Well, it was a hell of a Friday.
First thing in the morning, Elon Musk bought Twitter, the private-sector website that has become a global public square. In a tweet, he announced that “the bird is free” and that “comedy returns to Twitter”. A couple of hours later he was acting on that, sacking CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives who will take more than A$200 million in payouts (if they win lawsuits — Musk apparently fired them for cause).
Musk also announced that he would be sacking up to three-quarters of the staff. The right rejoiced in the new ownership, while the left wondered if he’d crash the whole thing.
While this was happening, breaking news later that morning announced that Paul Pelosi, House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s octogenarian husband, had been attacked with a hammer in their San Francisco home. Details emerged through the day. Speaker Pelosi herself had been absent from the place, and hence her security was absent too. Mr Pelosi had been attacked with a hammer. He had a fractured skull, but was going to make “a full recovery”, it was said, which seemed unlikely.
Around lunchtime, it was announced that Jerry Lee Lewis, last of the first crop of white rockers, had died at the improbable age of 87, a signifying event that no one really had time to react to.
By mid-afternoon, there was a real late-Weimar mood settling across the whole country. Your correspondent was in Washington DC, floating between think tanks, and in the imperial capital, minds were being concentrated: the guy who owned all the satellites now owned the social media that all the elites use. Mr Pelosi’s attacker had been said to have been yelling “Where’s Nancy?” as he attacked; the police had interrupted the assault as the two had grappled over the hammer. The attack bought outpourings of sympathy from everyone, although some were slow to make them — including Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, Pelosi’s rival.
The events darkened an already dark day at the end of a dark week for the Democrats, as they faced the increased likelihood that, bar some exceptional conditions, they were facing another shellacking.
Everywhere you look, Republicans appear to have the energy, the audacity and the numbers. They have no alternative program whatsoever, simply the mantra of cutting taxes to release growth, which will magically raise wages and thus fight inflation. But at least they’ve got a mantra. The Democrats, as James Carville was basically ranting about last week, can’t seem to roll out the basic big fear that they need: to scare people off the GOP.
That would be the charge that the Republicans want to abolish social security — government-owned and guaranteed superannuation — and gut Medicare, the over-65s universal public health care system. Which is perfectly true — abolishing social security means privatising it, like, um, our system. (Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone the US is to the left of us on this aspect of social provision.) Republicans desperately want to, they’ve made no secret of it, so why did the full attack only start to get rolled out this week?
The Democrats left it too late to pivot, is one answer. They spent so much time getting out the base — using the attack on democracy, and the abortion issue, the story goes — that they left a couple of weeks’ gap in which they weren’t on the attack on real core issues, and in which the emphasis on “base” causes thus also served to alienate independent and moderate voters. But that suggests a tactical error where some see a basic arrogance and lassitude at play. This theory goes that many Democrats just cannot see past the unquestionably serious, thuggish, anti-democratic intent of the Republicans and focus on how much less of a factor that is for many people, compared to the really stunning inflation — which, in consumer goods, is mostly price-gouging by cartels, under the cover of some global inflation — and the sense of crime rising and going unresponded to.
Many of their potential supporters don’t see much democracy going on in their lives — there’s no Bernie Sanders campaign, few real alternatives, and the same professional pols by and large became the party’s nominees as hitherto. Abortion is important for many, many women, of course, and not a few men, but the huge energy given to it, excluding other matters, has some people suspicious that they’re being played in a culture war.
There is far more energy and possibility on the other side. Many of the Republican primaries were competitive — a bunch of time servers got thrown out, vacancies attracted new candidates willing to say anything and everything to get elected. Many of the male candidates are celebrities — author JD Vance in the Ohio senate race, Dr Oz in Pennsylvania Senate, and former football star Herschel Walker in Georgia.
Many of the women aren’t, and they have a “called to duty” sort of vibe. Kari Lake, the possible future election-denying governor of Arizona was a minor TV figure. Tudor Dixon, going up against Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, is a “working mom on a mission”. Tiffany Smiley — running for the Senate in Washington state against Patty Murray, the original “mom in tennis sneakers” candidate — is the wife of a vet blinded in Afghanistan.
