A hot summer of campaigning in the USA
What must an American president be able to do and be?

There is no summer slump in American political life this year. After all, the president will be elected in the fall. And because the post of the world’s most important ruler is at stake, the leader of the world power par excellence, every twist and turn in the American election campaign enjoys the attention of the whole world. And there has been no shortage of twists and turns so far: the first direct clash between the two candidates turns out to be such a disaster for the Democrats that Trump’s renewed election victory seems to be a safe bet. Immediately afterwards, the Supreme Court issues two landmark rulings that realize two of Trump’s heartfelt concerns: a low blow against the onerous American regulatory authorities and a death blow to all attempts to prosecute a president for his actions in office. Within a few days, Trump is then the victim of an assassination attempt that only makes him stronger, provisionally acquitted of the charge of misappropriating secret government documents, crowned the messiah at the Republican Party convention, and confirmed by the polls as clearly the most promising candidate for the highest office. But just a few weeks later, nothing is certain: after Biden assures that only the Almighty himself can stop him from running again, he suddenly renounces in favor of his — even more unpopular — running mate Kamala Harris; contrary to all expectations, she is met with a wave of enthusiasm in the party and among the electorate. Just a few weeks later, she overtakes Trump in several polls.

This is where the journalistic mind is fully in its element. The concern that there might not be enough time to comprehend and explain one event before the next one happens certainly does not plague the representatives of this profession. It doesn’t even allow for that. For them, an event is above all “interesting!” and “significant!” Such judgments are easy to make; they actually come naturally. All it takes is a rough sense of when something can be considered sensational — quite simply, when something big and previously unknown happens to the great ones. Both together result in a high novelty value that consists in arousing and satisfying curiosity. And because this is what it is all about, neither the sender nor the receiver feels overwhelmed by the multitude of events. As a rule, the most recent incident simply swallows up the previous one and makes further attention to it superfluous. Or the multitude and interlinking of events themselves become the most exciting topic. This even multiplies the news value: “What’s going on there! Can it be called ‘historic’?”

In contrast, the following chronicle deals with something that has very little news value, namely lessons from the American political summer about the concerns of American rule. But what does “concern” actually mean? It is striking that the dispute over the issues at stake in this eventful phase of the election campaign is at best only marginally concerned with the kind of “substantive issues” that an American government would have to deal with successfully, namely the economy and inflation, the labor market and immigration, the wars and the morals of the nation. However, all sides agree on the main issue: what must an American president be able to do and be?

The television duel: a battle for dominance

The first televised debate between Trump and Biden is to take place at the end of June. The Democratic Party in particular insists on a live debate — without an audience and without the possibility of heckling, so that Trump cannot put on his usual show. Once forced into a factual debate, he will lose his mystique in his stupidity and mendacity; a nice foil that Biden can show himself off against as the epitome of seriousness, despite all the unmistakable signs of age, as the candidate with no alternative. At least that is the Democrats’ calculation.

One half of the plan is pretty much working. Trump delivers his usual litany of bogeymen with all the attendant fabrications, exaggerations, and distortions. The border is an open invitation to migrants who have no business in the American bloodstream, especially since they are largely made up of crazies and criminals; the Democrats want to impoverish all Americans and are succeeding in doing so; anyway, they hate the country and the people they would prefer to replace. But Trump’s obviously unreal rants are of little use to Biden. Nobody expected anything else from Trump anyway, so the intended shock effect has failed to materialize. After all, every American now knows how to understand the generous poetic license that Trump likes to take, namely as an overly clear declaration of his ruthless willingness to fight against the enemies that his patriotic supporters are supposed to see as their own. For this general clarification of his claim to power and its unhindered application, the polemical ruthlessness with which Trump freely and expediently defines his opponents and the nation’s problem cases in general is the best conceivable means. He leaves no room for doubt. He will accept nothing that contradicts his desire for “America first!” With every image of the enemy and every dystopian diagnosis of a state of emergency, he announces what he will fight and eliminate with all his might. In a way, Trump’s hair-raising distortions realize the ideal of the more powerful kind of politician, that he is not elected to show deep respect for a given reality, but to make it according to his own ruling needs, to “shape” it with all his might. In this respect, Trump’s duel is merely another performance of the very leadership personality that his supporters appreciate him for and that is obviously not alien to the famous “swing voters.” Above all, a strong leader is needed at the head of the nation, i.e., a model leader. And especially when the nation, according to cross-party opinion, is in a battle that will decide its fate as the world’s greatest power, the model leader must also be a born fighter.

