An Election Entertainment, William Hogarth, 1755
I never lied to ya.
I’ve always been cool.
Don’t wanna be elected.
With apologies to Alice Cooper
Ann Coulter began as Trump’s attack dog but, like the more untrustworthy breeds, she has taken to biting her owner’s ankles. Describing the President this week as an ‘incompetent buffoon’ is not fan mail. The Right-wing Valkyrie, to her credit, has not simply fawned on Trump’s every move, but has picked him up on the failed promises (where’s that wall, exactly?) and faltering attitude to the nightly rioting across American cities, and generally voiced doubts where doubts are there to be voiced. She has now asked a question I suspect was on a lot of lips; Does anyone want to win the 2020 election?
There is, of course, no third or fourth party ready to hoover up votes and gain ground over the final furlong if the two leading jockeys falter or make a hash of a fence as they turn for home. American elections are a two-horse race, even if one of the steeds comes foam-flecked and mad-eyed straight out of a Henry Fuseli painting while the other is a farmyard nag with its saddle on the wrong way round as it tries to remember the way to the glue factory.
Admittedly, this may be a very bad election to win. Only the pathologically optimistic now believe that America is not heading for a reboot of 1929, and everyone is wondering, to quote from the film Performance; at the death, who’s left holding the sodding baby?
Welfare claims in the US are running at a million plus a week still, and 55 million have put in jobless claims in the last 22 weeks. 52% of rentees in South Carolina are at risk of eviction. Over half the closed stores in San Francisco will not reopen. American Airlines alone are laying off 19,000 people next month. These figures are taken from the usually reliable website of Michael Snyder at the tellingly named blog The Economic Collapse here, and there are plenty more where they came from.
If this is a blip, then to paraphrase Jaws, we’re gonna need a bigger blipometer.
Barack Obama, who obviously despises America, doubled the national debt, and Trump failed to use this as the foundation stone of his perceived economic policies. The collapse, when it has finished making up in the green room and makes its grand entrance onstage, will of course be blamed on Trump, even though the pre-COVID economy was improving nicely, a fact obviously absent in any media commentary. The modern Democratic Party is composed of people of the stripe that is busy smirking and saying ‘told you so’ as the house they are in burns to the ground.
So whoever walks through the door of the Oval office the day after polling, which looks set to be as reliable as an Amish-built Ferris-wheel, might be entitled to feel like Joe Pesci’s character Tommy in Goodfellas when he realises that he has not walked into the house to become a made guy after all. Winning the big one is beginning to look like a rugby player receiving the ball as a dozen psychopathic forwards bear down on him.
Economic collapse, of course, may not be an unintended consequence but a copper-bottomed, all-singing, all-dancing, access all areas intended one. As Francis Parker Yockey wrote as long ago as 1939;
‘The tactic that is being employed to bring about the necessary crisis for the “complete seizure of power” is that of producing a financial collapse by profligate and insensate government expenditures on anything and everything’.
A ruse like this, if ruse it is, has been hiding in plain sight for some time now in the West, with governments spending money – your money – like a shore-leave sailor. Money paid to the government by the individual or company in income and other taxes undergoes a subtle transformation. It goes from being your money, of which the elected government is the steward, to being government money these dandy highwaymen and women have somehow earned. The difference now is that whereas governments used to believe there wasn’t a problem they couldn’t solve by throwing more money at it, now they may believe that there isn’t one they can’t create by the same expedient.
So, back to Coulter’s question; are both sides trying to throw the fight?
As far as Trump is concerned, unlikely. Much as it wearies me to wheel out the old phrase, ‘whatever you think of Donald Trump…’, it is wanted in reception. He may be a bullish thug with the decorum of a Millwall supporter on methamphetamine, but he wants to be the president. The problem is, as you can easily see, that at the time of writing America looks like an outtake from Apocalypse Now. If the ‘peaceful protests’ CNN insist are taking place look bad now, picture the scene after a Trump victory. You can stop now. I don’t want to be responsible for major psychological trauma.
As for Biden, who looks like a key-ring rubber skeleton and acts like he can’t remember which way round to hold the TV remote in the day-care centre, from the moment the Dems gave him the nomination it looked as though they wanted to lose. The idea of this mumbling fossil leading the free world must be making Putin wonder who actually won the Cold War.
Like one of those Ibsen or Chekhov plays where the family secret comes out in the last act, and the revolver from in Act I is still sitting on the table, forget asteroids passing close to Earth; there are an awful lot of chickens coming home to roost. Throw into the mix the slowly dawning fact that middle America, with its bikers and red-necks and armed preppers and neo-Nazis and run-of-the-mill psychos, is starting to fight back against the peaceful protesters, and this election looks like being no fun for all the family.
It reminds me of the uncharitable comment sports fans make when two teams are playing a fixture and they hate them both. Can’t they both lose? They may well. The problem is, so will everyone else.