How Is It Even Close? How Is This Possible?

We are two-odd weeks out from a presidential election with one of the contenders the most wildly unqualified candidate in American history and it couldn’t be closer. How can this be?

The fact that it can even be close at all tells us there is a massive failure on the part of the status quo, the “system,” the ruling class—call it whatever you want—such that half of the electorate would rather burn it down than give it any more time to fix itself.

That fact alone—the intractability of the MAGA movement's rage and its possession of half of the electorate—tells us that the country is going to be impossible to govern, no matter who wins.

If Harris wins, we will at best have a simmering, low-intensity Civil War for at least the next four years. If Trump wins, it won’t matter because the country we thought we lived in won’t exist any more.

Here’s a quick, admittedly only cursory, snapshot of who Donald Trump is:

• He’s a 34-time convicted felon.
• He’s an adjudicated rapist.
• He a failed insurrectionist who tried to overthrow the government.
• He’s a convicted tax fraud.
• He’s a six-time bankrupt business failure masquerading as a business tycoon.
• He’s indicted for 50+ other crimes, trials awaiting.
• He’s a twice divorced, swaggering adulterer.
• He’s a pathological liar.
• He’s called those who serve their country “suckers and losers.”
• He continues to rant about immigrants eating people’s cats and dogs.
• He claims Democrats sanction the murder of newly-born babies.
• He says schools are changing the sex of children while they’re at school.
• His jock talk marvels at the size of Arnold Palmer’s Five Iron.
• He says he’s coming after “the enemy within,” meaning you.
• He says his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed.
• He says we need to terminate the Constitution.
• His Chief of Staff, two Defense Secretaries, National Security Adviser, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—those who know him best and are closest to the levers of the highest power—all say he is unfit for the office of the presidency and a danger to the country.

Again, this is only a drive-by chronicling of Trump’s more obvious, odious infirmities and disqualifications for office. There was a time when any one of these would have disqualified a candidate from even being considered by his party.

Yet, Trump is fervently and religiously embraced by, what, maybe 70 million adults? And, it’s not at all clear that he won’t be the next president.

What does this tell us?

First, it tells us that there is a knock-down, drag-out fight between the Olympians and the Titans of our Reigning Oligarchy. The Trump wing of the Oligarchy is what we can call the “Burn it Down” branch. Its brain is Steve Bannon, seconded by Elon Musk.

In that world, chaos follows Trump’s ascension and it’s all turned over to the lesser oligarchs to rearrange the bouncing rubble in whatever fashion they see fit.

Social Security is privatized, handed over to the tender ministrations of Wall Street. Medicare, too, with trillions of dollars of “savings” creamed off to the Oligarchs. Most federal regulations are abolished, including those that protect workplace safety, the food supply, airline safety, the air and water, the integrity of the financial system, and people’s privacy from abuse by their digital overlords. The enemy from within will be quickly silenced, even if that means imprisoned or eliminated.

Don’t imagine that Trump or Bannon are bluffing about any of this. It is precisely their promise to deliver this dystopia—and their capacity to do so—that has their billionaire buddies licking their chops and writing the Big Checks to fund their run at it.

The other branch of our Reigning Oligarchy we can call the “Patch It Up and Try to Salvage It” wing. “Patch It Up,” for short. That is the branch currently in the driver’s seat, the one invested in the slow, steady, methodical but relentlessly successful disenfranchisement of the working and middle classes and the strangulation of democracy in all but appearances.

But they’ve gotta go slow or the people (aka frogs in the pot) will notice the temperature of the water rising too quickly, and they’ll jump out. Barack Obama is the mouthpiece, maybe even the titular brain behind this wing. The truth is we’re not allowed to know. It’s all occluded in the gauzy, unctuous symbology of Democracy and Freedom and Liberty and Opportunity and such.

This was Bill Clinton, passing NAFTA and shafting tens of millions of metal benders in the industrial Midwest. It was his ending welfare as we knew it, while deregulating the banking, financial, and telecommunications industries. It was Obama handing $16 trillion to recapitalize the banks that went bankrupt in the Great Recession that they, themselves, had caused, while letting 10 million homeowners lose their homes to the foreclosure of predatory mortgages that the selfsame banks had issued. It is Biden and Harris funding and lustily cheerleading the 21^st Century’s first televised genocide, all the while threatening World War III in Ukraine. Like Upton Sinclair said one time: “An honest politician is one who, once bought, stays bought.”

This wing is more strategic than the Burn-It-Down wing. Its highest priority is to keep hidden the strings on the political puppets that are danced before us to convince us that we have a working democracy. If people can see the strings, then the illusion is blown. And so, it’s all about elections. We are asked to watch "debates" or "participate" in town halls. We attend the rallies and listen to the stump speeches. From the July of 4^th parades. to "Stars and Stripes Forever"—it’s all so entrancing, isn’t it? It's all so Hollywood and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. We so love our national mythologies, don’t we, especially the ones that flatter us that we’re in control of our common destiny?

