How America Gets the Candidates It Deserves
Reagan, Trump, Biden, and the Inevitability of Kanye
With Democracy comes terrible choices. The critical difference is an autocrat or king does not make unaccountable choices, but the citizens make them and often cause the minority to suffer the consequences of being easily swayed by rhetoric light on substance and heavy on promise.
Americans have elected two celebrities as presidents: Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Reagan reshaped the landscape of US politics from top to bottom, eliminating the already bruised virtuous cycle of prosperity for the ruthless profiteering of the Friedman economics model. He is a god among small government, big defense conservatives. He was a disaster for the American experiment. Reagan never saw a program of aid he couldn’t cut, a tax that wasn’t anathema to free markets, or regulations bad for growth. He did not start giving away Main street to Wall Street, but he was far and away its best traffic cop.
Donald Trump came up in Reagan’s America. Business was everything. Draconian measures to enhance profit destroyed much of American drive, and Trump ate it up. A world where greed was a virtue and charity a sin was the world Trump wanted.
Now, Americans, through the arcane mechanisms of the Electoral College, have a Donald Trump as a president. He promised everything and delivered almost nothing. Scandal and corruption plague his every step. He is openly contemptuous of anything that resembles the principles upon which America was birthed. He is a petty autocrat blocked only by the ever-weakening mechanisms of the checks and balances system. His presidency will be one of the most memorable for how destructive it was to every norm that office ever held and perhaps the nail in the coffin of US relevance in the world.
To counter this weight dragging the country into the undertow, the Democratic party ultimately chose Joe Biden. In a primary full of bright, insightful, forward-thinking candidates, it does not get more establishment than Joe Biden. Biden has expressed a desire to claim an FDR-style legacy, and I believe him, but his actions whimper contrasted to his words. I am not a campaign manager and will not pretend to know what Biden should do to move against Trump. Biden is running on a troubled legislative legacy, as all politicians must, and a gimmick whose time has come, the choice of a female Vice-President of color. Troubling for the nation is Biden lives in the white fantasy of “but I have a black friend,” thinking that somehow compels him to believe his gaffes are lovable instead of offensive. Joe Biden is a compromise candidate; the compromise was moving forward versus sitting still. He will have his hands full untangling the Trump mess, especially if the Democrats cannot gain control of the Senate.
Kanye West announced, via Twitter, his intent to run for president on July 4th, 2020. The gut instinct of most in times past would be to shrug it off as the runaway ego of an extreme narcissist who believes in his godhood. To Kanye, nothing is as good as Kanye. America is not in times past, but now in the Trump age, where celebrity equals qualification and outlandish talk with no viable path to succeed in practical policymaking is a “fresh take.”
The most disturbing problem with the Kanye West candidacy is the cynical notion it will siphon black votes. A troubling premise if it suggests that voting should be based on his race instead of his views, which are comical. Republicans believe it enough that some are beginning to aid Kanye in his quest to get on the ballot in various states, hoping that African Americans will take any person of color versus Joe Biden.
If this logic bears fruit, Kanye West is proof that the Age of Trump has gas for the fire. Trump is one hopes, an aberrant reset of politics that systems sometimes need to realize their failings and successes. If the citizens of the US consider Kanye West and determine anything other than he is a talented musician with a runaway ego who married into America’s trash royalty, Americans deserve the candidate they get. Like Donald Trump, there is no content to West’s character, but there is color to his skin. If that biological characteristic is enough to hand the fate of the nation to Donald Trump for four more years, we all deserve the punishment, and we don’t deserve the Democracy we have.