An empire unravels as the “short-fingered vulgarian” reclaims the throne.
It wasn’t even close. But also, it was never going to be.
As the 2024 polls conclude, the global hegemon may be entering its own late Soviet Union phase: ancient leaders, vomiting soldiers, and the collapse of a rules-based order that, even in its prime, never quite applied to those writing it.
And yet such obituaries are a risky business: while the West’s neoliberals make up the dying regime today, they’re not going the way of the communist bloc just yet.
After all, America remains the greatest economy, the mightiest military, and the uncrowned keeper of the world’s reserve currency. It is empire, and empire is everywhere.
America picks Trump, again
But one would be hard-pressed to think, after yet another toxic election, that the American experiment isn’t flailing hard. Described over three decades ago as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in Vanity Fair, Donald Trump is displaying a different sort of hand gesture to elite magazines these days.
Fresh from a hero’s journey grosser than the reality TV he headlines, Trump is cruising past two assassination attempts, two impeachments, even a criminal conviction, to become the 47th president of the United States. “We love winners,” he said during his last term. “We love winners. Winners are winners.”
And losers are losers. Surely, asked The Guardian, didn’t the world see “Kamala Harris’s competence and expertise, her decency and grace, her potential to be the first female president?”
If the world saw it, the voter didn’t, handing the God & Oil Party its first popular victory in two decades. And the emotional meltdown on the other side is silly, self-indulgent, and self-delusional.
Because Kamala Harris was never going to win. Let’s face it: how many times has it happened in America that an unpopular incumbent won amid economic anxiety? Kamala hadn’t to distinguish herself from Trump so much as from Sleepy Joe. She decided not to. She couldn’t attack Trump’s corruption. Biden was corrupt. His harassment of women; Biden did that too. His age: Biden is ancient. His mental acuity: Biden is demented.
So Kamala was left with Kamala, and a politburo of Pelosis and Obamas lurking in the hall — a dizzy ex-prosecutor that had never won a single primary, couldn’t carry her own state in 2020, had no recognisable ideas as vice-president, had no core beliefs in general, and sold out each of her positions from the wall to Palestine. Should she have run?
Because the core theme of this election, same as the one before it, was simple: if Bill Clinton’s boys had come up with “It’s the economy, stupid”, the same dinosaurs were now too high up the managerial class to let Kamala know it was the economy again, and that those amid it were suffering.
Instead, the donors, operators, and hopey-changey Ivy Leaguers that form the Dems’ shadow party — the ones that knifed Biden when his brain froze on the debate stage — went on and on about Joe’s economic miracle: more growth, more jobs, more recovery all around.
And if median income was taking a beating, and food insecurity was at a high, and health insurance was on the wane, who cared? As Charles Schumer shrugged in 2016, for every blue-collar Democrat that dropped off, the party would snatch up two suburban Republicans. It was a poor trade to make, and it wasn’t going to work anyway, given the massive workers’ exodus from the left across the board.
“It should come as no great surprise,” said Bernie Sanders, forever the thwarted king across the sea, “that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
And how: nearly 80 per cent of voters that thought the economy was their top issue voted for Trump.
Racist orange billionaire beats deep state genocide enabler
In the other corner was Harris as a sad parody of Hillary — courting vapid celebrities over unions, and vile chicken-hawks like Liz Cheney over decent human beings. Say what you want about the state of Biden’s brain, he’d been in politics long enough to do a populist feint when needed, from laying track to splurging on jobs (all watered down once in office).
Not Kamala — she was content with just saying she’d be better than the brownshirts coming back. And why not; standing against something is still a stand. It’s just that the last time America defeated fascism, it required a titanic reorientation of the entire economy, near-full employment, and a war that killed 4pc of the world’s population.
What Kamala had were bumper stickers. “Never again,” she enjoyed telling crowds. “Never again. Never again.”
Interestingly, it may well have been never again: as of this writing, Trump is bagging the same number of votes as his losing bid in 2020, if not less. In essence, the Dems lost more than Trump won.
Yes, a fair few wealthy suburbanites feared, correctly, that Trump would take a gold-plated wrecking ball to their democracy. For everyone else, however, there were more immediate crises at hand. (“Did America really elect a dictator because Frosted Flakes hit $7.99 at the grocery store?” asked the Jacobin.)