As is well known, the other half of the plan goes wrong. Biden is showing obvious signs of advanced decrepitude. Not only is this a problem in general, it seems to be even worse than Trump’s penchant for “alternative facts.” Biden’s brave supporters lament the injustice of his proven expertise being ignored in favor of a superficial obsession with his appearance. The knowledgeable public is reminded that in the long history of American television debates, expertise has never been a priority anyway, since shortly after the debates, all that remains are a few pithy slogans that somehow hit home. Ever since the very first live duel between Kennedy and Nixon, the focus has been on the overall image of the candidates as leader types and how credibly presidential they appear. This demands less and at the same time more from the candidates than just a confident mastery of the various substantive issues, namely a commanding performance in the competition that is conducted on the basis of diverse, more or less interchangeable content. How much superiority does the respective opponent exude, how easily can he cope with his rivals — in short, who dominated the debate? This is sometimes considered a circus, and it is. At least on the one hand. But on the other hand, it shows what American voters are actually voting for when they march into the polling booth, namely not for a superior mind, but for a head of state whose intellectual abilities are worth just as much as they are good for the job — as a means of self-assertion in the trial of strength in acquiring and exercising power. So this circus is also scrutinized with all seriousness according to who can best credibly embody strong leadership.

The latter is therefore not just one, but the most important professional qualification. This is currently often illustrated with the concern that foreign countries could equate the president’s decrepitude with the weakness of the nation itself, causing enemies and rivals to rub their hands together and allies to gnash their teeth. The “three o’clock phone call” scenario is also popular, in which Biden might not still be fit enough to come out of a deep sleep to reach operating temperature at lightning speed and take even the most drastic decisions with utmost prudence — up to and including a nuclear world war. No one is right to think this scenario is silly, as it reflects the actual position of the nation and thus the main requirement of the American president’s power. For America is not just one, but the world power in the literal sense; enforcing its national security also and precisely includes the readiness to use the ultimate weapon at any time; an acute state of world war always prevails in principle and requires constant proof of total global sovereignty. And because this superpower is also a democracy, in which the American people periodically elect their super leader, the power of the nation and its requirements are translated back into the most primitive criteria of human vitality and strength — and into the silliest demonstrations of the same by old men whose credibility is extensively and pluralistically scrutinized in the free public sphere. The voters can then decide who has impressed them more in this respect.

Obviously, the weakness of the incumbent can no longer be ignored after this performance. Panic breaks out among the Democrats, but the party quickly gets a grip on it; the party greats in particular immediately switch to tactics and maneuvering — a combination of conspicuously celebrating Biden as the best president ever à la Trump while dismantling him in a measured way. Meanwhile, Biden’s insistence on carrying on does much to prove that Trump’s consistent refusal to acknowledge his previous defeat is not merely his narcissistic peculiarity, but another core component of the presidential character mask, namely the pronounced conviction of being indispensable to the nation. In his subsequent public appearances, Biden is reminiscent of his hated rival, right down to his choice of words. He rails against “the elites” in the Democratic Party who want to remove the people’s favorite president, and makes it clear that only he can save the nation and its democracy from destruction.

Two landmark rulings by the Supreme Court

The following week, the Supreme Court hands down two rulings on the freedoms and powers of the American state, whose executive head will be elected in November. Their political significance and practical impact are placed alongside the controversial ruling on the right to abortion^[1] and categorized as stages of this year’s election campaign for the soul of the nation. After all, these are fundamental decisions on the question of how liberal or conservative the soul of the state apparatus should be.

A verdict for the freedom of action of the world's most powerful capital …

The first ruling (“Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo”) “places a tombstone … no one can miss” (Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) on the so-called “Chevron Doctrine.” This goes back to a forty-year-old Supreme Court decision and concerns the fact that Congress often uses abstract, ambiguous directives when drafting its laws. The respective agencies are instructed, for example, to “ensure that the rules are in the public interest,” (New York Times, June 28, 2024) to determine the necessary individual rules — above all the various limits and safety regulations concerning environmental, occupational, and consumer protection — and to decide the countless disputes produced so reliably by the country’s day-to-day business activities.^[2]  The courts must also respect this scope for interpretation in accordance with the principle of “administrative deference.” When in doubt, the technical expertise of the relevant authority should take precedence, which in turn should ensure that disputes are dealt with more “efficiently” — in other words, that the relevant lawsuits do not end up in court all the time. This very principle is now declared to be a violation of the constitutionally prescribed separation of powers, according to which the right to binding interpretation of the law belongs exclusively to the judiciary. The occasion for the ruling is the complaint of a fishing company against the obligation to pay the observer fees for national fisheries authority inspectors who can be assigned to their vessels to monitor compliance with catch limits. The conservative-dominated court is now seizing on this rather minor case as a welcome opportunity for a landmark ruling that amounts to a far-reaching disempowerment of the national regulatory authorities — with the environmental, labor, and consumer protection authorities featuring very prominently. Their authority to set and enforce restrictive regulations, in view of the diverse damage that free enterprise reliably produces together with its capitalist wealth, is to be radically curtailed to ensure the “sustainability” of precisely this business freedom.

