Reality takes a holiday

The British used to call the month of August the media’s “silly season,” because virtually the whole class of British hommes sérieux (as they then were), the lords and the commons, the journalists and the politicians alike, left “town” — for their second homes in Tuscany or the Dordogne, or to go yachting in the Mediterranean or salmon fishing in Norway or grouse-shooting in Scotland — leaving the public prints in the hands of the junior varsity, which had not much of substance to write about anyway. The A-teams didn’t reconvene until it was time for the party conference season in late September.

Now, of course, it’s never not the media’s silly season, and in America no less than Britain. But this past August appears to have set a standard for silliness that must remain unsurpassed during our lifetimes. Throughout the media, left and right (such as it is), our own party conference season, beginning with the Republicans in July and ending with the Democrats in August, cried out for metaphors drawn from the world of entertainment. For Christopher Rufo of City Journal, for example, the two conventions were symbolized by “Oprah vs. Hulk.” For the excellent Niall Ferguson of The Free Press, writing even before the Democrats’ final night of Kraft durch Freude, it was “The Barbenheimer Election,” reminiscent of last year’s titanic movie box-office battle between Barbie and Oppenheimer.

Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for the presidency, the architects of the Harris campaign have managed to create their own Dream House. This one isn’t bubblegum pink, but it has the policy equivalents of a pool party. . . .While Kamala reads scripted lines, strikes staged poses, and avoids all press in a campaign of vacuousness unsurpassed in the history of American politics, on the other screen we have a different docudrama: The dark, fissile energy of Donald Trump, reviving his nightmare vision of American Carnage and taking it global

Reality TV star Donald Trump’s campaigns, it’s true, have always inspired this kind of melodramatic coverage, but it is a new thing for the Democrats, who were still attracting such attention, both positive and negative, weeks after the Democrat balloon-drop in Chicago. To Brian Karem of Salon, writing after the convention, the Democrats had pulled off “the Woodstock of politics,” while to Fred Bauer, also in City Journal, it was “The Music Man Convention,” with Kamala Harris in the role of flim-flam man, “Professor” Harold Hill, selling imaginary boys’ bands to the rubes of the Iowa.

Not at all! thought Anat Shenker-Osorio of Rolling Stone, who professed to see in Ms Harris a comedienne to compare with Charlie Chaplin or Bugs Bunny, both of whom, we are told, ridiculed Adolf Hitler just as she and her fellow Democratic practitioners of the politics of joy were joyfully ridiculing Donald Trump — because nothing says joy like interminable, obsessive hatred. Ms Harris is said “to relish in equal parts roasting her opponent and line dancing among her supporters,” and she and her running mate, Tim Walz, are supposedly “awash in memes” — in glorious contrast to President Biden. Remember him?

Yet Ms Shenker-Osorio proves to be a little light on examples of that razor-sharp wit which, like Yorick’s in Hamlet, is claimed to have set the Democratic table on a roar. Here is about the best she can do:

A recent press release now going viral from Team Harris-Walz merits an A plus for trolling the opposition down to conquerable size. Announcing an upcoming Trump campaign stop, it reads, “Donald Trump to Ramble Incoherently and Spread Dangerous Lies in Public, but at Different Home.” It goes on to remind readers who Trump is: “loser of the 2020 election by 7 million votes.”

I guess you had to be there.

The Rolling Stone column is headed, “Why Kamala Harris’ New Politics of Joy Is the Best Way to Fight Fascism: History shows that joy and mockery are key to taking down existing or would-be authoritarian regimes.” That’s highly doubtful, I’d say, on any of the usual readings of history, though in the history books of the left it appears to have become a truism. It is echoed by Michael Tomasky of The New Republic, who gleefully announced in the pages of that venerable publication that, “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him.” Finally? They’ve been ridiculing him for the better part of a decade and yet, somehow, he’s still alive and kicking.

