The left was flying high

While Trump won on the ground

(According to most of the press, that’s who what was just elected)

First a disclaimer: I am not American, and I don’t live in the US. One of the most important things when dealing with politics is the ability to feel first-hand the pulse of a people, and that’s something that can only be done in close real-life contact. On the other hand, with social media, it is possible to have some contact with what common people think, much more than when everything one read had to be mediated by mass media. That being said, what follows is my impressions from afar about the 2024 American presidential election.

During the roller-coaster ride that was the 2024 campaigns and results, I was shocked, above all, by the ideological high the left was in. They were so focused on their own collective belly button, on their own phantasies and fears, that their discourse reminded me more of the hot-air balloons that often pass above my house than of anything vaguely resembling a political campaign. To say they were preaching to the choir would be an understatement: they were preaching to the mirror. They were Dorian Gray preaching to his own picture.

(What are they talking among themselves way up there in the balloon’s basket? They are certainly not talking to the people on the ground, anyway. We’re smaller than ants for them)

For obvious reasons, what matters most to me in an American president is his foreign policy intentions, followed by somehow abstract, from a distance, humane considerations such as the degree of protection to be given to human life by his administration. However, American foreign policy is not controlled by elected officials, except in this or that personal project they might have the political power to see through. There’s not much an American president can do about what matters to me; even the end of Roe Vs. Wade was not Trump’s direct doing, and any other Republican president would have picked Supreme Court justices who would have done the same. The time was ripe.

Most of American foreign policy acts come under two closely interlinked systems, in which hard and soft power combine to keep in place a lighter version of the British Empire.

While the Spanish and Portuguese Empires tried and in many ways succeeded in establishing a version of their cultures in their colonies, the British famously couldn’t care less about anglicizing their subjects: they wanted little more than the glory and the riches, for all their talk about the white man’s burden. That is why India never became a larger mongrel version of its European colonial power, as Brazil did under Portuguese domination and the rest of Latin America under Spanish control, to such a point that “Hispanic” in the US often means a Spanish speaker with both Native American and Spanish ancestors.

After WWII, when it seemed that the sun had finally set on the British Empire, it could be argued that what happened was more akin to when the capital of Portugal came to Brazil with the Portuguese royal family, running from Napoleon. Just as Rio de Janeiro became the capital of Portugal, the British Empire transmogrified almost seamlessly into the American Empire. That’s why the same Washington DC career bureaucrats who dictate American foreign policy to their successive presidents also dictate much of Britain’s, Canada’s, Australia’s, and New Zealand’s foreign policy. Not to mention Japan’s, South Korea’s, and most NATO countries’. It’s just a new way of doing the same old Empire, pace LaRouchean conspiracy theories.

By the end of WWII, having lent and leased weapons to the Allies for the long duration of the war and, after entering the fight at the last moment, having imposed heavy financial penalties on the former Axis, the US suddenly became the world’s richest country. England only finished paying the US its Lend-Lease debt in December 2006. As that war investment worked quite well, and the US could for a while live its best life sustained by the due bills of WWII, the Military-Industrial Complex whose influence Eisenhower justifiably feared became the grey eminence of American foreign policy.

War after war has been waged to keep it going, both directly and by proxy (such as now both in Ukraine and in Israel/Iran). At the same time, the soft power of American cultural diffusion, in which Hollywood and Motown have a place of pride, prepares the world to accept and support American hard power. A few decades ago, it sold Anti-Communism; now it sells gender ideology and Pride parades, and I guess in a few years it will sell the amazing cure-all powers of cannabis.

That’s why one must take it with a grain of salt when Trump claims to be an isolationist who wants less, not more, wars on his watch: he may be honest — at least as honest as he was when he said American troops were in Syria so that the US could “keep the oil” —, but too much peace is bad for business, especially those of the enlarged entity Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex).

