Barring another surprise “event” the coming US presidential showdown is likely to be a duel between former President Donald Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris.
That duel, if it goes through, will include a number of new features.
Harris is only the second woman to reach the last round in a US presidential contest. She is also the first “black” woman of Indian and Jamaican background to reach the penultimate rung of the ladder.
There are novelties on Trump’s side as well.
He is the second former president after Theodore Roosevelt to seek a return to the White House, in the face of opposition from his party’s traditional elite. But unlike Roosevelt who left the Republican Party to found his foredoomed Progressive Party, Trump did not leave and united it under his flag.
One of the paradoxes of this election is that Republicans enter the final round unexpectedly united while Democrats, including some on the left, are still yes-butting Harris as their standard-bearer.
American presidential elections have often been more about personality than policy.
Of the 46 presidents the US has had 31 had a military background up to the highest grades. Only Bill Clinton made his refusal to enlist for service during the Vietnam War a badge of honor.
Barack Obama who also had no service record claimed military credit on behalf of his maternal grandfather who had served in the army. Grandpa’s picture adorned the cover of Obama’s manifesto “Audacity of Hope.”
This time round neither of the finalists has a military record, even through grandpas, to boast about.
What about other ingredients in an American presidential narrative?
The standard fable presents the aspirant as hailing from a modest, occasionally poor, family living in a log cabin but moving up the social ladder thanks to hard work and personal merit. Bill Clinton made much of the claim that he had been an orphan raised by a selfless and dedicated mother, a theme that helped secure votes from single mothers.
Such themes don’t work this time.
Trump may have not lived in the penthouse of Trump Tower from the start but certainly didn’t grow up in a log cabin either. Harris’s parents managed to secure an upper-middle class status thanks to hard work and the luck to live in California where positive discrimination is almost a creed.
Thus, one might have assumed that the contest this time would shift attention from personalities to policy differences.
The opposite has happened.
The two camps have chosen personal attacks of the kind and at a level seldom seen before. The list of charges made against Trump is too long for this column. He is castigated as guilty of every sin imaginable, including the original one.
As for Harris, she is caricatured as a Jezebel with a law degree and blamed for all the real or imagined failures of the Obama-Biden’s12-year joint tenure in the White House.
Since neither party allowed an open convention key policy issues were not debated even at the party level.
What are those issues?
The first is that the US has been engaged in a cultural civil war for over a decade.
The traditional vision of the US as a melting pot of cultural, religious and ethnic identities is challenged by what Samuel Huntingdon’s disciples present as a salad bar in which double-barrel identity is the rule. The clash of civilizations is happening inside the US.
In it everyone claims to be, and often genuinely feels to be, a victim.
“We’ll take our country back” implies that someone has stolen it.
The slogan “protect our social rights” means someone is trying to deprive Americans of public subsidies, positive discrimination and perks that almost half of the population receive.
The slogan” black lives matter” implies a system of values based on skin color.
Another key issue is that of the nation’s ethno-demographic persona which has been reduced to tittle-tattle about how many illegal immigrants to round up and expel rather than how to use managed immigration as a source of strength as it has been in the US since its inception.
One of the dangers that democracies face is that of the machinery of government morphing into a political party with its own culture, traditions, methods and, needless to say, interests above all that of self-perpetuation. Thus the US has a third, invisible party, besides the Republicans and Democrats.
The Federal Government employs almost three million people. Of those, between 5,000 and 7,000 change when the White House changes occupants.
Tenured, at times life-long, jobs help perpetuate a Mandarinate that sees its task as keeping the ship of state on a course it has set.
That Mandarinate is especially well-entrenched in the State Department, the Pentagon, the Treasury and, more importantly, the judiciary.
It also has well-established, at times incestuous, relations with lobbyists, single-cause action groups, universities with their tenured academics, and think tanks with rotating doors to government departments and the media.
The Mandarinate maintains close ties with those unmovable, effectively tenured members of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Conspiracy theorists refer to Mandarinate as “the deep state”.
However, what we are dealing with isn’t the product of a conspiracy by a cabal in a black chamber. It is the organic product of a system in which democracy is reduced to elections and elections to a beauty contest, just as a set of rituals is often marketed as a religion.
Winning an election is an art; governing is quite a different one.
Another key issue is the redistribution of power at the federal and state levels.
In several states, especially in the South, confederal anxieties abide.
This is often unjustly seen as redneck prejudice or even rank racism. But the fact is that the closer the decision-making process is to those affected the stronger a democracy is.
Trump has tried to express that view in his bull-in-the-china-shop style while advocating the opposite by calling for an increase in presidential power.
Elitist Democrats on the other hand preach the old federalist gospel of states close to water- especially the two oceans and the Great Lakes.
This is why Democrats portray the recent decision by the Supreme Court on allowing some states to set their own rules on abortion as an attack on democracy rather than a move towards decentralization that could be extended to other issues.
Rebalancing power between Washington and the states has been an issue since the end of the Civil War.
The defeated Confederate states suffered 12 years of military occupation by the northern army, not to mention plundering by “carpetbaggers” at the end of which they signed a treaty that while ruling out fissiparous dreams, promised a rebalancing process that never happened.
While the two candidates fire abuse at one another the voter isn’t told what they actually mean to do about cracks in the structures of world order, the war in Ukraine, China as a threat or a rival, the exponential rise of anti-Semitic activities and the deepening of incivility in public life.
On November 5 the Mandarinate or the third party won’t be on any ticket.
