Society and the spectacle

Freedom of choice! Would sir prefer a) empty platitudes and narratives or b) epic memes and lies?

American society has always struck me as being particularly fond of The Narrative. As the country that gave us Hollywood and the American Dream, the USA understands the power of a good story, both in defining our experience of the world and in shaping the world itself. And if there’s one über-Narrative, one Narrative to bind them, it’s that all you need to do is believe. Believe hard enough, and the impossible can happen. All your dreams can come true.

So: let’s just say that last week, we saw the limits of that idea. All political campaigns rely to varying extents on narratives and storytelling, obviously. But for decades, the Democratic Party has been an ongoing experiment in running election campaigns based on nothing but the narrative—campaigns that have been spectacles, defined by imagery and symbolism and the idea of Making History, not by policy and/or tangible achievements.

Four more years!

Think about Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Obama’s unique charisma wasn’t an asset to his campaign; it was the campaign. All those Shepard Fairey “HOPE” images were lauded at the time for being some of the slickest political branding ever—which they were. But after eight years of George W. Bush, the Democrats should have been able to run a cheese sandwich as a candidate and still piss in that election. In retrospect, the fact that they needed such a historically slick campaign to get across the line… it didn’t bode well.

The Democrats have been trying to pull of the 2008 trick again ever since, but despite what innumerable commentators have argued this week, their problem isn’t that the messaging post-Obama has been wrong. It’s that the messaging is all there is—and without someone like Obama to front the campaign, running on concepts as loose and meaningless as “hope” and “joy” just doesn’t work. This is how we’ve ended up watching the slow car crash of Kamala Harris waffling about “joy” to an ever more murderous electorate.

Who’s voting for “joy” when they can’t pay their rent? Who’s voting for Harris to be the first USA’s first female black president when all she has to offer is the idea of being The USA’s First Female Black President ? If all you’re offering an increasing fed-up electorate is a narrative, then it shouldn’t be any surprise that a lot of voters decide to opt for the candidate who’s promising them something tangible. Those promises are lies, obviously. But they’re something.

Of course, the Republicans also offer a narrative. But as I wrote last time around, they also stand for something. Ask me what the GOP is for—who it represents, what its ideology is—I can answer. I’ll probably swear a lot, but I can answer. The Democrats? Not so much. All too often, they come across as the same as the Republicans, but worse.

This is the problem with the deluge of scalding hot takes about how “the Democrats need to ABANDON THE FAR LEFT and MOVE TO THE CENTER” that have arrived over the last week. Beyond the fact that the Democrats have long since abandoned the left as a whole—2016 and 2020 demonstrated that they’d rather lose an election than run a leftist candidate—moving to the center makes no sense, because it assumes the existence of a large number of people who really, really wanted to vote for Harris but just couldn’t bring themselves to do so because she’s too nice to trans people. As one of the Chapo dudes said last week, if you like right-wing narratives, why vote for the Democrats’ 2% version of Trumpism when the full-fat version is right there on the ballot?

And speaking of “same but worse”: people used to say, disparagingly, that Trump’s first term was government via Twitter. Well, this term is shaping up to be government via X, which—as everyone knows—is basically the same thing but worse: nothing works properly, and no matter how many times you mute him, your feed is always being invaded by the latest sophomoric stunts and EPIC MEMES of the world’s richest overgrown teenager.

The result of the Democrats’ ineptitude is that the USA—and the rest of the world—now has to suffer through another four years of having the political equivalent of the giant baby from Spirited Away in the White House… except this time, he’s accompanied by most smug and insufferable 13-year-old boy imaginable. How’s that for a Narrative? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.