Similar to the landmark ruling on abortion, the reactions here are also very divided:

Some — especially the ranks of well-armed conservative lobbying organizations that support the brave little fishing company — are celebrating the ruling as a long-awaited triumph of the free-market economy against the regulatory fury of overbearing apparatchiks. The freedom-loving American entrepreneur sees these regulators at work wherever he comes up against state-imposed limits. With so much concern for the chips that just accumulate with the increase of capitalist wealth, it is supposedly no longer appreciated that the free enrichment of companies creates the nation’s wealth whose growth the national budget and the less well-off households of wage earners depend on. In this respect, the enrichment of capital is already the common good that the irksome authorities claim to protect. The only way to achieve sustainability in this respect is through sustainable boundlessness for business. The new ruling does not render the previous individual regulations of the various regulatory authorities invalid, it is only intended to apply to future cases; ultimately, however, only the relevant lawsuits are missing to put older regulations up for discussion. In any case, this establishes the general principle that if a law enacted by Congress does not clearly clarify the given situation, the competitors concerned do not have to listen to the dictates of an agency head, but have the right to take their dispute to court. Regulating free competition can therefore no longer be taken away from competition itself; in true American style, the law should also be able to be used as a means of competition. No one is under any illusions about the general consequences of this principle, for in matters of regulation, the power of money prevails in legal disputes. But this is how the undistorted justice of the market economy works. In the opinion of these judges, this dictates a risky but no less democratic separation, as such questions are only to be decided by the members of the constitutionally legitimized state power; in the eyes of the judges, in this case this is the legislative branch, which enacts the laws, and the judiciary, which decides any legal disputes, and not the agencies, which are assigned to the executive branch. The latter may be home to a lot of “expertise,” but not political decision-making power — that would not be a case of democracy, in which those in power, elected by marked ballots or dressed in black robes, decide on the conditions of existence of bourgeois competitors, but of bureaucracy. Fans of freedom recognize the illegitimacy of the latter by the fact that it all too often imposes onerous guard rails on the agents of capitalist enrichment — no matter how constructively intended, no matter how aimed at the sustainability of exactly the same business activity. The state superstructure has to serve the capitalist base through freeing and not through limiting — this is how consequent the freedom-oriented dialectical materialism of these judges is.

Others see the ruling as a disaster for this very reason. The left-liberal international paper from New York is representative of many:

“The Supreme Court’s decision … could lead to the elimination or weakening of thousands of rules on the environment, health care, worker protection, food and drug safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more. … The court’s opinion could make it easier for opponents of federal regulations to challenge them in court, prompting a rush of new litigation… ‘If Americans are worried about their drinking water, their health, their retirement account, discrimination on the job, if they fly on a plane, drive a car, if they go outside and breathe the air — all of these day-to-day activities are run through a massive universe of federal agency regulations’ said Lisa Heinzerling, an expert in administrative law … ‘And this decision now means that more of those regulations could be struck down by the courts.’” (New York Times, June 28, 2024)

Critics of the ruling are therefore very familiar with the systematic breadth and regularity of the effects of free profit-making. These effects are even conspicuously self-evident to them — so self-evident, in any case, that from the known and feared damage they always draw the same lesson, namely that the lasting need for a sovereign power that thereby protects the expected victims is everywhere plain to see. It is precisely this need that the friends of robust regulation refer to as a requirement for “technical expertise,” which is, after all, the domain of the agencies and not of judges. As if it were a matter of mastering science and technology and not the legal mastery of the conflicts and contradictions of capitalist business. It is apparently self-evident to the critics that this is precisely where scientific expertise has its place and thus provides a useful service to people as a contributor to the genuinely appropriate management of the damage and disputes that life in the market economy entails.

