The Tragedy of America
By: Vijai Jose
Tags: Election 2020, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Democrats, Donald Trump

This is the third and final essay in a three-part series: Part 1 and Part 2 here.

In October of 2019, then Democratic primary candidate Tulsi Gabbard fired a Twitter salvo at Hillary Clinton that began:

“You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.”

Gabbard was responding to Clinton’s attempt to smear her as an agent of — (who else?) — Russia for opposing America’s interventionist policies.

In describing the former First Lady in those words, Gabbard was articulating from inside the party the least well-kept secret in all of Washington.

That Clinton is a reckless warmonger is a belief shared by most of her critics. It’s a belief that’s seemingly true, even demonstrably so, but not quite so in the fundamental sense in which we understand the term. For Hillary Clinton is not, in her bones, a warmonger. She’s not someone who craves death and destruction from the depths of her soul, nor is she some kind of maniac who is biologically programmed toward militarism and war as a solution to every problem — not in the manner that, say, a John Bolton is, or a John McCain was. She’s way too compromised and characterless to be an honest warmonger. The most correct and noble thing she says carries exactly as much conviction as the most atrocious and dangerous thing she says: None. She only salivates for war when she smells gravy around it. She’s Bill’s wife; the better half that completes him.

As it exists today, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party has come to fully internalize this absolute corruption of spirit personified by the Clintons. The Clinton template is officially now the party playbook, with minor tweaks made around the margins to try and take the edge off the maddening (but ultimately harmless) insurgents who keep kicking at the door without really meaning to break it down. In this warped world of Democratic politics, descriptors such as “centrists” and “moderates” — which should ordinarily sound like good, sober, even desirable things to be — have come to be cute euphemisms for corporate tools unburdened by ideology or principle, and the mainstream of the party is overrun with such wafflers and establishment stoolies.

Joseph Biden Jr. is Exhibit A of that tribe.

In his nearly five-decade-long political career, the “Senator from MBNA” has shown that while he may smell of earth and smile more convincingly, he is every bit as much of a warmonger and a lobbyist’s wet dream as Clinton is. A little less mannered, a little less noxious and quite a ways more agreeable than his 2016 counterpart, but hoovered up from the same manicured cesspool official Washington dips into every four years to spring the loyal genie that would let them fatten themselves and soak the rest.

The product Biden is selling America this November is the continuation of the U.S. economy in its pre-pandemic Trumpian shape, minus the abomination of Trump and his violence against nature and science, plus a couple of foreign wars maybe that bastard Trump didn’t start. His chances rest to a great extent on how well his three main selling points resonate with their intended audience.

The first — “I’m not Trump” — is aimed at voters across political and ideological lines but chiefly at moderate Republicans and independents. The second is a rather subliminal twin-message telegraphed primarily to obdurate progressives within his own party — “I’m not Hillary (either),” inextricably bound up with “I myself am not the same jerk I used to be… b̶e̶l̶i̶e̶v̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶o̶g̶-̶f̶a̶c̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶o̶n̶y̶ ̶s̶o̶l̶d̶i̶e̶r̶.” The third, a piece of nostalgic fakery lobbed in the general direction of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minority groups but also scattershot across at everyone in America who thinks well of Trump’s charismatic predecessor — “I’m Barack’s friend (used to be, at least) — signed, Joe.”

The last of those planks would make Biden the first ever Democratic candidate to tout as his main qualification, as a key presidential attribute, his past friendship with the last Democratic president. Taken together, they place Biden in a pantheon of one as the first and only presidential candidate in American history to pitch his tent on who he isn’t, what he’s no longer, and how he’s not just the lesser evil (strategic) but also the lesser liar (tactical) and, now, apparently, the lesser molester (ditto).

And with Trump sitting at the other end of the scale, we are presented with the curious sight of two septuagenarians, each his own worst enemy and each with a purported cloud hanging over his mental fitness, squaring off for the chance to lead the world’s most powerful nation and make some of the most consequential decisions of our times.

