TOM EATON

Ninety-one years ago Franklin D. Roosevelt told his fractured, inward-looking country that it had nothing to fear but fear itself. Today, the US is once again fractured and inward-looking, but Roosevelt’s party now has something to fear that would seem strange to him: the desires of the American people.

Luckily political parties are very good at telling people what their desires should be, and on Sunday night the Democrat machine whistled and banged, hastily ditching arguments and diktats that had been rendered obsolete by Joe Biden’s decision to roll off the levers of power.

One I’ll miss the least was the oft-repeated claim that it was wrong for the media to call for Biden to drop out without also calling for Donald Trump to do the same.

This argument, of course, made the mistake of pretending that Trump is a normal politician subject to normal pressures, and not the chosen vessel of a once-in-a-century upwelling in the US of anti-democratic, anti-political feeling, exploited by masterful hustlers. Calling for Trump to drop out would be like calling for the Spanish Inquisition to pause and consider the merits of atheism. It’s a good thing to say, I suppose, but it’s also sort of implied in all the op-eds calling Trump a rider of the apocalypse, and besides, unless you have more than words, you’re just scenery.

Worse, it was a line that forced Democrats into a false dichotomy: by insisting that the presence of Trump on the ticket demanded a vote for Biden, they were implying that there was nobody else who might challenge the Republican.

Now, however, Biden has ended that argument. Kamala Harris has been anointed, which means she’s now the only one who can do it. (This implies the existence of a theoretically endless line of people who are the only one able to stop Trump, but I digress.)

On Sunday night, former secretary of labour Robert Reich tweeted that Biden had “passed the torch” to Harris, a rhetorical flourish which annoyed economist Adam Tooze, who tweeted: “in her own party when she ran in an open field in 2020”.

Those questions, however, are for the future. For now, Democrats feel that fascism is at the gates, and it is time to close ranks behind the official opposition to that threat.

I also understand this impulse. I don’t think that Trump is a fascist — I’m not sure he believes in anything beyond his duty to please himself — but as a hedonist whose compass is locked unwaveringly on his own appetites, he certainly provides a perfect point of entry to forces, both domestic and foreign, who want to dismantle American democratic institutions, women’s rights and the firewall between church and state.

Underneath all of it is the central absurdity of this moment ... if any of this made sense, the Democrats should be able to field 10 candidates who’d win in a landslide against a compulsive liar convicted of fraud and sexual assault

Still, the barely suppressed panic of the centrist and left-leaning media has produced some startling incongruities, like the sudden consensus among some US journalists, who, having spent the last few months explaining how age has nothing to do with anything, and that 81 is a perfectly sensible age at which to run for president, have suddenly decided that Trump at 78 is much, much too old to do anything but slither back to Mar-a-Lago.

It seemed a particularly odd hill to die on, or at least to sacrifice ones’ objectivity on, especially because it fails so completely to understand Trumpism. At this point, the former president could be 105, bedbound and unable to speak, and he’d still get 40-million votes, guaranteed. Hell, it might even make him more electable than he is now, as his interpreters explain that, as someone born when America Was Great Before, the reason he doesn’t speak is because he’s too busy being briefed by angels.

But perhaps that’s why there’s so much fear rippling around the edges of everything the Democrats are saying and doing right now: the old rules don’t apply any more, and the power of modern politics has evaporated like a dream.

Harris’s press machine is getting going, banging out boosterism and bumf about her past and her future; but underneath all of it is the central absurdity of this moment: the knowledge that none of the biographical bullet points should matter; that if any of this made sense, the Democrats should be able to field 10 candidates who’d win in a landslide against a compulsive liar convicted of fraud and sexual assault.

The fact that this is even close is being spun as failure of the Democrats, but the real failure is that of the system itself; and perhaps the real fear, deeper than merely losing power, is that come November, a majority of Americans will use democracy to announce that they are done with it, and that it’s time for something older, simpler and infinitely nastier.