Anyway, all that is but a small decorative arabesque on the wall, in terms of elections. The common man is not looking for solutions for the problems of other countries when he votes, even if those problems are started and managed by his own country’s nomenklatura. He wants to have a job he can be proud of, to be paid decent wages, to have a decent school for his kids, to live in a town in which his daughter won’t need to fear rape, and so on. The basics.

The Chinese used to say that a ruler who assured all that had the mandate of Heaven. It’s an interesting take on the legitimacy of governments; after all, it skips the intermediaries and goes for what matters. In today’s West, on the other hand, the idea of democracy — which is, after all, just a method for picking rulers, or, as the Chinese would have said a few centuries ago, for testing whether they had the mandate of Heaven — became something between an incantation and a touchstone, the be-all and end-all of political processes.

That is why it was so weird to see the discourse of the Democrat party in these elections. They would talk a great deal about how Trump was the greatest-ever danger to Democracy®, while avoiding real democracy like the plague when it came to their own party. Kamala Harris had tried to be their nominee in 2020, but she was so unpopular she couldn’t even reach the first stage of the primary process. Nevertheless, she was picked for Vice-President, due to the wondrous combination of being an obedient apparatchik and having the right sex (or would it be “gender”?) and skin color to ensure the needed “diversity” (jargon for having the exact same ideas in widely different bodies).

When the time came for having primaries to pick a candidate for the 2024 election, they were perfunctorily set aside because Biden would run again and it would be impolite to put obstacles in his path. Then they kept saying he was smart as a whip until it was too late for opening new primaries, and all of a sudden the same lady who couldn’t get any votes four years earlier was anointed candidate. No real primaries needed, as last time she had proved not to be that great on this kind of thing. Even Soviet successions were more democratic.

But Trump is the greatest danger Democracy® ever faced, of course.

At the same time, the fake misunderstandings that are common in politics, in which twisting the words of the adversary to make him look bad has always been commonplace, were taken to a point I have never seen in any country. Hyperbolic BS, a Trumpian specialty, was taken as so many declarations of intent. Project 2025, the wet dream of some right-wing think tank, was publicized as if it were Trump’s platform, even after he said he had nothing to do with it and hadn’t even read it (reading is not his thing anyway). People were told to “google Project 2025”, in a nod to the “do your own research” crowd who gave us the Flat Earth and other, ahem, interesting stuff.

All that proved beyond a doubt that Trump was (who else?) Hitler redivivus! They even managed to get some guy to say that Trump had supposedly told him he wanted to have generals like Hitler’s. The left should like that, by the way, as Hitler’s generals tried to kill him a few times, but let’s not allow History to intrude into such a good way to throw the-name-that-shall-not-be-named into our story, right?

Within the leftist bubble, whose prisoners seemed unable to glimpse outside, it all made some sense. Sometimes real life intruded, but that was taken care of, too. If I had a penny for every time I read something along the lines of “the economy is doing great, and your empty pocket is an illusion”, I’d be a rich man by now. Seen from the outside, from a small farm in the Brazilian mountains, however, it was all frankly quite dystopic. The way Mrs. Harris and her shaved-Santa sidekick became the object of such an intense outpouring of tenderness(!) from the second she was anointed candidate, as if she hadn’t been merely the uninspiring Vice-President in an unpopular administration until ten minutes earlier. An administration that called itself Biden-Harris, by the way; an absolute novelty, as Vice-Presidents are usually ignored. The way Trump — who, after having been President for four years, is certainly much more of a known quantity than Mrs. Harris herself — became literally Hitler overnight. I mean, come on, he may have many character defects, but he is certainly not a guy who could pretend to be a run-of-the-mill Republican president for four years, only waiting for his reelection to show his true Hitlerian colors. If anything, he wears his heart (which is emblazoned with a picture of himself admiring another picture of himself, and so on, ad infinitum) on his sleeve.

