doesn’t have to investigate or prosecute them at all. Apply yourself to this seeming riddle of self-defeat, though, and the clouds of perplexity begin to part.

“Immunity” is what the liberals who made it their profession to pursue Trump from pillar to post always wanted in the first place. They desired the moral immunity that comes with presenting yourself as morally outraged; the professional immunity that accompanies the display of superior virtue; the intellectual immunity that you get when cries of “existential threat” mask your intellectual mediocrity. Woke is, essentially, the endless pursuit of immunity by robustly crying affliction, portraying yourself as good by calling other people evil, and aloofly professing “kindness” and “caring” at every abstract turn. No longer certain that they can obtain that sort of immunity in Trump’s America, some of the country’s most prominent liberals now seem to hope it is conferred directly.

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Receiving immunity from Trump is certainly less expensive than paying for it. Ask Mark Zuckerberg, who, having been threatened with jail by Trump, has just paid protection money to the president-elect in the form of a $1 million donation to his inaugural fund. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has just forked over the same amount of money to the fund. You remember Bezos. His newspaper, the Washington Post, adopted as its motto “democracy dies in darkness” in 2017 as a response to Trump’s presidency.

So much for the “fascist” threat posed by Trump, who just appeared on the cover of the echt-liberal Time magazine as its “Person of the Year,” followed by his Time-sponsored appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, where he rang the opening bell to thunderous cheers and applause. So much for “holding the line against authoritarianism”! Especially now, when a rising autocratic tendency on the Right in politics — the same tendency on the Left has already killed culture — is becoming, actually and really, “existential”. But, then, like compartmentalised people, compartmentalised political and media coteries never tell anyone the truth.

The apprehension of 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday offered the uncanny feeling of American murder adapting to the latest American moment, the way music or fashion update themselves as society and culture change. Just over a month after Donald Trump stunned liberals by sweeping the White House and the Senate, thus proclaiming the triumph of “regular” Americans over “elites”, here comes this scion of a wealthy Baltimore real-estate family. Mangione is the product, as both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal declared in banner headlines, of an “Ivy League” school, as well as having been the valedictorian of an exclusive prep school. His victim, Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, was, on the other hand, a regular guy, the product of a public high school — where he was also a valedictorian, but to the media’s indifference — and a state university. Depending on your perspective, the moral advantage goes either to the Elites — Mangione struck a blow for the common man — or to the Regulars — a decent-seeming father of two was cut down by the misguided morality of an addled Elite.

That Mangione was caught in a working-class Pennsylvania town, sitting in a McDonald’s, where he was recognised by a customer and reported to the police by an employee, seems the stuff of well-rounded tragedy. Both Harris and Trump, if you recall, laid claim to working at McDonald’s, Harris solemnly, Trump archly, in order to (absurdly) demonstrate their working-class bona fides. And here was a rogue Elite doing the folk-hero work of Regulars, turned in by a Regular, as if to remind the Elites — not to mention the burgeoning new elite of vindictive Regulars — of good old-fashioned law and human decency.

“Senseless” is an epithet almost invariably attached to “murder”, but not in the case of an assassination, which is, by definition, not senseless. The victim of an assassination is a public figure whose public status rests on a public significance. Still American presidents have often been assassinated, or attempts have been made to assassinate them, by proverbial “loners” and “outsiders” who don’t seem guided by a coherent purpose, à la Oswald, Sirhan, and Hinckley. Indeed, the template for the insoluble enigma of an American assassination remains the murder of JFK, an event that encompassed the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the CIA, the KGB, the Dallas underworld and, well, you name it.

Mangione’s alleged murder of Brian Thompson seems, on the surface, to be perhaps the most rational assassination in American history. To the extent that Mangione is now, ghoulishly, being celebrated as a folk hero, the motive for his killing, declared by Mangione himself, seems to be simple and, in the manner of a folk hero, humane. In this view, Thompson presided over a healthcare company that denied life-saving, or at least, precious life-enabling care to thousands of people. As Mangione put it in a Goodreads review — a first; an American assassin writes book reviews — of a book by Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.”

You recall the finale of The Insider, that dazzling movie about Jeffrey Wigand, the whistleblower who brought down American’s tobacco companies. Wigand’s vindication, his triumph over both the tobacco companies and the craven corporate captains at CBS who wanted to suppress the airing of his story, is portrayed as happening just as the FBI is moving in to arrest Kaczynski in his remote cabin in the Montana wilderness. The movie’s implied message seems to be: either you permit people like Wigand to speak the truth or, not allowing that form of communication to prevail, violence will come.

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By Lee Siegel

“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.” Ukraine. Gaza. Lebanon. The coming apocalypse in Syria’s recently liberated charnel-house. These are places where people pray for history’s violence to stop. In American pop culture, however, there is no happy ending without violence. Consider the Wicked Witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Crushed as she is by, as it were, America’s falling housing market, all that is left is her shoes. And now consider the current Wicked, in which the Wicked Witch of The Wizard of Oz becomes uncomfortably humanised as a sort of domestic terrorist battered and bruised into a fighter for social justice.

A vigilante, if you will. Not unlike Mangione or, for that matter, Daniel Penny, the ex-Marine whose trial on a homicide charge in lower Manhattan ended in acquittal just as Mangione was being captured. Mangione allegedly murdered Thompson as revenge for heartless healthcare policies. Penny, a jury concluded, accidentally killed a black homeless man on the subway he was restraining because Penny believed that the man was about to harm, or kill, passengers on the train. No one seems to be in charge in America. So Penny takes charge. Mangione takes charge. As for the rest of us, we assert our own control by telling ourselves, and each other, conflicting stories about who is responsible for what.

And so we try to give Mangione a story. He has, it turns out, an uncomfortably humanising context that might help explain his turn toward social isolation and murder. It was chilling to learn that he suffered from an excruciating back condition. He allegedly shot Thompson first in the calf, where back pain often radiates to, and then in the back. Was that his cruelly symbolic way of taking revenge for his healthcare company? Or, perhaps, along the lines of the narcissistic personality that is the dominant psychological type of our day, he could bear his pain only by making another person experience it.

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The back pain, according to the owner of an exclusive Hawaii hostel where Mangione stayed, prevented Mangione from having intimate physical relations, for a lengthy period of time anyway. He was lovelorn. His first doom came in the form of a flirtatious smile with a desk clerk at a hostel in Manhattan, a smile for which Mangione fatally lowered his face mask, thereby giving police a crucial picture of him. His second doom was that pair of striking, entirely distinctive eyebrows, two saber flourishes above a Cyrano nose. A true cold-blooded revolutionary would have radically trimmed or dyed them, in order to thwart attempts to identify him. But those eyebrows seemed to mean more to the young Mangione than corrupt power, social injustice and starting a revolution put together. When the police approached him in McDonald’s, they reported, the Goodreads fan of Kaczynski turned pale and began to shake.

“We are what we hide,” said Malraux. Mangione, the most handsome, sensual-looking, socially and professionally successful incel in America. The truth is, no one will ever understand why Mangione killed Thompson. Least of all Mangione. As for the manifesto the police found in his backpack as an explanation of his crime, when has anyone’s explanation of their own motives borne the slightest resemblance to their true motives?

Between wanting to kill someone and actually killing them is a wilderness made of impenetrable human matter. Just as no person or entity, poet, philosopher, scientist or AI, will ever figure out how brain became mind, no one will ever know why someone, Ivy Leaguer or social outcast, becomes a killer. “But that’s no matter—,” as Fitzgerald wrote in the concluding lines of Gatsby, “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning…” Americans will keep searching for the meaning of America in the actions of every American assassin in hopes that one fine morning they will find it. But in the same way that the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is another perplexity— “a human being” — the disturbing answer to the riddle of America posed by America’s highest-profile murderers will always be another riddle: a killer.

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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America's future isn't fascist

By Lee Siegel

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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By Tom McTague

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.

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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Why Kamala's gun is a powerful weapon

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.

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.

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.

The details of the “scandal” are murky. Was the relationship, as Nuzzi claimed, limited to her sexting? Did Kennedy boast about having “intimate photos” of her? Did the inappropriateness really start after she wrote a piece about him? Whatever the answers, the affair has been filed away with all the other instances of Kennedy’s outsized existence: the worm in his brain, the dead bear he found in Central Park and arranged in a pose as a prank, his beheading of a dead whale in 1994, the revelation that he has had dozens of mistresses during his several marriages.

It was only natural that the media cover with single-minded intensity the trivial matter of a reporter’s professional infraction — once the media becomes its own subject, nothing short of nuclear war can distract it. But the question of why Nuzzi, a skilled and seemingly sober political reporter, should risk her professional existence for a dalliance, whatever its degree, with Kennedy, is intriguing. Because it’s not just Nuzzi who became magnetised by RFK Jr. Until Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race as a third-party candidate last month, throwing his support to Trump, much of the country was riveted by him.

America’s two-party system effectively functioned so long as the country was more or less defined by tense but clarifying polarities: coastal city and heartland small town, north and south, industrial and agricultural, rural and urban-suburban — even, at a certain post-war point, suburban vs everyone else. Democrats and Republicans sometimes shifted their different constituencies, but the shift occurred along clear ideological or geographical lines.

But the dissolution of American small towns, the conversion of cities from affordable, if gritty, havens to gleaming, exorbitantly priced enclaves, the rise of the increasingly unaffordable suburb in every region, the head-spinning transformations of the information economy, the new centres of gravity spawned by Silicon Valley and the digital revolution — all have made the two-party system nearly irrelevant and almost totally dysfunctional. If ever a country needed a parliamentary system, in which its increasingly fractured reality could resolve itself into a cohesive factionalism, it is the Not-So-United States of America. But the two-party system will never be dislodged from American life. American idealism needs the conceptual simplicity of two parties the way it needs a simple framework of good and evil.

