An American Referendum

NARRATIVE MAY BE A WORD that fills the void in a sentence short of ideas. It is still the word that has become indispensable in the election that crowns the Year of Elections, a spectacular finale and a vindica­tion: democracy, fake versions included, is the most shared idea of governance despite dire reminders from its sceptics. The narrative war that rages in America on the eve of its presidential election, portrayed as the severest trial of democracy by liberal sceptics and as a return of retribution by aggrieved conservatives, plumbs the depths of fear. In the clash of overwrought imageries, the evil is at the gate and change is seeking a historic personification after the Obama moment more than a decade ago. Caught between the deplorable and the desirable, the American Dream shrinks to an incendiary exclamation.

In a portrait copied ad nauseam with minor colour varia­tions, Donald Trump is the usurper who descended from the golden tower to reap the resentment of angry natives. His MAGA project is nationalism exaggerated by the combined power of grievance and pride, and it turns the past into a story of ravaged greatness and the future into a fabulous restoration, and both are a corruption of truth. The very idea of a convicted felon becoming president, amplifying hurt and minimising crime in his hallucinatory campaign, is a violation of freedom itself. It is only a partial portrait; the full picture of Trump cannot be captured even by reason’s widest narrative frames.

Kamala Harris, less scrutinised by a media that thinks what matters most at this darkest hour of democracy is not her unrevealed positions on policies but her political identity of being non-Trump, is a liberal necessity. She may have become the candidate without the rigours of a primary because of Joe Biden’s belated acceptance of debilitating senescence, but once there, she has become, in portraits without a trace of grey, the perfect American Dream, a rejoinder to what this magazine once called on its cover the American Scream. The one who is born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, both first-rate academics who made the best use of the dream America alone could present with such generosity, brings together racial reconciliation and political redemption in her biography. Unlike Trump, in the art of portraiture, she is the noblest liberal pursuit.

When it is Trump, even the most fabled news pages of objectivity cannot resist psychoanalysis. His concluding spectacle at New York’s Madison Square Garden, in ambitious descriptive journalism, was a play of psychosis in which the unhinged protagonist exuded “dark energy”. Unlike his Democratic opponent who “speaks”, with a prosecutor’s sharp focus, the language of change, Trump only “rants” against his enemies. The demonic whirl within the raging Republican is so accessible to a media worried about the future of freedom that the narrative structure of Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to be drawing liberally from vampire literature. It was as if on the stage in New York were the undead revealing their bloody fangs. What a sight, which included a comedian calling a country garbage, compared to the Kamala festival starring A-listers like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. In the competitive narratives of political aesthetics, it is a clash between kitsch and good karma.

It is not that the candidates themselves refrain from adding fuel to the combustion machine. Trump calls his storytelling style the “weave”. It is a long-winding passage of asides and accusations, a disjointed soliloquy of the outsider, angry and wounded, shaming his enemies with the brevity of invectives. The master weaver tells the base that the attack on him is a show of contempt for them: By firing at me, they are really coming for you. This is the technique of transference used by both victims and villains. In the texts of Trump toxification, it is nothing but a plot against America.

The portrait of Kamala Harris as an achiever straight out of the American Dream is the only liberal artwork that mul­tiplies itself to assume the aura of national mythology. Before Biden bowed out, which itself was described by chroniclers of anti-Trumpism as a great patriotic act, the vice president was nobody’s favourite. Even the most tolerant liberals could not compre­hend her philosophical eloquence such as “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” Candidate Kamala has become the closest America got to an invocation after Candidate Obama. She does not deserve to be psychoanalysed. She does not deserve to be distracted from the path of Save America by questions about Palestine and anti-Semitism. She is the only national celebration America can afford when Trump looms. That is why set against the toxic Trumpology is the soothing legend of Kamala, the backstory of her mother as a rebellious scientist from India being its most inspiring chapter. Trump’s backstory? There is a film titled The Apprentice running now.

In the narrative war, what is at stake is America as an endangered idea. The danger has only one name and that is Trump. He is the axis as well as the argument. In the new liberal code for media, daring to non-endorse him or talking neutrality itself is a crime against morality, as the own­ers of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are told. In the panic prose of the impending Trump imperium, it is a referendum on evil. What matters for the moralist is not the sociology that sustains the idyll-breaker from the right but the duty of anti-Trumpism. In the grand narrative of de-Trumpifying America, Kamala Harris is incidental but necessary. It is all about him, yes or no.

DemocratesDonald TrumpfreedomKamala HarrisliberalmythologynationalismRepublicanUS Presidential Election 2024