It’s already time for the closing arguments, and the difference couldn’t be more stark.
On Sunday, Donald held one of his hate-filled Nuremberg Rallies, this time at New York’s Madison Square Garden, at which the proceedings were exceptionally vile, authoritarian, racist, misogynist, and generally frightening, even for a Trump rally. Nobody familiar with the pre-war history of American isolationism and its flirtation with fascism could quell the eerie, disquieting feeling that we’ve seen this before, this very thing, in this very city, in a building with the very same name, dressed up a little differently but otherwise all but identical. They say history doesn’t repeat, though it sometimes rhymes, but I have to disagree; no, it repeats all right, near as makes no difference, and when ghoulish, bald-headed hate goblin Stephen Miller stood at the podium and screamed that America is for Americans, and only Americans (blood and soil, right Steve?), it was, in all the ways that matter, this bullshit all over again:
There’s one big difference: the 22,000 Nazi sympathizers who turned out to fill the Garden that night in 1939 were part of a fringe movement that had no hope of forming a government.
No such luck this time around.
Compare and contrast. As I write this, Tuesday night has just transitioned to Wednesday morning. A couple of hours ago, Kamala Harris wrapped up what wasn’t merely the most important speech of her career, but probably one of the most fraught and potentially consequential in American history, in which she made the case, powerfully and eloquently, that the American people still have it in themselves to be better than Trump thinks they are. Standing on stage at the Washington D.C. Ellipse, the White House looming behind her, she made her appeal for sanity to a massive crowd of perhaps 75,000 supporters, symbolically reclaiming the venue where Donald gave the rabble-rousing address that launched his coup attempt on January 6, 2021. Understanding everything that’s at stake, with just a week to go and the outcome very much in doubt, it was hard not to feel moved and encouraged by the scene:
She deserves to win this election, sure enough. Given the circumstances of her candidacy, and the extraordinary quality of her abbreviated campaign, I don’t think anyone has ever deserved it more, even leaving aside the myriad other factors that make her the only rational choice for the Presidency. How terrible that she’s as likely to lose as win.
All the more poignant, then, that she sticks steadfastly to the high road, advocating decency, civility, and an end to the spiteful stoking of division, especially tonight. In essence, Kamala, echoing so many on the liberal left in the United States over the past decade, has been arguing by word and example that America is, deep down, simply too good for a thuggish ignoramus like Trump. She made that pitch again tonight, expressly, trying to summon the better angels of the voting public’s questionable nature. God bless her, and were that she was right, but honestly, it seems a sincere yet hollow sentiment. The number of times I’ve heard this or that dismayed pundit or politician exclaim “that’s not who we are”, and “we’re better than this”, as if saying so makes it true, I swear, it’s enough to make you scream. It’s almost funny, in a bleak, cynical sort of way. Even now, for so many pathetically hopeful schmucks, the sad delusion of American exceptionalism runs too deep to succumb to objective evidence.
I’d love to believe in the old mythology too (trust me, I’ve tried), but from where I sit, watching the likes of Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, and assorted other grievance monkeys warm up the crowd for Donald, spewing their ludicrous, ham-fisted lies, and setting the stage for another round of Stop the Steal election denialism, just in case, I don’t see much to suggest that Donald’s twisted vision runs counter to the authentic spirit of America. The opposite seems just as plausible, don’t you think? How else to explain his incredible ongoing impunity, or the apparent ease with which he’s bent the whole system to his will? For almost a decade, I’ve been waiting for the supposedly real America to finally step up, for the legal, democratic, liberal, pluralistic immune response to kick in and eradicate this pathogen. Well, it’s pretty damned obvious by now that it ain’t gonna happen (don’t take my word for it, ask the Roberts Court), and that on balance, Trump’s America is actually the real America. If you want to talk about the true soul of the nation, consider that the guardrails haven’t held, not really; the adults in the room are nowhere to be found; the institutions are impotent, or outright complicit; the constitutional checks and balances haven’t proved worth the parchment upon which the Founders scribbled them. Trump just barrels on regardless, ever-confident that no matter what confronts him, he can count upon venality, corruption, bigotry, and the sheer, mindless urge to be led by the strong man, to come invariably to his rescue. The other day, I saw former General Mark Milley, Trump’s Chair of the Joint Chiefs, promise his audience that the U.S. military would never turn its back on the Constitution and follow Donald’s unlawful orders to wage domestic war against the American citizenry, and all I could think was yeah, sure, Jack, let’s put our faith in another sacred guardrail. Guardrails, end of the day, are made out of frail human tissue.
I don’t know. Maybe this breaks our way, and we don’t have to find out which orders the armed forces are willing to carry out.
I try to suppress the dread, but let’s face it, America doesn’t seem equal to this moment. Kamala may still win, but under the circumstances, a flukey sort of victory by 30,000 votes spread across a half dozen swing states isn’t exactly the hallmark of a healthy body politic. I’ll take it, but I’ll draw no comfort from it, even supposing the narrow win survives the various GOP schemes to overturn the result, a scenario which at this point makes me sound to my own ears like a bit of a cock-eyed optimist. Ah, but what do I know, maybe it won’t be so underwhelming. Maybe the polls are missing something. Maybe Kamala wins big. I won’t tell you it’s impossible.
If, on the other hand, she loses, I hope that history remembers how hard, how well, and how nobly she tried to come to the rescue at this moment of peril, and how much she merited the win that a sick nation wouldn’t give her. She was inspirational tonight, as she has been throughout. Come November 5, she’ll have given it all she had, and done everything she or anyone could do. In a just and sensible world, that would count for much, but that’s not where we live, is it?
Six days to go.
the needlefish 