Irony will officially breathe its last on November 3.

Biden is presently busy putting on the dove jacket because dovecloth happens to be in vogue; it’s the thing to wear these days, at least when stepping out in public. Tomorrow, if it’s the horse that finds itself the flavor of the season, or the damn walrus, he would have little trouble taking on the appearance of either. Never wildly popular but always more than acceptable, Biden is the archetypal zeitgeist politician: a “neoliberal shapeshifter” with a bipartisan appeal and an uncanny felicity to capture if not so much the spirit of the nation, then surely the mood of his political coalition. And, in the course of his long years of shilling for the banking and credit card industries and his family’s consequence-free specialization in legal graft, he’s been sagacious enough — and suitably avuncular — to have built himself room to fail, to have created an aura of forgivable frailty that allows him to fall hard and still be standing. Unlike, say, a Hillary Clinton who, despite her best efforts, is too rigidly engineered to pull off the trick and who in any case is far too gone to just pivot and play Green New Dame. Not so for Uncle Joe, the Teflon-chameleon who has had to face — unlike Trump — virtually no blowback for the incredible lies he has told and the monstrosities he has committed, and who continues to remain untouched — notwithstanding his apparent cognitive decline — by the vagaries of political seasons and fads.

Trump, on the other hand, is like Bernard Shaw’s pig. His grunts are insufferable and there’s no more delight he craves than getting down and dirty in a mud-brawl, but he remains — intrinsically and identifiably — a pig through and through, no matter how many somersaults he does or how much wind he breaks. For all his disconcerting suddenness and whimsy, you sort of know where he’s coming from. And when you step into the ring with him, you kind of know what you are getting into. Although no human or god alive or dead has ever quite managed to predict the precise form or features of it, least of all himself (as was evident for the umpteenth time during the first presidential debate).

A creature of primeval instincts, there are things The Donald just can’t help, things he has proven himself utterly unteachable at. You can’t ever keep the man from tooting his own horn or ranting deliriously at opponents, passersby and their forebears. You can’t make him stick to the script for longer than a minute or listen to someone for half that time without cutting them off or talking over them. And all the guns in all the world pointed at his napper can’t ever stop him from blustering his brains out, from saying vain, stupid, shocking things and blunt truths and ridiculous lies that all place him in a political planet and historical context all his own.

So luridly untrained is Trump, it’s nigh on impossible for most to get past the medieval grossness that clings to him like shit to a shovel. You could feel outraged about what you see as the unfair bad rap Trump gets from the media and could tire yourself out pointing out how other crooks have been worse, and then you turn around and you hear the man say something so staggeringly dumb, act so ridiculously cringey, that you can’t help but wonder: How did this fuckin’ guy ever get to be president? So much so that, no matter where you stand on stuff, all you want to do is just go on living your life without having to hear his shit.

Real in spite of his mendacity, Trump exists in a way that is taxonomically different from his peers and predecessors, in a manner that cannot entirely be put down to his demagoguery or rabble-rousing or the efficacy of his dupery. There’s a befuddling sliver of truth — or something like it — that streaks through many of his excesses and that, on occasion, resonates unspeakably even with those who do not identify with him otherwise, perhaps because no else seems to be saying the things he says despite some of those things being all too visible to everyone. There’s that permanent you-never-give-me-my-due peeve in his tone, suggesting a man smarting under wounds of perceived injustice, which sometimes underpins even his put-downs and tirades — best displayed in his tweets that are a raucous mixture of typically Trumpian abrasiveness topped with the petulant grievance of a star athlete unfairly cut from his varsity team — and which many believe he’s not entirely unjustified to be feeling. A wildcard if there ever was one, Trump is repugnant enough in his behavior and personality to alienate an ideological ally who shares his basic worldview, just as he is resonant enough to bring around a fence-sitter who dislikes his character and disagrees with much of his positions but can’t resist the suspicion that there’s a grain of truth in his lies and boasts and fulminations.

