Presidential campaigns are exhausting.
The media cycles alone are enough to tire someone out. The horserace narrative. The constant soundbites, especially when they’re coming from a tired, old racist and his repulsive protégé, tend to coalesce into a toxic stew. Before long, all of it mixes together until it becomes nothing but noise.
It’s a predictable thing, but nonetheless disappointing. Messaging battles are key to winning elections, and we’re watching a particularly noxious cycle at the moment. Democrats have seized on accurately characterizing Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their cohorts as a disturbing and off-putting crew of neo-fascists, while Republicans have relied on some of the most virulently racist and sexist attacks imaginable. It’s a rock fight in the mud.
And, unfortunately, as is always the case, we are losing sight of so much.
The focus on Trump and Vance’s weirdness is rooted in a true and natural revulsion. They are repellent. But we are not directly addressing the material conditions that gave rise to the modern GOP. The desperate need for answers and anything approaching solutions has created a pseudo-populist authoritarian movement, and simply labeling them as “weird” tends to mask the true shape of the situation. There is something there that begs to be addressed, and continuing to focus forward, on the results and consequences, will only obscure those origins more.
As the race moves on, we are caught once again in the pseudo-environment of American political theater. Kamala Harris announced Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday morning, and we will now be subject to days of endless speculation about electoral benefits and possible consequences, a media machine fine-tuned to wring every last bit of juice from it they can.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, tensions are overflowing. A couple of assassinations carried out by Israel in major Middle Eastern cities has led to an imminent conflict with Iran, as the United States implores its foreign citizens to leave Lebanon “as soon as possible.” Since October, the U.S. has played a pivotal role in assisting Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people, a topic that has only been gestured at by Harris as the presumptive nominee. We’ve heard some lip service that has mostly been a reintroduction of Joe Biden’s stance on the subject, with just enough revision to inspire hope that maybe something will change.
Israel’s provocations have created a hornet’s nest. The inability to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu and his Far-Right cohorts has led to one crisis after another and, despite neoconservatives’ long lust to wipe Iran off the map, the mishandling of geopolitics has created a situation where Iran is more firmly aligned China and Russia in an axis opposed to American hegemony. Israel’s ideology is attuned and linked with the Far-Right in the United States and its western allies. They have cemented these relationships through exchanges, conferences, sharing of strategies and resources. And it has brought us to the brink of something that looks disturbingly like the moments before our major world wars in the past.
This situation requires nuance and tangible solutions. To avoid a widespread tragedy reminiscent of those global catastrophes, this moment demands robust and ambitious planning that rises to meet the bleak reality of the situation. It is a powder keg created by the late stages of hypercapitalism, and peace depends on an active plan.
Instead, we largely get theater. Retread arguments and a bounty of slogans developed and planned in massive strategy calls. A pseudo-environment predicated on leaving the hard, seemingly inscrutable problems by the wayside in favor of pleasing rhetoric and continued fairytales. Half-hearted promises to protect what remains of our freedoms and liberties. Meanwhile, the mess only worsens.
That pseudo-environment has been in place since the beginnings of liberal democracy, but has been an intentional and deteriorating state as technocrats and elites created the administrative state in the early-20th century. We are overwhelmed by stereotypes and emotionally-triggering narratives then left in the dark about the most pressing matters.
We cannot afford this anymore. Trump and the Republicans are repugnant and have soiled anything approaching a reasonable discourse, but the antidote requires something more substantial than meeting them on rhetoric. Characterizations of weirdness please the base and inject a shot of dopamine, but if they are not coupled with solutions and frank discussions of pressing crises, we are left once more to twist in the wind. And the problems are compounding. The ravages of neoliberalism and the accumulation of unchecked capital fuels all of this and that historic conflict will continue to loom just over the horizon.
The pleasing feelings of enthusiasm and hope are not substitutes for the cold, hard reality of the moment. Standing on the precipice of a potential third world war, this time replete with technologies that would make the first two seem like ancient history, should not feel like background noise.
This, of course, has precedent. The first two world wars were sleepwalked into, ushered in by capital and, in many cases, mainly dreaded and warned about by Leftists. In those times, they diagnosed the problems. Economic inequality. Systems pushed to the brink by greed and desire for the chauvinistic spoils of empire. Once more, we are there. Ignoring. Sleepwalking.