I’ve noted before that the great tragedy of the 2016 presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton was less what the race was than what it wasn’t: a campaign for mayor of New York City.
Mayor of New York is a big job in politics, or at least it used to be (you can imagine Rudy Giuliani as Norma Desmond: “I’m big – it’s politics gone small!”), and it’s a job for which Trump or Clinton would have been quite suitable. Trump’s only real, almost unconditional success in public life was (or had been) a local project in Manhattan (he led a renovation of the ice skating rink in Central Park) and Clinton, who in her public life has always and at every turn overrated. probably shouldn’t have started her career as a senator from a state she’d never lived in, a job she took very lightly as she waited to become president.
Trump’s unsuitability for the presidency has been made even more apparent – this is something of a historical quirk – by his one catastrophic term in office, during which his laziness, his incompetence and his penchant for caudillismo were completely exposed for public inspection. Kamala Harris is a bit like Clinton in that she was elected to the Senate from a state so completely dominated by her party that the general election became a practical formality (California’s Democratic primaries are a different story, of course) and then became the Democratic candidate. after being carried to the doorstep of the White House by an old-fashioned, white, moderate Democrat and thrust into prominence by very little other than a sense of inevitability, by a vague sense among Democrats that it was “her turn.” Like Clinton’s tenure in the Senate and the State Department, Harris’ career in the Senate and in the vice presidency contains no evidence of an obvious future president, or even evidence of a future candidate.
If Trump is a Mr. Hyde who deleted Dr. Jekyll’s number from his phone, then Harris is Lord Jim, a figure who assumed to have been heroic, but just below par (“He was an inch, maybe two, not even six feet tall,” is the first thing Joseph Conrad tells us about the endearing clerk), an essentially passive character who ” had a gift for finding special meaning in everything that happened to him.” And so 2024 is a real clown show: Pennywise versus Cooky, the monstrous predator versus the frustrated aspirant who seems doomed to remain Vice Bozo forever.
Part of the clown show is pretending to take them seriously when they talk about ideas and policy proposals. Trump is pure shill, which is his natural state: Casino waiters and waitresses? No income tax! Old people in social security? No income tax! People with a car loan that they can’t pay? Less income tax! Harris, who seems to have graduated from the politician’s version of an improvisation seminar, has especially said “yes, and” to Trump: No tax on tips, and… joy!
Or something like that.
Sometimes it’s worth taking the time to meditate on the obvious. Personnel is policy, as the cliché goes, but that’s not all: personnel is too current. And that’s really what’s going on here. Trump’s view of political power is simply a general application of his old friend Roy Cohn’s famous proverb: “Don’t tell me what the law is – tell me who the judge is.” Harris’ view is a very slight variation on the same thing. All the legislative directors, policy makers and think tank nerds in Washington are like the kids who work painstakingly to perfect the student body bylaws, while Trump and Harris are content to get themselves elected and then ignore those bylaws – and the Constitution . and everything else. I suppose this qualifies as a kind of roughness realpolitik.
The sobering fact is that Americans are going to elect one of these two people as president — without any idea of what either would actually do in office. Their shortcomings don’t seem parallel or of equal importance to me, but while I don’t share that view, there are people I respect who are so absolutely terrified of Harris that they will pull the lever for Trump even though they understand exactly what he wants . is. We can probably take Trump at his word on the core of his agenda – “retaliation” – but no one really knows what that would look like. Harris’s effect is more conventional, bureaucratic and blasé, which is to say she looks more like one of the world’s middle managers. 1984 than that she looks like Big Brother. The history of the totalitarian projects of the 20e This century must ensure that we ignore the harm that middle management types can do.
Having said all this, we must realize that the personification of Justice holds a scale in her hands, supposing that what will be discovered therein is not equality but difference.
In 2016 I published a short (and completely unimportant) pamphlet entitled The case against Trump. A few days after Roger Kimball commissioned me to do the project, he called me with the intention of canceling the project, believing that Trump would certainly not be on the political stage long enough to complete the work. complete and get started. print. Good. I could have written a new one Case against Trump book twenty times as long this year, with 200 pages of footnotes at the end. (I don’t think my friend Roger would have been inclined to publish it.) But it is in return for Trump is a case for Harris only under the most limited kind of political understanding – all that superficial, silly stuff about that convenient phantom, the “binary choice.” And a case against Trump is also more than a case against Trump: it is a case against the Republican Party as it stands, and it is an indictment of the decades-long, self-serving and sometimes, calculatingly amoral embrace of atavistic populism, a mocking and destructive form of right-wing activity to which even sophisticates like William F. Buckley Jr. readily resort (I have no doubt that if he reality of two neighboring republics, one ruled by Harvard faculty and the other ruled by the first 2,000 names to appear in the Boston telephone directory, that Buckley would have chosen to reside in the former as chief critic rather than in the last as its chief celebrant.) There are many of us conservatives who would join the Polish sage in saying:No cyrk, no małpy“—”Not my circus, not my monkeys” – but that’s not quite right.
In 2016, it was quite defensible to argue, “Yes, Trump is a toxic buffoon, but I prefer him to the alternative.” In 2020, that line was a lot less defensible — but that was hard to tell if you were a public figure who had supported Trump in 2016 and didn’t want to admit how stupid and selfish you had been. In 2024, Republicans have tried to defend that same well-known line – lamely – by pretending that Kamala Harris is something other than what she is, i.e. that she is a Marxist militant (good grief, they even call crazy old Joe Biden a Marxist, as if he has read a book), that she is someone who has plans to install an authoritarian regime, etc. Which in reality she is bad enough for most purposes, but not for every purpose. Donald Trump is a sick, vague, mentally unstable moral grotesque who tried to be a coup the last time he lost an election. As your case for Trump says ‘Yes, but’, then you’ll have to tell me something about Kamala Harris that I don’t know yet. Perhaps a convincing argument can be made. But I didn’t hear it.
Eighteen days to go.
Read more at De Uitzending
The Dispatch is a new digital media company that provides engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary based on conservative principles. Sign up for free.