All of these candidates and others were either found, having stuck their hand up for primary consideration, or hunted out by professionals, looking for political republican tiger mamas. However they got there, they have then all had professional political training by various Washington political skunkworks outfits, so they come back to their state campaigns spitting fire.
The male celeb candidates appear to have been left to their own devices to bumble and shamble through, in a sort of aw-shucks manner. Their hamfisted opportunism is comic; history appears to repeat as tragedy, farce and then, in Senate 2022, as a series of Judd Apatow movies.
You can see Jack Black playing JD Vance (plot for movie: author-candidate is an LA sleaze who stole a hillbilly cred manuscript from a dying Okie meth-addict. Now he must spruik everything he despises), and Jay Pharoah playing Herschel Walker, the former football star now accused of bullying two women into getting abortions (movie plot: the brain-damaged spokesperson for brain-damaged football players is so loved he wins the Republican nomination by a write-in campaign and they must run with him).
John Fetterman, the Democrat Senate candidate for Pennsylvania? I’m not sure he’s not actually Seth Rogen doing a slow-burn deepfake (plot for movie: just more brain damage. Title: Senator Scarecrow. Tagline: “In America, when you’ve got a heart, who needs a brain?” Trailer: “Solsbury Hill” starts playing over montage as former rural mayor “Scarecrow” Scarrow, victim of a javelin through the head at the state fair, drools at lectern, hugs lampposts, etc — all the way to victory).
The low mood in the Democrat camp is because Republicans are winning in places it put money into — and also in races it gave up on, such as Georgia and Ohio (after Vance disappeared off the trail for months). They’re now within one point of Patty Murray in pretty blue Washington state, in New Hampshire, and even in Georgia, which would be like electing a hibiscus to the Senate.
Watching the debates on C-Span, one is struck by the energy and poise of the Republicans, and the tiredness and arrogant disengagement of the Democrats. This is part of the great cultural widening of America; the Republican side valorises that sort of rattlesnake energy, that relentlessness; progressives value the more reserved, bookish, responsible sense.
But it’s also the institutional sclerosis of the Democrats. Some of these incumbents should simply have bowed out this time around. The party has the air of a vast, ageing, creaking Rube Goldberg machine, all pullies and flywheels and ancient heads. The prospect of anyone looking at this party as the expression of youth and energy and determination are on the low side.
The attack on Paul Pelosi may have been horrifying, but shots of the Pelosis’ vast mansion where it occurred reminded people that they are nine-figure super-rich. When Musk took over Twitter, it reminded everyone that power and institutions are now shifting here at a speed that is completely beyond the control of government.
By Friday evening, as Halloween started to come near, all narratives were coming apart. Anti-Semites and “alt-right” white supremacists were racing back onto Twitter, cyber-wilding selected victims to test the limits of the new regime’s free speech dicta. Paul Pelosi’s assailant was revealed to be, allegedly, David DePape, whose profile as a nudist activist (Frisco, baby) gave the right a fillip before his online profile revealed conspiracy, anti-Semitism and election denial, and his friends said he was seriously mentally ill, had been for decades.
The only possible caveat to all this is that a lot of the polls are cheapish state-level ones, done for media to have something to talk about; and that the basic framework of US life — social media texting, TikTok, Zoom, etc — has so outstripped any polling model that it is not picking up the gains that thousands of quiet small-scale, fragmented, specific progressive campaigns are making, beneath the noise and bluster of the right.
If that’s so, and the Democrats do well, then the attractions of free TV publicity and headline stories will be shown to have been counterproductive, lulling the Republicans into believing they have connected with a public that has long since moved elsewhere. But… ahhhh… it just doesn’t feel that way.
So Shellacking 2: Shellack’s Back! seems destined to be streaming soon, and that’s the way a lot of people are feeling. Also, scared of imminent violence on the Brazilian scale, and of a country carved up by tech billionaires to make a point.
Even the urge to honour Jerry Lee Lewis as a reminder of a more innocent time was mitigated by the memory that he had married his 13-year-old cousin (she gave birth two years later), and was probably involved in the pool-drowning death of one of his other seven wives.
RIP JLL. We’re in the all Killer, no filler era now.