When Trump refers to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus” and gets savaged for it, plenty of people out there are liable to toss aside the incivility of that remark for a moment and say — or at least think to themselves, since this is Trump we’re talking about: “But he only spoke the truth.”

When he tweets in the same carping vein that:

“If Japan is attacked, we have to use the full force and might of the United States. If we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to do anything. They can sit home and watch Sony television,” and gets roundly criticized for insulting America’s closest and most important ally, some might wonder if he didn’t indeed have a point.

Or consider — to cite an extreme example — his derogatory comments on Mexican immigrants while on the campaign trail in 2015:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Those are incendiary words, even for Donald Trump. If you ask people if they find those remarks acceptable, of course you would be met with a resounding “No.” Now, if you ask instead whether they agree with the general thrust of his argument on immigration — minus the “rapists” slur and the offensive language — a lot of those same people may nod in the affirmative, whatever be the actual merits of such an argument.

The battle that plays out inside the minds of this cohort — folks who are no fans of Trump but believe he does have a point on many things but are too embarrassed to admit it, or are simply unable to decide whether to tilt in favor of the directness of his approach or against the vulgarity of his behavior — could prove decisive on Election Day.

Trump supporters are often derided by Democrats as bigots and racists (as though you can’t, by law, be anything else if you happen to be in his camp). Many of them clearly are; most, likely aren’t. Trump is viewed — by many among the other half of the population who aren’t yet repulsed to death by His Grossness — as the rascally rock star you could relate to and cheer for and feel at ease around, a billionaire everyman who speaks your language and gets your point and whose rallies and speeches you would pause your dreary life to be at and get worked up into a frenzy. A little too reckless and big-headed, sure, but also very plainspoken and, most satisfyingly, someone unrehearsed and not poured off an assembly line. He is reality show strayed into Beltway, a circus act who talks through his backside and lies through his teeth and still manages to come off as more authentic and earnest than the others in the ring.

Which says a lot about the others and even more about the ring.

And of course, the Democrats and the media, and left-liberals in general, need have no bounds for attacking and discrediting Trump — from openly rejoicing in Trump’s testing positive for Covid-19 to ridiculing the First Lady’s accent to vowing to “impeach the motherf**ker” to hoping “he dies” to spitting on Eric Trump, everything is kosher so long as it is directed against the president and his people. The rules of decency and civility only kick in when Trump uses similarly objectionable language.

The latest opinion polls show that Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump holds steady at 8–10 percentage points. That should mean the Democratic candidate remains comfortably placed to win the election in November.

Or not.

For such is the stigma around Trump, so great is the fear of social ostracism and ridicule in expressing the slightest sympathy or admiration for the president, very few folks outside his fanatical base would dare admit — even to themselves — that they intend to vote for him. We have seen this dynamic play out once before, in 2016, and if anything, the idea that “Trump is the personification of evil” has grown even deeper roots in popular discourse since then (a “national disgrace” is how Trump was described by Colin Powell, the half-sucker, full-invertebrate former secretary of state who sat at the United Nations 17 years ago like a professorial pimp and detonated the most destructive, consequential lie of the 21st century). Add to the mix what pollsters call the non-response bias, which occurs when subjects are unable or unwilling to take part in a study or drop out before its completion, as was purportedly the case with the white underclass that carried Trump to victory in 2016, and the Biden campaign might have reason not to get too complacent.

The former vice president though remains the runaway leader in the betting odds, and it should reassure him no end to learn that the folks who seemingly know best continue to rate his chances very highly.

Aside from independents and suburban women, the one bloc that is purported to prove decisive in November and whose support and turnout could carry the day for Biden are the progressives in his own party, especially the hardest-core Bernie Sanders supporters, who find themselves faced with a familiar quandary. Of having to decide, once again, whether to take their mutiny to the wall (vote third party or stay home to sulk, as many did in 2016) or whether to just swallow the organized theft of the Democratic primary and make peace with the status quo (hold your nose and vote for Biden), then hope they’re able to bring enough heft to the table to knit enough of their people and policy into a future Biden administration.

