“Kids are attacking old people on the bus! Teenagers wilding churchgoing ladies for no reason! People are being pushed off the tracks on the New York subway! America is coming apart and these people want to defund the police!”
On Fox News, the Z-list midday presenter is gabbing away at the camera as vision cuts to the attack in question — phone video of a middle-aged Black lady being kicked and shoved off a bus in Washington DC by a bunch of kids she had told to stop cussin’.
Over the next four hours — we have the thing running non-stop at the Quality Inn Riverfront in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where we have established the US affairs desk — different shows will feature the same footage four times. “America is being mugged by crime!” Sean Hannity yells, as it comes round again. Crime wave? There’s only one crime!
Fox is running big on crime ahead of the US midterms. It has other videos, of kids rush-looting a convenience store in Philadelphia, of someone being pushed off a platform in the New York subway, but the church lady is the favourite, now running into day three.
This is real get-out-the-base stuff, aimed at its elderly white viewers and few others. It’s got a few more extra features than your old fashioned law and order campaign, since the focus on crime can be connected to the “defund the police” push of Black Lives Matter — an organisation to which Joe Biden has given some very limited praise.
Inconveniently, it also has the support of reality. Crime may be down overall by the statistics, but a certain type of random street crime — unplanned, disorganised, haphazardly violent — is up, a product of the general coming-apart of everything here.
Coming apart? Are things coming apart? Certainly seems to be on the right-wing news channels, of which Fox is now firmly towards the centre. Newsmax and Blaze Media have none of Fox’s qualms about going with the full “stop the steal” movement.
The hard right channels have gone full culture war and conspiracy: plenty of public bathrooms and book-burning stuff, and Joe Biden and the Democrats have allegedly deliberately killed US energy independence in order to weaken the country so that it will have to submit to a one-world government, all as part of the “Great Replacement”. Here, millions of illegal immigrants will so flood the US that white, non-Latino people are an ever-smaller minority, not only killing the ruling American ethnos but providing the Democrats with a permanent majority. Democrats’ defence of abortion on-demand up to full term is part of this nefarious plot, encouraging good white girls to trash their babies.
Trouble is, there’s enough truth in some of this to give conspirators stuff to rub together. The Democrats have long had a brute force demographic strategy, based on maximising the proportion of Black and Latino voters — as well as Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans who vote Democrat about 2:1 — though are less keen on the Caucasian extinction, most Democrats being snow-white themselves. With the Democrats also losing on the economic issue, this election may see the lowest white, working-class Democrat vote to date.
Coming apart? Well yes, if you watch CNN or MSNBC too, which are running strong on the Democrats’ favoured themes: the election of pro-Trump 2020 election deniers, and the Republicans’ push to ban abortion nationally. This is even less hysterical than Fox, by which I mean absolutely rock-solid, literal.
On the Republican side, election deniers managed to replace traditional Republicans in the primaries in several key states. Given that everything gets directly elected in US states, from governor to dog catcher, this would mean the potential upvote of several full slates of people who might — might? Will! — refuse to certify the 2024 presidential election results if Trump or Ron DeSantis or Kanye West happen to lose.
Democrats are now panicking again after a few weeks of calm because the polls are turning against them. Having been in the doldrums for months up to June this year and facing a catastrophic wipeout, they were risen up miraculously by the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade and allowed numerous states to bring in gruesome anti-abortion laws.
Further initiatives by Biden such as student loan forgiveness and the pardoning of federal prisoners jailed for marijuana possession helped bring in groups broad and narrow (dropout stoners careless with their weed). Then Congress passed the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, albeit in an eviscerated form. This contained many cost-of-living measures such as prescription cost ceilings, which the Dems presumed would further buttress their lead. With abortion and the right to choose as the linchpin, they began to dream again of holding the House (they currently have a five-seat majority) and winning the Senate.
That is now looking dodgy. So what went wrong?
