Kamala Harris was the ideal candidate for Donald Trump: a West Coast liberal lawyer with a rictus smile, an undistinguished record as vice-president and an opaque policy platform. She smiled and laughed a lot during the campaign, she preached progressive orthodoxies, she rallied with Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, as if the showbiz elite could persuade provincial, working-class America to vote for the Democrats. But you could see the panic in her eyes. The truth is she had nothing to say to Americans disillusioned by economic hardship, alarmed by immigration and the porous southern border, and alienated by identity liberalism.
In the final days of the campaign, certainly following the publication of a rogue poll in Iowa that predicted a late surge to Harris, Democrats seemed confident that Trump could be beaten. Harris became more strident. She denounced Trump as a “fascist” and her supporters cheered. The momentum was with her, we were told, although the betting markets to the last remained firmly for Trump. On the morning of 6 November, New York Times commentators were clustering around Harris, increasingly certain that she would be the next president, the first woman to command the White House.
This was wishful thinking. In mitigation, as my colleague Megan Gibson wrote in these pages two weeks ago, Harris was destined to lose. Megan argued that she’d been given too little time to prepare and make her pitch to the American people: the Democratic establishment was culpable for supporting Joe Biden in his doomed pursuit of a second term even as with each passing week he became more shambling and incoherent. Trump’s quip during his debate with Biden in June signed his death warrant: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
But I think Harris, whose campaign out-spent Trump’s and raised as much as $1bn, had more than enough time to reveal her limitations; as vice-president she was the “incumbent”. She had four years to demonstrate her capabilities but, for much of that time, was largely anonymous: marginalised, forgotten. It was as if Biden regretted choosing her as his VP. During the campaign, apart from the issue of women’s reproductive rights, about which she spoke with authority and courage, Harris revealed her drastic limitations as a politician and communicator.
In the late 1970s, a divided Labour Party and much of the British left (apart from Martin Jacques’ Marxism Today) misunderstood the forces unlocked by the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. It was complacently assumed that her victory would be transient, and the consensus politics of the postwar order would be restored in due course. “When I saw Thatcherism,” the cultural theorist Stuart Hall told the New Statesman in 2012, reflecting on the turbulent politics of the 1980s, “I realised that it wasn’t just an economic programme, but that it had profound cultural roots. Thatcher and [Enoch] Powell were both what Hegel called ‘historical individuals’ – their very politics, their contradictions, instance or concretise in one life or career much wider forces that are in play.”
Something similar could be said of Donald Trump, as I wrote in our Saturday Read newsletter last weekend. When he first ran for the presidency as a Republican he was traduced, ridiculed and written off: part orange-faced game show host, part preposterous Mafia Big Man. The American novelist Philip Roth called him the “boastful buffoon”. Trump is boastful and he is a buffoon. His long, tedious, erratic victory speech – there was praise for the “super genius” Elon Musk and a bizarre appearance on stage by the golfer Bryson DeChambeau – was absurd even by the standards of a Trump rally.
And yet, for all his repulsive excesses and uncouth behaviour, Trump keeps winning. What does he know? What does he understand about the atavistic impulses and insecurities of the American people? Why has the Republican Party allowed itself to be captured? The Maga movement is not a passing phenomenon: like Thatcherism it has hardened into something permanent. It is a counter-hegemonic project. There is no turning back for the Republicans.
Alongside Trump will be vice-president elect JD Vance, a true ideologue, and the intellectual leader of the so-called pro-worker, anti-liberal American New Right. But Vance, once a Never Trumper, embodies the contradictions of the Maga movement, which seeks to encompass both the Silicon Valley libertarianism of Musk and Peter Thiel and the common good conservatism of the academic Patrick Deneen who, in his recent book Regime Change, wrote: “The institutionalisation of the libertarian ethos – in both the economic and social domains – has globally ravaged the working classes, leaving them simultaneously in a condition of economic precarity and social disintegration.”
“No one,” Philip Roth said shortly before he died, “could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the USA… would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.” But perhaps this outcome could have been imagined. After all, as John Gray has written, the word “populism” has no clear meaning but is “used by liberals to refer to political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies”. Trump’s return is some blowback.
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