Choosing the first option would be a surefire way to invite all-around criticism and cries of betrayal, especially if Biden ends up losing. Stepping dutifully through Door No. 2, on the other hand, would mean the revolutionaries having to resign themselves to their role as the Democratic Party’s emergency service — its perennial eleventh-hour bitch — playing the part just long enough before having to walk off the stage once the off-season begins to resume being the pesky pariahs they’ve always been.

And yet for all their misgivings about the man, Bernie fans and progressive Democrats in general do not seem to despise Biden quite as viscerally as they did Hillary in 2016 — an admittedly tall order — and their feeling of having been robbed appears at least mildly attenuated this time around. The Biden campaign, keen to avoid a repeat of 2016, has played it smart — a lot smarter than did Team Clinton — by doing what it can to make sure progressive voices are seen to be heard and a few of their proposals reflected in their candidate’s policy agenda.

The other tactic being employed — both by Democrats and the corporate media — to win over the recalcitrants is to reach for tender loving blackmail. The pitch goes broadly like this: Look, we know you feel gypped, we get that Biden is very far from your idea of a Democratic presidential candidate, but how can you possibly let your beef with Biden or the party blind you to the existential threat posed by a Trump reelection? If only the Republican candidate were someone else, someone civilized and stable of mind, with a mindful mouth and non-orange hair and with functional brains in place of scrambled poop, it would have been understandable somewhat, your wanting to stay home on voting day. But to sit November 3 out when the world is faced with four more years of this monster is not just wrong, it’s unforgivable, a crime against humanity.

It’s a touchingly valid concern, and indeed presents a legitimate moral dilemma that many progressives no doubt find themselves stewing in. Only it may not be as straightforward as that for someone looking through stonkered, system-weary eyes.

For one, the mainstream of the Democratic Party, as mentioned, is chokeful of establishment surrogates of the first order, and you can’t fix what’s broken about the American system — from Washington to Wall Street to Silicon Valley and beyond — without first fixing what is broken about the party that holds most of the keys to that system. And between them, while Trump may not be the swamp-drainer he claims to be — and may even have built an all-new Trump-branded one of his own in his time in the White House — Biden remains far more the personification of that rotten, broken system. Trump is what that system led to.

And two, a Republican candidate who doesn’t look like Trump would look a lot like a Jeb Bush or a Ted Cruz or a Mitt Romney (another of those former despicables freshly washed and ironed into a liberal icon). Or a George W. Bush or a John McCain before them. He, or she (just kidding), whoever that might be, is assured to be an establishment GOP candidate (with the possible exception of the long shot Rand Paul), diverging in his views — superficially in some cases, more meaningfully in others — on a handful of issues to do with law and order, environment and such, but fundamentally mirroring the economic and foreign policy direction of the establishment Democratic candidate he is up against — in eventual practice if not in initial conception. In other words, what you would get is a Republican Biden, one of only a handful of things worse than a Democrat Biden.

Which brings us to the predicament facing the American electorate since at least the Bill Clinton years: That of being burdened with a politically epicene two-party system that keeps sending to the White House starkly dissimilar candidates dressed in sharply differently colored suits who then go on to produce broadly similar outcomes in office; of living in a world where the fight is real but the result always means the same.

The real political differences these days get played out within the two parties, not between them (true especially of the Democrats), and the mainstream in both parties generally see to it that reformist impulses beyond permissible limits are relegated safely to the fringes. Trump’s explosion on the scene broke this pattern in the Republican Party — in the face of loud resistance from party elites — but the party eventually found a way around by recasting itself in the image of Trump. Trump had emerged from nowhere and quickly grown bigger than the party, so the party decided to hit back and quickly became Trump. Problem solved. Grateful and gratified, Trump returned the favor by absorbing into himself bits and traits of his party — and of the other party, too, for good measure — and enshrined himself as the new establishment. The party mainstream as it once existed is not so much dead as in a state of suspended animation, subjugated — until further notice — by the omnipotence of Trump Almighty and his potential to make or break ambitions, and many of his allies within the party would drop him like a bomb and not miss a beat if only they could be sure he won’t blow up in their face. And, for all his anointing of himself as the new emperor, Trump continues to operate — in an unselfconscious, almost pathological manner — with one foot planted firmly in outsiderland.

