US election: God help us all

The worst thing is the feeling of powerlessness, as we wait to discover our fate.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

It's about now that you feel the ice-cold fingers around your heart. They've been there a while, slowly inching closer, causing this constant low-level chill in your chest. But now they've made contact. They're grasping for the aorta and the ventricles, they're starting to squeeze. The fear is here. The dread. 

It's no longer possible to ignore the US election, if it ever was. I can't pay full attention to it or I will lose my mind. I can't ignore it or I will lose the plot. There is no sensible rational distance to keep from it.

We're just days away from an event with limitless consequences, from a moment which will change everything. Usually that's hyperbole. This time it is not. And yet, we have no power over it. We have no influence, as individuals or a country. There is, realistically speaking, not a single thing we can do. We have to sit and wait and watch and then accept our fate. 

The most obvious impact is Ukraine. It must now be clear what Ukraine is. All but the most obtuse must recognise what it stands for. You'll notice the way that left and right conspiracy theories both centre on this conflict. Like covid, it's where the paranoid mind comes to rest in a series of garbled anxieties. And there is a reason for that. It is a physical conflict between liberalism and populism. it is the physical battle in what is usually a war of words. It is the freezer in which our ideological struggles play out.

The principles that are at stake in Ukraine are obvious. The self-determination of people. The resistance to imperialism. The European dream of peace, cooperation and reason versus the Russian nightmare of aggression, dominance and grievance. But underlying all that is the real moral instruction, the one that flows through almost all aspects of the global populist movement: That might is right. That a strong country can take what it likes from a weaker country. That real men are manly and tough. That governments should do as they please without these weak-willed institutions like parliament and the courts getting in the way. 

We act like these are all unique political elements - geopolitics, identity politics, individual rights, constitutional issues. They are not. They are all different facets of the same sentiment. They are expressions of the need for potency. Might is right. I'll do what I want. I can, so I will. Grab them by the pussy. The triumph of the will.

If Donald Trump wins, Ukraine is lost. I can't see any way in which that can be avoided. Vladimir Putin's war strategy has been very clearly based on maximising territory ahead of a hoped-for Republican victory. That land will presumably be handed to him on a platter with Ukraine told to survive without American help if it rejects the offer. Europe can help Ukraine survive. But we almost certainly cannot do that indefinitely.

The next steps are so disturbing that they seem almost fantastical. But they are perfectly possible and perhaps even likely. Trump has no interest in Nato. He probably won't leave. He will just ignore it. And then Putin, basking in one victory, will face a tempting choice: why not invade a Nato country? 

It would be a chance to test the organisation's central idea of mutual defence, right at the moment that the US will not stand by it. It would be a chance to drive a dagger through its heart. And once that happens, we face a series of choices which are so ugly that the fingers around your heart squeeze and you can feel the atria shatter and collapse. Very quickly you are looking at a world where Britain and France, as the only major European military powers, are facing a direct confrontation with Russia, without American assistance. Or that we submit to Putin's move, thereby ushering in an age of populist dominance around the world.

Sounds mad, I know. It is merely a logical series of decisions based on the situation we're in now and what we know about the key players involved in it. Will it certainly happen? No. Is it massively more likely in the event of a Trump victory? Yes.

We should be clear what we're talking about here. It's a kind of fascism. Once you use that word all sorts of obvious reactions take place. Some people feel you really have to use it or you're not taking the threat seriously enough. Some people feel that anyone who uses it is obviously a hysteric. 

Neither is true. It's often not a useful word to use, because it shifts the debate into semantics rather than politics. But at the same time, it is a perfectly accurate word to use in the current circumstances and it makes sense to use it when it might do some good.

Trump has not always been a fascist. In his first presidential run he was simply a vicious racist cunt. Even today, he still omits several of the qualities that we would associate with Hitler or Mussolini. He's not interested in creating a fascist New Man, for instance, and he's not a totalitarian. He doesn't want full social control. This aspect of the old Nazi experience is not present anywhere in the populist movement.

But he exhibits sufficient examples of fascist tendencies to justify the use of the word. He works to undermine and eradicate democracy. That's not controversial. That is a fact. I'm not even going to bother justifying it here. Democracy cannot survive where candidates do not accept its results and anyone who claims not to understand that is being wilfully obstinate.

He talks openly about being a dictator, about deploying the military against political opponents, about racial hygiene, about his love for strong-men authoritarians, about the victimhood of the in-group, threatened by traitor minorities, which can only be resurrected through his leadership. More than anything, he believes that might is right. That is perhaps the defining creed of fascism: the desperate yearning for potency, the love of violence, the euphoria of dominance. He exhibits all these tendencies.

Fascism has two definitions really, one factual and the other practical. The first is based primarily on the key elements of the fascist programmes we saw in the early 20th Century. The second is based on the word's use as a warning signal. It is break-in-case-of-fire language. It's supposed to shock people out of their complacency when something truly dangerous and frightening is happening.

I agree with the people who warn that we have overused 'fascism'. But the danger now is very evident. Look at him. Look at his support. Look at Ukraine. The danger at this moment in time is in underestimating the peril, not overestimating it. At certain moments, in certain times, we must raise the alarm. This is one of those moments. It's one of those times. 

Fascism is rising once again. It threatens Europe. It undermines the most powerful nation on earth. It threatens to corrode liberal democracy from within. The scariest thing is not that this is all true. It is that it's so obviously true that it is almost a platitude.

The difficult thing is how powerless we are. We've really nothing to offer, no way to advance. We just have to sit here and wait to discover our fate, while some bloke in Arizona decides what will happen on the battlefields of Donetsk, in between gulps of beer and mouthfuls of hot dog.

I doubt there's ever been a time in my life when two such stark outcomes have presented themselves. The moral, political and geopolitical consequences are potentially so vast, so stratospheric, that it is hard to describe them without sounding hyperbolic. 

Two more weeks. Two more weeks until we discover our fate. Two more weeks of icy fingers, reaching closer to the heart.

Odds and Sods

Aftersun did something to me. It's a seemingly slight drama by newcomer Charlotte Wells, set during a holiday between an 11-year-old girl, played by Frankie Corio, and her father, played by Paul Mescal. I tried to explain online what happened when I was watching that film, but found myself unable to do so. Basically it was all generally quite pleasant until the ending, when something happened. I'm still not sure entirely what. 

All I know is that it'll introduce a slab of pitch-black sadness into your heart which will not leave it afterwards. It's not baseless sadness. It's not even necessarily unpleasant. It's the sort of sadness which enriches you, which forces you to acknowledge the tragedies of life but will also make you feel less alone, because others feel them too and have been able to articulate them.

Wells did something with the language of film in that movie, something that's very hard to specify. I think it might be to do with the way images and sound combine and how this does and does not reflect the way our memory works. There is a moment where the girl says something - it's the sort of thing which could indicate a potential for depression - and the father spits out toothpaste onto the bathroom mirror. At the time I was confused by it. Then afterwards, as I tried to piece things together, it started to become clearer to me. The film demands a kind of archeology, of the type that its characters are going through. And with that archeology it wants to say something truly profound, about the extent to which we can truly know anyone, and the vast elements of life which happen in the spaces.

It's on BBC iPlayer. I don't know if everyone will like it. I suspect many people will find it uneventful and abstract. But if you're someone who does like it, you will like it very much. It's certainly the best film I've seen this year. It is, like all true masterpieces, a work of humanism.