In any case, the polls showed a tie, and Trump had outperformed his polling by several percent last time around. Yet the Democrats gathered around to assure each other that Harris was in the stronger position. The elite—with a tiny number of exceptions, like Trump himself, with his grip on a kind of perverse populism—only know how to be elite: their sole tactic is to get as many of themselves as possible—preferably popstars—to appear with or otherwise promote Harris. When people are angry at the elites, this is very clearly the stupidest tactic they could have gone for. But they will never dissolve themselves in order to be replaced by another force that might defeat Trump. So we can look forward to more of the same. Perhaps we should expect that their next candidate will—like Harris—have previously accepted money from Trump, as well as transport in his private jet.

Meanwhile, Latino and Black men are blamed for voting for Trump, despite majorities of these groups voting against him—a huge majority in the case of Black men. And the disgust amongst Democratic supporters for those who dared to vote for Stein or West or anyone else (dismissively referred to as Third Party Candidates, as if they collectively run for a single party) demonstrates a disgust with participation in an actual democracy, whereby your choice to vote for a candidate you actually most agree with is taken as a given, as proof in fact of the robust nature of the system.

Let us remember: the USA is a State, but not a Nation. There is certainly an ideology there, demonstrated in the excessive reverence for the Founding Fathers and the long out of date Constitution they bequeathed, and Macdara does not seriously object to its being called nationalism. But his point is that this was a kind of emergency ideology, appearing as a corollary to the double-genocide of the Republic’s creation, against the native nations, and the nations of West Africa. When one views the US as a white settler experiment, one in which the price of admission for all the immigrants since its founding has been their acceptance of the irrationality of the experiment, its violence, its wastefulness, its threat, then we should know to expect the worst from the Democratic-Republicans that represent the State.

Trump is a symptom of the Present State: a global political scene without a strong Communist movement. Yes, a powerful Left provokes the Forces of Reaction, but his populism would not be sustainable in the presence of a movement of the people, and to the extent that the electorate wanted to vote for an outsider, for a force believed to be opposed to the elite capture of the instruments of the State, the Communist Left offers an alternative within the realm of actual Politics, as distinct from the playacting of the Democratic wing of the Leadership Class.

Postscript

Some of the ghouls running the disastrous campaign surfaced recently to explain themselves on a friendly podcast. In truth Macdara only listened to as much as he could bear, less than a third of the full offering, but he managed to divine some of the key messages, which he helpfully summarises here.

In addition to the of course she lost, that’s only natural line, and the she was a complete unknown explanation, they told us that they had been busy trying to run Biden’s corpse, did not have time to develop a Plan B (let alone any further plans), and were therefore bounced into running Harris when their Weekend at Bernie’s conspiracy was revealed.

A sample of the type of excuse offered for other catastrophic decisions:

Vice Presidents stick by their Presidents and eh she wasn’t willing to, you know, change that precedent for whoever the future President-Vice Presidential partnership would be, because it would mean a whole, you know, different set of problems, as if we don’t have enough problems in our democracy right now.

There you have it: she failed to articulate any difference, from across a period of four years, that might distinguish her from the current desperately unpopular president…in order to preserve democracy! In fact they did get in a few digs at things that Harris wanted or did not want, hinting that their skills were limited by what she would tolerate.

We did talk about things like—she’s a different generation, most of her career is from outside of Washington, not inside Washington, so she knows a lot of the best ideas are from across the country. Her career has been about reaching across the aisle, finding common sense ways to get things done, it’s not been based in ideological politics, all of these things we were trying to tell a story, and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue.

This is all so horrible, there is little to add. The idiot commoners were seduced by ideological politics, they failed to be impressed by calibrated stories and impressions of non-specific difference. The constant reference in their excuses to data and testing says it all: these bright people have proof that they were right, the foolish electorate is to blame for failing to respond to the best-testing slogans. 

Those responsible for the disastrous campaign must therefore be left in charge, their expertise simply cannot be disregarded in this dangerous age. Onwards and upwards!