Fear and loathing in the United States

All is fair in love, war and election campaigns. About the only thing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agree upon is that, unless one of them wins, democracy will die in the United States. Though they are divided as to which of the two would let it survive, both say they think the other would be delighted to give it the coup de grace.

Democracy depends on the willingness of most people to let themselves be governed for a while by politicians they dislike because they assume that, sooner or later, voters will decide to give them the boot, but in the US, there are many who evidently believe that what those on the other side really want is to install a permanent dictatorship and jail everyone guilty of wrongthink.

According to Kamala, Trump is a Hitler-loving “fascist” supported by what, a couple of days ago, her current boss, US President Joe Biden, called human “garbage” – a remark that brings to mind Hillary Clinton’s allusion to the “basket of deplorables” she imagined she was up against and which may have ensured her defeat in 2016. With the help of friendly media, the Democrats insist that Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally was a carbon copy of an event staged there by North American Nazis in the 1930s, an assertion that was met with derision by the many blacks, Jews and “Hispanics” who were among the attendees, all of whom cheered wildly whenever a speaker mentioned Israel.

As far as Trump is concerned, Kamala is an intellectually-challenged Californian leftist, a “diversity hire” who is backed by a gang of crooks who would be fully capable of stealing the election should it go against them by a narrow margin. He also accuses the Democrats of weaponising the law, the FBI, the CIA and other tentacles of the “deep state” in their efforts to thwart him. This has enabled him to brush off charges that, as a “convicted felon” he should never be allowed to become president again.

None of this bodes well for the future of “the great Republic,” or for the increasingly rickety “Western world” which desperately needs having someone sane, competent, realistic and self-confident in the White House. How will Trump’s supporters react if, once again, he loses by a whisker? And what will Kamala’s do if “Hitler” regains power? For North Americans of a moderate disposition, these questions have alarming implications. In both camps there is no shortage of self-righteous individuals who, after whipping themselves into a frenzy, will do their best to encourage violence even if they are reluctant to participate personally in the mayhem they help to unleash.  

Which lot would be the worst? Though Democrats say the MAGA mob is far more dangerous and point to what they say was an “insurrection” spurred by Trump on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters invaded the Capitol, with one of their number getting shot dead by a nervous cop. Disturbing as that episode may have been, it was a very peaceful affair in comparison with the enormously destructive “Black lives matter” riots which Kamala and her running -mate, Timothy Walz, thought were splendid examples of people power in action.

The Democrats also enjoy the support of the extraordinarily aggressive “Antifa” street fighters who – seeing that Trump has been officially labelled a fascist many view as being “literally Hitler” – will surely feel entitled to go to any lengths in order to keep him and his backers at bay. Trump has already been the target of several assassination attempts. It would be surprising if nobody out there was dreaming of helping humanity by killing Hitler reincarnate before the evildoer gets a chance to bring about even more disasters. Perhaps US progressives – who for years have been telling us that “words are violence” and “hate speech” always has unpleasant consequences – should ask their leading representative, Kamala, to be a bit more careful when she speaks in public.

Of course, the United States is not the only country in which democracy is threatened as different sectors of the population drift further apart from one another. Much the same is happening in Europe where, as in the US, the interests of the established “elites” do not coincide with those of the majority. Once upon a time, such conflicts were interpreted in terms of social class, with right-wingers speaking and acting for those at the top and leftists taking up the cudgels on behalf of the downtrodden masses, but this arrangement came to an end about half a century ago when allegedly egalitarian organisations, such as parties claiming to be socialist, were taken over by technocrats with university degrees who drove out the crude working-class operatives that had once dominated them. This has led to the current situation in which, on both sides of the Atlantic, proudly “progressive” diploma-wielding elites confront “reactionary” working-class and middle-class folk who, naturally enough, find the self-satisfied arrogance that characterises them extremely galling.

When in opposition, leftist politicians insist that, like their counterparts of former years, they will be able to govern for everyone and will take special care of the “underprivileged,” but as, after less than four months in office, the Labour administration in the United Kingdom has discovered, this is by no means easy to do. The way things are going, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his team could soon become even more unpopular (some suggest they already are) than were former PM Rishi Sunak and the rest of the Tories they so roundly defeated in the July general elections.

Hard as it may be for Labour Party apparatchiks to understand, their priorities are not shared by many of their compatriots who, as is the case among their equivalents in the United States, happen to be strongly against open borders, take pride in their country’s heritage, resent having to pay through the nose for energy in order to fight “climate change,” greatly dislike getting bullied by gender activists who think “transwomen” convicted of crimes, among them rape, should be put in prisons for females, find utterly ridiculous all the fuss about pronouns, and much else besides.