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By Lee Siegel

The result is Donald Trump, the first of what is sure to be many party leaders who are barely of their party at all. In this American moment of hybrid cars, and sexually hybrid people, and hybrid work-patterns, and hybrid economies, American leaders are also becoming hybrid as their party’s frameworks disintegrate.

Trump is, clearly, composed of stark contradictions: a populist cosmopolitan, a louche devotee of God, a tribune of both the moneyed class and the working class. In her understated, endlessly self-correcting, self-adjusting and repositioning way, so is Kamala Harris, whose withdrawal from public scrutiny is an invitation to be all things, no matter how contradictory, to all people. Both Harris and Trump, then, are de facto third-party candidates breaking the boundaries of what their parties stand for, as they appeal to a country whose various boundaries — geographical, economic, cultural, personal — are being broken apart and reconfigured every day.

Enter RFK Jr, who was, for a time, the thing itself, the political figure the entire country has been waiting for, the very figure each party both fears and longs to assimilate and cultivate: the synthesising, unifying, bold and original alternative to a desiccated two-party system.

Kennedy’s announcement, in April 2023, that he was going to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination struck terror into the party. And for good reason. Kennedy had all the trappings of the deus-ex-machina hybrid candidate. He was, nominally speaking, a staunch liberal Democrat. But beneath that, he embodied the power of legend thanks to his lineage; unlike Jeb Bush, he was not merely a dynastic descendant, but a mythic transcendent, his family history well-shrouded in the manifold mysteries of the past. Most important of all, though, he possessed a rare and precious energy that has vanished from the American scene. He represented a counterculture. More specifically, he embodied the essence of a counterculture. He was a walking, talking “Fuck you”.

America has always thrived on countercultures, in politics, society and the arts. But in politics, it hasn’t had one since the Sixties. Occupy Wall Street couldn’t even come up with a leader’s face to put on its often-admirable sentiments. In society, a counterculture hasn’t thrived since the various waves of feminism and gay rights, the LGBTQ movement being a set of ultra-refinements. Black Lives Matter? BIPOC? More ultra-refinements. The entire woke movement was a commercially restless status quo simply turning over on its side.

The absence of a counterculture in art is even more telling. From America’s Ashcan artists, to abstract expressionism, the Beats, pop art, and the Happenings of the Sixties, America’s defiant art movements often fuelled, to one degree or another, its political and broader cultural changes. But for the past 50 years, as titanic sums of money overtook art, society, culture and politics and put even the most diabolical American energies at the disposal of PayPal: Zip. Nada. Rien. Nichevo. The last time any American came close to hearing a consequential, beautiful, original, startling, profound “fuck you” was, probably, when Ben Kingsley pronounced the first of those two words with two syllables on that semi-countercultural phenomenon, The Sopranos.

If, on every point of the political spectrum, that chthonic phrase seems to be at the core of people’s politics, if casting a vote has now become synonymous with throwing a punch, it is because America has been, for the past 50 years or so, in search of a counterculture. Unable to find it in art, popular or high, people turn politics into a form of art brut. And since the heart of a counterculture has been to confront structures of power with the simple, deconstructing, levelling fact of biology — King Lear’s “poor bare, forked animal”; Montaigne’s “kings and philosophers shit” — it is no wonder that “blood” and “murder” are often on Trump’s lips, it is no wonder that he is consumed by the idea of immigrants cooking and devouring household animals. “Fuck you” is, after all, the fundamental biological act. But it has been RFK Jr who has elevated biology to its preeminent countercultural role.

Kennedy’s entire politics are centred on biology: his anti-vaxxer convictions; his warnings about cancer-causing cellphone towers and radiation; his belief that endocrine disruptors — chemicals found in plastic and pesticides — are affecting children’s sexual development; his certainty that emotionally blunting psychiatric drugs are behind the rise in school shootings. The bear and the whale, and even the seemingly compulsive sex, are run-offs from his political and intellectual obsessions. The promise of the countercultural turn to biology is twofold: the chance to clear away rotting structures of civilised power by returning to “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”, and the sheer democratic power of being physical, which is a gift everyone possesses. For a brief span of time, Kennedy seemed to offer both.

Kennedy is gone from the national scene now, felled by character flaws that are as fascinating to analyse as they are impossible to tolerate. No one wants Sardanapalus to be president of the United States. But his popularity is proof of concept: America is teeming with Olivia Nuzzis, vulnerable to the seductions of outlaw defiance. Hybrid outsiders will continue to make their way to the increasingly accessible inside of American politics until, one day, if things keep declining as precipitously as they are, the American eagle is replaced, to the huzzahs of Bacchanalian voters declaring Year One, with that legendary icon of a once-flourishing counterculture: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

Great question. What, for that matter, did the wannabe killer, Ryan Routh think of the impending match-up on Monday Night Football? What were his thoughts on electric vehicles, school choice, weight loss drugs and parenting? 

More prestigious outlets hardly showed more attachment to what remains of proper American journalism. The New York Times seemed more caught up in proudly displaying the fact that it had interviewed Routh a year earlier about his experiences trying to recruit fighters in Ukraine. By the time darkness had fallen, on the very day Trump was, maybe, almost killed, you had to make your way through the coverage of the Emmy Awards, to find any mention of the assassination attempt. 

By mid-week, focus had shifted from the man on the golf course to who was to blame for America’s political violence, or in this case near-violence. Trump and his supporters, relieved to change the subject from their canard about pet-devouring immigrants, blamed the Other Side for super-charged rhetoric demonising Trump as an existential threat to democracy. The Democrats, for their part, were themselves relieved to turn off the short-lived spigot of crocodile tears over the violence. Instead, they blamed the former president and his supporters for bringing assassins upon themselves with their own super-charged rhetoric. Both sides’ arguments were accurate, as far as it goes. But in a saner society, such arguments, on both sides, would have been grotesquely beside the point. 

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Ever bored and restless, the conversation about what seemed to be an attempt to assassinate Trump evolved yet further. In baseball, a pitcher will sometimes hit a batter intentionally, or pretend to. When the opposing team takes the field in turn, their pitcher will then hit an opposing batter in retaliation, with the spectators holding their breath in anticipation. And sure enough, here was Elon Musk, real-life Chauncey Gardiner, and a moral imbecile of world-historical dimensions, tweeting out shortly after the incident at the golf course: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”. At present, whatever happened to Trump on Sunday now straddles the spheres of politics, culture, sports and entertainment in general. It has been spread so thin over the national atmosphere that no one I know, on various levels of society, is even talking about it.

So much has been written about how our commercialised and commodifying societies have assimilated and normalised mores that used to épater les bourgeois. The combined transgressiveness of Kafka, Celine, Mann, Gide, Lawrence, Henry Miller and Genet do not even approach the transgressiveness of teachers, doctors and politicians enabling children who, in the perplexity of innocence, wish to swap out their genitals for those of the opposite sex. In America, if it makes a profit, or anyway if it virtuously conceals the lust for material profit, it is allowed. 

The rate at which political violence, in deed or word, has been comfortably taken in stride would, at another historical moment, have been shocking. From the moment Trump was elected in 2016, violent rhetoric and acts on both sides gradually moved from controversy, to social media fodder, to simple background noise. Comedian Kathy Griffin holding a mock-up of Trump’s severed bloody head resulted in outrage, official investigations and sold-out gigs wherever she went. After publicly saying he’d like to “punch Donald Trump in the face,” Robert De Niro declared “Fuck Trump” at the 2018 Tony Awards. Meanwhile, in 2017, Trump appeared to be defending the white supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville as, at least, not neo-Nazis.

But then, way back in 2004, Nicholson Baker published a novel musing about the possibility of assassinating George W. Bush. But then, De Niro himself had starred in Taxi Driver, in which the violence of a murderous vigilante is, by the end of the movie, depicted as morally superior to the sanctimonious soul-murders committed by an average America politician. By the time Will Smith bitch-slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscar ceremony, in 2022, you had to ask yourself whether the actor was simply bringing decades of Hollywood values to their logical conclusion, or whether he was acting under the influence of American politics; which is influenced by American popular culture; which is influenced by American politics. The tortuous complexity of American life really makes you wish you could find who was responsible for the whole mess and punch them right in the nose. 

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As anything goes in culture, people become numb to the lack of inhibition around them. Say what you will about the maddening dispensations that sometimes have resulted from the popularisation of trauma psychology, but there is now a collective emotional numbness that is one of the salient symptoms of trauma. On the one hand, anything goes. On the other hand, no one protests that anything goes. Which opens the door to more erstwhile prohibited behaviour. Which causes more emotional numbness. And on and on.

And the bitter irony is that the so-called “political violence” being mechanically bemoaned by both sides is as nothing compared with the violence tearing civil society apart. It is almost obscene to express outrage over political violence when America suffers more mass shootings, and more school shootings, than any country on earth. In such a situation, political violence surely is an inevitability.

Yet  the term “political violence” is probably a mischaracterisation of the two assassination attempts, though Routh never actually made an attempt. Routh is clearly a profoundly troubled man. From what is known, so too was Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired at Trump during the latter’s Pennsylvania rally. Neither has had a coherent ideological motive attributed to him. Ideology matters. If Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated by some insane Austrian and not a politically motivated Serb, the First World War might never have happened. Modern America, then, is not suffering from political violence. Rather, America is suffering violence that is occurring in the political realm, violence committed by members of the country’s increasing legions of people disconnected from reality. Politics is, by definition, an arena of pathological egotism and self-love. It only follows that madness is to politics what flies are to the dregs of human intestines.

