The problem with campaign rally songs is that nobody ever picks the right one. Franklin Roosevelt
chose “Happy Days Are Here Again” in the middle of the Great Depression
with Adolf Hitler rising to power in Germany. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born
in the U.S.A.” has charmed Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,
none of whom apparently ever actually listened to the lyrics of that
lament for post-Vietnam malaise and economic decline. George H.W. Bush
used Woody Guthrie’s pinko anthem “This Land Is Your Land.”
Lately,
Trump has been using Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a
diabetes-inducing hunk of treacle that makes me want to join the Islamic
State, while Joe Biden
has gone back to the Guthrie well with a version of “Shipping Up to
Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys, a band that, like Joe Biden, is still
getting by playing hits from the 1990s.
I
have my own theme song for the 2024 election, David Bowie’s magnificent
1995 collaboration with Brian Eno: “I’m Afraid of Americans.” It is an
anthem for our times.
Presidential
elections are almost always showy, nationalistic affairs, full of
appeals to patriotism and unity, occasions upon which even Ivy League
diversity officers wave the flag and festoon the public square in red,
white and blue. And that points to the tension at the heart of the
dreadful and contemptible 2024 presidential election, which almost
certainly will be fought out by Donald Trump, a depraved game-show host
who tried to stage a coup d’état when he lost his 2020 re-election bid,
and Joe Biden, a plagiarist and fabulist first elected to public office
53 years ago who is going to be spending a lot of time this campaign
season thinking about his family’s influence-peddling business and the
tricky questions related to it, like whether you can deduct hookers as a
business expense.
Run
Old Glory up the highest flagpole you can find, but 2024 is going to be
the least patriotism-inspiring election in American history so far, a
reminder of what a depraved, decadent, backward, low-minded, primitive,
superstitious and morally corrupt people we have become.
Don’t blame “the system,” you gormless weasels. You chose this.
For
most of my life, the dominant myth that informed American politics was
that there was too much “big money” in the system, that Washington
lobbyists in Gucci loafers gathered with self-seeking party bosses in
smoke-filled rooms to subvert the will of We the People and foist their
preferred candidates and policies upon the country. The moral of the
story was that the common people do not have enough of a voice.
But that’s the great lie of American politics (and of democracy at large): that the people cannot fail but can only be failed.
Conservatives
told themselves a carefully tailored version of that story, one in
which Republican Party careerists insufficiently committed to limited
government allowed themselves to be pushed around by the liberal media,
selling out their principles and the electoral interests of the GOP so
that they could feel welcome “at Georgetown cocktail parties,” as the
slavering imbeciles of talk radio still put it. The left told itself a
similarly inane story, with Big Business turning the Democratic
establishment into corporate shills with no interest in anything more
radical or fundamental than smoothing out the rougher edges of
capitalism rather than—finally!—“putting people over profits,” as the
idiots over in their village put it.
And then, a funny thing happened. Two funny things, in fact.
First, the Internet broke the old media oligopoly, which at the height of its power had consisted of three newspapers—the
,
the Washington Post and this one—alongside three television networks
that aped those three newspapers, and the Associated Press, which
digested all that and regurgitated it, birdlike, into the pages of
10,000 local newspapers. This ensured that the same biases that shaped
the political coverage of the Washington Post ended up in the Sacramento
Bee and the Tulsa World, serving up D.C.-N.Y.C. gruel at a hundred
million breakfast tables across the fruited plain.
With
the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in
and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories
powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orbán and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson
is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built
around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors
has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million
underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter. The news was
democratized, and, as such, it became corrupt, irresponsible and ugly.
Second,
the same forces that disintegrated the old media cabal have radically
democratized fundraising for political campaigns and committees.
Whatever control those smug party bosses once lorded over candidates
mostly had resided in the power of the purse. But the Internet made it
possible for politicians and hustlers to go straight to the people, who
don’t want to hear about the need to raise their Medicare premiums and
reduce their Social Security checks to avoid a national fiscal crisis.
No,
We the People want to hear more from that Marjorie lady about the
Jewish space lasers and how Donald Trump is going to wreak vengeance
against the “communists” and “Marxists” who run…
,
and how vaccines are what gave them lumbago. The digital masses may not
be dropping bundles of C-notes into the campaign contribution tip jar,
but they hit that tip jar pretty often with smaller change, and there
are an awful lot of them.
Whatever
real power big-money donors had to shape the political agenda has been
dwarfed by the power—the much more thoroughly corrupting power—of
small-dollar donors, who, unlike the National Association of Realtors or
the AFL-CIO, do not have a long-term policy agenda or the attention
spans to maintain one, because they are in this regard not citizens in a
meaningful sense but only content-consumers. Spend a couple of hours
reading political posts on Facebook and tell me that the smoke-filled
room doesn’t look pretty good by comparison.
Like the protesters’ placards say: “This is what democracy looks like.” And it’s kind of gross.