From my foreign point of view, it was as if there were two different worlds. In one of them, a regular political campaign was going on and a (hyperbolic and weirdly orange-faced) candidate talked about the economy, jobs, taxes, immigrants, public safety, and the rest of the quite short list of things that matter to the common man. In the other, our beloved (although until ten minutes ago virtually unknown) Brown Mommy and Pink Daddy were saving the world Democracy® from the Orange Hitler, who not only is literally, honest-to-God literally, Hitler, but who has also promised to reduce all women to slavery, probably forcing them to wear those weird red-nun outfits from some dystopic TV series in which their only function in the world was reproduction. Oh, and he also promised that he would put an end to elections, in general. And he would probably send people to concentration camps or cotton plantations, according to the color of their skin. And send the Army against everybody who voted against him. And did I tell y’all he is literally Hitler?

Trump certainly spouts tons of bovine excrement whenever he speaks, but it’s clearly just the kind of extravagant speech a guy who really thinks he looks better when his face is painted orange will shoot off his mouth. “Haitians are eating our pets” is clearly a hyperbolic and overblown way of saying “the arrival of too many people with strong cultural differences change our society in ways we cannot predict, but that are probably for the worse.” That’s traditional fear tactics to drive the point home: politics as usual. But the other side would at the same time “fact-check” it into “no Haitians have been proved to have eaten any pet”, which is idiotic and misses the point, and transform it into “even legal immigrants, such as the Haitians, will be sent to concentration camps”, which is delirious. If he said “I like Coke better than Pepsi”, it would become “all Pepsi drinkers will be shot.” He called Mrs. Harris a “low IQ lady”, which is rude, but they would call him (for the umpteenth time) Literal Hitler and fill all articles about him with adjectives such as “brutal”, “violent”, and so on, when he is the guy who famously ended up not sending the National Guard against protesters, even after the protests had degenerated into riots and a police station had been vacated so that an Anarchist “autonomous zone” could be established. All that in the midst of a global pandemic. Even Carter would have probably sent the National Guard.

About the stuff that matters to regular folks, those boring subjects like being able to live with the money made by one’s hard work, nothing. Nada. Zilch. It was just like when a hot-air balloon flies over my farm and I can see the tourists in its gondola, but I can only imagine what they are saying. Nothing that reaches the ground, that’s for sure.

(From the ground, that’s how things look. I took this picture with a telephoto lens, but I don’t know if they could even see me from way up high)

When the results came, there was a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth from the balloon gondola. Google News was all like that:

When more details appeared, however, one thing became very clear: Trump was not elected by a small cabal of Nazi misogynists bent on enslaving everybody. He was elected by everybody: men and women; the young, the middle-aged, and the old; people from all races and classes. He had more votes than before in virtually every one of the so many categories in which one can subdivide an electorate. He was elected by people who were worried about the stuff the common man (and woman, of course; it’s implicit, but these days…) worries about: the economy, crime, and so on.

On the other hand, those who voted for The Woman of Color and her pink-cheeked shaved-Santa sidekick voted for them because they cared about highfalutin abstractions such as the famous Democracy® that is imperiled by Zombie Orange Hitler, but not by anointed ex-nihil candidates, or (a tad, but not much, closer to the ground) Reproductive Rights that seem to be only about stopping reproduction after it has already occurred. The fact that Trump promised to veto any attempt at a federal abortion ban notwithstanding.

Those who voted for Trump, in other words, voted on the ground, about things that matter on the ground, while unsurprisingly, those who voted for the folks who threw a histrionical campaign from way up high about grandiloquent abstractions voted because of the same abstractions. It’s not that they don’t live in the real world, or because they don’t care about the things that have always mattered both in electoral campaigns and in the Ancient Chinese perception of whether a ruler had the Mandate of Heaven. It’s because social media made it possible to isolate people within thought bubbles and fill those with so much foam that abstractions become as scary as reality, if not more so.

