Whoever wins will have their head cut off. I write this on Monday without knowing what will happen on Tuesday. This is tomorrow (good title for the future presidency of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump). This is what a presidential election in the United States is like. The uncertainty is as overwhelming as the fatigue with the campaigns, the weariness with the war speeches that bombard voters day and night, the shameful propaganda alignment of the press of one sector or another, the arrogance of hundreds of millions of dollars invested in support of one candidate or another, while the rising cost of living and the problems of employment for the young and pensions for the old, plague the daily reality of the vast majority of voters.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, donated $120 million to Donald Trump’s campaign and became the linchpin of his circle of influence. Kamala Harris raised two billion dollars a few days after Joe Biden appointed her to replace him on the ballot, and to this very day, Kamala is still soliciting money, twenty-four hours before the vote. The problem with her is that we still don’t quite know what her candidacy offers, other than the donations she is asking for to rid us of a second Trump presidency. Is that enough? Worst of all, her campaign began with a hopeful call to look to the future with laughter and joy but ended up looking to the past with bitterness and terror towards her rival.
With this background and only hours before the election, it can be asserted that, no matter what happens, whoever wins the popular vote and then the electoral college, American democracy is failing miserably in this past election. The mere fact of a second consolidated Trump candidacy, supported by half of the national electorate, is a symptom of that failure: having been indicted on charges of bribery, incitement to insurrectional violence against state institutions, falsification of public documents, and concealment of evidence in the proceedings against him, Trump is not a threat to Republican democracy, as the Kamala campaign has tried to present him, but the symbol of its decadence. Otherwise, it cannot be explained that he is there, with popular support that has nothing of “deplorable,” as Hillary Clinton assured in 2016, and neither of garbage as Biden said regarding Trump’s audience at Madison Square Garden that closed his campaign in New York.
The abusive, violent, and degrading quality that Trump’s candidacy implies for the sense of dialogue and persuasion that democracy is supposed to have, we must add the stubbornness and blindness of the Democratic representatives, mainly occupied with the preservation of a power that is falling out of their hands. In an electoral cycle that has had everything from assassination attempts to last-minute resignations and total incoherence in programmatic terms, it is no longer a surprise that disbelief, if not distrust and rejection, are a significant part of the response of the young population, as well as of important sectors of Latino and African American voters, today transformed into swing voters in the wavering states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and others.
For the Democrats, in particular, it has not been easy to believe and convince their neighbors of the value of a candidacy that was born of concealment—to the point of scandal and public stubbornness of covering the sun with a finger of secrecy—in the face of Joe Biden’s inability to lead the election. Sustained by an opaque and unnamable nomenklatura, finally the successor of the successor appointed Kamala Harris as the official successor to serve the interests of the party, in the best tradition of the Soviet Politburo and the Mexican PRI. A triumph of the infinite ways of manifesting itself that democracy has, without a doubt, and that somehow equaled the kidnapping that Trump and his gang undertook on the Republican Party to achieve the total obedience and adhesion of its members. The fact is that when democracy is in danger, whether in the face of the imminent onslaught of communism or fascism, it is understood that it is necessary to act quickly and without contemplation.
Even so, explanations are necessary. Two days ago, the prestigious national poll conducted by the alliance of The New York Times and Siena College showed an alarming outlook: 64% of white voters without an academic degree were leaning towards Trump, against 34% for Harris. The rates tended to balance out with the responses of non-white and non-degree voters, although the final picture showed a clear and gradual slide of Democratic voters toward the exit door. When this migratory process began is no mystery. Paradoxically, it began with the first presidency of Barack Obama, who came to the White House in 2008 with the promise that change was possible, Yes We Can, but left eight years later, ceding power to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again. Between those two slogans, between those two emblems that redefined the history of the country and confronted it with its present crisis and distrust, the black waters have been entering the ship of democracy without haste or pause. Today those same waters have made it so heavy, rhetorical, and repetitive in its promises that no one notices how little it moves and how much it sinks amid a dangerous discredit. It’s what Trump has sought from day one: to erode the credibility terrain to divide and rule. But it’s also what Kamala has found with her Olympian nomination and the weakness of her leadership: fanning herself with a governing agenda that made her rival the sole and primary protagonist.
From this perspective, it is clear that there is no way out for either. Whoever wins, rancor and hatred will cut off their head. There is no time for anything else, free enterprise is over, after having done everything right and ended everything so badly. A new American tragedy, in the background, is what we have been seeing during these campaign times, fertilized with the background of Mexican corridos and immigrants at the southern border. But there is nothing to complain about; the tragic is always like that. It has that gray tone of the inevitable that is going to happen, no matter how much no one wants it to happen but no one is really willing to prevent it. All dictatorships start this way, making democracy a comedy. And when they don’t, it is simply the curtain that falls on democracy.
* This article was published originally in Spanish on Rialta Magazine on November 5, 2024, election day in the United States.
