The Remains of American Politics
In a little over two months, the identity of the next President of the United States will be determined. I choose my words carefully. I say that the identity of the next president will be determined, not that it will be revealed. To be fair, there is a vague sense, which may be more a factor of one man’s marketing genius than of real conditions, that if the Republicans win the day, we will know the actual identity of the president, namely Donald Trump. If the Democrats win, however, it almost goes without saying that the next president will be some variant of the unidentified cabal that has been running the executive branch of the US government since January 2021 under the official name “Joe Biden,” and which is currently in the process of rebranding itself as “Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump tries to look very serious most of the time, but it is all in the name of acting, and in truth even his serious poses and facial expressions tend to look like a comedian’s parody of a “serious man” look, an impression which becomes all the more exaggerated when Trump speaks.
On the other side, Kamala Harris seems to have a permanent, over-the-top broad smile on her face, and no one can say anything serious while smiling broadly. Harris’ typical look of the moment, as the mainstream media and their owners in the DNC are carefully framing it — head slightly tilted back as though laughing, mouth open, teeth showing, nose slightly wrinkled up as though she has just seen the cutest child doing the funniest thing — is, to be blunt, the look of democracy in its descending stage: fun, cheerful, thoughtless, appealing exclusively to children and childish pseudo-adults.
Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has now suspended his third-party candidacy and endorsed Trump, mostly, I would say, out of spite at the way his old party has treated him during the past year. Kennedy was, to be blunt, the only one of the three notable presidential candidates who sounded like he had any ideas about anything, any knowledge of pertinent facts, any grounding in historical awareness, and any facility with the English language. In the old days, he would likely have been dismissed as a bit of a crank and a one-trick pony, albeit a well-spoken one. This year, however, even a skeptic would have a hard time not feeling, while listening to Kennedy with any semblance of an open mind, that it is awfully refreshing to hear a politician who needs neither to be protected from his/her ignorance and incapacity behind barricades of teleprompters and scripted questions, nor to be muzzled before he humiliates his country and undermines its national interests and international credibility any further.
Having said that, Kennedy essentially grounded his whole campaign in resistance to the government’s overreach during Covid — yesterday’s catastrophe — and to the extent that he attempted to formulate a position on current events, he chose the wrong position, i.e., apologist for Putin. True, he has also spoken out forcefully about the way the phony two-party system has used its joint control of the media to marginalize alternative voices, but of course this cannot help but sound like sour grapes in his case, rather than the kind of disinterested crusade that might instigate a serious national discussion — imagining, for the sake of argument, that America were still capable of engaging in a serious national discussion, which is self-evidently false.
So we, by which I mean the rest of the semi-civilized world that still clings to the fantasy that America is the bulwark of freedom without which the whole house of cards will fall — it has fallen — are now left with the certainty that the next President of the United States is going to be a lifelong clown who play-acts seriousness for laughs while ceding national interests like a subversive mole and bursting constitutional constraints like a punctured canoe, or an empty-headed placeholder who is being trained to play-act joyfulness as a moron-friendly mask for the totalitarian deviousness of the dark forces running the show.
You be sure to get out and vote now, folks!
