American Burlesque

About a week ago, I gatecrashed a MAGA fundraising dinner in downtown Milwaukee. The event, held in the opulent art deco ballroom of the city’s Hilton hotel, opened with a prayer. Reverend Dr. Karl Fabrizius, an evangelical pastor from nearby Greenfield, Wisconsin, thanked God for the blessing of limited government and denounced socialism as a sinful menace spreading through American society. Then a local choir led guests in a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. After that, attendees were asked to stand for the pledge of allegiance.

As the meal – chopped salad and battered fish with a side of tartar sauce – commenced, so too did the evening’s speakers. Ron Johnson, a conservative Wisconsin senator, told the audience that Joe Biden’s immigration policies were part of a conspiracy to rig Tuesday’s election in favour of the left: “One of the first things he did as president was task his agencies through an executive order to register voters. You think that’s been done in a non-partisan way?” Richard Grennell, who served as Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany and might be his next secretary of state, argued that a second Trump term would restore “credibility” to America’s standing on the global stage. Matt Gaetz, an anti-woke congressman from Florida, joked that “illegal aliens” caught in the American prison system should be subject to mandatory gender reassignment surgery: “It would be a pretty good deterrent – they probably wouldn’t come!”

This wasn’t quite the blue-collar MAGA crowd I had expected. Most audience members were prosperous white retirees or small business owners from the Milwaukee suburbs who had been voting Republican since the early Reagan era. One couple, Tony and Kristin, told me they had recently returned from a trip around Italy where, to their surprise, everyone they encountered wanted Trump to win. During the Q and A session, several contributors called for an end to American military aid to Ukraine. Others worried about the size of the federal budget deficit. Above all, the room was united in the belief that the polls were wrong. The presidential contest wasn’t close. Kamala Harris – a radical left extremist, an unhinged liberal from Oakland – was going to lose, and Trump was certain to be re-elected. I left the event feeling unsettled. Was this gathering of upper Midwestern reactionaries – if ‘reactionaries’ is the right word here – correct? How close are we, exactly, to Trump 2.0? 

I have been in the US for nearly a month now and, anecdotally, the omens have not been good. In Seattle, the first stop on my strange and disjointed American journey, one guy, a hipster entrepreneur from LA, told me that international threats – Russia, China, Iran, etc. – made him think that America had to be strong. “Trump is an asshole,” he said, “but Kamala, I don’t know.” In Portland, the mood was tense. A pro-Israeli campaign group had erected billboards across the city in response to campus protests over the Spring. One of them, rendered in bright pink and white, read: “Remember when college was for losing your virginity, not your mind?” In snatches of conversation at coffee shops and grocery stores, I picked up a vibe: many Portlanders – traditionally, loyal Democrats – were dreading election day and would rather not discuss it at all. 

If Trump does win – for the record, with a few hours to go, I’d place his chances at precisely 50 per cent – the bulk of the blame must lie with the Democratic Party. The warning signs have been visible for a while. According to one poll, published in 2023, four per cent of Americans think democracy is working “extremely or very well.” Levels of trust in the federal government have never been lower. In an economy still reeling from the effects of high inflation, a majority of American families feel poorer today than they did four years ago, even during the depths of Covid. 

Against this backdrop, whose rhetoric is more likely to resonate? Trump tells voters that crime is out of control; that immigrant gangs are eating dogs in Indiana; that the West has pushed Russia to the brink of nuclear war with NATO; that China has brought working-class ruin to the Rust Belt. On Fox and Newsmax and Breitbart, his PR outriders emphasise the same apocalyptic talking points. His opponent, by contrast, promises to inject “joy” back into American public discourse. 

The problem for Harris is that this is not a joyous moment. Democrats, like the American people at large, are skittish. The party is desperate for the vice president to win, but enthusiasm for her candidacy has ebbed since Biden’s belated decision, in July, to drop out. Throughout the campaign, Harris – a former California prosecutor and state’s attorney general; a black woman who has thrived in the oppressively white world of Washington politics; the first woman of colour to secure the presidential nomination for either major party – has seemed unsure of herself. Is she an agent of change? An anchor of continuity? In what way, and on which issues specifically, would she break from the Biden administration? 

The air of anxiety hanging over liberal America wasn’t anticipated by commentators at the turn of the century. In 2002, two journalists, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, published an influential book. The Emerging Democratic Majority argued that a “strengthening alliance” of women, minorities, professionals, and college graduates, bound by a common cosmopolitan worldview, would soon lock the Republicans out of power for good. “When the fear of terror recedes,” the pair wrote shortly after 9/11, “the country will once again become fertile ground for the Democrats’ progressive centrism and post-industrial values.” 