Mr Fintan O’Toole, once awarded The Observer’s distinction as one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals,” provided The New York Review of Books, of which he is now something called “the Advising Editor,” with a handy résumé of all the cutting and clever remarks made about Mr Trump by the various speakers at the Democrats’ convention, with what devastating effect can be imagined. Nor does he neglect what Mr Tomasky calls the “hilarious” aspersions cast by former President Barack Obama upon his successor’s alleged sexual potency, or lack of it.

But this retailing of and rejoicing in the Democrats’ campaign of insult and invective may also remind at least some people who are not already of the Trump-hating fraternity of how overdone it all is, and long has been. The cumulative effect of so much raillery may strike such people as being rather like that recorded by Mr O’Toole’s fellow Irishman, W.B. Yeats, in characterizing “Those That Hated [J.M. Synge’s play] The Playboy Of The Western World”:

Once, when midnight smote the air,
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat,
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

Not that the railleurs themselves are likely to care. Mr Trump is still in Hell, along with the lesser Satans, Don Juan and all those sweaty eunuchs. So there’s that.

Yet Mr O’Toole is not quite unmindful of the contradictions involved in simultaneously building Mr Trump up as a monster of evil and diminishing him to a pathetic little man with delusions of grandeur (to put it charitably).

Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic. . . Harris implicitly acknowledged the tension within this strategy of minimization when she said in her acceptance speech, “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences . . . of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” The trick she is trying to pull off is to turn Trump from the evil ogre that looms over America into a little hobgoblin capable of unleashing some of the most destructive forces in the country. But do persuadable voters fear goblins as much as ogres?

And who can know the answer to that question if not one of Britain’s Top 300 Intellectuals?

The same problem arises with respect to the new direction in the Democrats’ media campaign with the arrival on the ticket of Mr Walz: the attempt to portray its Republican adversaries as “weird.” This clumsy attempt to pull back a little on the Trump-demonization — which must be getting old even to some of the demonizers — has not, at this writing, proven to have legs. For how can it be that the guys who were only yesterday about to pull down the very foundations of American democracy are now, all of a sudden, just a couple of weirdos?

Errol Louis, occupying the chair, pro tem, of New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column makes a similar point:

So which is it? Are Democrats waging a desperate fight against a would-be dictator, or trying to have a good time? “It’s not a campaign theme,” Quentin Fulks, deputy campaign manager for the Harris-Walz ticket, told columnist Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times about the j-word. “It’s just something that they’re doing, that they’re bringing to the table. I think if you try to manufacture something like joy, it can go wrong because it’s fake. I think the reason why it’s resonating with people is because it’s authentic.”

They have no sense of irony, these people. What were all those speakers trying to do in the context of the usual hate-Trump message if not, precisely, to “manufacture something like joy” for the benefit of the media? It was about as authentic as the chants of “USA! USA!” and the waving of American flags. I’m sure that in living rooms all across America, the cry was going forth: “Honey? Remind me which one is the ‘Make America Great Again’ party? All I know is, that’s the one for me.”

Perhaps the most cogent characterization of the Democrats’ fun-fest, however, was produced by David Samuels of UnHerd who compared it neither to a movie nor a TV show nor a music festival, nor a comedy set but to a magic act so impressive as to be called — miraculous.

Making an elephant disappear is a notoriously difficult test of the magician’s art. Turning a flower girl into a duchess might be even harder to pull off. Convincing the world’s most powerful man to agree to give up his job and his house to a younger rival without any visible use of force is, most people would agree, a trick that surpasses them both. In the space of the past month,. . . the behind-the-scenes wizards who run the Democratic Party pulled off all three.

Of course, Mr Samuels is writing with his tongue in his cheek, from the point of view of the would-be magicians whom he presumes to be enormously impressed with their own feats of prestidigitation, even if they impress nobody else but the willing believers of the media. “Now a greater magic act has happened,” he writes:

Joe Biden is gone, and the three and a half years of his failed Presidency are gone along with him. As speaker after speaker emphasised, Trump represents the past, while the Party represents the future. Trump represents himself, while the Party represents us. The rhetorical opposition is an effective one. Magically, the Democratic candidate plausibly represents change and the people fighting against power, when the Democrats themselves are in fact the party in power.

