The online version of yesterday’s Irish Times carried two opinion pieces by liberal authors, almost side by side, and both carrying very similar messages. Flagship feminist columnist Una Mullally was writing from New York, where she often finds herself, and getting the feeling that she was “living in the pages of a burning history book”.
As is very often the case, Mullally’s article reads like self-parody, though as usual this is unintentional. Nevertheless, the following extracts are instructive, I think:
“Walking around New York city, listening to the audiobook of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (fail to prepare, prepare to fail), I’m sometimes interrupted by messages from friends asking “what’s it like over there?”…..
Normality reigns. It’s in the lines of people queuing for a $10 viral-on-TikTok fettuccine alfredo. It’s in the kids playing basketball in the park. It’s in the guy washing his face at a spurting fire hydrant to cool down at the tail-end of the heatwave….. As the days pass, these scenes feel less like everything is fine, and more like that bit at the start of a disaster movie, the “little do they know” stage….. If [Trump’s] 2016 campaign was characterised by shock and panic, then 2024 has a different edge. It’s one of rumbling terror.”
If this mindset wasn’t written down openly for the rest of us to read, it would be difficult to imagine it was real: Una Mullally is wandering around New York with almost the status of prophet, watching the foolish little people going about their daily lives entirely unaware of what she, Mullally, knows: That Trump is coming and soon this idyllic New York will be gone and changed forever. She is laden down with that curse of the ancient Sibyl, the ability to see clearly the horrible doom ahead for us all if an election in a country she’s visiting were to go the wrong way. One would nearly be tempted to advise her to take a breath and calm down, if such words were not the patronising language of the patriarchy and thus doomed to draw her ire.
Anyway, not far from Mullally, in the same newspaper on the same day, Fintan O’Toole was having a bit of a moment:
But loyalty and gratitude clouded the approach of a terrible reality: Biden was going to lose to Trump and a criminal coup-monger was going to have control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and a Supreme Court that has effectively declared him a monarch with permission to override all the laws of the land.
All is well now, thankfully, in Fintan-land. Joe Biden has done his duty and given the forces of light a fighting chance against the forces of darkness. Whatever Harris’s flaws may or may not be as a person, politician, or campaigner, Fintan will go all-in for her in his own little way on the pages of a newspaper read by hardly any Americans, because that is what this moment needs, or whatever. It’s a sort of full-scale neurosis.
It is a fact of life that Kamala Harris, the now almost certain Democratic nominee for President of the United States, is not a particularly impressive campaigner. What might be being missed, I fear, is that she doesn’t necessarily need to be a very impressive, or even adequate, campaigner, in an environment where liberal neuroticism about the stakes of the November election is as high as it is. For tens of millions of Americans, all she needs to be is mediocre, and not Trump. The fact that the worst predictions about Trump are so widely believed on the left side of the political aisle will do most of the rest for her. Trump is about to face a veritable army of Unas Mullally.
The vast majority of interactions I have, as editor of Gript, with members of the public, are positive. Whenever I’m in public, it’s commonplace for one or two people to come up and say hello and say something nice. Negative interactions are uncommon, but not unheard of. Last week, in Limerick, a young woman approached me perfectly politely and accused me of being a fascist. I informed her that I was not, in fact, a fascist. She insisted that I was. So, I asked her for evidence of any fascist thing that I had ever said or done. “You support Trump”, she said.
Now, regular readers who do, in fact, support Trump might find this revelation to be welcome news, but that’s besides the point: For this young woman in her middle-to-late twenties, there was literally nothing I could have said or done that would have persuaded her that I was not a fascist. She had internalised that belief without ever having met me (or apparently having ever read a word I’ve ever written about Donald Trump) and a simple thing like being told she was wrong was not going to change her mind. I am sure that the young woman in question is a lovely person in her personal life, with friends and family who love her and value her – but I’m also not entirely sure that she’s seeing the world with perfect clarity. It’s a form of liberal neuroticism: The ability to see things not as they are, but as they might be if you don’t get your way, every single time.
Over the next three months, hundreds of millions of dollars and acres of newsprint are going to be invested in stoking this phenomenon amongst American voters, and indeed, for the sake of consistency, the Irish public. Kamala Harris does not need to be a superb campaigner if she becomes, very literally in the eyes of people like the young woman who accosted me in Limerick, the last hope of civilised society.
The irony here is that this is, in many ways, the mirror image of Trumpism: With Trump, any concerns a person might have in good faith about his character, or his ability to pass legislation, or his ability to pick an effective team, or even his ideological soundness, are constantly waved away by his supporters on the grounds that it’s him or the end of western civilisation as we know it. Trump supporters “know what time it is” and therefore overlook every flaw the man has on the grounds that the alternative is the political apocalypse.
This transformation of politics in the west from a battle of ideas to a battle of competing tribes of people convinced that a single defeat will bring the end of the world as we know it is, needless to say, not a great development. But it’s also why, whatever the polls might say today, the election in November will be very close, either way. There are millions of people on both sides who, entirely incorrectly, believe that this election – yet again – is the most important election of their lifetimes and losing it will bring disaster. That fact alone will make it a toss-up, however bad at campaigning Harris is.