The Campaign of Nothing

I voted for the Coconut Lady...

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I mailed in my absentee vote for Kamala Harris yesterday from Toronto, and casting a ballot for a potential first female president for the second time should’ve felt better than an obligatory resignation. Instead, it was like as Dave Chappelle described voting for Hillary Clinton: “It felt like I was lucky enough to eat Halle Berry’s pussy—and whilst I was doing so, she fuckin’ farted in my face.” Since I’m only begrudgingly, rather than enthusiastically, voting for Kamala, I understand the following post may come across to some as both sides-ing what’s at stake in this election, or that I’m a crypto-Trumpist useful idiot Russian bot on a mission to enable the dawn of fascism in America. So Kamala was my default choice because Project 2025 is a further extension of ghoulish MAGA theocracy, and a deteriorating Trump should be nowhere near the nuclear football. And for America to meaningfully progress as a nation, this MAGA culture war shit needs to die, and this will only be accomplished if it is rendered electorally unviable. The point I’m belaboring to make is not whether Democrats are “better” than Republicans; it’s just depressing that this is what qualifies as better than Republicans.

Since accepting the Democratic nomination, Kamala has shifted her stance on fracking, vowed to maintain the most “lethal” military in the world, enthusiastically courted Republican support, paraded cops and sheriffs at the DNC, and told pro-Palestinian protesters who interrupted her rally, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Her campaign recently rolled out this Country Over Party strategy, flaunting the endorsement of Liz and Dick Cheney; this is uniquely demoralizing not just because it’s an unforced error, but this Orange Man Bad mode of politics has remade the Democratic Party into something palatable for someone who should be tried as a war criminal. The veep debate was framed in explicitly right-wing terms on Israel, immigration, climate change, and the deficit—and Tim Walz did nothing to challenge these assumptions. So Kamala’s running mate positioned himself as someone who would compassionately and competently execute the Trumpist vision for America. “Pass the bill,” Walz said about strengthening the southern border and ramping up deportations. “She’ll sign it.”

The flabby, violent, ineffective status quo continues to dither along instead of outright fail, and the unspoken and unexamined political consensus is that the job of the state is to protect the right people and make sure the right people get hurt. Conservatives actively work to enhance this damage while liberals have accepted that their job is to try to mitigate it. Actually remaking the status quo is not part of the conversation. There is a learned helplessness that is depressingly familiar in the Democratic pitch of Get a Load of These Other Guys and detailed plans to responsibly administer something like Republican policies with public displays of guilt. In my lifetime, they have done nothing to arrest and reverse a rightward drift that feels increasingly untenable. While Trump is symptomatic of some bigger issues, his towering personal smallness is a problem; his overwhelming coarseness and avarice are shot through American politics, so Democrats have since shifted from Reagan-era Republicans to Bush-era Republicans.

The Blue Establishment has long held a classically wonkish contempt for the “unrealistic,” though there’s a realpolitik consideration since the Electoral College has diminished presidential elections down to a national decision made by the same six states. Democratic campaign consultants and media apparatchiks make their living by defining and describing the scope and scale of the possible, so Kamala has chosen to traffic in the familiar rhetoric of half-loaves and compromise. It’s also evident that her campaign is more interested in courting erstwhile Republicans who are embarrassed to vote for Trump than offering a compelling reason for their base to vote blue. Over the years, all this triangulation has resulted in bipartisan-approved forever wars on terror that cost $7 trillion in tax dollars and almost a million lives, bipartisan deregulation of Wall Street that turned the economy into a gilded shipwreck, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade under a Democratic administration.

This feels eerily similar to 2016. The Harris Campaign is making the same calculus as Chuck Schumer’s now-infamous gambit: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois, and Wisconsin.” Pokémon Go to the polls is now brat summer. Hillary had Henry Kissinger’s endorsement, Kamala has Dick Cheney’s approval. Lin-Manuel Miranda was filmed performing a pro–Hillary song that included the line “Tim Kaine in the membrane!”—now the cast of Hamilton reunited to record a song encouraging people to vote. Sarah Cooper dropped another Trump lip-sync video. Jeff “I voted for the email lady” Tiedrich is doing his Tourettes Guy posting about cum socks. Even the #Resistance is back to vote shame anyone who’s insufficiently excited about pulling the lever for Kamala’s shitty campaign—especially castigating Chappell Roan for having the audacity of demanding something from the Democrats other than We’re Not Trump.

