Superficial Democratic Politics Are to Blame for This Close Election

The explosion was nearly instantaneous across social media. At Sunday’s neo-fascist Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City, “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe’s routine sucked up a ton of oxygen. There was one clip after another of Hinchcliffe commenting on Latinos and their “love of making babies,” suggesting he carved watermelons with a Black attendee, and calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Reaction was quick and seemed certain that the unabashed racism would damn Donald Trump’s electoral chances.

While Hinchcliffe bears the brunt of this criticism, Trump’s entire rally was filled with this bullshit. Speakers called Kamala Harris the antichrist, continually fearmongered over immigrants, and Trump himself played all his greatest hits, railing against the press as “enemies of the people,” citing “sinister forces” and an “enemy within.” His final appeal to voters is a torrent of hatred and division.

As we approach next Tuesday’s election, it’s time to face the facts.

Racism is far from a disqualifier in the United States of America. 

Despite liberal handwringing and assurances that love or whatever will automatically win over hate, it’s quite clear that this is delusional thinking. After all, we’ve already seen Donald Trump win the presidency; 2016 should have been the moment where even the most pie-in-the-sky citizens finally let the scales fall from their eyes and recognized that America, despite assurances otherwise, is largely motivated by racist, sexist, xenophobic, and hateful energies. And it isn’t anything new. It has been one of America’s bedrock principles since its founding.

We have now watched, for nearly a decade, as hate has gained ground, and despite those very, very apparent facts, I still see people commenting on the size of Kamala Harris’s crowds, at the slew of meaningless celebrity endorsements, and lying to themselves that partnering with the Dick Cheney’s and Alberto Gonzalez’s of the world is a “smart political strategy.”

Even as it has become liberal orthodoxy to fully admit that America’s history is riven through with white supremacy and intentional inequality, there is a deep desire to believe that all of this poison is somehow ineffective or self-defeating, all while it has continued to fester since our inception.

This folly of a campaign should make those notions disappear. Trump has been a shambling disaster. His mental acuity is dissolving by the second, leaving him to rant wildly and change any question posed to him into a hodgepodge of nativist swill. He has been essentially bought and manipulated by a tech fascist determined to seize control over the federal budget and operate Trump’s corpse like a decaying puppet. That support led to the adoption of one of the most unpopular running mates in history. Their chorus of racist dog whistling and lie campaigns has led to legal immigrants being targeted and a state of violence around the country.

And, yet, there is still an outsized chance Trump wins back the presidency.

Why?

Because these racist, sexist, xenophobic instincts are presently the lone strain of populist discontent appealed to by either of the major parties. That space has been so ceded by the Democratic Party that charlatans like JD Vance and Josh Hawley have been able to wiggle their way into the ideological space and position themselves, while being disgusting toadies of the financial elite, as the last remaining warriors for the underclass of Americans. Liberals even bought JD Vance’s book in droves which supposedly was going to explain this strain of anger to them. 

What a crying shame that is. And what an insult.

If Harris is to lose on Tuesday, and she very well may, this is the essence of why any of this was possible. This campaign was a failure to stand on principles, especially opposition to the genocide in Gaza. The increasing precarity in American life that is echoed by so many Americans in poll after poll was met with a nebulous promise of an “opportunity economy” that largely is a repacking of the neoliberal status quo, and this has made a nailbiter of an election out of what should be an absolute drubbing and a mandate for the Democratic Party to do big things. 

We are watching the great cognitive dissonance of the Democrats exposed. As America continues its rightward trajectory, we should be alarmed by this country’s willingness to accept cruelty against immigrants, the almost total disavowal of gay and trans people, and the eagerness with which war criminals like Cheney and George W. Bush have been rehabilitated. To read polls detailing what “issues” are most important to voters, we must remember that the obsession with “the economy” and “illegal immigrants” are signs of a growing cultural nihilism and narcissism that has been cultivated by the Republican Party, our complicit media, and a Democratic Party that has seemed unwilling and uninterested in reframing the state of play.

What matters to many isn’t Trump’s agenda, but rather his aesthetics. The cruelties and exploitations are fine. It’s what Trump says. It’s how Trump and his associated ghouls behave. Political orthodoxy revolves around accepting the myriad indignities of empire but doing so with plausible deniability and, at best, a well-worn trove of kind-sounding gestures. What was on full display at Madison Square Garden, and has been there for anyone to see for the past decade at minimum, is a gleeful championing of the type of brutality that nearly half the electorate welcomes, and the other is more comfortable simply voicing disapproval while not really opposing it.

In other words, our political sphere is less a battleground of ideas, and more about good manners and playing nice with the powerful.

This does not have to be the case. Economic populism is wildly popular and effective, but it does require among the Democratic Party a desire to change the status quo and distance themselves from their corporate donors and backers. This is why it has been so discouraging to watch Harris continually fall back on support by entities like Goldman Sachs – it’s a clear sign that what is being communicated is a protection of that status quo and an unwillingness to actually affect the kind of change which could overturn the state of play as it exists.

And so, the GOP is allowed to continue selling itself as warriors battling against the elite, all while stuffing their pockets with that elite’s blood money. Populism is so effective that Trump and his MAGA project have managed to succeed by just adopting the aesthetics of populism while redirecting populist energies away from the elite and toward vulnerable communities.

What Harris has run so far is a campaign predicated on feeling “better” than Trump’s. We still hear the warmongering, the calls for a robust military and law enforcement apparatus. We’re still inundated with appeals to “strengthen” the border, even though our economy and its stakeholders rely on the exploitation of immigrants and nothing will change that, save for a paradigm shift the likes of which we are hoping for.

This battle over manners camouflages something incredibly important that continually gets overlooked in liberal circles. Though politics have largely become cultural and consumer battles, what is still lurking beneath the surface is a war for power. Consciously and unconsciously, Republicans have managed to understand this glaring fact. This is why they are able to overlook or paper over Trump’s litany of contradictions. They never actually cared about “family values,” “fiscal conservatism,” “patriotism,” or “small government.” These were cudgels that could be drawn whenever the situation, and the battle over power, required them. It is a complicated but effective means of politics that has left us stranded in these bizarre and dangerous times.

The question now is whether the Democratic Party will come to understand that their only way forward is mobilizing the earned anger over what has been done to this country by the financial elites. And, I suppose, another question is whether they will even discover the courage and guts to make good on that realization.

Handwringing over racist discourse gets us nowhere besides a feeling of moral superiority. Demagogues like Trump and hatemongers like Hinchcliffe recognize the advantages of weaponizing hate. At the core of this appeal, though, is at least the communication that power can be seized and harnessed in the service of a political project. Whether Trump or any Republican actually does that is a different story, but it is undeniably an appeal that has been effective.

It is quite another thing to root your “political” worldview in a notion of civility that does not play very well outside of Washington D.C.  Whether intended or not, this superficial appeal communicates to a broad scope of the electorate a level of comfort with a status quo that is crushing them. It prioritizes “decorum,” which is easily perceived as staid comfort, when millions upon millions are looking for a proportional response to the crisis that is continually communicated. 

They want someone to offer them bloody knuckles and a willingness to get dirty with the powers that be to set things right. And, in the middle of a brawl, they’re not worried about what someone says. They’re focused on who is left in the dirt and who is left standing.