Well, inflation is raging again. The prices are crazy here in a country where cheap gas and cheap soda are seen as God-given rights. Rents are going through the roof. The base interest rate is 6%. The deep cause is ever-increasing profit share. People are being gouged for every spare penny. It’s everywhere.
The yet-deeper cause is cartelisation and price-fixing. But the size of the stimulus package has contributed to the most recent spike — or people believe it has — and the sheer inability of the government to correct for it has got people blaming them for their wages being diluted and their savings being steadily eaten up.
The Republicans have no real answers to the problem and so rely on a nebulous idea of growth through, guess what, higher rate tax cuts. Indeed, a few weeks ago they were lauding Liz Truss’s “borrow to cut tax rates” plan as truly visionary. Having gone quiet about that now, they have nothing left to say.
But they don’t need to say anything. The disquiet is building.
Biden said in a speech last week that the numbers were now running against the Democrats, but that they will come back before polling day, and that early voting showed a strong turn up of the sort of people who vote Democrat. Well, it will need to be a big lift to give them the result they want.
They have a five-seat majority in the House. The House has 435 seats, but only about 75 of them are in any way competitive. Really it’s about 30 or so seats, and that seems too many to hold the Republicans to less than five net gains. Should they lose the House, the new Speaker will be Kevin McCarthy, a professional politician who has signed on for pretty much all of the Trump-steal-conspiracy stuff, is opposed to the US’ lavish “support” for running a proxy war in Ukraine (good), but only because he loves Putin so very much (bad). He will unleash chaos if he controls the House, from switching off the January 6 putsch investigations, to starting his own of Biden and his failson Hunter.
In the Senate there are a half dozen races, some of which shouldn’t have been close. Here in Pennsylvania, ageing, stroke-injured, grey-goatteed hoodie-hipster John Fetterman is running for the Democrats against TV doctor Mehmet Oz. In Georgia, footballer Herschel Walker is running for the Republicans on a strong anti-abortion ticket, despite having allegedly paid for at least one himself.
In Arizona, the 70s-TV-show named Blake Masters has been running on an explicit “stop the steal” ticket. Democrat holds in Nevada and Washington are also in play. The Democrats can’t lose any net Senate seats (Pennsylvania would be a win; they may also pick up one in Wisconsin) — with de facto independent Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema it is already difficult enough to get anything through.
Of the governors’ races, the most important by far is Arizona, where former TV news presenter Kari Lake is running full-tilt against the media she came from; a Trump-style troll campaign with a distinctively bitchy flavour, as an alternative to Trump’s air de arsehole style. She has said she’ll accept the election as valid if she wins. The most important of the many ballot measures is Kentucky number two which, like the defeated Kansas measure in July, would put a state ban on abortion in the state’s constitution.
If the pro-Trump candidates get up in the Senate, and Lake in Arizona, and amendment two in Kentucky, well, Gilead hath cometh.
Out in the real America? Well a half-hour of stroll through Harrisburg, all colonial row houses and portentous post-war civic buildings, a church disgorging a huge congregation in Sunday best, suggested that it was all a beat-up.
But another half-hour into the place’s half-dead downtown cancelled that suggestion — filled as it was with the largely harmless and sad homeless, what they call “sketchy” types. Half the restaurants were closed down, half the few shops empty, and in those that were open a sullen mood prevails.
This has been noticeable throughout, from the airport onwards. The cheery bouncy America is largely gone, save for places where it’s an affected, contrasting style. And the TV ads of course, where everyone is hypomanic and most of the products being spruiked are “second” anti-depressants to add to the ones you’re already taking.
Everywhere else there’s a numbed, mild hostility, an unmistakeable change from, say, a decade ago. The dream has died, you work simply to reproduce yourself, and no one has any simple answer about how anyone, or the country, will get out of that.
The Uber drivers, the convenience store clerks, the hotel receptionists are scathing about all politicians, and the refrain is the same: the everyday corruption, the unchanging realities, the conveyer belt from politics to business.
The nation is being mugged by reality over and over again. Will it respond by retreating deeper into fantasy — the dream of a republic, and what may prove its final one?