Decades ago, I was taken by a Spanish friend to a dark restaurant in Madrid that served only two dishes, one type of fish and and one type of steak, and where two waiters stood a polite distance from the table the entire night. My friend had brought another man, whom he did not introduce. Not long into the meal, this second man laid a paper napkin in front of him and took a pen from his pocket. He diagrammed, with painstaking precision, noting the position of the car and the position of the explosive devices, and the route that Carrera Blanco, Franco’s successor, had taken that fateful day Basque terrorists blew him out of his car, thus saving Spain for democracy. Then he suspended the napkin over an ashtray, held a lighter under it, and dropped the shriveling flames into oblivion.

The Basques who assassinated Blanco had not cared a whit about democracy in Spain; they cared about their cause. But when I think of political assassinations, I think of that sort of planning, and of a commitment that is both ideological and personal. I also think of the fine and noble figures assassinated in America during the Sixties. Here is another brute fact: Trump may be a pathological liar, but the straight shooters are all on the Right. If Pennsylvania and the golf course prove anything, along with Elon Musk, it’s that Trump has less and less to fear from what now passes in America for political violence. 

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.

A few weeks later and another line from the English canon sprang to mind. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the TV audience watched Gus Walz, Tim Walz’s 17-year-old son, who has a non-verbal learning disorder, turn frantically around, overstimulated, anxiety and uncertainty on his face. Tears ran down his cheeks as he clearly mouthed the words “That’s my Dad!” to his father, who stood on the stage accepting the nomination as Kamala Harris’s running mate. I have an experience of people with non-verbal learning disorders. Involuntarily, out of the depths, Milton’s immortal line from “Lycidas” came into my mind: “Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.” Politicians are fond of quoting Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature”, especially Obama, whose almost obsessive identification with Lincoln is provocative, to put it mildly. But the angel America needs is not an admonitory angel. It is an angel whose gaze starts from the mortal core of being human, groupless, as it were, and irreducibly particular, and guides society from that place.

The media distracted itself with some vicious MAGA types, who mocked Gus Walz’s display of vulnerability. Right-wing agitator Ann Coulter posted a picture of Gus with the comment: “Talk about weird.” It was good to expose these social atrocities, if only to give a glimpse of the moral atmosphere that will prevail should Trump clamber once again to the top.

Other people have written about their own experiences with children who, as Tina Brown movingly put it in The New York Times, “struggle with being different”. Brown did not use the term “neurodivergent”. That was admirable. “Neurodivergent” is a precious replacement for some blind, ugly slur. At the same time, why should people who are unquantifiably different be quantified with a clinical term that establishes their “difference” irrefutably, narrowly, scientifically, for all time and on every occasion? Brown ended by gratifyingly calling for national attention to be paid to human beings like her son.

There was also another way to regard the revelation of Tim Walz’s son. He is what progressives have desperately needed. Gus was not vulnerable because he belonged to a racial, or biological, or sexual group; he wasn’t vulnerable because the planet is in jeopardy; he wasn’t vulnerable because history had been unfair to people like him. He was vulnerable because he was entirely, specifically, uniquely human. Cyril Connolly once quipped that imprisoned in every fat man is a thin one wildly signaling to be let out. Well, imprisoned in every supposedly “normal” person is a person like Gus. Mortality and circumstance guarantee that inner person’s eventual emergence.

At the heart of the “caring” society put forward by Harris is a long tradition of moral imagination, beginning with Christ’s injunction to do unto others what you would have them do unto you. That runs through Kant’s precept of acting as though what you did everyone should do, to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. Rawls’s concept is a thought experiment in which you imagine that you know nothing about yourself: your abilities, your class, your race, your sex, your nationality, even your taste. What you do know is that all those qualities are distributed unequally in the hard, brutal world. The experiment requires you to create a society based on your ignorance of your situation, and on your knowledge of the cold, cruel world. Of course, any rational person would create a society based both on Christ’s injunction, and Kant’s precept.

It’s a thought experiment that the MAGA tough guys, the sophisticated conservative liberal-eye-pokers, and the hillbilly elegists would do well to perform. They should not fear the onset of national weakness as a result. On the contrary, the protection of that figure of Gus deep within every person requires a powerful, protective state that seeks rational, peaceful authority among the world of nations in order to guarantee the safety of its citizens. A strong, stable society builds itself out from the image of Gus Walz, along the lines of a million strategies, some soft, some hard.

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The progressive practitioners of piety politics would benefit from performing the experiment as well. Maybe the next time they hold a convention, they’ll discourage splintering the human experience into a thousand tales told by a thousand different identities.

“Caring” is a big word in America today, overtaking “empathy” as the concept du jour. But societies often publicly emphasise the very qualities they lack. The ancient Greeks, who were given to rages of unreason, celebrated the Golden Rule. “Indians” were sentimentalised as noble savages just as Native Americans were being exterminated. The state where I live, New Jersey, hit on the official moniker “Garden State” for itself at the very moment sufficient space for garbage disposal had become a crisis. “Caring” has become a war-cry just when people, withdrawn into screens, emotionally numbed by psychiatric drugs and carapaced in rebarbative ideologies, seem to care less about other people than ever before.

The fact is that in America, both Left and Right has forgotten how to care. Therefore, let both sides gaze upon Gus Walz’s face at the convention, reflect on his exclamation, “That’s my Dad!” and melt with ruth. In a time where God is absent, we are all, whether we know it or not, searching for that moment of grace.

The speech was so eloquent and complex that, hearing it, you feared it might disqualify him from being president. It addressed the issue of race head-on, without posturing evasions or virtuous boilerplate. What really distinguished it, though, was that even as Obama told white America the hard, naked, painful truth about what it is like to be black in America, he told black people what it meant to be an ordinary, decent, non-racist white person in America.

It has to be said that the speech itself was, in part, disingenuous since Obama was deploring racial divisions after having spent his campaign playing them up in order to present himself as a healer. Though far more upbeat than Trump — the “audacity of hope”, if you recall — Obama’s rhetorical insistence on race being the supreme issue in America (it’s not) just happened to situate him, America’s first black presidential candidate, at the centre of American destiny. It was Obama’s version of Trump’s “American carnage”. Both men had to make America feel bad about itself in terms that reflected their own personas, for the purpose of making the case that they, and only they, could make America feel good about itself.

And then the demons Obama had let loose turned on him with Wright’s comments. Obama had to make an about-face and now tell Americans a complicated story about how the races existed harmoniously alongside each other even as, time after time, they didn’t.

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Why liberals envy JD Vance

By Lee Siegel

Reading the transcript of his speech now, you long for the days before piety politics took hold. Instead of glibly presenting himself as a hero by bravely fighting battles that had been won generations ago — railing against Confederate monuments, for example — Obama reminded people of how “in South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans”. One could imagine the legion of pietist editors at The New York Times hearing that line today: “Where the Confederate flag still flies? Whites and blacks together? Is he a crypto-fascist?”

It was a magisterial peroration. He inveighed against the wrongfulness of “a view that sees white racism as endemic [let alone ‘systemic’], and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America”. He talked of “problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all”. And he spoke with compassion about “the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who has been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family”.

But Obama grazed the democratic sublime when he, a biracial man, put himself into the lives of white Americans:

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one handed them anything… They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labour. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away… [So] when they hear an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighbourhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time… to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.”

I’ve quoted from Obama’s speech at length because if I simply paraphrased it, young people would not believe that a liberal, let alone a two-term liberal president, once spoke in that way. I might as well be paraphrasing Demosthenes.

Imagine. There was a time when a liberal, a progressive even, spoke about people in terms of irreducible, incalculable, particular and unique individual experience. When the white mother or white father who has just lost their child to an opioid overdose — or is battling cancer, or grief, or depression, or isolation, or failure, or poverty — could be acknowledged as having a pre-eminent claim to compassion; when that claim would be more real than the self-aggrandising white fantasies of black people, including millions of happy, healthy, high-achieving, prosperous black people, still supposedly reeling from the conditions on slave ships in the 17th century. When the disappointments that totally irritate the privileged, pampered, mega-entitled white women of Gen Z — the only true beneficiaries of the DEI revolution — were not considered, especially when expressed through tears at just the right moment, more pressing and intolerable than real pain in the real world afflicting non-historically oppressed persons.

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Like everything tailored in consumer society to ever-more delineated appetites, historical suffering is now in its Mannerist phase. Just as the proportions of the human body in a Mannerist painting are distorted, on account of what had become artists’ weariness with the accurate rendition of the human body, so the actuality of human suffering is now tailored to new types of appetites based on new forms of self and group identity. In other words, there is now an exuberant market for suffering by the demographic numbers (“We have just the cross for you to bear!”). There is no market for plain old particular and incalculable anguish and despair. (“Have you tried the vintage shops downtown?”) That is why so many people simply explode. It is a desperate act of product placement.

Kamala Harris, for all her flaws the only figure now standing between America and the monstrous prospect of Trump, has called herself an “underdog” in this election. That could not be further from the truth. The election is hers to lose. Trump now has all the appeal of a 1962 Buick running on gas fumes and a flat tire.

But it is telling that Harris should think of herself as an underdog. As she has done all her professional life, it seems, she is basing her strength on what she wants to sell as her historical weakness — as a woman, as a black woman, as a woman of South Asian descent. This former prosecutor seems only to excel at special pleading. It is excruciating that an unimpressive, incompetent-seeming figure like Harris should be the one person able to obstruct Trump’s plans to cause chaos on the grandest scale.