For instance, somewhere in the internet, I came across the following iPhone prints of a dialogue that, seen from the ground, is much scarier than the scariest Trumpian supposed threat to Democracy®:

Even if we recognize in it the same Puritan out-of-here-you-heretics folkway that led to the infamous Salem witch trials, what we have here is a mother who was tolerant enough to drive an Anarchist son to his political meetings being proudly excommunicated by her daughter because she dares to worry about the price of eggs instead of embracing the scary accusations that substituted for a campaign on the Left, instead of fighting Literal Hitler, as her virtue-signaling daughter prides herself in doing. The deluded young lady is so proud she printed the conversation and uploaded it to the Internet so that her “virtue” in breaking the Fourth Commandment could be flaunted to the many.

This is not to say there is no cult of personality around Trump, of course. Until 2020, the madness of Q-Anon (which seems to me to have been a very successful psychological warfare operation undertaken by real pros on behalf of the Left) reigned in some corners, just as now there are many “Evangelical” preachers and followers who see Trump as a kind of Messiah or, at least, a new Cyrus — who was not a member of the Chosen People but brought it back to the Holy Land. It doesn’t seem to be the case for this poor suffering mother, though; the little of her writing her daughter allowed to reach us as a prologue to her long adolescent virtue-signaling speech shows a lady who adheres to the classical Liberal values of political tolerance and familial unity. The reason her daughter despises so much as a justification for her mother’s vote is the price of eggs, after all, not Trump’s supposed Chosenness.

Ironically, the very fact that this young lady feels not only justified but positively virtuous in publicly dishonoring her mother already proves that not only democracy, but even politics are no longer possible. There is no more polis, therefore no more real politics, democratic or otherwise, when there no longer is any common ground, as I wrote just the other day. The young lady’s first reason to dislike hate Trump is that Orange Man “openly mocks” some protected identities she enumerates. Then she lists Trump’s moral failures (which, I must say, are essentialy the kinds of things any realist should expect from politicians, high executives, or other strongly ego-driven people), starting with adultery. Monica Lewinsky, it’s your cue. Well, at least she didn’t vote for Trump:

Another clear sign that democracy is no longer something to be protected, but rather mourned, has also been proudly shouted from the rooftops (or the balloon) during this campaign its supposed protectors: lawfare against a former American president. While it is only to be expected in other countries (in Brazil there is a saying, “For one’s friends, everything; for one’s enemies, the law”, and I won’t even start with the French), a President of the United States of America has always been a kind of high priest of the Civic Religion. Even his adversaries would always treat him with respect after the end of his presidency, and the mere idea of seeking reasons to sue him would be seen as disrespectful not of his person, but of the very institution he embodied while POTUS.

If Bill Clinton’s life had been gone over with a fine comb as Trump’s was, how many more scandals would have been unearthed? If the many mysteries in Obama’s life were brought to the front pages, what would happen? If Biden’s known shady dealings were brought to the courts, how many more would appear when the threads were pulled? If in Trump’s case one single instance of not-even-that-creative accounting (putting down as expenses with a lawyer the reimbursement of money paid by the lawyer to a blackmailer) became dozens of different felony convictions, the sky’s the limit.

Lawfare against Trump was so abusive he had to ask the Supreme Court to make into law what heretofore had been a courtesy and grant Presidents some degree of immunity, something that opens a whole new can of worms and doesn’t bode well for democracy either. The same happened to his assistants: Rudy Giuliani and almost all of Trump’s other lawyers have been disbarred and prosecuted. A judge wants Giuliani to give away a watch he inherited from his grandfather! That would be already bad enough, if democracy were more than a buzzword, but it got much worse when those evidently partisan and political convictions were used as arguments… against Trump.

Meanwhile, the common folk was seen by the democracy-wrecking Saviors of Democracy Against the Orange Menace as “natives who need civilizing”, “deplorables” 2.0, or “garbage”. It took Bernie Sanders, of all people, to state that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Working class people, just as middle class people and all other people Mr. Sanders’ ideology refuses to acknowledge as such, care about those things that for the Chinese of old implied the mandate of Heaven: jobs, safety, wages, groceries, taxes. Things on the ground, things that can barely be glimpsed from a balloon flying so high above the ground, from which meaningless buzzwords ring as softly as the warble of distant birds.