The conservative majority of judges is now providing its own clarification on this very point. In American democracy, questions of professional expertise — at least in those cases to which the Supreme Court somehow attaches great importance — are to be treated as questions of power.^[3] So the ruling is definitely in Trump’s favor. Not only because it is a significant contribution to his notoriously bitter fight against regulation, but also because it corresponds to his — democracy-fanatic — definition of politics in general as a field of competition for enforcement, as a power struggle.

… and for the most powerful office holder in the world

According to the conservative majority of judges, what must be removed from the competition before the court is the president’s freedom of action. This is exactly what is decided a few days later in the case “Trump v. United States.”

The court is dealing with the question of whether the charges against Donald Trump for attempted electoral fraud must be dismissed because the president enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts — at least that is how the former president sees it. The highest court has now largely ruled in his favor. It explicitly states that the president is not above the law, does not enjoy criminal immunity as a private individual and cannot claim absolute immunity for all of his official acts — the latter only applies to the so-called “core powers” that fall exclusively to the president and in which congress and the judiciary cannot interfere. However, in the gray area that extends beyond this, which is still “within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities,” his immunity is at least “presumptive.” He is only liable to prosecution in the event of a “manifest” breach of authority. The public prosecutor must prove that his investigations against the president do not represent a “danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Crucially, all official communications, e.g., between Trump and his Attorney General, his Vice President and various officials in the individual states, are protected from criminal investigation.^[4] Investigating the president’s motives is also taboo — the conservative majority sees this as a Pandora’s box that could hinder the president in exercising his core competencies. The decision as to whether Trump’s attempts at the time to invalidate his election defeat should be classified as the official actions of a president or rather as the unofficial actions of a private individual will be referred back to a lower court. To this end, the Supreme Court’s explanatory memorandum humbly notes that it itself is “a court of final review and not first view. … This necessarily factbound analysis is best performed initially by the District Court. The Court therefore remands to the District Court to determine in the first instance whether this alleged conduct is official or unofficial” The immediate relevance of the ruling is that Trump has nothing more to fear in this matter before the election in early November; the ruling was made too late for that — malicious tongues say it was deliberate. If he wins the election, he can instruct his Attorney General to dismiss the case without further ado; if he loses, he still has the reasonable hope that the lower courts will dismiss the case in light of this landmark ruling; and if not, the highest judicial body in the land has at least done much to clarify how much protection it has left to spare for the holder of the highest office.

But the conservative judges are concerned with much more than this particular case. Due to its fundamental and unprecedented nature, the conservative majority of judges feels compelled to decide a question of principle, namely, what must a president be allowed to do, given what he must be able to do? The conservative majority of justices, in keeping with their judicial philosophy of “originalism,”^[5] invokes the nation’s Founding Fathers and numerous references from previous decisions of the Supreme Court itself:

“… the Framers ‘deemed an energetic executive essential...’ A ‘feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.’ ... He must make ‘the most sensitive and far-reaching decisions entrusted to any official under our constitutional system.’ There accordingly ‘exists the greatest public interest’ in providing the President with ‘the maximum ability to deal fearlessly and impartially with’ the duties of his office.’ Appreciating the ‘unique risks to the effective functioning of government’ that arise when the President’s energies are diverted by proceedings that might render him ‘unduly cautious in the discharge of his official duties,’ we have recognized Presidential immunities and privileges ‘rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by our history.’”

The president’s lack of concern about the consequences of his actions for himself must be absolute, because the ruthlessness of the use of force is his first and decisive core competence. Only then will the executive fulfill its mandate — so great, so pervasive, and so urgent is the nation’s need for force. Conservatives are thus recognizably setting out to create a legal protection for the president that fits what the president of the United States objectively is, namely the most powerful person in the world, who performs his useful service to the nation precisely by ruthlessly asserting himself. This functionality of presidential power thus requires in substance a far-reaching leap of faith in the one who possesses it, the far-reaching “presumption” of an identity between the president’s motivations and the nation’s interests.

This is precisely where the many critics of the ruling intervene — again by invoking a catastrophe for the nation. They deplore the “law-free zone” that the conservative judges — moreover with a flimsy historical argumentation^[6] — expediently construct. Along these lines, a judge from the defeated liberal minority presents the following damning review:

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. … In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

When it comes to “the most powerful person in the country and possibly the world” and the question of what American presidents can do and actually do with their apparatus of power both within the country and abroad — especially with the most powerful army in the world at their disposal — a lot can come to mind. A good liberal judge can think above all of the personal-political advantage for which this power can be abused. The concern that moves her professionally and with recognizable passion applies therefore to the office and the form of rule itself, namely that such an all-powerful profession requires legal control — then it is not evil purposes that make headway, but the concerns of the so-powerfully-led nation. These, in turn, are good because they are democratically clean and therefore entirely legitimate.

