Of course, if I were an American I would vote yes Kamal Harris. Of course, I hoped for her victory, at least for a while. As election day approached, that hope waned, until it almost evaporated. Less because of the change in mood in the polls, more because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Kamala's victory, at this stage of decay and obfuscation, would America and holy was - unnatural. And unnatural things rarely happen in politics.
When Trump first won, I was surprised because I thought it was not only bad, harmful, shameful, etc. but also - unnatural. Maybe I didn't recognize the strength of the trend in time, or maybe everything just happened in an awkward evolutionary moment of the snake's skin, exactly when the previously unnatural becomes the new natural. After all, don't forget: Hillary got three million more votes than the orange creature from the green lagoon. The USA is the only country in the world (not counting those in which elections are stolen en gro, because they are not states, they are more modern armed tribes with chiefs prone to cannibalism) in which elections can be lost in this way. Now, Trump won Kamala by an even more convincing margin, winning many places where for generations it was believed that someone who did not vote for the Democrats would have his hand withered, his wheat would never grow white again, and his only son would become a mobster, a lawyer or a copywriter.
So what happened in the meantime? "Elite" and "deep state" became the most hated words, and by God, so did "meritocracy", although it was not yet clear what exactly that meant, but it is clear that something was designed to destroy the strings of the "little man". Fortunately, there are characters like Trump to defend him... A visitor from Neptune would think that the orange man must have been a bum picked up from a bench on the banks of the Hudson or a laid-off steel worker in Pittsburgh, not a neglected parasite of the caste of the big caste ("The Family Tarana") of the nouveau riche who went through life without learning anything, because he didn't even need any knowledge to make a living from it. I couldn't even swear that he had learned to operate an elevator, since I can easily imagine that he had never been alone in an elevator in his life.
Okay, but knowledge is not everything in life - even Einstein was not the president of the world - so what about other virtues? Honesty, modesty, truthfulness... Even Trump's voters will not tell you that they have ever detected traces of something like that in him.
"We" may not have understood what was happening, but Trump did; predator instinct. A few days before the first election that he will win, Trump says: "I could kill a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue right now, and I would still win." "We" are appalled, but we are somewhat comforted by his naivety. He wins. Granted, he didn't shoot anyone, but we realize that he really could have, and we try to see where this new world we've woken up leads us. Our heads are like a GPS that resets the settings after the driver did not turn onto the highway as it should have been only logical, but on a wild field path.
What's boiling somewhere underneath it all? Processes of long duration, as always. Let's go back to the time before GPS. It is infinitely useful to watch movies, read books, listen to music and read newspapers and magazines from 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago. The war is already a relatively long time ago, the ruins and hunger have emerged, contempt for every "f" from fascism is almost universal, we live in consolidated democracies, freedoms of all kinds - political, trade union, artistic, sexual - are growing and spreading. At least this is the life of Western Europe and North America - and others trot after them, no matter how far they go. The South is not among the worst... Of course, this is not the time for idealization, by no means: the Cold War with its risks and paranoia, America that is just starting to emerge from informal apartheid and plunges into Vietnam and similar shit, Germany that is "healing" its identity trauma, among other things and crazy left-wing terrorism, Italy which adds right-wing terrorism and two large and countless small mafias to it, France which does not know how to deal with Algeria neither as a colony nor as a an "independent country" which, with its neighbors, is slowly beginning the siege of Paris, but everyone pretends not to see it because the Gods of the Left will roast you for paying too much attention to mere facts and too little to class consciousness, which alone gives facts real meaning, Britain according to the IRA, but also which is dragged to one edge of ruin by the dilettante Labor government, and then pushed to the other edge of ruin by Thatcherism, which sometimes looks like a cytostatic to treat a cold...
BUT, in spite of everything, for the most part, people live well, freely, and even economically quite peacefully. The "Golden Decades" got that name for a reason.
Look at who then leads the states, who the majority votes for. Angels and geniuses? Just work. But, people with competencies at least in politics, and usually in something else, far above the "ordinary voter". Honest enough that they are not thieves (well, Italians don't count 🙂 ) and if they are, they will end up in prison and certainly out of politics. They would end their political career if they pushed a passer-by a little more roughly on Fifth Avenue or overtook a tractor in a full lane. They provide everyone with "freedom to bark", but not themselves. No one will arrest you if you say that "immigrants are eating our dogs and cats" in some murky bar, but the president of the state or government who would say that would first be sent to an insane asylum under rotation, and then to further proceedings.
Today, it's sexy for a voter to vote for someone who's much more unhinged than himself. Most of the voters of Trump, Orban, Putin, Vučić are much better and better people than them.
