The central domain of this coming election is power. Trump promises this through his Project 2025. Harris promises power through furthering (or restoring) personal freedom. These two competing promises define our aspirations and fate.
Trump laces his exercise of power with lies, conspiracy theories, plots, threats of punishment, and so forth. In the past, these kinds of lies, conspiracies, threats, blusters, and cover-ups occurred only with fringe groups, like Huey Long or the John Birch Society. Because Trump does not understand and thus distorts history, he inlays every conflict, no matter how personal or petty, with the immanence of his power. He cajoles his supporters by claiming that only his supporters can control the wicked.
Harris promises power exercised by a shared common good of freedom, of government minding its own business, of the beneficence of democracy and the legitimacy of majority rule. Her promise carries a heavy and dense ideological weight in America, which the country itself values and celebrates.
But pockmarks scar our political body with serious failures in the past 50 years. These failures have winnowed and depleted the middle class. Along with dismantling our industrial capacities and selling our empty factories for a farthing, we have had three needless and expensive wars, two serious economic heart attacks brought about by the economic aggression of “private” individuals and companies, and one psychopathic president — and for which we are $35 trillion in debt.
These problems have vacuumed out the presidency as a sphere of power and allowed Trump’s invasive and cancerous ideology. Our central paradox is how to reconcile the concept of a free individual (who consents to the power of the government) with this pile of alienation (which invites the rule of force).
We’ll see. Ms. Harris wants to enter a blown-out political White House, but she is dancing on shards of fancy and hope.
Stephen Armstrong
Hadley