In the liberal judges’ warning of a vengeful king in the White House, the head of the conservative majority of judges, John Roberts, sees only frivolous “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.’” For him, hypothetical horror scenarios are appropriate elsewhere:

“The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. … Virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration, or environmental laws). An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute. … The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid."

This ideal of strong leadership, which is in fact not monarchical but very democratic, is the sole remedy against what judges see as the greatest danger to American democracy: that the supreme power holder could be merely a weak plaything in the competition between the parties.

*

At this point, the polls of the relevant institutes and the rulings of the Supreme Court are clearly pointing in the same direction. From next year on, America will feel the unleashed leadership power and the desire for revenge of an “America first!” president; with a government guide called “Project 2025” offered by a conservative think tank, the “Heritage Foundation,” which sensibly combines unleashed business and unleashed executive power.

The assassination attempt on Trump and his coronation

At that moment, a sniper intervenes by all accounts a là Herostratus with his own notoriety-seeking motives. Trump is shot on stage in front of his supporters. As soon as he falls to the ground, his impressive democratic instincts take over. He seizes the opportunity for an iconic pose, raises his fist in the air, and shouts “fight fight fight!” into the crowd with a bloodied face. Fortunately, the cameras are on hand to capture a moment whose meaning is immediately clear to everyone. Trump’s conspiratorial talk of the many villains who are out to get him because they want to oppress his supporters may not be true, but it is extremely vivid. And his supporters’ belief in a savior who doesn’t shy away from fight or danger in the battle against omnipresent anti-Americanism is spectacularly confirmed.

Great material for the Republican Party convention, which begins two days later and whose main agenda item is in any case paying unanimous homage to a man who has always wanted to be far more than the candidate of a party and is celebrated as more. Trump is and remains the leader of a political movement; conversely, his party increasingly sees itself as such. In the days leading up to the crowning finale with Trump’s speech, the party members conduct themselves as they would at his famous rallies, mutually reinforcing each other in their claim to be the only true Americans through their demonstrative joint devotion to their now demonstrably divinely blessed leader. He in turn celebrates himself as the epitome of his followers’ consternation and entitlement, as a martyr and at the same time a battle leader for the true Americans. When he begins his much-anticipated speech with conciliatory gestures, promising to be a “President for all Americans” this time, only to immediately return to his usual rants against politicians and the media who don’t love him and against immigrants who don’t fit into his national blood and color scheme, he is not contradicting himself at all. The victims of his invectives are characterized precisely by the fact that they are non-supporters of Trump, i.e., un-American. They do not deserve a president who serves them, but only one who punishes them. In this way, Trump offers a lesson about the people he needs, namely one that acts in a perfect way, that imagines the president’s sovereignty as its own. Whatever his supporters expect from his time in office — less inflation, keeping out and kicking out the illegals, more Jesus and less wokeness in education and culture — they have to let it all coincide in the idea that they are being treated badly, i.e., in an un-American way, by their current government, deprived of their freedom. So they can savor Trump’s promise that it will be their retribution if he prevails against his enemies — and hail him as a leader who will not be stopped by anything or anyone.

At the start of the convention, it is also proven that, despite all the nastiness in the “deep state,” there are more and more good guys who no longer tolerate the systematic witch hunt against the true president of the people. The charges of misappropriation of secret government documents are surprisingly quashed by a judge nominated by Trump. The special investigator should never have been appointed here because such an investigator may only be appointed by the president himself — and not merely by the attorney general. The ruling is spectacular in that it overrules a practice that goes back to the famous “Watergate” affair and is intended to ensure that the investigator is not subject to directives by the accused, of all things. The finding, which moots the trial, is very formal on the one hand, but in another way not at all. The judge is obviously following the hint that the conservative Chief Justice Clarence Thomas gave with his reasoning in the completely different proceedings on presidential immunity mentioned above, in order to make a fundamental contribution to strengthening the power of the head of state to control the entire executive apparatus. The trial is not yet over, as the prosecutors are allowed to appeal, but here too the extraordinary delay in the verdict ensures that Trump has nothing more to fear before the election.

