When I left America this June for two months while my visa application was being considered, I was glad not to be in New York. Friends informed me that humidity was sometimes 90 per cent, and the US election had begun to feel imminent, sensations that seemed not entirely experientially divorced. Even abroad, though, the race was inescapable. My boyfriend, an American, was reading reports of the increasingly dire Biden situation, and after I asked him to stop doing so aloud, I could tell when he was anyway, from the groans and knitted brow. I set a limit: we were allowed to talk about the election for ten minutes a day. This was almost immediately rendered redundant as events kept accelerating, the drama piling up as if we were living in a dodgy Aaron Sorkin finale.
In Paris, I emerged from the shower one morning to hear my boyfriend say: “I know you don’t want to talk about the news, but Trump has been shot.” A few weeks later in Marseille I was thrilled to be the one who got to tell him that Biden had finally bowed out. Before the events of July, most people I know in New York – barring a couple of committed politics addicts – had barely mentioned the election. When someone at home in Ireland asked me, in the late spring, how people in my social circle were feeling about the possibility of a Trump victory, I told them the truth, which was that everyone seemed to be quietly resigned to its inevitability to the degree it was hardly spoken of. The feeling of the shambolic Biden candidacy was so laden with thudding dread it felt easier to ignore the whole thing while one still could. Besides, the seriously politically active people I knew – as opposed to mere newshounds – had spent the last six months aiming their disgust towards the Democrats because of their funding of Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians. (On 13 August, the Department of State announced that the US had approved a further $20bn weapons package sale to Israel.) They weren’t all that interested in punditry around the party’s future success.
Cut to last week’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, and I have become increasingly fascinated by who is enthused by the Kamala effect and who is more alienated than ever. At a friend’s drinks on the night of Tim Walz’s speech, a guest asked – kind of joking, kind of not – if we could stream the convention. When the rest of the party said no, and laughed with bemusement, she said with joking, self-aware guilt: “I know, I know, I’ve gotten so lib-pilled this week.” She was referring to a feeling I had been noticing in others and myself lately, the urge to feel comforted, enthusiastic even, about the Democrats now that new leadership had emerged. Harris is a woman of colour from an immigrant family who supports national legislation to protect the right to abortion. Walz is an educator with a strong history of supporting LGBTQ rights who, as governor of Minnesota, signed a number of gun safety measures. He is also charming and likeable. A touching moment during his DNC speech where his son Gus, a neuro-divergent teenager, stood up in tears mouthing “that’s my Dad” quickly went viral. Harris, meanwhile, appears to have a team who recognise the need to get young people on board – when pop star of the moment Charli XCX gave her the seal of approval, they instantly took advantage of the endorsement by rebranding their socials in the aesthetic and font of her album Brat.
Very few young people were Joe Biden fans, which in a way made protesting the government’s fervent support of Israel’s war easier. It almost felt perversely validating to see Biden’s bizarre incompetence alongside his co-signing the ongoing stream of horror we are witnessing in Gaza; it made sense that such an abhorrence would be overseen by somebody incapable. It’s a different, uncanny feeling to see Kamala Harris – sharp, charismatic and completely in command – grow steadily more popular, when she will (as her policies currently stand) enact the same policies if elected. (Despite previously calling for a ceasefire, Harris has said she would not support an arms embargo on Israel, and said in her DNC speech: “Let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”) It’s unnerving to watch a cult of personality emerge around her so thoroughly and quickly that this is obscured.
The urge to be relieved by Harris’s candidacy is understandable, something I have sympathy for and experience with. My brain is so broken by political disappointment that it instinctively hopes that each dreadful new development may actually be positive in some secret, mysterious way. During Brexit, I tried to preserve some sanity and hope by reading the arguments of “Lexit” proponents, allowing myself to believe in them. There is an animal instinct in me that tries to reframe bad things as good. In 2016, after Donald Trump’s election, it seemed that he would be such an unbelievably nightmarish president, that in fact he must be good in some unseen way, for to be as terribly bad as I feared would just be too bad. It’s an attempt to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, wherein the truth of events cannot be reconciled with profound personal beliefs and hopes about humanity.
There are some Democrats who appear unconcerned by the slaughter in Gaza – see for example the delegates who blocked their ears, laughed and rolled their eyes as protesters outside the DNC venue read aloud the names of Palestinian children killed. But those who are more compassionate, or more cynically aware of the risks of turning away from the horrors of the war, are beginning to share this sense of cognitive dissonance. Harris’s energy, eloquence and competence are fundamentally a relief when compared with the discomfort of watching Biden speak. We see the competent woman instead of the apparently confused old man and the irrational, hopeful part of our brains tend to think things will be fine. But Harris – lesser of two evils as she may be in some pertinent senses compared to Trump – is not fine, will never be fine until she at least commits to ending US funding of Israel’s war.
I recently watched the film My Dinner with Andre, which depicts a conversation between two friends debating the nature of reality and perception. Andre describes visiting his visibly dying mother when “a doctor, who was a specialist in a problem that she had with her arm, went into her room and came out just beaming. And he said, ‘Boy, don’t we have a lot of reason to feel great? Isn’t it wonderful how she’s coming along?’ All he could see was the arm.”
Here, Harris’s competence is the arm, on a body that is dying. It’s understandable to feel good about it in isolation. But it offers us little consolation in context: the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians, funded by the US.
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