They don’t want us to know that democracy—which is when the will of the people becomes enacted as public policy—requires not just elections, but legislating, as well. There, behind closed doors and in what used to be called “smoke-filled rooms” the real business of government is enacted as legislation. But we know that it is not the will of the people. It is the will of the Oligarchs, which is why they continue to fund it all. It's a Potemkin Democracy. Just don’t tell the people.

The business in those smoke-filled rooms is transferring the nation’s wealth, built up over centuries, to the already wealthiest (boy, is that ever working); slowly removing “burdensome” regulations to liberate the entrepreneurial energies of capitalism; greenlighting monopoly control of all sectors of the economy; privatizing everything that can be sold off; sluicing anything to the weapons makers that they demand; allowing the judiciary to be stuffed by right wing ideologues so that it can constrain anarchic, radical impulses like the right to vote, the right to control your own body, and the right to protest genocide being carried out in our names; it is allowing billionaires and corporations to put any amount of money they want into buying national elections, all the while calling it “Democracy.” That’s the Potemkin part.

This is the battle between the two branches of the Neoliberal Order that is our true, reigning, even if disguised and disavowed, national secular religion.

Beyond this Cosmic Battle Between the Oligarchs, our enrapturement with Donald Trump tells us that major powers in the media back his anointment to the presidency. How else could such a horrifically malignant force be allowed to dominate not just American politics, but American culture, as well? And for now, going on decades.

Watch any of the major cable networks and see how they interview an endless stream of Trump surrogates. It’s 2 minutes of letting the surrogates spew their mesmerizing, psychotic bile, with a feckless “fact check” at the end. Which presence, which narrative, do you think retains resonance with the viewers? It’s clear which one does. The fact that the surrogates keep coming tells you that they believe it’s working.

Or, read the top newspapers and political web sites. There’s the shameless euphemizing (“sanewashing”) of Trump’s most heinous, unhinged issuances. The normalizing of the lying, the grifting, the conspiracy mongering, the hate, the racism, the derogation of national sacraments like democracy and the rule of law. It’s the signaling of social acceptance accorded through the servile issuance of thuggishly perfumed social notice.

It’s like what used to be the status achieved in making the Society pages, or the Social Register, only now it’s the Political Pages and the Election Register. It is fawning, envious sycophancy, masquerading as journalism. It is the signaling from our betters about which cultural totems we are obliged to genuflect and bow down before.

Finally—and this doesn’t begin to exhaust the proctology of public pathology—is the collapse of culture that is signified in Trump’s elevation as our culture’s dominant avatar.

At one time, our culture venerated in its leaders and people such traits as dignity, thoughtfulness, self-restraint, civility, service, depth of character, courage, sacrifice, integrity, steadfastness, and honor. Remember? Even a scofflaw as noxious as Richard Nixon had to pay at least nominal homage to such cultural standards. Remember?

This is how the Greeks invented Western Civilization. Hesiod and Homer and Aesop and Sophocles and Euripides told ennobling stories to themselves, about themselves, in order to birth themselves, as themselves. It worked.

Do you see any of that in the adulation, indeed, the deification of Donald Trump? What you see is exactly the opposite.

You see the desecration of every one of those aforementioned-character ideals. Trump is garbage gilded as golden tennis shoes or a gold-plated toilet. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Entitlement personified. Imperious. Condescending. A coward phony to the core. Never took responsibility for anything. The dirtiest, most derelict, degenerate, dangerous deceiver ever to command the public’s attention. And he is sanctified in our culture, not in spite of these failings, but precisely for them. That is the tipoff.

Trump hasn’t so much failed us as we have failed ourselves in holding ourselves and our institutions to standards that we can respect. We have allowed our culture and media to become sewers, and tolerated in our politics and public personas dirtbags, lowlifes, grifters—are there any words of opprobrium that carry enough odium to awaken us from our besotted, bottom-dwelling revery? It doesn’t look like there are.

Simply put, Trump is who we as a nation have become because he is who we have idolized. Yes, yes, I see Kamala Harris, the standard bearer of the Patch-It-Up wing, dutifully, chirpily, joyfully begging for just one more chance on behalf of her string-pullers to make it all right.

My fear is not only that she might be too late. I’m not even sure anymore that she’s even right. She’s not going to begin to fix the systemic, engineered failings that gave birth to the endemic Burn-It-Down MAGA vengeance that threatens to, well, burn it down. And that surely will. That is precisely not why she is where she is in the first place.

She has spent her entire life as a standard bearer of the Patch-It-Up wing of the neoliberal order, which is to say, follow the same ends as the Burn-It-Down branch, but with more taste, more elan, more discretion, more nuance, more patience, more artfulness, more subtlety, more savoir faire, more grace, more (dare we say it?) Joy. But follow the ends, to be sure.

That is why Harris is who she is, and is where she is. You can’t let the temperature rise too quickly or the frogs will jump out of the pot, as the MAGA folks already have. Ultimately, that is why we are where we are today: perilously poised on the precipice of presidential perdition. Meanwhile, the shelf life of redemptive Joy—with all of the gravitas it ever deserved—is long since expired.