Otherwise, the party goes to some lengths to present itself as the real American workers’ party. For the sake of credibility, a few authentic everyday Americans appear who have three jobs at the same time and still can’t afford presents for their grandchildren. What is this supposed to speak for and against? According to the rationale of democracy, free-market poverty apparently speaks for the need for better governance even in libertarian America, i.e., against Biden’s bad governance. Afterwards, even a genuine militant trade unionist, the head of the Teamsters transport workers’ union is allowed to appear. He denounces the greed of the big corporations, whose crime consists in fighting union representation of their workforces, imposing the costs of caring for the famous vicissitudes of a proletarian life (health insurance, sick pay, pensions) on the American taxpayer, and being disloyal to the American business location. His polemics against big business and his fiery pleas for the importance of patriotic American unions like the Teamsters are largely met with stunned silence by those present, but his appeal on behalf of the workers to politicians and his colleagues from the other unions is entirely in the spirit of the “America first!” hosts:

“We need trade policies that put American workers first. It needs to be easier for companies to remain in America. … To ensure we make this great nation …the bigger, faster, and strongest nation in the entire world.”

At bottom, then, this is a stereotypically populist celebration of the patriot in the worker. Members of this class can celebrate themselves as the epitome of the true American, victimized by the establishment elites who never appreciate their hard work and honorable struggle to get by on meager earnings. This is now being made up for by a Republican leadership that is demonstrating its radical will to exclude foreigners and all other deviants in the name of the workers. The delegates carry around the party’s material promise to the working class on their colorful cardboard signs: “Mass deportation now!”

The ceremonially nominated vice presidential candidate JD Vance stands for all these core elements of the current Republican identity — for absolute devotion to Trump, ostentatious hostility towards all non-Americans, often with reference to the situation of the working class. He combines Christian nationalists’ aggressive hatred of immigrants and women who have too few children with the smart business acumen of Silicon Valley.

Biden out, Harris in

Less than a week after the Republican party convention, Biden packs it in. He praises himself for his great service to the people, especially the hard-working ‘middle class,’ and though he still firmly believes in his ability to win and prospects of victory, he realizes that he has lost the trust of his party as campaign battle-leader. As a parting gift to himself, he single-handedly appoints his successor, his running mate Kamala Harris. She is considered a no-go for the race until Biden’s failed televised debate. Her poll ratings are as bad as Biden’s, if not worse; her 2020 candidacy for the presidency is regarded as a nonstarter; far too unsympathetic and aloof, it is said. As vice president, she did not make herself popular with any notable successes either — the bipartisan dissatisfaction with the situation on the border is reckoned as her failure because Biden once put diplomacy with Latin American countries in her portfolio. In short, she has convinced few and achieved little, so she is neither convincing nor effective. To the end, she is seen as the most effective deterrent weapon in the hands of Biden’s last defenders, according to the motto that compared to her, Biden looks old, but not so bad.

But as soon as the change of candidate takes place, both the party and the media that lean toward it radically change their view of the candidate, without anything having changed in terms of her actions or attitudes. Within hours, the Democratic governors endorse her nomination, followed a few days later by the party grandees, and finally Obama pronounces his blessing to the media. By then at the latest, enthusiasm breaks out. The overwhelming relief at the withdrawal of the old man, who was considered to have no chance, is projected onto the new candidate and celebrated as her quality, the new one seeming so young and so vital! The enthusiasm is not only abstract, but also very instrumental, being primarily aimed at the revived hope of being able to beat the Trumpian devil after all — something like a purposed führer cult. But once it gets going, the optimism of purpose produces its own reasons for finding the woman great. The meme factories from the online world create their own icon in real time in their playful, insistent way; they draw on appearances by the unpopular politician previously considered embarrassing in order to now recirculate them as evidence of a sympathetic popular touch — yesterday “cringe,” today “brat.” The networked celebrities and ordinary voters circulate the images among themselves for a while, share their enthusiasm with each other, then look at their collective product and come to the conclusion that the woman is really popular! People are first enthusiastic en masse, then enthusiastic about the enthusiasm — a kind of mini-movement for Kamala snowballs. Representatives of all demographic categories are somehow found — suburban mothers and women in general, “people of color” and “White Men for Kamala!” — who speak out with their exuberance. Donations are flowing in at a record-breaking rate, which reinforces the enthusiasm of the other supporters, which in turn proves to the donors that they’ve hit on the right choice. For a long time now, no one has found it somehow indecent to take the amount of money raised as an indicator of the candidate’s chances of success — the interest in the success of the right candidate makes up for a lot. The traditional experts of the serious media examine the phenomenon and draw the same conclusion with only a little astonishment and skeptical detachment: people are enthusiastic, so there is definitely something to the woman. That’s how abstract, circular, and personality-cult-like it is, the creation — from above and below — of democratic approval for prospective rulers. And this is precisely how the reawakened Democratic Party is now setting about saving democracy from the populist Trump.