Having said that, I intend to vote for Harris. If what the Republicans say about current Democratic machinations to ensure their victory is true — I hope it is — I will vote for her several times. I would vote for Gumby if that were the Democratic candidate. But if Harris is going to win, she is going to have to find someone to write her own Jeremiah Wright speech for her. (No, I am not saying that she cannot write a speech like that because she is female/black/of South Asian descent. I am saying that she can’t because she can’t. Let Michelle Obama write it.) The challenge will be to talk about the particular ways in which Americans suffer now, rather than mouth pieties about what has become a boutique, self-serving caricature of social injustice.

After Trump implied that Harris uses her various group identities as vehicles for political and social advancement, liberals rushed to celebrate the brutality of it all. The New York Times ran a piece with the following headline and standfirst: “Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History: White America has long sought to define racial categories — and who can belong to them.” What followed was the white-owned — reportedly a mere 12% of The Times’ employees are black — paper’s numbing, antediluvian bromides about how white people define race.

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In fact, many Americans agreed with Trump. Harris is a type, known both to exasperated whites, and also to talented and accomplished black people who are used to tolerating both white inferiority in high places and, with sadness and understanding, the race-opportunism of certain black figures. Harris comes across as someone who, on account of her deft manipulation of group affiliation, has never been criticised in a substantive way to her face, and who therefore cannot tolerate criticism. Allow a tasteless joke from my own special, protected group: What does a Jewish-American princess say when she knocks over a Ming vase? “It’s okay, I’m alright!” That’s Harris.

It is remarkable that she retained her embarrassing nervous giggle for so many years. Did nobody point out how alienating it was? And now the sudden disappearance of the laugh is nearly as unnerving as the laugh itself. This indifference to the insular way she comes across is obvious to everyone. It is, perhaps, the result of both a flaw in temperament — watch: she never connects with an interlocutor, thus the laugh, now de-escalated into a maddeningly knowing smile, meant to fill the emptiness —and a reliance on the rarefied liberal snow-globe she has thrived in her entire professional life.

The election is hers to lose. And she will lose it if she doesn’t embrace all those people, of every race and background, who do not want to see Trump back in power, but who do not want to experience on a national level the insulting deception and fix-is-in that they sometimes encounter in their daily lives. With the Democratic Convention taking place next week, Harris needs to, with all the charm she is able to muster, raise the issue of her manipulation of identity in order to laugh it — with a real, genuine laugh — away. “Hey, I use whatever I can. As we all do. Donald would love to be a black, South-Asian woman. He’d put it on a T-shirt and sell it on X.” Something like that. She needs to directly address white people who suffer, not like 18th-century slave-masters, but like humans who rarely think about race, and say that she will be their president. She needs to bravely say that no one is born indecent because they are white. That no one is born indecent because they are anything.

She needs to say that she understands how the idea that boys can become girls and vice versa can strike some people as unnatural, even perverse. Then she needs to wonder aloud how liberating it must be to be someone entirely the opposite of yourself. “Maybe we all need to calm down and spend one day dressing up as each other. I’ll be Steve Bannon.” She needs to tell people they can keep their gas stoves and cars. “You tell me when the storms and power outages and heat waves become too much. Then I will do whatever you think needs to be done.” That’s populism.

She needs to tell a story about black lovers arranging to meet in a small southern town by the local Confederate monument. You are young and in love. They are defeated and dead: trophies of your happiness. She needs to tell a poised epic about good black cops and good white cops hating bad black cops and bad white cops, and about good cops catching bad guys without harming good guys in bad neighbourhoods, so that people’s good kids can live long enough to get into a good neighbourhood. She needs to say that physical illness, mental pain, heartbreak and death have no colour. She needs to acknowledge the narrow world she comes out of, and then ask people to believe that she is larger than her environment. Then she needs to invite everyone to help her change their environment.

True, it won’t be Jon Meacham, the former editor of Newsweek who ran the magazine into the ground before reappearing as Joe Biden’s main ideas-man and speechwriter, and who kept Biden sounding vapid and banal for four years. From Meacham’s lily-white speech to the 2020 Democratic Convention: “In its finest hours America’s soul has been animated by the proposition that we are all created equal and by the imperative to ensure that we are treated equally.” It was mind-numbing banality like that which used to make Trump seem like Voltaire. Which at times made Trump, for all his dissembling, sound so honest he seemed black.

No. Harris needs the gripping candour of Obama 16 years ago. Without some kind of electrifying departure from routine politics — Obamaesque, or Trumpian, for that matter; whatever works — and some soaring, eloquent acknowledgment and then disavowal of the pious groupthink that put her where she is today, and that has driven people away from the Democratic Party, she will never win. “It’s okay, I’m alright.” Somebody has to level with her about that.

Having gratifyingly removed a leader who had become dangerous and unstable, the media, like a grizzly bear that kills its first human and will only eat human flesh from then on, shifted its purpose from investigate, report and expose, to search and destroy. In the process, it has normalised disaster thinking about American life, from the most ordinary experiences — love and work — to the highest echelons of human activity. If America is on the verge of political calamity, it is because for the past five decades, the media has kept the country on the edge of its seat expecting no less.

Unable to come up with another Watergate, the media tried to force every story it could into the Watergate template. Someone big had to be exposed as doing something really bad, with the result that they had to be made to fall exceptionally hard. There was some precious, honest, public-spirited journalistic work as a result. But the media, as befit its proud new image as heroic saviour of democracy, gradually robbed democracy of its vital essence: the freedom to live life privately, secretly, incalculably. (When Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, he did not have in mind 24/7 cable news.)

It was, of course, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in particular, whose doggedness exposed the connections between the Republican burglars of the Democratic National Headquarters and figures close to the paranoid, self-destructing Nixon. Their bestselling memoir, All the President’s Men, along with its blockbuster movie, made the men’s names synonymous with Watergate and media heroism. Never mind that had it not been for countless law enforcement figures, politicians and the Supreme Court, which ordered Nixon to give up the notorious tapes that incriminated him, Nixon might well have never been impeached. Woodward and Bernstein caught but the tip of the iceberg, yet it proved enough to keep the self-celebrating media’s champagne cold for two generations.

Like parents who refuse to allow their adult children to grow up, the liberal media has spent 50 years in a stage of arrested development. It continues to pretend that the country is a wayward child of the Sixties and Seventies, in need of the corrective hand of death-defying journalism. Indeed, the “woke” turn in the liberal media, now in the process of artfully incorporating criticisms of its pious effusions into its pious effusions, was really just an attempt to find a dramatically clear-cut moral issue, like Watergate, to get all heroic about, again. This desperation has been all the more intense since the media itself was discredited by its advocacy of the invasion of Iraq: having exposed the politicians as scoundrels, the credulous, war-mongering media got themselves indicted as same by the bloggers. Now, alternate universes of news on social media proclaim little Watergates every day.

In 2016, it was breath-taking to watch the media hurl itself at Trump in the hope of recapturing its pursuit of Nixon. It was hardly a coincidence that the movie The Post, about The Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, came out just over a year after Trump was elected.

Yet the Nixon era seemed like innocence itself, as the epithet “Tricky Dick” mutated into “Hitler”, “Tiberius” and “Peron” as monikers for Trump. We longed for the bad old days, when the humble legwork of reporters like W and B, and sober, investigative columns by the likes of Jack Anderson, had not yet given way to the sniping, middle-school groupthink that too often passed for reporting after Trump’s ascent. In the Watergate era, the media exposed Nixon as a petty criminal. Now, in its longing to recapture its glorious past, the media has pummelled the petty criminal from Queens into a kind of Christ. Where Proust had his madeleine, nostalgic American journalism has its Trump.

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Trump gave the “failing media”, as he calls it, a second life. But it was Nixon who elevated the media into a role that it had long hungered for: democracy’s indispensable eyes and ears. The invitation rang out among the protestors at the Chicago convention in 1968. “The whole world is watching” was an ironic slogan from a New Left that sought to deflate self-centred American arrogance. But the whole world cannot watch unless it has a medium to watch on. Enter TV news, and a new era of media domination.

Nixon himself, in his famous “Checkers” speech of 1952 — where he successfully debunked accusations of misusing campaign funds — made an end run around the dominant print media of the time by delivering his speech on television, just as Trump when he entered politics made an end run around TV and print journalism by resorting to Twitter. John F. Kennedy later used his photogenic charm to vanquish Nixon in the first televised debate in 1960, and TV news later helped serve as handmaiden to Nixon’s demise.

But the new media reality of constant vigilance and the pursuit of truth and justice had been established. Before Nixon, the news was just the news. There had been newspaper crusades; there was Edward R. Murrow’s truly heroic pursuit of Senator Joseph McCarthy. But the American press had never taken down a president. That was big game.

After Watergate, the press acquired a gravitational force usually possessed by sheerly political forms of power. It possessed a level of authority and reality all its own. Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of the Superman comic strip, had known what they were doing when they made Superman’s alter ego a newspaperman named Clark Kent. They knew that the newspaper editors they were hoping to convince to publish their comic strip harboured their own alter egos as the Supermen who would protect the republic from harm.

Today, the media obsession with Nixon, sensationally lucrative and ego-gratifying, has mutated into a trillion-eyed media obsession with everything. The effect has been to turn democracy against itself. Here is Edward Shils in his classic work, The Torment of Secrecy, explaining why, “without the willingness to disregard much of what our fellow citizens do… there could be no freedom”:

“Democracy could not function if politics and the state of the social order were always on everyone’s mind. If most men, most of the time, regarded themselves as their brother-citizens’ keepers, freedom, which flourished in the indifference of privacy, would be abolished, and representative institutions would be inundated by the swirl of plebiscitary emotions — by aggressiveness, acclamation and alarm.”

