America Election : While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand,” famously stated Lord Byron. Rome will fall if the Colosseum falls; The world will be affected when Rome falls.
Many of Byron’s apocalyptic undertones are evoked as the high-octane presidential race in America enters its final stretch.
At an event in Greensboro, North Carolina, Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris stated, “In this election, your freedom, your democracy, and America itself is at stake.” The one is here. The most significant, significant, and existentially significant election of our lifetime.
Democrats have garnished their political rhetoric with similar allusions to the apocalypse in preparation for the great showdown in November in the event that Trump wins the presidency. Of course, these tired arguments don’t really explain some of the really bad things that have happened in their camp. Additionally, there have been a lot.
When Harris was interacting with voters at a supermarket in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was asked to comment on an endorsement she had recently received, one of these moments came gunning for Harris.
Former vice president Dick Cheney, once vilified by Democrats, backed Harris for the presidency, putting his weight behind a campaign with which he initially appeared to have little in common, in a move that shocked political pundits, journalists, and voters alike. Even more surprising was Harris’s visibly exuberant celebration of Cheney’s endorsement as though he were Santa Claus:
I consider it an honor to have their support. Respected leaders, in my opinion, are making a significant statement. That) it is acceptable to prioritize country over party.”
The in question “well-respected leader” is the decorated and unapologetic architect of the illegal Iraq War. This self-described “Darth Vader” is liable for prosecution under every anti-torture and war crime statute known to man and crossed off murderous atrocities against the Global South like items on a grocery list during his time in office under the Bush administration. However, Harris believes that a person is more than just their war crimes.
At the time of writing, Harris and his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, are traveling the country in an effort to reach the conservative GoP base.
In Ripon, Wisconsin, Democrat VP Kamala Harris campaigns alongside Republican ex-Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Source: The Cheneys’ support for the Harris/Walz ticket, which follows more than 200 Republican endorsements, is the latest development in a larger pattern of explicit bipartisan reshuffling that Washington has never seen before. Legacy conservatives such as the Bush family, Mike Pence, Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troy, Geoff Duncan, and Jeff Flake, to name just a few, have said that a second Trump presidency would be a “unique threat to democracy.” This highlights a growing divide in the GoP camp.
Republicans and Democrats have banded together in an unprecedented manner amid hollow slogans of “Country Above Party” in an effort to protect the Oval Office from Donald Trump by any means necessary in a nation where bipartisan consensus on any issue is generally unthinkable. As a result, no topic is off-limits. Goalposts will move, once-unbreakable ideologies and dogmas will be abandoned, bitter adversaries will embrace like lovers who have crossed their arms, and once-impassible party lines will be permeated with relative ease.
These glaring contradictions are beyond the comprehension of those partisans who view American politics as a maze. They typically view these shifts as sporadic flaws in a political simulation that is largely supported by a two-party system.
As a result, when more than 700 current and former national security officials from both parties endorse Harris as possessing the “temperament and values needed to serve as commander-in-chief,” they are perplexed. They are perplexed as to how politicians who say they support global peace and prosperity, human rights, and individual liberty can join forces with imperial hawks like the Bushes, Cheneys, and Clintons.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum, according to Dr. John Mearsheimer, a political theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, “miss the forest for the trees.” According to Mearsheimer, the division of American politics into Republican and Democratic camps is a game of deception and a vestige of a bygone era.
During a panel discussion with economist and Columbia professor Dr. Jeffery Sachs, he stated, “I like to refer to the Republicans and the Democrats as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.” The two parties have very little in common.
This reinforces something about America that most people have known for a long time but just weren’t quite aware they knew. For many, this taps into a kind of Jungian dream. Take, for instance, Barack Obama’s presidency, which was won by the Democratic Party. Obama’s campaign had promised to eliminate many of the problems that had plagued the Bush administration, and he was elected president with slogans of hope and change. But the GOP’s incessant filibustering ensured that much of Obama’s domestic agenda was never implemented. Republicans relentlessly impeded progress on issues like immigration reform, minimum wage increases, gun reform, climate change, and any domestic issue that would have aided in the real-life amelioration of the American working class. The President was also unable to get many of his innocent appointees into office.
However, Obama appeared to be able to pick up where his predecessor’s more controversial policies left off, all of which he had criticized throughout his entire campaign, despite the obstruction from the GoP.
During the Obama administration, individuals were executed without due process, prisoners were held without charge, the American people were subjected to dragnet surveillance, and the Insider Threat Programme conducted unprecedented witch hunts against federal employees.
After the 2008 financial crisis, when individual stock ownership fell to record lows and cash-rich corporations lined their pockets with stock buybacks, Obama also led an increasingly deceptive recovery of the stock market. Inequality in the national economy skyrocketed, GDP growth outpaced wage growth, and Wall Street’s failure to reform led to highly leveraged markets that became increasingly susceptible to failure.
On the foreign policy front, Obama orchestrated regime change operations in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine without a peep from the antagonistic Republicans who filled both Houses of Congress. He had run on the promise of ending Bush’s endless wars. Obama’s response to accepting the status quo was always, “Yes, We Can!”
At the DNC keynote address in 2004, a relatively unknown Obama embraces superstardom. Source: Politico.com To the uninitiated, this bipartisan convergence on issues of international governance, economics, and war but never on domestic issues like healthcare, infrastructure, gun reform, and education appears to be a random coincidence. However, Mearsheimer’s thesis suggests a deeper, more pervasive pattern of cooperation.
What specifically disrupts this script about Trump if this hypothesis is correct and the Republican-Democrat divide is just political theater? What extraordinary threat does he pose that makes him so repugnant to the political class in the United States?
Pied Piper Trump was nothing more than a second-generation plutocrat with a discernible last name, a flamboyant flair for showmanship, and no political experience other than an ill-advised interest in Obama’s birth certificate when he first entered politics in 2015. Even from his eventual rival, Hillary Clinton, he received little to no respect during his initial presidential campaign.
According to a Wikileaks memo that was leaked, Clinton was the one who deliberately orchestrated Donald Trump’s rise to the party nomination as part of what she called the “Pied Piper” strategy. This strategy is a deliberate effort by the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to encourage media coverage of far-right Republican candidates, like Donald Trump, in the Republican primary. The prevalent theory was that Clinton would have an easier time defeating these candidates in a general election because they were thought to be too extreme or unpopular.