Twenty years later, progressive centrism and ‘post-industrial values’ – whatever they are – remain politically imperilled concepts. Indeed, if anything, the cross-class, multi-racial coalition that carried Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 and 2012, and Biden in 2020, is starting to splinter. White people without a college degree will overwhelmingly back Trump. Support for Harris among black and Hispanic men is, apparently, soft. Young Americans can be ideologically unpredictable. Even some immigrant groups, so often the target of Trump’s most demented attacks, have drifted towards the Republicans in recent months. As if to pre-empt the growing sense of centrist despair, last year, Judis and Teixeira followed up Democratic Majority with a new title: Where Have All The Democrats Gone?  

A few days before my brush with the MAGA movement, I watched the 44th president of the United States stroll onto the stage at the Alliant Energy Centre in Madison, a university town 80 miles west of Milwaukee. Obama’s warm-up acts were good. The actor Bradley Whitford, a Wisconsin native best known for playing White House staffer Josh Lyman in a popular Aaron Sorkin TV drama two decades ago, told abortion ban horror stories. “You may know me from The West Wing,” he said, “but currently I’m working on a documentary called The Handmaid’s Tale.” Minnesota governor and Harris veep pick Tim Walz ridiculed Trump’s de facto running mate Elon Musk for “skipping around like a dipshit” at a recent Republican rally. (Walz – who, by the way, used to be a high school football coach – is a surprisingly salty and effective speaker: “Both members of the Democratic ticket are gun owners; the Republican nominee can’t pass a background check.”)

Then Obama emerged and the arena erupted. “Hello Madison! Are you ready to go?,” he roared. 16,000 Democratic activists roared back. For 40 minutes, Obama pitched the anti-populist case for Harris, fluently framing politics as a painstaking process of incremental reform. “No president or vice president or senator is going to solve every problem,” he said. “We are born into history, and change takes time.” On Walz, he gushed: “Love that guy, love that dude. The other day, I learned that he can take a vintage truck apart and put it back together again.” On Trump, he hissed: “Here is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his own problems since he rode down that golden elevator nine years ago.”

And yet, even Obama, for all his oratorical power, couldn’t disguise the scale of the challenge currently facing his party. Another name for that challenge might be ‘Joseph Robinette Biden Jnr.’ The departing president, cloistered away in his Delaware compound, haunts the Harris campaign. Over the summer, after his impaired debate performance against Trump, his approval ratings slumped to record lows. Since then, Democratic strategists have viewed the ailing 81-year-old as their single greatest electoral liability. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Biden had repeatedly offered to stump for Harris, and that Harris had repeatedly said no.

Biden’s approach to the Middle East, in particular, could seriously damage Democratic prospects. On 24 October, I attended a talk by Pramila Jayapal at the University of Wisconsin’s main campus in Madison. Jayapal is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a leading leftwing voice in the House of Representatives, allied to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a small seminar room, in front of no more than 20 people, Jayapal spoke enthusiastically about what she saw as Biden’s progressive achievements, pointing to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased federal investment in green energy, and to the cancellation of some student loan debt, as evidence that the president had been receptive to demands from the left. 

But when asked about Biden’s decision to continue supplying arms to Israel, even as the IDF razes Gaza, raids the West Bank, and occupies southern Lebanon, Jayapal’s demeanour shifted. “Look, I think if we lose Michigan, it’s probably because of the war,” she said. (Michigan – like Wisconsin, a key swing state – has a high density of Arab-American voters; Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, is from Detroit.) “I’ve had long conversations with the president about this,” Jayapal added. “On foreign policy, this is a man who has a view of US-Israeli relations that dates back half a century.” In other words, Biden’s personal determination to walk in lock-step with Benjamin Netanyahu over the past year, in the wake of the Hamas attacks, might cost Harris the election. 

For reasons that remain unclear – beyond baseline loyalty and institutional inertia – Harris has done nothing to distance herself from Biden on this issue. Instead, she has let it fester, deepening internal Democratic tensions and bolstering Trump’s chances ahead of today’s vote. (Over the weekend, Tlaib, a Democrat and ally of Jayapal, said she could not vote for Harris.) Until now, the Republicans have been buoyant. The American right cannot believe that the race is, or appears to be, as close as it is. After the impeachments, the indictments, the convictions, and countless other assorted scandals, Trump’s presidential career should be over. But Trumpism, it seems, is resilient.

One theory attributes Trump’s success to the changing structure of the American economy. In the 1990s, under Bill Clinton, the Democrats swapped FDR-style social democracy for the free market, mixing Wall Street deregulation with welfare cuts and union-busting reform. Clinton signed the NAFTA initiative into law and championed China’s accession to the WTO – a major flashpoint in American industrial decline. After the 2008 financial crash, Obama briefly embraced stimulus spending before caving to the austerity demands of a Tea Party-controlled Congress. In the years that followed, Trump gorged himself on the anger generated by globalisation. In 2016, Hillary Clinton railed against Russia – at the time, a largely spectral threat. But Trump trained his fire on China, whose growing industrial heft he pledged to pin back with a barrage of protectionist trade policies and tariffs. Thus began the great realignment of American political life. Historically Democratic constituencies – above all, white, male, Midwestern workers – moved to the right, and the MAGA insurgency was born.