Well, nowadays, most people, modelling themselves on the aggressive, acclimating and alarm-ringing media that Watergate created, regard themselves as just that. With Watergate, the American media established a style of never disregarding what our fellow citizens do, no matter how trivial or irrelevant. Of course, this has been taken up with fury by social media, where reducing the secrets of politics to everyday stuff is on everyone’s mind every minute, day and night. And once you declare secrecy an intolerable torment — the secrecy of the “deep state”, of hidden thoughts, of words and actions buried in the past — then any seeming exposure of truth has the liberating force of not being a secret. Exposing a secret has now become the sole criterion of truth. Even if it is a lie. Especially if it contradicts an official fact, which is by definition, something born in the realm of official secrets. Populism is thriving now not least because at the heart of populism is an abhorrence of secrets, which for some time has been at the heart of culture.

Unlike Trump, Ivy-educated, born to wealth, bathed in wealth, schooled and quickened in the sybaritic dens of sophisticated New York, Nixon was a born populist. Trump falsely believed that the 2020 election was stolen from him because he felt entitled to remain president; Nixon believed the Kennedys stole the election from him in 1960 because he felt humiliated by coastal elites all his life.

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His pursuit of Alger Hiss for betraying American secrets to the Russians probably had as much to do with Hiss’s elite WASP background as with his treachery. Nixon’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction during his Checkers speech when he, accurately, accused Democrat presidential candidate, and mandarin of mandarins, Adlai Stevenson of misusing campaign funds. The root of Nixon’s populism was his feeling of smallness, of being an impostor always grabbing for more.

Yet this product of a world-historical inferiority complex established the Environmental Protection Agency, passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act, signed the Equal Rights Act into law, temporarily imposed wage and price controls, expanded the Food Stamp programme, and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass the Family Assistance Plan, which was an attempt at a guaranteed basic income that even Biden never pretended to espouse. He decreased troop levels in Vietnam, drastically reduced American casualties and extricated the country in 1974 from a war that had been created by liberal idealist opportunists, a war that had started with “military advisors’ in 1961. Even as he illegally expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos; even as he authorised Kissinger, long American high society’s favourite war criminal, to commit or enable atrocities in Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh, Cyprus and East Timor; even as he tried to destroy his critics — he called them “enemies” — at home.

Nixon is routinely referred to as an enigma, a mystery, a cipher, a fungible opportunist. This is accurate, probably, but it is a tedious and tired narrative line that illuminates very little.

Fundamentally, Nixon was a watershed figure who led America away from any sort of shared reality into the obscure recesses of the American mind. That is to say, you couldn’t make sense of America during Nixon’s reign unless you turned away from the chaos in America and towards what made Nixon tick. That was when mind began to trump matter; when who a leader really was started to matter more than the context they acted in. That is another shift in the direction of populism. Populists prize personality, the more intriguing the better, in their leaders above all else.

After Nixon Aenigmaticus, the political question of our time is not: What does this person believe? No one, after all, believes anyone’s profession of belief anymore, least of all a politician’s. No, after Nixon, the question of our time, when it comes to democratic leaders, is not what, or who. It is when, and how, will a particular “who” begin to unravel. And, depending on your goals, or mere desires, what you can do to hasten it along. We are all our brother-citizens’ keepers now. We are all, that is to say, Woodward and Bernstein. Thanks to the self-anointed hero-journalists of yore, we are condemned to ceaseless, remorseless vigilance — all in the name of democracy.

The movie was co-written and directed by Robert Rossen, who had been a member of the Communist Party until he broke with it in 1947. He was initially blacklisted, but then testified behind closed doors and named names. The Hustler was his first, and only, successful film after the blacklist and his testimony. It is a parable of the inextricable links between money, character, success, failure and love. American style.

“YOU OWE ME MONEY!” Bert the professional gambler, backed up by thugs, unforgettably erupts at Eddie, the pool-playing genius, at the end of the movie. Scott roars the last word out as if it were the eternal answer to an eternal question, the alpha and omega of creation itself. And that is what the movie is about: money as a finality. Not as in The Color of Money — the trite title of Martin Scorsese’s disappointing sequel. Rather, money as ontological essence; money as, to borrow Spinoza’s characterisation of it, “the abstract of everything”. Money as the consummate medium for the human desire to possess.

Eddie “Fast Eddie” Felson is a young, uncannily gifted pool player. But he’s also a pool hustler. He enriches himself by tricking other players into thinking he’s not that good. He gets them to place high bets in the expectation they will beat him, and then relieves them of their money once he’s taken them in.

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Eddie, though, has his hamartia, his tragic flaw. He travels all the way from California to New York — from the kingdom of illusions to the city of grimy reality — accompanied by his shill, a middle-aged sad-sack named Charlie, to play Minnesota Fats, performed to perfection by Jackie Gleason. After playing the legendary Fats, considered the best pool player in the world, for hours in Ames, the pool room that is Fats’s domain, Eddie trounces him. He wins $10,000 — the equivalent of over $100,000 today. Charlie tells him it’s time to leave. Eddie refuses. “The pool game is over when Fats says it’s over,” Eddie snaps. Fats waits, uncertain whether the match will continue. Bert, clearly Fats’s backer and handler, has quietly seated himself in the pool room, in a chair slightly higher than the others. He says to Fats: “Stay with this kid, he’s a loser.”

Eddie doesn’t care about the money. In that sense, he is what an American is supposed to be, from the Western sheriff, to the outsider-hero private eye or cop, to Superman and Batman. He cares about being true to himself. So he looks at Bert with pain and surprise when Bert makes his comment. They continue to play and Fats ends up destroying him. Eddie is left with nothing. Wildly drunk at this point, he stumbles toward Fats with a few crumpled $100 bills and begs Fats to keep playing. Money is still the medium of his pride. Fats declines. Eddie falls to the ground, and the poolroom clears out. Bert departs, shaking his head.

Penniless, Eddie parts ways with Charlie and lives in a bus station for a while. There he meets, in the station cafeteria, Sarah (Piper Laurie), who is the movie’s moral centre. Lame, alcoholic, depressed, cultivated, sensitive, psychologically astute, Sarah lives in a small apartment alone with the elaborate lies she tells herself. She and Eddie begin a steamy affair. Sarah, who resists Eddie in various ways, falls in love with him, and Eddie, who flings himself at Sarah, clearly, if unconsciously, uses her for sex and solace until he can right himself.

The movie’s turning point occurs when Eddie, feeling restless and boxed-in with Sarah, quarrels with her and leaves. He follows his calling and goes out to hustle. But on this occasion, Eddie is antagonised by a young player who talks down to him. Eddie loses his temper. “I don’t rattle, kid. But just for that, I’m going to beat you flat.” Yet Eddie is rattled. His fragile pride is bruised. As a result, he reveals himself as a hustler too early. Just when he is about to collect his winnings, the young man’s friends force him into the bathroom and break his thumbs as punishment for his deception. Eddie drags himself back to Sarah’s, arriving on her doorstep broken and in tears.

A transformation occurs. Eddie and Sarah no longer simply eat, sleep and make love. Eddie begins to genuinely care for Sarah; Sarah drops her shield of sarcastic irony and ministers to Eddie’s inner and outer wounds. The length and fine control of human opposable thumbs are what distinguish us from any other primate. When Eddie has his thumbs broken, his pride is broken, and he is humbled in an elemental way.

For Rossen, the erstwhile communist, Eddie’s injuries make him not disabled, but profoundly human. He cannot grasp anything. This confers a deeper humanity on him in a grasping society. He becomes an ideal human type. For communists, and Christians, being broken is a permanent condition of being human. For liberals, too: the philosopher John Rawls’ famous and influential idea of the “veil of ignorance” imagines people having to choose what kind of society they would like to live in given the worst-case scenario of being a person at the very bottom — a broken person, that is to say. Most people would choose the fairest, most equal and most caring social structure.

If Rossen had indeed wanted to write a communist or, indeed, a Christian parable, he could have ended his movie right there. In a society whose cardinal acknowledgment is that everyone is broken — lame, or with shattered thumbs — everyone is protected from everyone else. Quod erat demonstrandum.

But that would be liturgy, not fiction. It would not be honest. Bert comes back into Eddie’s life and performs his own hustle. He offers to put up the money Eddie needs to make a comeback. Though in conventional Hollywood terms, Bert is a villain, it is hard to deny that he is on the side of the living. “So I got talent,” Eddie says to him at one point. “So what beat me?” Bert replies: “Character… Everybody’s got talent.” But what, the movie now asks, is the American definition of “character”?

In the event, Eddie takes up the challenge and agrees to let Bert put up the money for his long road back. Bert invites Eddie to the home of a rich Kentucky patrician to play pool during the Kentucky Derby. To Bert’s annoyance, Eddie brings Sarah.

From the beginning, Bert, the scourge of the broken, of “losers”, makes his contempt for Sarah clear. He thinks she is holding Eddie back. In fact, she is. After the patrician, Findley, beats Eddie — he plays billiards not pool, and Eddie needs time to adapt to the new game — Bert tells Eddie that it’s time to leave. In an echo of what happened at Ames, Eddie pleads with Bert to stake him more money, assuring him he knows he can beat Findley.

