Old men don’t die easy. At least not those who think they are on the verge of losing their grip on absolute power. If Biden took so long to withdraw from the presidential race, if Trump’s authority continues to rest, more and more precariously, on an untenable vision of national greatness, ad absurdum as one might say, it is because they are both making a wager against aging and dying—over which neither of them has any control. The image of Trump tearing off his surgical mask before the 2020 election is still eloquent of a form of masculinity that will do pretty much anything, including place itself and others at mortal risk, to affirm the limitless mastery that one man’s ego can exert over the world and over itself. Biden’s sin was to present the electorate with a body and mind in decay. He paid the price. No frailty permitted in either case. This has an added irony insofar as his victory in 2020 seemed to have something to do with the fact that, in the face of spiraling death rates brushed aside by Trump and his followers, Biden was a man who had borne the weight of personal tragedy and knew how to grieve.
Almost everyone I know is praying for a Kamala Harris victory. But her much-needed exuberance can also seem somehow unreal, as if she had been tasked with presenting her energy as inexhaustible. This is something familiar to many women, especially mothers, whose role is to cushion their infant, and no less often their partners, from the bruises of a normally lived, fallible existence. Harris has been ruthlessly scorned for not being a mother, even though she is a stepmother—most notoriously described by J.D. Vance as one of a Democratic “bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” No invective has been spared. But I also like to think that, as with many if not most mothers (though not only mothers), she knows that the expectation she excites is too much.
Her running mate, Tim Walz, declares that they are “joyful warriors,” against opponents who are trying to “steal the joy.” This may not be the best move they can make. Joy is as exhilarating as it is rationed and rare on this earth. There is little to go around in such violent and woeful times, when impoverishment, assaults on women, racist aggression, and the massacre of oppressed peoples increase by the day. Joy can be the sister of emancipation and solidarity, but as seen in the January 6, 2021, assault on Capitol Hill, as well as on the streets of Southport and across the Midlands in the UK this summer, it can also dangerously skirt the forms of gleeful, triumphant rage and rapture engineered against the weak and underprivileged by the far right.
It then falls to women to secure the future and keep human misery out of sight. Reproducing in the teeth of inequality and hopelessness is meant both to camouflage the world’s cruelty and to make it a better place. The misogyny against Harris is undoubtedly fueled by that silent demand and the precise form of gendered hatred it promotes. A “childless” woman fighting for reproductive rights is seen as a contradiction in terms. Why on earth would a woman deprived of the joys of motherhood support the right to abortion?
From the beginning Harris’s campaign has struck a very different note, notably in her repeated references to the law, which she represented as the California attorney general, in contrast to the insurrectionist violence of January 2021. At moments she could almost be quoting Virginia Woolf on Antigone in Three Guineas, her disquisition on fascism written during the run-up to World War II. What the world needed, Woolf took from her classical heroine, was not to break the laws in a bid for unqualified freedom in an unjust world but to find “the” law, one that would not lead to the pageantry of war and the killing of women. In a stroke, Harris sets herself apart from the felon for whom breaking the law is a skill and a boast, who bestows on himself the right to abuse women and a divine dispensation freeing him from the constitutional rules of democracy. (He has already intimated that there will be no peaceful transition if he is defeated in November, and stated that if people vote for him, they “won’t have to do it anymore.”)
Just occasionally, we are given a glimpse of the forms of insanity at play—a moment of truth where it is least expected. When Trump was barely grazed by a bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania, Melania Trump made one of her few interventions, breaking a silence that has become her trademark. (Despite her stated support for abortion rights, her memoir promises few significant revelations.) Thomas Matthew Crooks, the assailant, was, she said, a “monster” who “recognized” her husband as an “inhuman political machine.” I assume that what she meant to say is that Donald Trump is a man with powers beyond the remit of the human (divinely protected and inspired). What she allowed us to hear, despite her best or worst intentions, is that he is a brute with no feelings, as only she can know.
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He is the master puppet of a technological progress identified long before the climate catastrophe by writers from Hannah Arendt to Sigmund Freud as on course to destroy the planet. The time is long gone when I foolishly hoped she would speak out against her president husband, a possibility that—if it ever existed—recedes every minute she continues to stand muted by his side. But just for a split second she ripped off the covers and hopefully brought his political life a jot closer to its ending. Meanwhile, the idea of a Black woman in the White House speaking in the name of a law on the side of the many no longer feels unimaginable.