The theory isn’t incorrect, exactly. In September, the Teamsters, one of the most influential trade unions in America, declined to endorse Harris and, for a Republican, Trump attracts a disproportionately high share of working-class votes. But MAGA’s appeal is visceral, not economic. In Milwaukee, the dominant themes of the night were immigration and isolationism. The attendees were petit-bourgeois conservatives whose businesses would suffer if the southern border was suddenly closed – choking off their supply of cheap Latin American labour – and China imposed retaliatory tariffs on US products. Low-income Americans, too, have nothing to gain from Trump: the only economic policy he has ever really cleaved to is slashing taxes for the super-rich. 

In truth, what Trump offers is the thrill of transgression, the punitive pleasure of state power being used against social minorities mostly incapable of defending themselves. Consider the key points of his governing platform: a nation-wide assault on abortion rights; mass deportations aimed at sweeping millions of undocumented migrants off the streets; huge cuts to education, health, and welfare; more immunity and beefed-up military provisions for the police; federal troops on American soil, in American cities; prohibitions on the teaching of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ in schools; an authoritarian crackdown on non-existent voter fraud; a radicalised Supreme Court, and the stripping back of historic civil rights law. These policies come packaged in the language of paranoid anti-communism. The Democrats, Trump keeps telling us, are “Marxists” hell-bent on destroying American democracy. Harris, meanwhile, is a racial interloper, neither fully black nor fully Asian – and certainly not fully American. In office, Trump 2.0 will be an amped-up version of his initial, chaotic incarnation – MAGA unleashed, America First on a cocktail of prescription steroids. 

Trump’s strength could be inflated. In recent weeks, the Republican nominee has completed a sweep of the alt-right podcast circuit, sitting down for interviews with, among others, Joe Rogan, Logan Paul, and Adin Ross, a controversial YouTuber with ties to Andrew Tate. Trump’s aim in these interviews has been to consolidate his support among Gen Z and Millennial men disaffected with contemporary woke culture. However, such men are also typically apathetic, hard-to-reach, ‘low-propensity’ voters, which makes it hard to anticipate how many of them will turn out today. Trump has tried to jolt them into life with a torrent of menacing and misogynistic remarks. On 30 October, at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he threatened to “protect” American women “whether they like[d] it or not.” On 31 October, he described Liz Cheney, Harris’s top conservative surrogate, as a “radical war hawk” and “very dumb individual” who had never experienced, but perhaps should, “guns trained on her face.”

Harris has seized on Trump’s misogyny – his hyper-masculine burlesque act – to press home her central strategic advantage: the gender gap. Trump trails Harris among likely female voters by 14 points, and women have voted at a higher rate than men at every presidential election since 1980. Throughout these final phases of the race, the Democrats have zeroed-in on Republican plans to extend restrictions on reproductive rights across the US. Harris is betting on a late surge of suburban disgust. If she can get enough middle-class women to the polls on 5 November, she may be able to hold Trump off – or even flatten the MAGA machine entirely.

On 27 October, I arrived in Washington D.C., bleary-eyed off the overnight Amtrak from Chicago. 48 hours later, I was standing in a sprawling queue off the corner of Constitution Avenue and 15th Street, waiting to enter the Ellipse, a 52-acre park that stretches from the south lawn of the White House towards the Washington Monument. Hawkers huddled by the curb, selling hats, badges, iced beverages. At 4 pm, the queue was funneled through a set of security barriers into the park. At 7:30 pm, Harris appeared, smiling and waving to a crowd of 65,000 – predominantly young and black – supporters while a Beyoncé track boomed into the sky from the speakers overhead.

Harris’s address, broadcast live on TV and billed as her valedictory plea to voters before election day, had none of the energy of the Madison event, none of Obama’s voltage. To me, Harris even looked slightly nervous: a diminutive 5’4 figure at the podium, flanked by plates of bullet-proof ballistic glass and two massive, static American flags. On this patch of D.C. grass almost four years ago, Trump incited the Capitol riots. If re-elected, he says, he will pardon the “absolute patriots” and “warriors” convicted of participating in those riots.

The vice president worked carefully through her closing arguments. Trump, she said, was a “petty tyrant” who held American constitutional norms in contempt. Only the Democrats could heal the country’s partisan divides. It was time to “turn the page” on a generation of failed Washington leaders. “We are not going back,” Harris said at one point. “We are not going back.” A Democratic prayer to counter the Republican one, I thought, and to close out this cold campaign.