At that moment, Sarah enters Findley’s den and tells Eddie not to beg. She urges him to leave. “That man [Findley], this place, the people. They wear masks, Eddie. And underneath the masks they’re perverted, twisted, crippled… Don’t wear a mask, Eddie. You don’t have to.” Accepting society’s shallow conventions as the price of restoring his pride, Eddie tells her to “shut up”. He plays Findley and beats him, winning a small fortune. While he is walking back to the hotel, Bert, who has taken a taxi, allows himself to be seduced by Sarah, in part as a way of making a trophy of Eddie’s pride; he keenly envies Eddie. Revolted and shamed by her self-abasement, Sarah commits suicide in the bathroom. Arriving back at the hotel, Eddie discovers what happened and flies at Bert in a rage. The police officers at the scene pull him off.

An entire book could, and should, be written about how those Jewish screenwriters in Hollywood who had once been communists almost seamlessly assimilated communist values to Christian ones. Sarah delivers herself to Bert for the purpose of sacrificing herself, Christ-like, to the truth. Winners like Bert, she wants Eddie to know, are the true losers — but never mind that Bert survives, prevails and flourishes. Seeming losers, like Eddie are the true winners — but never mind it was Bert who taught Eddie how to stop losing. By means of her death, Sarah teaches Eddie a lesson beyond their social world. She teaches him to be a saint.

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At the movie’s climax, Eddie returns to Ames and soundly beats Fats in the presence of Bert. It is the sweetest revenge for Eddie. Ever the unsentimental businessman, Bert offers to stake Eddie again, at a reduced rate. Eddie, saintlike, refuses. “Too high, Bert. Price is too high. Because if I take it, she never lived, she never died. And we both know that’s not true, Bert, don’t we, huh?” Bert reveals himself as the breaker of worlds, threatening that if Eddie does not give him his share of Eddie’s winnings: “You’re gonna get your thumbs broken. And your fingers. And if I want them to, your right arm in three or four places.”

Eddie still refuses. Bert relents and tells him that he’ll let him go unharmed. But, he warns, “Don’t ever walk into a big-time pool hall again.” Eddie is freed from hustling. He can now pursue his vocation simply for the joy of fulfilling his destiny in his work. Or as Marx put it, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

This, then, is the heart of the American dilemma. Does the true American character lie in not living like an American? In refusing to count up your money to see who’s best? Or does it lie in mastering the terms of American success? In sacrificing ethical freedom for practical liberty? Eddie might be free at the end, ethically speaking. But how does he, whose calling it is to play pool, and to hustle pool, now fulfil his destiny in his work? Now that he has thrown off his mask, how does he live in a world where wearing a mask is essential to survive? Has Sarah hustled Eddie?

As for Bert, he is still a king — the directions at the end of the script read: “Bert takes his seat again on his throne overlooking Ames, sipping his glass of milk [like the eternal American boy].” Yet he is, as Eddie has told him, “dead inside”. And Sarah was right when she told Eddie: “[Bert] hates you ‘cause of what you are. ‘Cause of what you have and he hasn’t.” Democratic envy — no individual my superior! — is sharper than a serpent’s tooth. As someone once said, you can build a throne with bayonets, but you cannot sit on it. Still, Bert is sitting on his throne.

Ethical freedom? Or practical liberty? Some will scoff and say such a dilemma is an effete fiction. Life simply isn’t so clear cut. But some might say that, as it becomes more extreme, not just in its politics, but in its everyday rhythms, American life is coming down to just that: Eddie or Bert. If everyone is indeed broken, does a politician, say, claim to be a champion of the broken ones, only to deceive them with an abstract morality? Or does a leader emerge who runs roughshod over the broken, preaching robust survival at all costs? Do you believe the otherworldly promises that the broken will prevail, or do you throw in your lot with the worldly ones, who break?

To put it another way: Who will emerge as America’s Hustler in November? The impossible saint? Or the intolerable sinner?

Titled “How Yale Propelled J.D. Vance’s Career”, it reveals that “many students and professors remember Mr. Vance as warm, personable and even charismatic. But several also said they were perplexed by what they saw as Mr. Vance’s profound ideological shift.” That’s a real head-scratcher: since when does being warm and personable have anything to do with one’s ideology? Mussolini could be warm and personable. As for charisma, well.

The article recounts, with an air of true perplexity, the conundrum of Vance and his wife, who is of Indian descent and the daughter of immigrants, “deliver[ing]- home-baked treats” to a transgender student who had just undergone, as the Times put it in smug jargon, “top surgery” as if it were an everyday procedure, like a tonsillectomy. It then quotes the student, who said they abruptly ended the friendship after Vance, as senator from Ohio, supported legislation in Arkansas that prohibited transgender care for children.

Of course, they had every right to take offence. But there is no contradiction between treating trans people with kindness, protectiveness and respect and opposing transgender treatment for children. Except in the mind of the New York Times, whose grim, sanctimonious and lucrative prosecution of MeToo, the 1619 Project, the trans revolution, and its stigmatising of everything from a Confederate statue in the middle of nowhere to gas stoves and gas-powered cars had as much to do with Trump’s resurrection as anything else.

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After falling all over itself in 2016 to display its fair-mindedness and embracing Vance’s bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, as a “compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass”, the once prestigious liberal flagship now portrays Vance as a second-rate student at an Ivy enclave ingratiating himself with one powerful figure after another.

And this, then, according to the newspaper of record, is what really made Vance the success he is today. It is the truly revealing part of the article: one of his professors, Amy Chua, herself a bestselling author, arranged a meeting for him: “Then she introduced him to her literary agent, Tina Bennett. He was off.” In other words, for the NYT, it is not Vance’s resilience, literary talent, intelligence, political instincts or his book itself that made him a political success. It was his agent, the ultra-powerful and highly effective Tina Bennett.

For the success and status-obsessed Times, the success and high status of people who don’t share its moral framework can only be the result of obsession with status and success, not the consequence of any admirable human quality. Even Trump’s raised fist after the attempt on his life was, as one of its Times’ cultural interpreters pretentiously put it, a carefully calculated suck-up of world-historical proportions: “The force of the photographs, in other words, rests not in what they depict politically but what they convey about political depiction… Mr. Trump had the instinct, amid mortal danger, to consider how everything would look.”

There is another way to look at Trump’s raised fist. It was the reflexive motion of a man with failing mental faculties whose default response is the single obsession that is the glue keeping his mentality intact: the banal raised fist that is his ego’s doppelgänger.

Rest assured: what the liberal media commentators ruminating on Trump’s reaction were really thinking was: “I went to Andover and Harvard and followed all the rules. So why don’t I have Secret Service protection instead of this jerk from Queens?” As for their response to Vance, who dared attend Yale, it’s not: Here is a true Right-wing danger to the republic. It’s: “How can I meet Tina Bennett?”

But America is faced with a true slouching beast in Vance. He is smart, shrewd, intelligent, literary, young and not un-pretty to look at. And he plays with his cards exceedingly close to his chest. Vance is the most cunning politician in America. I cannot think of another recent politician with his national ambitions who published a bestseller with true literary qualities that then set him on a trajectory to the White House. Hillbilly Elegy was Vance’s Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy’s 1956 bestseller that also nearly made him the vice-presidential pick that year — he decided he didn’t want it in the end — and put him on the path to the presidency. And unlike Profiles in Courage, now generally agreed to have been mostly written by Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, Vance seems to have composed his book by himself.

For Vance is no blustering Trump, who perhaps is bumbling his way, yet again, to the most powerful position in the world. Trump is, unquestioningly, a master of self-presentation who at the same time undercuts his political skills with a seemingly uncontrollable temperament, only to right himself again. Vance, on the other hand, is the most masterful self-creation in modern politics, from his book to his beard. Especially The Beard, which did not appear until 2022, when he ran for the senate seat in Ohio. Its effect goes far beyond the immediate one of hiding a baby face.

No one has had a full beard in American politics since the late 19th century. The last time facial hair was an issue in that realm was in 1968, when allies of Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy urged his hippie supporters to “get clean for Gene” and trim their hirsute display of defiance, in order to try to appeal to the calls for law and order from the other side.

Vance’s beard is a whole other level of symbolic meaning. It makes him look, above all, like a Civil War general — from either side — right out of one of Matthew Brady’s famous photographs. Or it could be the beard of a pre-modern American president, presiding over America at a time when Christianity and traditional mores held sway. Or is it a hint of the countercultural type, a hippie for all seasons, after all?

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It has, simultaneously, a masculine working-class quality and a hint of insulated privilege affected by millennials devoted to a permanent dark stubble. Take a look beneath that. The Beard also could be the result of some sort of acedia, the medieval term for spiritual apathy, or depression as we would call it: that would put him in the ranks of so many working-class white Americans who turn to opioids for relief. But hold on. The Beard could well be the bohemian affectation of a literary man, meant to signify immersion in a world of mental work so thorough it leaves no time to shave.

From here, The Beard’s levels of expression move faster than the wildest cable-channel surfer Defiance of norms? Perhaps. Subtle defiance of Trump, beneath Vance’s fealty to him, who reportedly dislikes facial hair? Perhaps. Dangerous mountain man right out of Deliverance? Or valiant vanquisher of same? — remember that Jon Voight, the effete urban professional in that movie, had to grow a beard before extinguishing the Appalachian menace. And perhaps there are also meanings behind the Beard that Vance does not wish to project; perhaps it hints at a dark psychic wound. After all, growing up amid the savage dysfunction Vance sugarcoats in his book surely could have the same warping effect, or worse, as passing through the liberal mandarin pipeline of privilege and entitlement.

Or does The Beard say to increasingly hysterical liberals, who are already speculating about Vance refusing to certify the 2028 election, “Don’t worry. If I can change my appearance on a dime, I can change my politics on a dime, too.”