For the rest of us, however, there is no mystery to the Democrat magic. It’s the same magic by which we were meant to believe that Joe Biden was in charge and “sharp as a tack” up until June 27 last — or that Mr Trump had colluded with the Russians to get elected in 2016 or that the 2020 election was impeccably honest or that Mr Trump had led an “insurrection” to protest against its irregularity, or that he had committed multiple felonies in paying off a gold-digging mistress. All these things were conjured into being merely by the Democratic party’s (and the media’s) say-so and were implicitly believed by the faithful.

So, too, the miracle confidently predicted by Ms Harris in her convention-closing speech, of ending the war in the Middle East by her own and President Biden’s efforts, “such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.” What’s not to like? Miracles will apparently be everyday occurrences in the forthcoming Harris-Walz administration, and the media, mirable dictu, have swallowed it all, hook, line and sinker.

Or have they? Certainly they want to believe, but the excess of jubilation over the party’s conjuring trick in Chicago suggests a certain nervousness on their part about the believability of the act to those all-important swing-state voters, especially now that Ms Harris’s manifestation as the new figurehead of her party has come about through an implicit acknowledgment that her now discarded predecessor, still nominally in office, was no more than a figurehead himself.

As F.H. Buckley wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

In 2020 he campaigned from his basement, and in office he largely hid from the press. After his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the reason became all too clear. The man was an empty shell, and the real locus of power was a shadowy group of party apparatchiks. Nor should we expect anything to change if Kamala Harris wins in November. She was promoted by the Democrats’ éminences grises, and they’d continue to run the show. They know what buttons to push and how to make things happen. They are the people for whom we’re asked to vote, even if we don’t know who they are.

To him the relevant movie to this year’s election is neither Barbie, glorying in its own phoniness, nor Oppenheimer, agonizing over the moral burdens of world leadership, but Being There, from way back in 1979, about an empty suit miraculously endowed by the media with the charisma of royalty.

J. Peder Zane of RealClearPolitics makes a similar point:

Instead of decisive figures who guide the nation, the [Democratic] party is driven by untold numbers of elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, academics, and media voices who share a leftwing ideology. Harking back to its earlier history, the party is once again a machine. Its candidates are not visionaries but apparatchiks committed to the program. The name on the ballot is largely irrelevant. No one is really voting for Harris, but for the party she represents. . . Like Biden, her vacuity is her appeal; she is another empty vessel that Democrat marketing whizzes can fill with blithe slogans – Joy! Freedom!! Goldilocks!!! Also, like Biden, her lack of insight and conviction is a plus as she is unlikely to offer any pushback to the plan.

If, as I expect it must, the election eventually comes to be seen as a contest not between Oprah and Hulk or Barbie and Oppenheimer but between phony and real, there can hardly be any doubt of the outcome. But Mr Zane also has a warning:

All of this shows the folly of the Trump campaign, which seems to believe it is running against Harris. His schoolyard insults of the vice president raise her stature, casting her as a potential world leader instead of a mouthpiece. It gives hope to Americans who are disappointed with the Biden administration – maybe she will be different. It obscures the fact that Trump’s real opponent is a vast machine, a mighty ship of state that may have no captain at the helm but is irrevocably steering the nation on a dangerous course.

You would think that someone like Mr Trump, who has been so long a victim of that same machine and of its unparalleled publicity engine, would be able to see this for himself. Perhaps he does. But he must also know that any campaign directed against the machine, rather than Ms Harris, would be immediately and universally damned as arising from a “right-wing conspiracy theory.” I wouldn’t give a lot for his chances of persuading those wavering voters of the swing states that sometimes conspiracy theories, even right-wing ones, are more than just theories — though they just might, if the conspiracy continues to overplay its hand, begin to see it for themselves.