The Most Peculiar Election in American History Is also the Most Consequential

Americans once complained that the two parties gave them no meaningful choice. Be careful what you wish for.

Having watched American elections all my life (my first, dimly remembered, being 1964), I have heard Americans perennially complain that no choice is offered by the two parties. The candidates are always Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For decades, Americans envied Europeans, whose elections did offer clear ideological differences between parties and candidates. (Ironically, recent European elections have offered the voters little choice but have been engineered to exclude dissident candidates, the counterparts of Donald Trump.)

No one can complain any longer. This election offers two candidates that reflect the alarming ideological divide that has opened up in American society. It comes at the cost of selecting the two most unusual candidates ever. While this may offer some hope of redeeming American elections from their seemingly endemic voter apathy, it is not in election outcomes that America will find redemption — though it may be there that it confronts perdition.

Whatever you think of Donald Trump — and his flaws are too obvious to enumerate — he stands outside the Republican party establishment and represents a rebellion against it. He has galvanized followers and inspired them with genuine enthusiasm as no other. Lacking past elective office and having independent means are what enable his unorthodox showmanship. In past elections, such an outsider (Jimmy Carter is a distant approximation) would provoke my fellow political scientists into a flurry of activity to explain how he managed to get past the party gatekeepers. But professional commentators are now so preempted and preoccupied with vilifying outsiders that attempts at detached scholarly understanding were long ago abandoned. It is now left to the rest of us to make sense of the Trump phenomenon.

Kamala Harris is even more peculiar. The Democrats are traditionally the party of the bien pensants, intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, students, teachers, civically minded clergy: well-educated people in positions of cultural and civic leadership. Yet the logical culmination of everything they stand for, now on vivid display in the greatest political contest on earth, is embodied in shallow, scatterbrained Kamala, the aging class bimbo (by some accounts, bitch) who does not even bother to do her homework and gives not an inkling that she may possess redeeming qualities that somehow fail to come across in the mass media. Revealingly, this dumbing down of the Democrats comes well after they ceased to be the party of the working class.

Kamala represents precisely what Trump had already represented a rebellion against, and yet the Democrats could not help themselves. They put up a candidate who confirms everything Trump supporters were already complaining about them, and then some. Even if current trends continue and her campaign crashes and burns, the very notion that this personification of inadequacy should ascend to such a political height and be taken seriously as a major party candidate for any office tells us what an illusion all that intellectualism amounted to all along. Since at least the 1960s, real thought in the Democratic Party has been squeezed out by ideology, which now has free rein in this superannuated Valley Girl and her following of teenyboppers.

(And given that Republicans either react against the Democrats’ positions, and according to their terms, or try to steal their thunder by mimicking them — either way, allowing the Democrats to set the agenda and determine the terms of debate — it is hardly surprising that Republicans’ pretentions to intellectual weight are equally vapid.)

Yet intelligent Democrats are not ashamed to support her, and intelligent Republicans are forced to take her seriously. Almost no one stops to ask the crucial question of why: Why have we allowed ourselves to be faced with this debacle? What were the critical changes/mistakes/neglects that led not just the Democratic party but all of us to be maneuvered into this embarrassment?

Painful as this question is, addessing it is the only way to avoid the return of Kamala in some form — much as she represents a return of Hillary. Their groupies are increasing in number, and defeating them in one or two elections will provide only a temporary, illusory fix. Without rising above the fray and asking the larger questions, then in one way or another, regardless of the outcome of this election, we will continue to descend into the control of the Kamalas.

Next time: My own attempt to answer this question.

---

If you want to read more analysis of this kind, you can find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.