But inflation’s a desperately dull subject, one almost as dull as social stratification — the kind that breeds status anxiety; the realisation that a certain standard of life can now only be the province of rich idiots that live in gated communities, go to the same schools, inter-golf, and inter-marry. Why not vote for Trump?
Instead, the rest of the world gets to listen to how America’s rotten id let the Donald win again — a triumph of racism, sexism, fascism, this-ism, and that-ism; that the barbarians have disarmed lady Liberty, and the Capitol will be toppled next. If it was Jan 6 then, it’ll be blood in the streets now.
The hysteria is so loud, it’s almost as if this hasn’t happened before: that a void so carefully nourished over generations — a culture that sanctifies capital, and a politics bereft of class — wouldn’t be filled by right-wing populists.
Because it’s hard to imagine it was Nazis that re-elected the Squad: Rashida Tlaib, who refused to endorse Kamala, was returned to Congress by the same Michigan voter that had so humiliated Harris, in a stunning 20,000-vote swing away from Biden’s haul in 2020.
“Genocide is bad politics,” said an activist in Dearborn. Unless, of course, we believe the Democrats: that the minorities have turned into white supremacists overnight. Could it be, instead, that they sensed the liberal order’s self-immolation in Gaza; that the bodies of shredded children on hooks was no longer international law as usual?
It was hard to come to any other conclusion, especially with Bill Clinton being trotted out to tell potential voters their family members deserved ethnic cleansing at the hands of Eretz Zion. Incidentally, the man thought best-suited to soothing Muslim horror over an ongoing genocide was the same president that had let Serbs slaughter their way to the last Bosnian enclave before stirring himself awake (and was still celebrated by the Muslim street for it).
In fact, the Republican Party, despite boasting the world’s most diverse range of war criminals — from Kissinger to Rumsfeld to Bolton — sounded more moderate on killing kids overseas than the Democrats this round. And if the Kamala voter was being expected to ignore a genocide, why should the Trumpist be made to blush over race riots?
As for policies at home, the blues seem to have decided that victory, via a happy left-wing, would still be worse than defeat by grandpas in red hats. If there was a coalition the Democrats wanted to win over last week, it was, well, the Republican coalition. And the Republican coalition couldn’t even recognise itself: the neocons were dead, the blazers-and-slacks bunch was cowed, and the MAGA Trumpers were legion.
Because politics in America is no longer about bettering social conditions; it hasn’t been since Reagan. Politics in America is about target selection — a perverse culture war that helps people forget what’s attributed to Tanzania’s Julius Nyrere: that the US is a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
So it is that a racist orange billionaire beats a deep state genocide enabler, in what the press calls our “most crucial election” — even as both are united on backing Israel, fighting China, protecting guns from their victims, deporting illegals en masse, drilling record amounts of hydrocarbon, and building up defence-tech. The big stuff is settled.
If there are differences, it’s on the second-string issues — tax cuts for the rich, anti-trust enforcement, crackdowns on even-legal immigrants, and whether or not Elon Musk is a white replacement weirdo.
And yet, if Trump remains the anti-war provincial he pledges to be, that will be more than enough for millions of innocents so removed from his universe — the kind of indifference that drove Bush-era torturers like Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales into the Democrats’ loving arms.
As for Pakistan — and depending on the politics of the Pakistani saying so —he’s a breath of fresh air for the country’s largest party, the PTI, and bodes well for the imprisoned Imran Khan; alternatively, say those partial to the current regime’s jailers, Pakistan’s not important enough to care about anyway. The first assumption is still premature; the second is already wrong.
What’s beyond argument is that the Donald returns older, angrier, and more extreme. He’s mopped the floor with America’s traditional dynasties, the Bushes and the Clintons, and carries a party remade entirely in his image. Meanwhile, the Senate has flipped red; the House is on knife-edge; and a third of the Supreme Court sits as his appointees. A broader realignment, towards the populist roar, is ensuring his surname becomes an era.
“This will truly be the golden age of America,” he says. Ever since its supervillains took the controls in 2000, it hasn’t been.