The
great political players of our moment include university presidents who
cannot explain why they’ll expel students for failing to use made-up
genderless pronouns (Zie! Zim! Zir! Zis! Zieself!) but not for calling
for a global pogrom against Jews, which needs “context.” They include
Jan. 6 vandals and goons and the former (possibly future) president who
insists that the ones convicted of crimes are “hostages” and “political
prisoners.” They include Proud Boys cosplaying revolutionaries and the
college professors who are sure there were some very fine people sawing
the heads off Jewish children in Israel.
Meanwhile,
the family-values guys over in the evangelical Christian world are
showing more loyalty to Donald Trump than he ever showed to any of his
wives, insisting that the lying, chiseling, philandering, coup-plotting
grifter and occasional porn-movie performer is Jesus’ Own Personal Guy
chosen to hold off the forces of darkness in Anno Domini 2024.
Apparently, all that old “Thou shalt not bear false witness” stuff has
gone right down the theological toilet.
Nobody
makes boots tall enough to wade through the avalanche of B.S. headed
our way in the next 11 months. Republicans, having decided that
knee-walking Trump sycophant Kevin McCarthy was not quite sycophantic
enough, have entrusted their legislative agenda to Mike Johnson, a swamp
grotesque from Louisiana who was among the leading 2020 coup plotters
and apparently believes that he is the second coming of Moses. And so
critical national priorities will be taking a back seat, for the
foreseeable future, to utter kookery.
If
you think Ukraine aid has been held up by legitimate concerns about
border security, you are not paying attention. Ukraine aid is being held
up because a sizable portion of Republicans are Putinists, in and out
of the closet to varying degrees, and believe (or pretend to believe)
Tucker Carlson’s claim that Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew, simply wants to persecute Christians and that pro-Ukrainian elements in the U.S. hate Vladimir Putin because he—a former KGB goon—is a defender of Christian piety. Meanwhile, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her Squad can’t get entirely on the right side of the massacre-the-Jews issue.
If Trump wins, he’ll try his best to act like some kind of midcentury caudillo, the unholy spawn of Augusto Pinochet
and Don Rickles. If he loses, then expect something along the lines of
Jan. 6 or worse. But if you think Democrats can’t hold their own when it
comes to irresponsible claims about election-rigging and voting-machine
tampering, then you weren’t around for 2016, 2004, 2000—or any other
big election that Republicans have won going back to 1864.
Sometimes,
a country is doing so well that it can afford a silly season. This is
not that time, and the U.S. is not that country. The government has a
very, very large military budget—but as of 2023, spending on interest
payments for federal debt now exceeds defense appropriations. Which is
to say, we are spending more money refinancing Medicare subsidies for
the dentures your granddad got 20 years ago than we are spending on
things like infrastructure, scientific research or, you know, building
aircraft carriers and making sure all those nuclear missiles we built
back in the Reagan years still work. And the Reagan-era stuff is the new
stuff: We’re still enriching uranium in the same facility they were
using back in Robert Oppenheimer’s day.
So
who do we want sitting across the table from Xi Jinping? Do we prefer
the guy who got flummoxed celebrating the musical legacy of
“LL…Jay…Cool…J…Uhh” before calling him “boy,” or do we want the guy who
was in “Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins” and who,
you know, tried to overthrow the government by invalidating the lawful
election of his feckless successor last time around?
Your choice, America. Enjoy all that pure, uncut democracy.
Democracy
isn’t our form of government. It is a feature of our form of
government—an important and irreplaceable element—but it is only a
means. The end is well-ordered liberty. Democracy works well only when
it is enabled and fortified by a great many institutions that are not in
themselves democratic—or that at least aren’t supposed to be
democratic.
One
of those important institutions is functional political parties, which,
in a sane world, would keep figures such as Donald Trump—and here I
mean 2016 Donald Trump, to say nothing of the Caligula-Travis Bickle
hybrid he has become—well away from political power, along with, at this
stage in the game, Joe Biden. All those gatekeepers occupying the party
offices, running the fundraising operations, working in the media,
conspiring at the bar at Café Milano in D.C.—it turns out they were
doing something really quite valuable, whether they intended to or
didn’t.
Some
of the institutions that make democracy work—that make it tolerable—are
formal, like the Bill of Rights. Some of them are the result of
longstanding conventions. But many of them are organic and ad hoc,
institutions and norms that evolved in particular conditions for
particular purposes—and that have been swept aside by the radically
democratic and relentlessly homogenizing forces of political life in the
digital age.
China,
Israel, the debt: Dealing with any of the urgent issues before us is
going to be hard in the best-case scenario. And say what you will about
Donald Trump or Joe Biden, nobody outside of a few daft cultists
believes that either one of these senescent miscreants represents the
best-case scenario. Being president is hard, it’s harder if you’re
stupid, and it’s even harder if you are stupid and your next landmark
birthday is your 90th.
That
being stipulated, the No. 1 issue in the 2024 presidential campaign is
not the debt, the economy, Ukraine, Israel or crime—the main issue is,
beyond any doubt, immigration. At least, it’s the one at the top of my
agenda and foremost in my own thoughts.
I just haven’t settled on where to go.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/election-2024-you-asked-for-it-america-8028bc04
