The 2024 political war is just beginning - The Democratic party has rigged the system
In a moment of raw personal courage at local fair-grounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump upended America’s presidential race by surviving an assassin’s bullet and then leaping to his feet and punching the air while proclaiming “USA!” and “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The resulting photographs may well change America and the world in ways no one seriously imagined even last week.
Trump’s heroic response to an attempt on his life is a reminder of the extent to which, even in our technologically-mediated universe, the arts of narrative manipulation and framing only reach so far. At the core of every story is a human being whose character, as expressed through his actions, will be judged favourably or not by his or her fellow humans — such stories being especially important in societies where people elect their leaders, as shown by the rapturous reception that Trump received at the opening of the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee.
Trump’s instincts under fire prove him to possess the courage of a leader, however dubious other aspects of his character may be. It is fair to surmise that there isn’t a single head of state on earth, from Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who wouldn’t trade a large part of their kingdoms for a photograph of themselves standing bloodied and defiant beneath their national flag, having taken an assassin’s bullet and lived. That kind of political charisma is impossible to counterfeit.
The images of the bloodied but defiant Trump also clearly underlined the contrast between a man who at 78 retains the physical vigour and presence of mind to take a bullet in front of a crowd, then get off the ground and shape a lasting image in the moment, and his doddering rival. Now, the sport of reading the Beltway tea leaves to determine which party figurehead might head the Democratic ticket in November has been replaced by inklings of real panic.
Even worse for the Democrats is Trump’s ability to seize the most valuable ground in American politics: the future. If most peoples on earth live their collective national lives somewhere between the past and the present, Americans have always been different. Their idea of their past is generally shaky and non-binding. Instead, Americans exist between the present and the future, which is why they do things like invent digital technology and the iPhone and send men to the moon and Mars.
In the 24 hours following the assassination attempt, Trump seized the future with two bold moves. The first was attracting the public endorsement of Elon Musk, the technologist and builder who also happens to be the single wealthiest man in America. By uniting his charisma with Musk’s, Trump showed that he is not simply the backwards-looking angry white man candidate of 2016 looking to “Make America Great Again”. Rather, he is seeking to Make the American Future Great, which is a different, more inspiring, and potentially more unifying, sentiment. To underline the importance of the future, Trump then chose a Vice Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who is 40 years younger than he is, anointing a successor who can inherit his movement — and who could in theory serve two terms as president after Trump’s term is done.
It’s been a while since an American political candidate was able to capture the future. Trump’s first campaign was an angry, backwards-looking affair that targeted the country’s feckless elites; Biden never bothered with the future at all. Obama, who ran his first campaign on the basis of “hope”, by his second term was largely looking abroad to repair supposed past American crimes everywhere from Iran to Cuba. A heroic Trump who has energised his base and proven his personal courage while laying claim to the future is likely to have significant appeal to American voters.
Yet, the Democratic Party is a well-functioning, massively-funded, centrally-directed machine, capable — as it did in 2020 — of rewriting election laws to its advantage and banking millions of absentee ballots in advance of the election. By contrast, the Republican Party is a ramshackle, decentralised affair whose local worthies tend to be car dealers or pillow salesmen rather than corporate Ivy League types and lawyers. The structural imbalance between the parties has suggested that Democrats could run a cardboard cut-out of Taylor Swift for the presidency in 2024 and still win — especially given the immutable presence of the polarising Trump at the top of the Republican ticket. In fact, some polls showed Biden doing better against Trump after his doddering debate performance.
“The Democratic Party is a well-functioning, massively-funded, centrally-directed machine.”
Trump’s fairground heroics, therefore, hardly guarantee a win in November. To be clear, that’s because America is no longer home to a functioning two-party system, in which each of the two parties represent coalitions of regional interests and can count on the allegiance of local industries and opinion leaders. That’s a concept from political textbooks written 50 years ago.