Whatever The Beard really means, beyond the guileful self-adjustment of a man who, for all his gifts, may well be a cipher, it represents what the liberals have long whined was absent in Trump: studied, calculated, reasoned, cosmopolitan, educated, disciplined self-presentation. Make no mistake about it. They hate Trump. They envy Vance.

To even begin to understand it, you first have to understand the arc of contemporary mores. To put it crudely: behaviour that was once publicly unacceptable is now tolerated, even embraced. Trump’s abusive language and threats didn’t come from nowhere. America’s famous radical individualism has burst its last restraints. It is hardly a surprise that a major American political party will be anointing an apparent sociopath its king when, for example, some American schoolchild somewhere could still be responding to the TikTok challenge, “Slap-a-Teacher”. Trump didn’t drop from the sky. He grew out of a coarse transformation of American life.

Or to put it another way, just as liberal culture long ago assimilated a culturally avant-garde nihilism — moving from Dickens to Kafka to Fifty Shades of Grey — the conservatives are experiencing their own upheaval in morality. Liberals have Quentin Tarantino’s revels in meaninglessness and violence. Hard-Right conservatives can now be entertained by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s social media posts encouraging the execution of Democratic leaders.

This Right-wing assimilation of once subversive values and sentiments, however, had a long gestation. For the fringe energies on the Right — the calls for violence, the paranoia, the nativism, the xenophobia — to have come bounding into the mainstream, two things had to happen. The Right had to shift its attention from political issues to cultural ones. And culture had to become a highly personal, idiosyncratic matter. The disappearance of a mass culture, and the rise of countless streaming niches, has had an incalculable effect on politics. People no longer stand around the proverbial water-cooler talking about the TV show or the movie they saw the previous night. Now they sit in their cubicles and watch on their screens recaps of what they saw the previous night. And few people saw the same thing as other people. A good part of Trump’s appeal is simply that he is someone who gets lots of people to poke their heads out of their cultural niches and pay attention to him, the way people used to go en masse to a movie theatre instead of sitting home alone in front of their screens (where they are now all following Trump). This great divider is also, for masses of people, a great uniter.

The story of the contemporary American Right is a tale of fringe to mainstream, of a long, slow embrace of what was once unacceptable. It took some time, but an adversarial energy was its mother’s milk from the beginning. Today’s take-no-prisoners, radical American Right was born in opposition to the New Deal and to what appeared to be Soviet communist threat. The Right has been and will always be a counterpunch. Trump is a born counterpuncher.

In the Thirties, class was the focus of both Right and Left. With the legislative triumph of FDR’s New Deal, though, the liberal idea of material hardship as something to be ameliorated by the state established itself, forevermore, as the dominant political ideology in America. The Right-wing counterpunch occurred quickly. But it found no real outlet in national politics, fulminating instead in print and in the new medium of radio. It was exemplified by the ideas of Father Charles Coughlin, the radical Right’s chief demagogue at the time. Coughlin was a pastor in a small Michigan town who had turned sharply from a supporter of FDR and the New Deal to a vicious opponent of both, using radio broadcasts and a magazine he published called Social Justice, to attack communism, bankers, and Jews. Coughlin began as an advocate for the economically disenfranchised, but his Left-populist rhetoric gradually evolved into pro-Nazi tirades. At his height, his broadcasts had a staggering 30 million listeners — he was proof of concept for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson. Though Coughlin’s sentiments found no political platform, their incendiary quality threatened public order, especially after America entered the Second World War. The federal government shut down Coughlin’s magazine in 1942 for violating the Espionage Act, and the Catholic Church put an end to his radio broadcasts at the same time.

Coughlin had been silenced, but his enmity toward liberalism seethed under the surface of American life. Yet as the New Deal became a welcome permanent condition for most Americans, as the country grew prosperous after the Second World War, and as accelerating industrialism slowly eroded the moral fabric of small-town America, Coughlin’s focus on class lost its pull. Enter Senator Joseph McCarthy, who replaced class consciousness with an obsession with seditious elites. This shift in emphasis was a virtuoso move. McCarthy’s anti-communism provided an intellectual style of its own for the masses of people alienated by the liberal intellectual class. McCarthy became a sort of cultural mandarin from below, simply by virtue of his attacks on the cultural mandarins who ruled from above. This was the first step, by the Right, out of politics into culture.

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McCarthy was exposed during the televised 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings as vapid, venal and heartless. And as a result of its tribune’s public discrediting, the Right lost much of the following McCarthy’s conspiracy theories had won for it and settled back into the political margins. There the fevers McCarthy had unleashed were soon embraced by the ill-tempered John Birch Society, which represented the return of Father Coughlin’s dark populist zeal. Like the Tea Partiers and MAGA enthusiasts who eventually followed them, Birchers blamed moderate elites in the Republican party, just as much as Democratic elites, for an expanding universe of entitlements — and also for the seemingly unstoppable growth of international communism. William F. Buckley, routinely praised for purging the conservative movement of its extremist fervors, in fact gave the Birchers an appreciative wink as he finally, and with finely calibrated ambivalence, seemed to usher them out the door in 1965 with a series of scathing editorials that he published in his weekly magazine, National Review, at the time a highly influential force in conservative life. After all, Buckley’s seminal 1951 God and Man at Yale lambasted cultural elites across the political spectrum in a way that held great appeal for the Birchers.

Coughlin’s original economic populism had never caught on with conservatives, who were, and always will be, the party of banks and big business. But with Buckley’s book, a strenuous argument for replacing the teaching of secular humanism in universities with the propounding of Christian principles, the Right found its most powerful appeal and its true purpose: the battle over who owns American culture. The shift from the conservative pursuit of class conflict to its pursuit of a culture war was almost achieved. Once you draw a bead on the liberal elites, the liberal elites train their attention back on you. The result is that you share their visibility, and their glamour. Bob Dylan in 1962:

So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin’ down the road
Yee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!

The American radical Right was well on its way to being mainstreamed.

The Left, clutching their Gramsci, followed a similar path, as they embarked on their long march through the cultural institutions, mainly the universities. In 1989, the Catholic conservative Michael Novak published, in Forbes magazine of all places, an essay titled “The Gramscists Are Coming”, in which he urged conservatives to adopt the principles of Gramsci’s Kulturkampf — what Gramsci called a “war of position” — in order to head off the Left’s incursions into culture.

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Three years later, at the 1992 Republican convention, the Right-wing Catholic populist Patrick Buchanan — Father Coughlin with an urbane, smiling face —declared: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” The cosmopolitan Buchanan was shrewd about empowering people who felt left out by the ruling elites: he gave them an intellectual framework of their own. A “cultural war” is, after all, a form of culture. The Right-wing motion from politics to culture was complete.

In response, the Left’s grip on the universities hardened into identity politics and “political correctness”, the ancestors of today’s “woke” crusaders. And in response to that, but mostly to the election of the country’s first black president, the Tea Party briefly rose to prominence, bringing the virulent sentiments of Father Coughlin and the Birchers, which had always lingered on the fringes, into the Republican mainstream. Yet the Tea Party’s feral energies were too much, it went too far in its refusal to compromise in Congress — and wiped itself out.

Trump would later incorporate the Tea Party base into the GOP by elevating the Tea Party’s cultural animadversions — they, like Trump, believed that Obama had not been born in the US, and that he was secretly a Muslim and a socialist — over its radically libertarian economic agenda. Trump played down his radical free-market economic agenda — it pretty much went without saying for a GOP candidate who was also a successful businessman anyway. Instead he played up a rhetorical Grand Guignol of feral sentiments. He abandoned the Tea Party’s intransigence over the budget. And made a bullying, derisive intransigence the substance of his politics. Trump is the only American president to be loathed by liberals, not for his policies and actions as president — as Nixon, Reagan and Bush had been — but simply for being an asshole.

Nowadays both Right and Left accuse the other of inflaming passions over culture to conceal an economic agenda; but with the triumph of neoliberalism, the economic agenda of the two sides has become strikingly similar in many respects. The war over who owns the culture, though, is where the irreconcilable differences lie. Not over tariffs on China, or managing Social Security, or even the need to curb illegal immigration. There is middle ground on all those issues. There is no middle ground over the belief in the fungibility of biological gender, or the certainty of the existence of inherent racism, or the issue of whether to teach both to children in school. The emergency in the way people expect their most intimate realities to remain constant is what is largely inspiring them to protect Trump from the destabilising assaults upon him.

Surprising as it may sound, the culture war in America has been, to a meaningful degree, a clarifying, sometimes bracing, dispute in the absence of the communist menace on the one hand, and of a shared water-cooler culture on the other. But America’s culture war has now, like pretty much every public experience in America, begun to vanish into the labyrinth of the American psyche.

Just as late capitalism has made the commodification of psychological life — Mark Zuckerberg is the Cecil Rhodes of our time — its last commercial frontier, American politics now is more and more a matter of mental states; no wonder that Taylor Swift’s lyrics often sound like middle school meets Munch’s The Scream. It is fitting that the entire country should be obsessing over the fraying synapses of its two presidential candidates. Ideology is out. What you think people are actually thinking behind the veneer of what they want you to think they are thinking, as you are trying to figure out what you actually think or should seem to be thinking yourself: that is in. Unmasking deep psychic truth, once the project of high art and modern sociology, is now a common reflex.

Forget all the talk about the administrative state, and the deep state, and Hayek and Strauss and Agamben; forget libertarianism, and Catholic integralism, and neo-conservatism, and the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025, and the slick, hustling Right-wing New Dealers. Think instead of that great emblematic American experience: driving on a highway.