In the battle between Biden and Trump, there are, in fact, very real and very credible ways in which a Biden presidency could potentially prove better than a second Trump term. Such as if the progressive left is able to hold the president’s feet to the fire and keep his corporate pandering and warmongering instincts in check, and the “moderates” are able to do likewise to the radical left and stifle their tendency to lapse into destructive — and, in the long run, self-destructive — unruliness (and somehow also contain the seemingly uncontrollable cancel culture epidemic, with its cult of hair-trigger outrage and deplatforming where not only ideological opponents but even fellow travelers and sympathizers are attacked and occasionally smothered for agreeing less than 100%).

There is also the danger that Trump’s purported self-dealing could reach gigantic proportions in the event he gets a second term, freeing him to push, with greater abandon, policies that favor his own businesses and generally act more recklessly — and, more divisively, such as by pandering openly to the worst instincts of the most radical of his base — especially toward the latter stages of his tenure.

Those are all possibilities very much in the air — as is the one that none of those things might prove true and that a Biden presidency might actually turn out to be an authentic disaster and an oligarchic paradise befitting the man’s past record.

The point is this: A defeat for Trump would mean a nation having succumbed to a fraud and a threat. It would amount to condoning — indeed validating — the treachery of the media and Democrats and all the crock they roiled America with for four years; and it would amount to acquiescing to the warning — implied none too subtly every day in every liberal media outlet and every Democratic stump speech — that there will be more of the same should Trump be returned to power.

When mainstream media and establishment voices insist that a Trump reelection would lead to four more years of unrelieved chaos, what they really mean is they will do everything in their power to see to it that things remain chaotic for another four years. That they will be ready once more with their claws out and their old playbook dusted off to keep making life hell for the president until a tired-out world that simply cannot take it anymore strings along with having him gone — ahead of the scheduled curtain-fall: Vote Trump out, or be prepared to live through more of this madness.

Just think back to the almighty tumult that has marked the Trump presidency. Now, did the president not have any part to do with it? Of course, he bloody well has. Trump has said and done shitloads of stupid, shocking, outrageous things that have rightfully earned criticism and scorn (Where Obama’s personality and conduct, for all the man’s sins, never lent themselves to caricature or mockery, Trump is a comedian’s fantasy come true). One could even claim, credibly, that given Trump’s character and given his congenital tendency to blurt out the first thing that pops into his head — truth, lie, exaggeration, anything that would make him look good or save skin — some measure of hostile reaction is unavoidable, that the man is built in a way that invites, even demands, criticism and controversy.

But that still doesn’t explain the venom that has been unleashed upon him daily for four years, the willful twisting and desperate making up of facts, the mass burial of his triumphs and the general hiding away from view of his side of the argument/reality, of anything that might bring context into the picture or might chafe against purveyed wisdom.

And that — more than Trump’s own accomplishments, more than the fact he’s the first president in four decades not to start a new war or that he delivered strong economic growth and record-low unemployment rate until the pandemic struck, more than his Democratic rival’s unflattering record and shameful opportunism, is the reason why Joe Biden should not win the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Trump losing is not the problem (there are ways in which he deserves to); even Biden winning isn’t, strictly speaking. The problem is that victory for Biden would mean America settling for a false and unjust truce at gunpoint — dreamt up by permanent Washington, brokered by a deceitful media and curated by Silicon Valley.

The tragedy of America, then, is not that it has had a boorish narcissist for president for four years. The tragedy is that the boorish narcissist turned out no worse than the courtly gentlemen who came before him, and showed up the morals of society’s self-appointed guardians to be even more rotten than his own. That should make Americans look back — and look around — and shudder.