Since the Nineties, America has morphed from a sprawling, continent-sized democracy to a more European-style centralised federal state with a ruling class of coastal billionaires serviced by a unitary national elite. The Democratic Party is the home of the vast majority of America’s ruling oligarchy, and of the highly-paid, well-credentialed class of lawyers, consultants, researchers, media bosses, and others with degrees from a small number of elite universities who help the oligarchs do business, as well as the class of billionaire-funded NGO workers and “organisers” who harvest votes on behalf of the Party, which is both a self-enclosed life-world and a unitary socio-political machine. Unless you intend to confine your professional life to a few far-flung, largely rural states, being a Republican in such circles, or even being insufficiently “progressive”, is a sure-fire career-ender.
By enforcing an ideological line that serves America’s billionaires in the name of the “oppressed”, and labelling discordant or disruptive views as either bigotry or Russian propaganda, the Democratic Party helps ease the glaring contradictions of the privileged classes it represents, while continuing on with the work of destroying the country’s middle-class and unionised labour markets and ensuring that the oligarchs don’t pay taxes.
The structural importance of the Democratic Party to the new American system goes deeper, though. As the institution that mediates between the country’s oligarchy, its servant class elite, and masses of dispossessed voters, who are divided up into ever-multiplying numbers of identity groups and then set against each other, the party plays a key role in making the new American system run. It coordinates the activities of bureaucrats; the sprawling network of billionaire-funded NGOs that augments the power of the bureaucracy and the party alike; the media; and academia. The party also sets the policy and hiring agendas for America’s large corporations, to the point where, before the shooting, Trump had yet to attract the endorsement of the head of a single Fortune 500 company.
With all that socio-economic and bureaucratic power at their fingertips, it is perhaps no surprise that Democrats had long ago argued away the need to be polite to their increasingly powerless Republican opponents. Whether you were a corporate CEO, a university president, a tech baron, or head of a major American law firms, endorsing Trump meant more than social suicide; much lesser offences have reliably resulted in being aggressively targeted by NGO-led pressure campaigns NGO-led pressure campaigns and having protesters show up at your home, as well direct targeting by a federal bureaucracy that has increasingly abandoned the pose of social neutrality in favour of enforcing Party diktats on gender, race and nearly every other subject under the sun. Republicans, with the exception of a narrow group of fellow Beltway elitists, were racist, sexist, transphobic white supremacists and insurrectionists.
One of the chief targets of the Democratic Party’s society-wide enforcement machine has been Trump himself. Since Trump left office in 2020, he has been relentlessly targeted by a series of cases that have been aggressively prosecuted by both local and federal prosecutors despite a glaring paucity of evidence to support the idea that his actions were, in fact, crimes. Actually, the legal basis for these cases was dismissed as such by authorities as various as former Democratic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democrat-appointed judges on the US Supreme Court. The recent federal case against Trump, alleging that he had committed a crime by retaining classified government documents, which resulted in a full-scale raid by armed FBI agents on his home in Florida, was thrown out yesterday by the presiding judge, Aileen Cannon, on the grounds that the appointment and funding of a special prosecutor in the case was itself “unlawful”. But the legality of the cases against Trump was never the point — which was to use the proceedings to prevent Trump from campaigning for months, while suggesting to voters that he was a criminal.
In turn, the legal onslaught against Trump and his supporters, which began even before he took office in January 2017, was only one part of a larger, incredibly well-funded, whole-of-society campaign that the Democrats launched against a man they have ceaselessly depicted not merely as the blustering, attention-seeking buffoon that he clearly sometimes is, but as a dark Hitlerian threat to democracy. In the wake of the attempted assassination, it is the other two major components of the elite anti-Trump campaign that appear most threatening to the American future.
In a pervasive information warfare campaign, Trump is depicted not as a political naif or a crude vulgarian, or as a deeply chaotic personality who can’t manage his way out of a paper bag, but as a sinister dictator-in-waiting, who must be stopped from attaining or exercising power at any price.