Everyone is a centrist behind the wheel. You drive according to the speed limit when you have to, exceeding it when you are alone or when everyone else does. You mostly stay in the middle lane, or in one of the middle lanes, changing to the left lane to pass or to the right lane to exit the highway. So long as everyone else driving near you behaves in the same way, everything goes smoothly. Your life is fine, it will be fine, all will be fine. There is no reason to think or feel radically different about anything. All of sudden, though, someone cuts you off. You fly into a rage and want to follow them to wherever they are going, pull them out of their car and beat them into extinction. In much the same way, patriotism and ideology instantly vanish from the minds of soldiers in battle, who care only to survive.

As American life fills with conveniences, inconvenience begins to feel more and more like a broken promise. Responsibility itself comes to be experienced as a betrayal of free will. In this carnival of sovereign impulses, the space between politicians — and every public figure; think of those postgame press conferences in which athletes have to atone to viewers for their mistakes during the game — and the people who elect them disappears. It’s not enough to vote someone out, or vote against them, when they cut you off, as it were. You have to destroy them. Ideology is irrelevant, except as someone’s pretext for enraging you, and as your pretext for striking back.

The rise, in Europe, of fringe parties in the mainstream, is one result of a democratic politics that regresses, more and more, to the appetites of the individual. In America, where the sense of community has always been elusive, such bespoke politics, if you will, is becoming more and more prevalent. You might also call it streaming, or niche politics. Something for everyone; nothing for all.

This atomised political consumerism is why, professed liberal amazement and outrage to the contrary, there is nothing contradictory about an American Right in which Mitch McConnell and Marjorie Taylor Greene share the same (ultimate) fealty to Trump. Having its roots in opposition to the New Deal, then to godless Ivy-educated elites, and now to progressive commandments to transform human life from the genitals, to the kitchen, to the highway, the American Right, like any person ruled by anger, is open to the most intense emotions, no matter how contradictory. In a blurry, mentalised time, Trump’s own anger is downright enlightening for many people.

In Milwaukee, Trump will continue to capitalise on the American Right’s movement from fringe to mainstream, from politics to culture to psyche, and turn himself into a syncretic masterpiece. He is, all at once, a fractured Picasso and a reassuring Hudson River landscape; a Buckley-like cosmopolitan exerting a clownish appeal to born disrupters and, in the eyes of prim liberal elites, “losers”; a convicted felon who can now present himself as an American anti-hero on the order of Christ himself. And, to top it all off, the Democrats are becoming, before everyone’s eyes, the party of sclerosis, dishonesty, concealment, and sanctimonious hunger for power.

That is to say, the erstwhile party of the New Deal is now retreating into the shadows, while the party of Father Coughlin has emerged from the shadows once and for all and, short of the Lord himself intervening with Josephus Bidenarius Caesar, ready to take centre stage.

My joy at seeing my son matriculate curdled into chagrin. Over the past several years, he had often come home confused, stunned and once or twice on the verge of tears at being told — by white teachers — that, because he was white, he was “inherently racist”. This stung him with extra force because his favourite book was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, most of his friends were black, and the people he was closest to in school were the black administrators who instinctively grasped his status as an outsider and nourished and protected him. Meanwhile, our — I mean my wife’s and my — daughter, then in middle school, was arriving home from school asking if it was “okay” that she did not want to be a boy.

That early evening at the graduation ceremony, as the sun slowly set on America and the afternoon’s wilting heat began to ease, you could cut the irony, as they say, with a knife. Not only was the graduation speaker the very emblem of white-male hegemony, but his values seemed way out of sync with the town’s purported moral framework.

Just about every commencement speech has a story illustrating a moral precept to live by at its centre. Here was his: years ago, he knew a woman in California who was making only $40,000 a year as a teacher. By Power Lunch standards, she was a loser. But then truth poured from the heavens and opened her eyes. She took up painting and mastered, not her art, but the art of marketing her art, and she began to sell her canvases, the speaker said, for $350,000. This was the moral of the story the graduates needed to absorb. If you “invest in yourself”, the speaker explained, you will be a success. You will, in other words, stop being a loser-teacher and you will become a winner who knows how to game the marketplace and other people. The speaker finished his inspiring peroration by declaring that a college degree was of little importance in a world where personal initiative could make one a fortune, and with a flurry of references to certain celebrities who live in town, the implication being that he knew these gigantic exemplars of American success personally.

By high school, most of Montclair’s wealthy liberal elites have sent their children to private school, so though there was still a meaningful group of rich people in the audience, most of the people in attendance were on some level of the American middle-class, with at least a third of the audience belonging to the black lower middle-class or working class, or the working poor. I can only imagine what effect the speech had on those black families for whom their child’s high-school degree was an occasion of joyful coming-through, and the possibility of college something like a miracle, let alone how the speech struck the many teachers who were there. No one, however, protested. The speaker left the podium to weak applause and a bewildered silence.

My thoughts turned to that graduation ceremony as I listened to Biden implode during last Thursday’s presidential debate. The chagrin returned. Here, after nearly eight years of progressive hectoring about systemic racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and general condemnation of anyone who dares question any component of the super-accelerated revolution in mores that American liberals have wrought — here was an 81-year-old straight white male leading the country into chaos. And not just any white male. A mentally deteriorating white male who, until that moment, had the full support of the rainbow coalition of Excluded Others who had staked their credibility and authority on their opposition to straight white-male dominance.

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Was it all for naught then? The enormous effort to adapt to a world where you had to tolerate and endure mediocrity, incompetence and sometimes outright malevolence and venality all because the person embodying such qualities belonged to a protected group? Was the onslaught, begun in the universities in the Nineties, against any aspect of culture or society that bore the imprint of a dead-white male hand actually the greatest instance of collective gaslighting since Pravda? In fact, after a while, I had jovially gone along with the riotous shift in paradigm since, to be honest, many of the people I dislike most in the world happen to be unqualified, untalented, unintelligent, overbearingly powerful and super-privileged white males. And here, after all that, was the inadequate, grotesquely over-rewarded white male par excellence, right there on CNN, leading the country, including the officially excluded, straight to hell.

Following the debate, the liberal media turned, en masse, on a dime against Biden, after years of gingerly acknowledging Biden’s visible mental decline and then delicately refuting it: “Mr. Biden has been a wise and steady presence” (The New York Times, 29 February 2024). A recent “insider-access” (read: sycophantic) book about Biden, Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician, published just 10 months ago, noted the President’s mental stumbles only to dismiss them by celebrating his “weathered instincts and robust self-confidence”, his “calming presence and his strategic clarity”, and “the advantages of having an older president”.

An authoritarian regime that constructs an alternate universe of peace and harmony with which to hide its monstrous subversions of the human spirit creates an atmosphere of almost universal irony. The ironies in American life are proliferating as fast as America is declining. For eight years we have heard, again and again from liberal mandarins, that Trump poses an “existential threat” to democracy. But a president who cannot mentally function is a greater one. And even amid all the sudden liberal calls for Biden to step aside, there is the same reliance on Trump to justify Biden. Trump lied again and again at the debate, we are told, and he indeed lied, again and again, shamelessly. But, aside from Biden’s own lies — Obama built cages for illegal immigrants, not Trump, who happily made use of them; Trump never vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare — the Democrat lie that the President is in control of his faculties when he has been, for years, descending into dementia is far more destructive than Trump’s lies about his “achievements” — lies that are, after all, merely campaign and debate boilerplate.

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It would be productive if, before the liberal establishment answers the question of what to do if and when Biden steps aside, it asked itself why it promulgated the Big Lie of Biden’s Mental Health in the first place. Obviously, jobs depend on Biden remaining in the White House; a change in president is a change in career, income and status for many people. Beyond that, though, it seems plausible to consider another reason. A victory for Trump is a victory for liberal culture. The worse, the better, as the Trotskyists used to say.

In America, you can buy something called an E-Z pass, a plastic sensor that you stick on the windshield of your car in order to drive through a toll without having to stop. Since 2016, Trump has provided a moral E-Z pass for the American liberal establishment. You stick the Trump E-Z pass on your conscience, as it were, and you can betray your obligations as a journalist, artist, teacher, politician or just about any position that requires you to approach a situation without bias, or the baggage of an ideological presumption. Since the advent of Trump, fiction, poetry, the theatre, film, even music have all been reduced to exercises in social justice. Yet, in the eyes of the liberal mandarinate, work remains to be done. Some among them still brood over oppressive hegemonies like the “moral imagination” and “critical thinking”. A victory by Trump in 2024 would embolden the reduction of all cultural expression to social issues as never before.

As the liberals conceive of it, let the Right have the political institutions anyway. Generations of post-structuralist thinkers have shown how impoverished they are — the “deep state” is a Left-wing construction. Culture and civil society are what matter. Behind the cover of anti-Trump defiance, they are yours for the taking. After all, Biden didn’t decide to run in 2020 because he was horrified by the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, as he said he did. Having lost his bid for president twice before, he ran because the revulsion against Trump after Charlottesville was so striking he felt he couldn’t, at long last, lose. In that moment, his instincts, and those of his closest advisor, Lady Macbeth — I mean Dr Lady Macbeth, his wife — were unerring.

Beyond Biden fumbling his golf handicap — first six, he said, then eight — not many people made much of the two ghostly cognitions sparring over their 18-hole capacity. But it was the most depressing moment of the evening. The question of who was the better golfer made both men more animated and engaged than they had been for the entire debate. At that moment, they were not bitter political adversaries. They were avid sports competitors, and they were closer to each other than either man has ever been to the people they are so madly driven to represent. Let the American people eat super-accelerated changes in the most intimate public and private dimensions of their lives. The power lunch stays the same, always, and no “$40,000” human, in any part of America or the world, is invited.