The Nightmare of the American Election — Follow-Up
One person’s perspective from across the pond
Just before the recent American election I posted an article with the title ‘The Nightmare of the Coming American Election’. My main point was that the electorate was being offered an appalling choice — were these two candidates the best that the country could offer from a population of more than 300 million? Now that the election has happened and the result is known, it’s worthwhile to add some further comments.
Unsurprisingly I received a wide range of responses. Some agreed with me. Perhaps my favourite, because of the colourful language, was: “we have the obnoxious 12 year old boy and the brat 14 year old girl fighting over who gets to play captain, as the engine rooms fill with water and first class heads for the life boats with the cases of champagne”.
Others disagreed. However, the expressed approval of Harris was merely because the alternative seemed so appalling — there was very little positive said about her:
- “Kamala might not be perfect, but she is certainly a better choice than Trump, who is a threat not only to democracy but also to the planet itself”
- “ I hate the entire two party system. But my fear of fascism convinced me to vote for Harris in order to vote against Trump”
- “Should we work for a better system and better choices in future? Of course. But only one of these two paths offers even the chance for such a future”.
The only exception seems now to have been deleted, but said something along the lines that she has served as a senator and VP, therefore is one of the best qualified candidates ever, so what was my problem?
Now that the election is over and the apparently dreaded result has in fact materialised, I think it is worth going into more detail about what was wrong with Harris and her campaign, purely in the hope that something better may emerge at some ill-defined point in the future.
I’m aware that some of what follows may be accounted for by cultural differences between the American and British personalities. Perhaps politics as show and spectacle is the normal way in America and therefore acceptable — we tend to be more restrained over here.
That said, Harris seemed to think that all she had to do to succeed was to walk on stage with a cheesy, false smile, madly clapping her hands and waving to the crowd.
Then we come to the vacuous soundbites. At a rally she asks the crowd “Do we love freedom?” Thousands of sycophants scream back yes. “Do we love opportunity?” Thousands of sycophants scream back yes. What else do you expect them to say? It’s worth noting, however, that the voters seemed to think that they would have more opportunity under Trump — “it’s the economy, stupid”.
Next on the list is a pathetic appearance, devoid of any political substance, on a comedy show, the weekend before the election in a desperate attempt to appear appealing.
Harris or her team seemed to think that getting endorsements from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift (is she a political expert?), and getting Michael Stipe and Bon Jovi to play at one of your rallies were more important than doing serious interviews with journalists posing difficult questions. This was something she avoided doing, according to the media consensus.
Then we come to the View interview in which she said that she could not think of a single thing during the last four years that she would have done differently from Biden. What about his decision to get out of Afghanistan, abandoning the people, especially the women, to the hell-on-earth of life under the Taliban? Did she not raise an eyebrow at that? (Please don’t tell me that this couldn’t have been foreseen.) She may care about the right to choose of American women, but she obviously didn’t care about the rights to freedom and education of foreign women on the other side of the world.
So, is that why Biden chose her? Did he know that she had no mind of her own, and would blindly endorse everything he did?
Then we come to a speech she made a few days before the election. From memory I think she said that, if she became President, she would do whatever she could to end the war in the Middle East (massive cheers from the crowd), get the hostages freed (massive cheers from the crowd), and seek a two-state solution (more massive cheers).
The first thing that can be said about this is that, whatever they may say in public, Biden and Blinken have achieved absolutely nothing in those areas, all the time expressing unconditional support for Israel. So what exactly did Harris think she would be able to achieve? Netanyahu and his government do whatever they want, even when criticised publicly by America. Either she is ignorant and stupid, in which case why would you want her as President, or she is being hypocritical and lying. She has been a member of Biden’s team for four years, and has presumably attended some high-level meetings. She must know that the policy of the American establishment is total support for Israel whatever they do, since this is considered vital to maintaining American interests regionally and globally. (Benjamin Netanyahu here calls Israel a “mighty aircraft carrier” of the United States, and he presumably knows what he is talking about.) Her speech can therefore only be seen as a cheap attempt to appeal to pro-Palestinian voters a few days before the election. It’s unlikely that anything would have changed, had she been elected.
Now it’s not just me, a British outsider, who thinks along these lines. See this article for the views of one American woman. Her overall point is Harris’s lack of authenticity, but here are some relevant quotes: “The current VP has a noticeable distaste for impromptu inquiries, often resorting to death-glares to interviewers who dare to launch tricky questions meanwhile providing impossibly vague, head-scratching non-answers. These behavioral tendencies certainly do not help her case”; she is “notorious for her puzzling, insubstantial public statements”; (the Democrats’) “suave, empty moral grandstanding”; she is lacking in substance; “Kamala’s campaign strategy derives most of its energy from negation (of Trump) and markedly less from the strength of her own personality or fleshed-out plans for the American future”; she is “a woman prone to word-salads, skin-crawling cackling, and ideological shape-shifting”; “a chameleon-esque expedience and false sincerity about her”; she is “lacklustre” and “inauthentic”. (Word-salads is a term I’ve heard several times in recent days from various commentators.)
Perhaps the Democrats were complacent and merely assumed, aided by the “countless cheerleaders in the American media”, that Harris was bound to win simply because she was not Trump. After all he is or is claimed to be a misogynist, anti-democratic, a fascist, a convicted felon. He may also have had a relationship with a porn star. The election result shows, however, that a majority of the American public simply don’t care about any of that, at least not enough to vote for Harris. Trump won both the Electoral College (by a significant margin) and the popular vote. Whatever you many think of him, this is democracy in action — the majority of the people got what they wanted.
Let’s now consider whether Trump is actually a threat to democracy. To all American Medium writers and readers who are horrified by his victory, let me just remind you that you all survived his first four years. During that time he didn’t actually put into practice his supposed projects — build a wall, lock Hillary up, drain the swamp — so it’s possible that he may have been exaggerating again in order to win popular votes. It may not be as bad as you think; we’ll have to wait and see.
Americans in general are in favour of free speech; it’s actually enshrined in your Constitution. So if you think that Trump is an anti-democratic Fascist, and you love freedom as much as Harris claims to, let’s consider that “under President Joe Biden, the US government has undertaken ‘the most massive attack against free speech in United States history’ ” (see this article, which mentions “the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and other federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike”). Since Harris cannot think of one thing she would have done differently, she was presumably in favour of this massive attack on free speech and open debate. Therefore, if you think that Trump is planning to become a dictator, and that your democracy hangs in the balance, just consider that you may be no better off under the Democrats, who under Biden have just attacked the American Constitution on an unprecedented scale.
I therefore repeat the appeal to all American voters from the end of my previous article. Since the American President is often described as ‘the most powerful person on the planet’, or ‘the leader of the free world’, please can you do whatever it takes to get some credible candidates the next time round. Perhaps someone opposed to the whole system needs to get the necessary funding. Is it too much to hope that this person might actually be a spiritually oriented leader who wants to stop wars? (I’m not expecting Trump to do much on that score.) The planet needs better than this. If Trump and others like him are indeed appalling and need to be got ridden of, then this will require a massive raising of consciousness of the American public.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, and politics. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website spiritualityinpolitics.com (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