To support this dark view, Trump was placed at the centre of a whirl of conspiracy theories which were duly reported as front-page news on a daily basis for nearly a decade. Yet to date, there is no evidence that Vladimir Putin conspired with Trump to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful victory in 2016; Clinton lost because she was a terrible candidate who blew a perfectly winnable election. No, Trump was not a paid Russian agent who communicated with Putin through a secret server in the basement of the Alpha Bank branch in Kiev. No, Trump didn’t have a secret deal with Russian businessmen to build hotels in Azerbaijan, which allowed Putin to control him. No, Trump was not taking money from Putin through intermediaries representing the Chabad Lubavitch stream of Judaism in Russia.
Every conspiracy theory was wilder than the last, and was treated like the scoop of the century for a day or a week before disappearing without a trace. Nor was there any form of correction or consequences for the reporters and editors involved. Instead, they rewarded themselves with Pulitzer prizes. The result has been the wholesale and tragic destruction of the entire credibility of the mainstream American press.
Unsurprisingly, the decline in Americans being able to trust what they read, and the rise in apocalyptic political rhetoric, was matched by a corresponding rise in political violence. Trump himself was hardly innocent of involvement with political violence, even if he never exactly called the white supremacist rioters at Charlottesville “good people” — a charge that has been extensively debunked. Still, clashes between the Proud Boys (a Canadian-led Right-wing group) and other so-called patriot groups and Left-wing Antifa protesters were common in the first two years of Trump’s Presidency, lending credence to the idea that both parties were cultivating bully-boy militias. Yet, as Trump’s interest in the violent Right lessened after the first year or so of his Presidency, the Left’s reliance on violence as a political tool only increased.
Trump’s election was greeted by large-scale riots in every major American city, some of which went on for weeks. In June 2017, Steve Scalise, the Republican majority leader in the House, was nearly killed in a mass shooting by a Bernie Sanders supporter in what the Virginia State Attorney General concluded was “an act of terrorism… fuelled by rage against Republican legislators”. A year later, in June 2018, recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by a California man named Nicholas Roske, who arrived at Kavanaugh’s house with a rifle before giving himself up to police, and was then indicted for attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh. Roske told investigators that he was upset over the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade as well as the potential for Kavanaugh to help loosen gun laws in the country.
The steady drum-beat of calls to public disorder from the Left during Trump’s Presidency reached its apogee in the run-up to the 2020 election, where rioters acting under various banners, from Black Lives Matter to Antifa, trashed the shopping districts of over 20 major American cities. In cities such as Portland, nightly battles between the police and Molotov-cocktail-wielding demonstrators went on for months, becoming a form of nightly street theatre in which young masked attackers threw bombs at police and federal buildings while teams of Democratic Party-aligned NGO lawyers stood ready to get offenders out of jail. As the damage mounted, and local panic increased, violent protesters in Democrat-led municipalities, most of whom turned out to be from upper middle-class Democratic families, seldom faced any consequences for their actions, with celebrities and others offering to bail them out.
“The party’s message was that Donald Trump, not the rioters, was responsible for the scary scenes shown nightly on television.”
With the attempted assassination of Trump, the political and social stakes have once again been raised, in a system that seems ill-equipped to meet such a significant challenge. Any attempt at return to a procedural normalcy that was already badly weakened before Trump took office seems entirely beyond the capacity of America’s callow and insulated elites, which have lost themselves for nearly a decade in the fantasy cosplay of anti-Trump.
What we will witness over the next four months will be an election campaign pitting the hero figure of a bloodied but unbowed Trump, a man despised by nearly half the country, against the anti-democratic manoeuvrings of the country’s institutional elite, as exemplified by whichever hand-picked candidate Democratic Party insiders choose to field against him. The resulting campaign will be a game without limits, in which the level of violence seems likely to escalate — which will further diminish the interest or ability on either side to acknowledge a victory by the other. Americans are about to find out what it feels like to live in a country at war with itself — no matter who wins the presidency in November.