The questions that remain are which running mate Harris will choose to run with her against Trump and what exactly her campaign strategy will be for the three months or so until the election. Harris finds an answer to both questions in the governor of the state of Minnesota, Tim Walz. He is making a career out of a single word, which he has repeated in numerous summer interviews and talk-show appearances and which is intended to adequately characterize the positions and programs of his Republican rivals: “weird.” It is of course not new to characterize Trump as crazy and thus discredit him as a political opponent. The entire Democratic campaign under Biden was based on the warning that Trump would bring a vicious madman back into power who would ultimately lead the nation to disaster. The Democrats now feel that this shows far too little mastery; they would still be taking Trump’s political program far too seriously and considering it far too worthy of attention. The nonchalance with which Walz dismisses the competition, deeming them more pitiful than frightening, inspires the Democrats — so suddenly everybody who is anybody says the magic word into every camera they can squeeze in front of. Immediately there is a telling warning: don’t exaggerate! After all, we must not give Trump’s supporters the feeling that we despise them as outlandish and hopeless simply because we think it is quite obviously crazy to see even a conceivable alternative in Trump and Vance. Interested observers rightly consider this to be a very fine line. The choice as vice presidential candidate falls to Walz, the figurehead of casual contempt, because he is in addition the perfect antithesis to the strange Republican couple: so normal, down-to-earth, without affectations and a true everyday American, right down to his choice of clothes! Normal people definitely like that — especially traditional Republicans who can’t relate to the notorious Democratic “coastal elite.”

The Democrats’ coronation mass

With this contemptuous bow to the voters, the Democrats, once again enthusiastic about themselves, enter their party conference at the end of August.

There, the base and the leadership get the chance to jointly realize their unified enthusiasm for their new leadership duo as a party collective both internally and before the eyes of all interested Americans, thus really firing it up. They conduct themselves on and in front of the stage in a way that differs from Trump’s rallies above all in that Trump’s critics do not find them repulsive in this case, but infectious. Above all, they enjoy the cheerfulness with which the many speakers celebrate their own party and mock their Republican opponents. They still do this with drastic images of a national doomsday scenario if Trump returns to power, but now with a completely different tone, as “joyful warriors,” leaders of a fighting movement that is one big offer for euphoric cheering and participation. They raise their thumbs instead of their pointing fingers, swap boring fact checks for their own narrative and luminaries — and find no image too striking to “outshine” Trump’s combination of self-canonization and demonization of others: future instead of past, light instead of darkness, new beginnings instead of apocalypse. With this, the Democrats are making their supporters a happy offer to get to like the abstraction they are being asked to accept. They are supposed to see in Harris a non-Trump with prospects of success, a holder of power who is not thought of as exercising power, but as sparing them from it. But not just as the notorious “lesser evil” that makes the decision demanded of voters not really palatable, but digestible. Instead, they are offered the object of truly convinced enthusiasm, simply by setting a resolute example for them.

After the speeches by the living party legends (Biden, the Clintons, the Obamas), who will be remembered above all for having inspired the members of the audience in their own way and made it clear to them that they are enthusiastic about Harris & Walz, the audience finally gets the opportunity to get to know a little better the candidates for whom it has already been enthusiastic for several weeks. It is presented with two exemplary images, two personal representatives of how it sees itself and America’s moral community. The candidates reach deep into their own past to present themselves as the opposite of an aloof “coastal elite,” instead as genuinely normal people with whom even the most average American can identify, but who just in that way express such a shining example that they are obviously inherently called to lead normal Americans.

