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With three weeks until polling day, Kamala Harris has not sealed the deal. That can be said with certainty. Her candidacy wiped out the Democrat voter deficit arising from Joe Biden’s infirmity. She has taken the fight to Donald Trump, to some degree. She has brought the polling to a neck-and-neck state.
But that’s all she has managed to do. And that, really, is a failure. It may well be an inevitable failure, given the nature of contemporary politics, but a failure it is. The candidate for one major party is in the closest election in modern US electoral history with a man who appears to have given up on campaigning in any modern sense of the word.
Trump now riffs, he freeballs, he starts the impro — all before the main theme has been got out. He’s like those jazzmen in Kansas City in the ’40s who got so bored playing six identical sets of standard tunes every night that they invented bebop jazz, where the whole tune is one step to the left.
That’s Trump now. To make sense of his speeches, you have to know what the old speeches were like. At that moment, you start to appreciate his weird genius. To vary the comparison, there is a touch of John Ashbery, the poet whose whole technique was to make the poem change topic, scene, etc, so suddenly that no summary of the poem can be made. That’s Trump in his late stage. An hour speech is an hour summary.
In the past few days, he has gone beyond that. With his decision to stop a town hall Q&A a few minutes in and just play music and have the audience dance, he has reached the Sun Ra free-jazz stage of American politics.
Ra — the leader of a large collective whose mission, at some point in their endless tours, became the summoning of interplanetary spacecraft — had concluded that what was getting in the way of the pure communion he had sought in music was music itself, and that he should break it apart from within.
This was all going on at the same time as the political protest of the ’60s new left had mutated into both Yippiedom and the targeted political violence of the Weathermen. The Yippies threw money into the stock exchange, nominated a greased pig, Pigasus, for president, and tried to levitate the Pentagon.
Trump’s campaigns are where that antinomian spirit went to live, and to die. The Yippies were pitching a carnival against the machine that American politics had become. Trump’s campaign is now a protest against reality itself, as the dismal truth lands on Americans in instalments.
The most advanced capitalist country in the world is going to be the first to get the major problems of the era. For Americans, that counts as a double whammy. The UK lost its imperial role in 1945 (with another decade of holding on), but in the 30 years after, its working and lower-middle classes gained a greater stake in power and equality.
Americans are not getting that consolation prize. Imperial decline is increasingly committing to a deficit-sapping military and impossible global overextension that are contributing to a steady decline at home. China races ahead, and in racing ahead domestically, expands globally in prestige and leadership, a virtuous version of the vicious cycle America is trapped in.
Such a failure of projective power on the domestic front has created a cultural civil war. Trump is now drawing on that to give a dark shadowing to his pitch, talking about communists, Marxists, etc, and “the enemy within”. This is paranoic politics 101, but what’s interesting is how it has been twinned with the carnivalesque campaign style and appeal to the ’60s spirit of pure self-autonomy.
Usually, it’s the fascists who are projecting a notion of order and control, of grim authority, against the wildness from the other side. Here, it’s the left and progressives who have become the party of the fused ego and superego.
Harris and the Democrats now pitch a vote for systems of control and administration of life — in the name of prosperity and equality, to be sure. But those outside it can see who it will favour, and what sort of view of the world it will advance.
The fact Trump and Harris are running even has been interpreted as a gender split, given that Harris is leading among all women, and Trump among all men. But as Batya Ungar-Sargon notes, this hides the real split, which is once again college attendance.
In the US, women are considerably more likely to go to college than men — a fact directly related to the de-industrialisation of the economy, the rise of expanded admin and service sectors, and the “qualification inflation” of the latter, requiring degrees for what would once be covered by experience.
This would appear to be the missing piece, and why these indiators are swinging so widely. Trump is running neck and neck because Harris has failed to pitch a combined program fusing Democrat left measures for equality, opportunity economy-greening and the rest with demands for a crackdown on illegal immigration, and a genuine return of more basic jobs and services, through messy tariff fights if necessary.
Messy is an understatement of course. This is the tragedy. No US president can offer their people good news, since the best possible program would involve mass retraining subsidised by the state, a reconstruction of the working day, and a redefinition of how we budget economic activity.
Were the US able to do that, were a presidential candidate able to offer it, it would be as radical as FDR’s New Deal. But it is almost impossible to offer, given the Republicans are now representatives of a rigid cabal of Christian nationalists, racist mystics and the most backward sectors of capital — leaving tech capital, by and large, to flock to the Democrats to represent them.
Hence Harris’s courting of establishment Republicans, and her promise to integrate Republicans into her administration. Dont be fooled by the antics and visibility of a Musk or a Thiel; most tech wants a stable system of governance to expand accumulation and innovation.
These multiple and contradictory loyalties — tech capital and the unions — are hemming Harris in. People talking about her lack of skills and presidential projection are guilty of a barely concealed sexist condescenion. Harris probably is a progressive type who would prefer not to have to actually campaign. But she’s also a non-white woman who rose in the brutal politics of California state government.
Doubtless she has aggressive personae she could draw on if she wants. Trouble is, she can’t. Any declaration of anything that isn’t wonkish politics — subsidsed in-home care, for example — will piss off one or other of the major blocs in her coalition.
Harris and the leadership are just hoping they can hold it together until polling day, eke out enough votes, and that issues such as abortion are giving them hidden voting pockets among conservative women, and other such specific vote tranches. That’s one possibility.
The other possibility is that from Washington, to London, to Sydney, the progressive political caste are now so isolated, so arrogant, so out of touch with everyday life and people’s demands, that they really think they’re doing swell.
This would explain Harris’ campaign, Labour’s faltering in the UK, and Albo’s decision to rub the sight of sparkling blue waters visible from his new country property into the face of everyone who’ll be looking at 10 mouldy bedsits this weekend.
We’ll know more after November 5. Actually, we always say that, and it’s usually not true, but in this case it is. County and city polling, and group polling, this election may actually give us a view of where the situation lies, and what the mix of class-by-education, class-by-work, gender and race are playing in this.
But remember: Harris hasn’t sealed the deal. She may, in the next weeks, with a strategy change, but it doesn’t look likely. If the answer is Trump, all that wonderful new information may be in vain. Minerva’s owl flies at midnight, and so does Pigasus.