What a week it has been in America, and what a strange, phantasmagoric thing American politics has become. First bullets whistled millimetres away from killing Donald Trump. Then followed the surreal spectacle of the Republican National Convention, with Trump citing divine intervention and elevating Vance as his VP. Biden, meanwhile, was promising that only divine intervention could get him out of the coming election. Days later, he was stepping away from the race, and endorsing Kamala Harris. 

There’s something a little uncanny about American modernity full stop. In a land that had stood largely empty of human habitation for thousands of years, vast Babylonian cities burst up like mushrooms in the course of decades. Miles of empty road stretch out into empty deserts and plains. Whole cities — Reno, Las Vegas — exist to cater to vice. The works of human hands seem too large for humans to bear. Nowhere is this more keenly felt, I think, than Harris’s native California. In 1846, only 100,000 Native Americans, and barely 8,000 settlers are recorded to have been living in the newly acquired American state. The gold rush first brought people pouring in, but much of the state’s growth happened in the early 20th century, transforming it from a backwater to the frontier of global modernity in a single generation. 

There are two great films that capture the sheer weirdness of this tidal wave of technological and social change. One is Chinatown, set in LA, and detailing the extraordinary corruption involved in the development of the city, and the vast water engineering projects that made urban life and commercial agriculture alike viable ventures. The other is Hitchcock’s Vertigo in which a retired San Francisco detective with a morbid terror of heights stumbles upon a sinister plot, and is consumed by a shattering erotic obsession. Doppelgangers, incest, conspiracy, altered reality, and everywhere, in the background, the mighty rumble of industry and finance. In both cases, the protagonists are led by their desires into destruction. In Chinatown we see it in the hero’s escalating injuries, in Vertigo in the former detective’s worsening dizziness. What both men lose, by the end of their bruising ordeals, is the illusion of control over their environment. 

In a country of over 300 million people, society, and its economic and political organisation, is too vast and complex for any individual to fully understand, master or navigate. In such a society democracy often acts to obscure and impede collective decision making. Those decisions often end up being made in backrooms, and legal and political processes are subverted, manipulated or evaded by those with wealth and power. 

Ordinary Americans have long been aware of this problem. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

The problem of American politics is often presented, by high-minded Brits, as one of irrational mob mentality. It’s a narrative that middle class American liberals like too, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics is but the most iconic work in a body of literature that condemns Americans for their mindless prejudices and superstitions. But if Americans are less than reasonable, it is because America itself is an often unreasonable, random place, that actually is manipulated by shadowy cabals of unaccountable decision makers. 

From Andrew Jackson, to Teddy Roosevelt, to Trump today, populist leaders have long tapped into this mistrust, and promised to take on the system, with varying degrees of success. Such leaders are popular, in part because they speak to a sense of unreality. It is not merely that politicians say one thing and do another, it is that, increasingly, they present us with pictures of the world that are subtly or explicitly false. Populists, of course, are often as guilty of this as those they oppose, crafting rival counter narratives that are just as misleading. Yet, like a detective piling together the facts halfway through the film in an ingeniously wrong order, they don’t seem to lose popular sympathy because of it — they have taken on the role of the hero taking on the corrupt system, and people need, desperately, to believe in that.

The degree to which American politics is manipulated seems to simply escape much of our own British media class. A prime example of the tribe is Emily Maitlis, a former Newsnight presenter, who is currently tweeting adoring propaganda about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and spreading a number of basic factual errors in the process, not the least of which is her suggesting Joe Biden would be staying on until the November election, rather than in January, the date of the inauguration. We all make mistakes, but it felt indicative of a UK political class that is simultaneously obsessed with, and highly ignorant about, US politics. Getting the date wrong may have been a thoughtless slip, but what about endorsing the idea, in a post that she retweeted, that Biden “enthusiastically backed Obama” in 2008? Anyone with even superficial knowledge of US politics is aware of the two men’s mutual dislike, and just how loveless a marriage their political partnership was from the very outset. Or how about, in the same post, the extraordinary claim that Biden had been “betrayed by the media class and has to drop out because he’s too old for them.” 

Who was this political mastermind that a veteran BBC journalist was broadcasting to us? Why, it was Mikel Jollett, frontman of moderately successful indie rock band The Airborne Toxic Event. If this isn’t the disinformation (and how about that paranoid style too?) that fellow BBC worthy Marianna Spring likes to warn us about, I don’t know what is — though she is thus far mysteriously absent from the case of the manic Maitlis. 

This is more than just a party organically rallying behind a frontrunner — this is an old school stitch up

For those who follow American politics intermittently, or filtered through our profoundly inadequate press, let me paint a picture of the past few years. Joe Biden has been in severe, and obvious, physical and mental decline since the start of his Presidency. He was just about up to the job, though frail even then, during the 2020 election, when he benefited significantly from the Covid restrictions allowing him to barely appear on the campaign trail, largely fighting the election through soundbites and ads. 