Walz comes first and delivers new material for worshiping him as a super normal American hero: veteran, teacher, football coach, hunter, good neighbor, and above all family man — authentically loved by his son and his former students, which they, too, testify to on stage. He declares “freedom” to be the new lodestar of the Democrats. As their governing motto, he ironically presents the principle of leaving the citizens alone — Republicans, who traditionally foster this as their special governing motto, only mean their own freedom to deceive citizens, according to Walz. Finally, Harris takes the stage and introduces herself as the multi-ethnic offspring of immigrant academics who embody the beauty of a society of capable immigrants; as the product of a “working class neighborhood” with the typical hardship there, which Harris discusses as the birthplace of important virtues. First and foremost, this includes a pronounced work ethic: tackling instead of complaining, no half measures! You need that to make a living, which may not make you rich, but is obviously enough to cultivate the pathetic pride of getting by in the form of a neatly mowed lawn. This also includes the virtue of declaring oneself responsible for the many victims of the American way of life. In her childhood, an abused neighborhood girl finds shelter with Harris’s family; her heart for victims leads her to a career as a tenacious prosecutor who fights for victims by fighting to protect state law that punishes offenders whenever the harm they cause to life and limb defies the law. From there, she draws a direct line to the highest office: with her heart and her toughness, she is predestined to defend the well-being of the nation and the goodness of humanity against evil, both within and outside the nation’s borders, from the most powerful post in the world. A born representative of patriotic community spirit and militant strength, qualities she claims to be completely absent in Trump, a weak egomaniac who puts not America but himself first, and who can therefore be wrapped around the finger with flattery by any dictator who comes along — i.e., by any of America’s foreign rivals. So if you want strong leadership for a strong superpower, there’s no getting around Harris.

The word “coronation mass,” which the local press uses to highlight a residual detachment from the event whose success is clearly so important to it, is actually not a bad description — even if the expression is meant somewhat differently. When Americans elect the head of the state power that rules over them, they are also electing a functionary of a different, higher kind, for which some European democracies still fall back on their monarchical past: a ruler who not only governs, but also embodies the unity of those above and below and makes it shine. The governed are offered a radiant mirror image so that they see themselves in their personal and collective virtuousness when, of all things, they look at the authorities. This is something all Americans should really do in this case — the decisive contrast between Harris and Trump on the moral front. The Democrats present themselves along these lines as the true representatives of all the conservative virtues that the Republican Party claims for itself: freedom, national strength, at home and abroad. “USA, USA, USA”: the classic battle cry of American chauvinists is chanted again and again — but cheerfully! And red, white, and blue balloons rain down at the end of the party conference. That fits. At the height of their flag-waving patriotic ecstasy, the Democrats land on the main issue of the American election: the direct identity between their uninhibited love of their country and their need for a sovereign authority with the strongest and most charismatic cast possible. This is also the Democrats’ avowedly strongest argument to the voters out in the country.

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One thing is clear: the “good vibes” are absolutely supposed to continue after the party conference. But it is also clear that the honeymoon will be over at some point. At some point, according to the increasingly frequent reminders, Harris will not be able to avoid presenting a concrete government agenda, at least in the key areas — in other words, a solid offer in the area of “substantive issues.” That also fits. At least to the extent that it clarifies what is the main thing and what is secondary in a democratic election campaign. An agenda for sovereign governance in the election campaign is merely one way of promoting what is essential, namely the sole intended item on the voters’ agenda: the election of the ruling personnel, who then determine the agenda for the citizens. On the other hand, such reminders do at least highlight where the candidates really have to prove themselves once in office: in success in the nation’s cause, in its proving its worth in the global competition for money and power. And Harris certainly delivers the requested information at the latest with her big speech — at least in a hint: on the economy and fiscal policy, on healthcare and immigration, on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East in which America sees itself called on as the supreme force for good. So the whole “what for” of American rule is certainly present — in the form of a whole host of challenges to the universal responsibility of an American president, which she has the right spirit for anyway.

There prevails between the polarized parties at least a striking amount of agreement on this. Every issue is once again about the nation’s cause in the most fundamental way. They are all about the freedom and security of the economy, meaning the successful accumulation of capitalist wealth and its fiscal and regulatory management; the freedom and security of citizens in their everyday struggle to get by; the security of American superiority, i.e., its freedom as the leading superpower — and thus the question of how American world leadership should be defined in the first place; the security and freedom of family life, i.e., the sovereign regulation of what women may and should do with their bodies, and what the family relationship as the economic and moral nucleus of nation and state has to achieve; finally, immigration or as the case may be the necessities and pitfalls of radically stemming it — a topic in which every combination of freedom and security just mentioned seems to be relevant. Dealing with this multidimensional national cause and the notoriously acrimonious US partisan bickering over it is likewise good for some lessons — about what the American nation is and needs today. In other words, what this nation needs such sympathetic leadership personalities for.

In this sense: to be continued.

© GegenStandpunkt 2024