In an era when Marvel movies are politics and Boeing loves gay people, this is a positive feedback loop of signifiers signifying nothing. The memeification of the Democrats dovetails nicely with Harris having absolutely nothing to say and nothing to stand for. When politics is drained from a political campaign, the vacuum is filled with vacuous appeals to pop culture designed for you to fill the gaps with whatever you want to believe.

The lib-brained hystericize over how Republicans continue to support a convicted felon who has sexually assaulted several women—especially after his unconscionable and incompetent response to a pandemic, and especially after he flailed and fumed through an exceptionally oafish coup attempt. They have classic fascist mentality: If you are convinced the enemy is always worse, it is easier to rationalize anything your side does because it’s in service of stopping a greater evil. These have inarguably and disastrously been terrible years for the national conceptions of object permanence and basic causality. Trump represents a long spate of grievances and a certain sour cast of mind, an idea of power that exists only to blame and punish and deny; and in the deepest pits of the MAGA Cinematic Universe, these doughnuts are convinced gender-neutral bathrooms and wokeism and CRT will destroy Western Civilization. Also, Trump’s bottomless demand for more has empowered an untold number of similarly unappeasable Americans who consider themselves entitled to the same service, because they view any kind of broader responsibility as tantamount to Marxist tyranny and an inhumane assault on their personal convenience.

But a congruent, albeit less severe, dynamic is present on the Blue Team. The Biden administration is passively abetting the mass murder of Palestinians, and Kamala has done nothing meaningful to distance herself from a conflict that is shocking the conscience of the entire planet.¹ The toxic abstraction and deep denial that define American politics have not fully fallen away, especially as Palestinian hospitals are pulverized and children’s body parts are carried around in garbage bags. A debate burbles among liberals about the least offensive way to describe and respond to it all—think “de-escalation through escalation”—while it remains unclear what line the Democratic Party can cross that would finally dampen the unyielding loyalty amongst their core constituency. And if human life is this expendable to them, how can we trust that Democrats will stand up for, say, reproductive rights—especially when there isn’t much compelling evidence that they will do anything about it?

The whole country is trapped in Trump’s gilded and claustrophobic life, and the last few generations of reactionary drift inculcated a tragic fatalism and passivity among Democrat partisans; now any criticism of Democratic omertà is immediately interpreted as enabling an evil authoritarian to destroy our democracy. Harris doesn’t need to articulate any political vision and Democrats seem willing to rationalize anything to stop Trump. This isn’t a matter of arid debate or familiar political circumlocution and compromise anymore. The future that these years of atrophy and anomie and enmity has arrived all at once, and anyone who cares to look can see, up close and in real-time, just what this future has always augured—a status quo that is violent, vicious, and powerless before longstanding bigotries and new manias.

American politics has come to not just reflect Trump’s personal obsessions and shortcomings, but to actively resemble them. On its own degrading terms, then, that ambient mirroring is clear in Kamala Harris, an avatar for a uniquely depressing value proposition. She is the bellwether of a party that mostly seems overwhelmed, out of touch, and behind the curve—and their words and deeds have reflected that. This is a campaign for no one, and it stands for nothing. Trump’s endless fudgy thundering about law and order and enemy migrants and total cultural and political war had always been little more than agitprop paraphrasing of reactionary cable news programming, but he has captivated and changed the American political imagination. And his life—both inside and outside of politics—has unfolded as a series of compromises forced upon other people.

This is a battle that Democrats don’t know how to wage or alter the terrain—they’re all tactics and no strategy—but it is one that their voters have almost reflexively learned to accept. Clintonist Third Way policies remain vexingly prominent despite repeated, devastating, high-profile failures. The last time a political project was centered around the idea of shut up and vote, Trump ended up barreling down the gates of the White House in a Sherman’s March of testosterone fury. But that’s either a buried fever-dream or unworthy of introspection, let alone reason for a different course of action. Democrats were gifted a uniquely unpopular opponent who had a low-percentage electoral path to victory and appears to have flipped into energy-saver mode at his last rally—and poll after poll and betting markets suggest they’re barely hanging on against Trump’s bleary and futile thrash. There is an acid satire in the realization that the leaders of the Democratic Party only know one way to govern and campaign, and that it does not work, and everyone knows it does not really work—but it nevertheless prevails again and again because they at least know how to do it. Removed from consequence and removed from all the ways Trump would make the world demonstrably worse, Kamala’s campaign deserves to lose. It’s just a tragedy of who they would lose to.

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1. While Biden has accomplished some progressive goals like the Infrastructure Bill and anti-trust rulings, keep in mind, Lyndon Johnson passed the Great Society, signed the Civil Rights Act, and implemented Medicare and Medicaid, and his presidency is still remembered as a failure because of his handling of the Vietnam War.