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Donald Trump — who would have passed from any enlightened political scene four years ago, who wouldn't have gained a foothold in one eight years ago — has won both the electoral vote and, apparently, the popular vote. Let it be understood at once that the most crucial failures of enlightenment occurred far from the haunts of the people who voted for him.
Oh, it may always have been written in the stars that absurdity would stalk any country named after Amerigo Vespucci; but let's not give in to superstition. The movers of the American Revolution and the founding of the Republic were eminently serious people, not to say cognitive giants by today's embarrassing standards. They understood well enough that "of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." How could they foresee that party politics would eventually defeat their safeguards against that fate? Even the demagogues of their acquaintance were more considerable men than Donald Trump. They themselves, regardless of political leanings or social sensibilities, were at any rate men of character. The baseness — not evil, but baseness contending with mediocrity — of political movers in our time was beyond their imagining.
A survey of those movers must begin with a reference to Donald Trump, as this one did. But many words have been written about him, and more will follow. Let's move on while keeping him in mind.
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Consider Joe Biden. The negative re-evaluation of this man can begin at once, because his negative qualities have always been in plain sight. His personal vanity, which, though not on a par with Donald Trump's, contradicts the image of a regular guy at peace with himself. His creepy tendency to fabulize and plagiarize, made only creepier by his allies' standard excuse ("That's just the way his mind works"); albeit a far cry from Trump's reality-bashing. And his selfishness — which, again, doesn't put him in Trump's company, but which does put him in the company of morally negligible career politicians everywhere. Nothing in his political life defined him like the tardy leaving of it, having subordinated his party and his country to his vainglory. He might at least have become an object of compassion if those around him had declared that he wasn't quite himself; though, in truth, he was quite himself through it all.
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Then there's Kamala Harris. As she was essentially a pawn or, at most, an anti-mover in this saga, she doesn't warrant the harshest of reckonings. She proved the weak candidate she was generally said to be before and after the burst of giddiness upon her nomination. Here was a person who had hopscotched from state politics to the presidential nomination in exactly three steps, the second and third of which consisted in being picked up and set down by Joe Biden. As for the first, her truncated term in the US Senate, she acquitted herself well in hearings and co-sponsored some legislation. However, her campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination collapsed before the first primary elections and caucuses. At that time and again during her term as vice president, the organizations under her control were known for dysfunction, demoralization, and extremely high turnover. In both of her presidential campaigns, she deployed a manic laugh that seemed a cover for the insecurity perceived by people who have worked for her. That and her habit of escaping substantive discussion through the mere churning of verbiage marked her as an empty vessel. She had never needed to be anything more in a career of riding political currents. Some observers have professed indignation at seeing yet another woman allegedly denied the nation's highest office by misogyny; but did they really want the "glass ceiling" to be broken in such a way, by such an aspirant?
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And then there's the Democratic machine. After learning to think of Trump and his surrogates as the only ones imposing on people's credulity, we — all right, I — increasingly struggled to hold back the dawn of recognition that national Democrats and their surrogates were playing a vast, ceaseless, multifarious confidence game. The word gaslighting had enjoyed a vogue in progressive rhetoric when the subject was patriarchy, with men (especially male doctors) portrayed as perpetrating mental mischief against women. Now it transpired that the Democratic Party and its associates comprised a veritable Axis of Gaslight. I had been quick enough to notice some pieces of this picture, such as the pan-progressive effort to put all brains under an ether of social-justice dogma. But I was very slow to step out of the mainstream of liberal thought about the coronavirus pandemic and entertain doubts about the science behind masking or the absence of science behind the outbreak in Wuhan. I also thought that a letter signed by more than fifty former intelligence officials was sufficient to pigeon-hole the affair of Hunter Biden's laptop as a Russian disinformation scheme. Again and again, trust proved misplaced. Then, with the reckless campaign by the Biden administration and its advocates to conceal the president's unfitness for another term of office, the keystone of Democratic credibility dropped out and the whole edifice collapsed.
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The rest are evanescent Shakespearean shadows: Jill Biden, whose assured fate is that those who liken her to Lady Macbeth will outlast those who insist on her academic title; Tim Walz, a sub-Polonius as windy as the original but too much the knucklehead (his word) to form the habit of shunning falsehood; and JD Vance, our Edmund, who diligently aids the eclipses in portending these divisions. We can expect Vance to return in a Republican production of Richard III, but in which role?
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The political scene of 2024 wouldn't give Shakespeare much new material for anything but a farce. And with what a dreary cast of characters! First Knave, Second Knave, Third Knave....
It won't do.