Despite mounting gaffes, and endlessly shared videos of stumbles, confusion, memory loss, incoherence and senility that slipped past the White House staff trying to contain them, the media colluded in obscuring this increasingly open secret. It was a “Republican talking point”. Even as evidence mounted, the President’s health was treated as something to debate, with much time given to those willing to baldly lie or obfuscate the issue. When the Presidential debate exposed the truth to too many people in too obvious and public a manner, the media pivoted at lightspeed, with little to no acknowledgment that they had done so. It’s become a cliche, but the behaviour of America’s mainstream media is Orwellian — “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” 

Within weeks of the media changing the narrative, Biden was forced to resign from the Presidential race, endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris to succeed him. Not only was the media hivemind involved, the invisible Democratic Party machine was at furious work behind the scenes. Anyone doubting its influence just needs to look at all 50 state Democratic chairs endorsing Harris, the record-breaking $81 million of “grassroots” donations that suddenly fell into her electoral warchest (coming to a total of over $250 million, according to her campaign) within 24 hours of her announcing, or previously touted favourite Gavin Newsom stepping aside to back her candidacy for President, along with (at the time of writing) 263 congressional Democrats and 23 Democratic governors, whilst other leadership hopefuls Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Joe Manchin have dropped out. Biden’s money men swung behind the candidate, with Reid Hoffman, as well as Alex and George Soros all endorsing Harris. This is more than just a party organically rallying behind a frontrunner — this is an old school stitch up. 

Whose hand was at the tiller? Almost certainly those involved included the Clintons, who were quick to endorse Kamala Harris. Biden, bear in mind, had unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination three times before, including in 2008, when Obama was running. Yet, citing the death of his son, he failed to run in 2016, despite being widely tipped to beat Hilary Clinton. Were there other reasons involved than personal tragedy? We may never know, though the pair regularly met during his time as Vice President to wallow in their mutual dislike of Barack Obama. Now, he has again stepped aside, for a candidate that has received the fulsome endorsement of Bill and Hilary Clinton, but not, significantly, Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders.

Kamala Harris was nobody’s idea of a strong Vice President. Considered odd and unpopular even at the time, her role was almost entirely a product of necessity. The political atmosphere of 2020 demanded a black woman, political strategy demanded one who was relatively centrist, and Biden demanded one who would be too weak to challenge him, especially following his own sense of being overshadowed by Obama. Kamala ticked all those boxes, but, following the collapse of Biden’s health, is now being rapidly remade into a Presidential candidate by the same machine that put Biden into power , and spent years concealing his health problems. 

The K-Hype is coming your way — but it’s not to be trusted or believed

They are hoping that the blaze of celebrity and political endorsements, mountains of cash and glowing media attention will blind America to the glaring flaws of the Vice President. Harris’s polling numbers are potentially catastrophic, with a favourability rating 9 points behind Biden. As VP, Harris has stocked up plenty of ammunition for her opponents, and potentially combines the disadvantages of both an untested candidate and an incumbent. She is highly identified with Biden’s mishandling of the border crisis, and with divisive issues such as abortion and a fracking ban. But apart from all the points scoring, her basic problem is that she comes across as deeply weird and inauthentic.  

Peculiarly synthetic characters are a growing feature of America’s postmodern politics, but Harris is particularly strange. There’s the surreal ad in which Harris, a half-Indian, half African-American child of academics, acts out a camp, exaggerated stereotype of a working class black woman. There are her weird attempts to sound homespun — “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”. And of course her wide eyed Silicon Valley-style spirituality, with Harris constantly repeating the baffling phrase “What can be, unburdened by what has been” in her speeches, a gnomic sentiment that she has never attempted to explain, and appears to be entirely meaningless. 

If her elevation to the national stage has already brought out the bizarre and the brittle in Kamala Harris, one can only imagine what  a presidential run stage-managed by the party bureaucracy is going to do to her, all in the full glare of unprecedented media attention. She is set to be an uncanny valley candidate, invented and reinvented by the Democratic establishment and the mainstream media. Adding to the oddness is the “K-Hive”. As with other wildly unpopular leaders, a niche “fandom” has been drawn to her peculiar brand of anti-charisma and eccentricity — one thinks of Liz Truss in Britain, or Hilary Clinton herself. Expect this “community” to be presented as signs of widespread “grassroots” support, with endless puff pieces designed to generate a synthetic “buzz” for her astroturfed just-in-time political “movement”.

The British press, terrible at covering overseas politics at the best of times, will lap this up with its typical credulity. Our own media will not tell you the truth, something that those actually living in America will be widely aware of — Trump’s support is genuine and widespread, stretching widely into communities that ordinary Republicans struggle to reach, whilst Kamala, like Hilary before her, is a creature of machine politics with no ability or connection to ordinary voters. If she wins, a task for which she is no means suited, it will be off the back of massive media manipulation and a richly funded campaign. Unlike Biden, who, though very far past his prime had been a gifted politician and a sincere Catholic who was genuinely well liked by working class voters, Kamala is an extreme social liberal from the Californian elite who hangs out with celebrities, and, like Hilarly, often seems more concerned with her own “story” than she does the plight of working people. And it is this patina of second hand glamour, just as with Hilary, which so appeals to our shabby British establishment, even as it goes down like a lead balloon with large parts of Middle America. 

The K-Hype is coming your way — but it’s not to be trusted or believed.