An Archeology of the 2024 US Elections
Norman Klein
The United States is more than at a crossroads. It is in the midst of an interregnum that may last decades. Its constitution has been undermined. Rising inequality and oligarchy remain off the charts, despite the relative boom of the Biden years. The nation itself is dividing into three de facto countries: the Atlantic kingdom, the Pacific kingdom, and the new confederacy. All this suggests a long game, twenty or thirty years. Within that interregnum, any vast reorganization of digital capitalism, as part of fully dedicated master planning, will seem unworkable.
Until the Harris campaign for president started, a collective morbidity in America seemed to guarantee a Trump victory. Then overnight, by a magical propulsion, the principle of solidarity took hold in the Democratic Party, even more than in 2008, and with a clarity of purpose not seen for eighty years. Once again, the change in wind patterns was dizzying. What might next month bring?
Let us imagine there is a reversal of the feudal condition, of the stalemate that has seized the US by the throat (the gulf between the richest and poorest now resembles 1929, as if the twentieth century had never happened). I am astonished by the Democratic Party’s instant reversal, but not yet entirely impressed. One fact is sure: Trump will flame out, even if he succeeds in November. His MAGA sociopathic anti-plan is a suicide march, with no future and no greatness possible. Trump’s cult will flame out within two years, leaving a hole as deep as an asteroid. However, Trump is merely a caricature of something deep in the American character, echoing how the Atlantic settlements began after 1607: mercantilist, aristocratic charters slowly devolved into a partial democracy. However, along the way, the unfair pressures inspired many insurgencies; many vendettas larger than January 6. If Trump wins, a near collapse will linger, overwhelm America’s chances of any recovery for at least a decade. But even if he loses, many of the same challenges will need fixing anyway, or at least repair. For example: a need to fully restructure the American constitution; impose staggering election reforms immediately; then, but at the same time, rebuild the economic heartlands, while inventing a more egalitarian economic reality. All this requires very innovative master planning, especially of the infrastructure, as hurricanes, fires, and droughts continue to dash against it. Then last, but also first: America’s knowledge industries must be resculpted, not abandoned like an AI zombie land.
If the Harris momentum crosses the victory line instead of Trump, that means a vast change in the American mood, because of this shared solidarity, even more than specific policies. But reversing America’s sour direction is not the same as solving crises that will clearly absorb decades. And I am saying if.
The “new” American crisis began in 1973, with Nixon’s New Economic Program, which transfigured world financial policies and launched what became “globalization” by the eighties. But now, after the COVID-19 pandemic, those global supply chains are old. They have proven themselves unable to cope. Global capitalism pretends to be efficient, but is only relentless in its manic pursuit of profits at the speed of light. Global capitalism cannot, by itself, master plan on behalf of multinational needs. It “needs” instead a clearer partnership with governments. The US Federal Reserve and congress can provide the brakes and steering wheel that globalism requires—with its blind genius for just slamming into walls, adding to greedflation like a kleptocrat.
And finally, world politics: addressing land wars from Ukraine to the Middle East. The unimaginable bloodshed resembles civil wars in Africa, but also the bloodlust of the seventeenth century, when religions and partisans seemed to be hyper-militarized by rage. That heating up of vengeance runs parallel to the heating up of the planet itself.
All this points toward the major stumbling block: since the sixties, a contempt for the nation-state has grown in America, and has even been essential to politics from the far right to the far left. And yet, with COVID-19, as well as the Great Recession, the federal government, craven and corrupt, saved America from plummeting into pure nightmare, first in 2008. And with the waves of disaster out on the horizon, we realize that the nation-state has to get stronger. The problems are too large for any other approach. I look at this ruckus in support of Harris, this unexpected show of solidarity, and realize that it is also solidarity on behalf of the American federal government. The nation-state has become energized again. Indeed, the American election in November is all about restoring a viable path for expanding the nation-state, for regulating capital, for master planning against the perfect wave.
Biden was an old-fashioned state-builder, an insider from the Senate who was also vice president, like Lyndon Johnson. His Senate finesse did show, along with his hubris–again vaguely like Johnson. But Johnson in 1968 was not threatening to dismantle the constitutional government itself. I was there as a New Lefty in 1968. No one in the antiwar insurgency truly wanted to tear down the nation-state to the bone, nor the constitution. I was, in fact, shocked, after participating in the Convention “riots”; I may have accidentally voted for Nixon eight times. Now, another Democratic Convention is set in Chicago. It also follows a president’s resignation. But this resignation did not utterly fracture the Democratic Party. Johnson’s record of achievements was amazing, highlighted by the Civil Rights Act. Over six hundred laws were passed in less than four years. But Johnson could not rally the nation behind him, not at all; and neither could Biden. And yet, while these two Chicago conventions sound like twins, in fact, they are utterly different. Yes, Nixon who replaced Johnson turned out to be a criminal, and flamed out. Trump is already legally a criminal, and has been vetted as mentally ill. He makes Nixon seem almost humanistic. The difference lies in their relation to the constitution. However perverse Nixon’s sins were, his own party upheld the constitution, and so did he, when he resigned. The nation-state had antibodies to stop infections like him. Little did we know that firewalls destroyed by Nixon would somehow lead to Trump.
Let us reverse-angle the shot for a moment and try a world-systems POV. Does 2024 point toward an empire hollowing out? 1968 was a year of inflation and Eurodollar hysteria, as well as a war in Southeast Asia. The difference may be clearer to see from a worldwide perspective. But the soft tissue of the law, those customs that are considered part of the social contract, were still legitimate. Now, the habits of America’s social contract lie in shreds. The Supreme Court, presumably the guardian of legal truth, is now dead set on dismantling the federal balance of powers altogether. On behalf an authoritarian president? How strange indeed, even rather comical somehow. The US is hardly on the edge of economic or even social oblivion. But its collective mind is struggling through a nervous breakdown. That is why I keep a special eye on this matter of solidarity with Harris’s nomination. If this represents a burst of oxygen, it runs against the downward spiral of the past fifty years, despite the glamour after the Cold War, and cell phones that become our AI lovers and protectors.
The key that drives all this is utterly economic. A squeeze on middle class income has averaged about one percent lost each year since 1979. These statistics are uneven; many factors ratchet the figures up and down. But the perception is real. Most Americans feel more exploited almost year by year. Legislative gridlock adds a forlorn distrust of all government, and with it a growing belief in the fictional deep state. Comparisons to Gilded Age America are frequent, and to a growing feudalism. I would also compare America to Old Regime France in 1760, when the church and nobility were forbidden to pay taxes. The Crown was morally and economically bankrupt. A push to bring back more feudal dues quietly infuriated the masses, and even the commercial elite. Then in 1787, the king ordered an Estates General, to force the obdurate nobles to pay taxes, and get bank debt keepers off his back. Instead, 1787 fired up an insurgency and a solidarity—the rights-of-man-principle–that no one in Europe had seen on this scale, not even from the US, Holland, or Britain. Perhaps 2024 is a kind of 1787. That is another reason why I am watching this solidarity that suddenly appears, after being out of sight for generations. Has the Trump cult pushed beyond its limits? How symbolic was Biden’s old age and frailty, so that his leaving seems for the moment to reverse American morbidity about the future? There have been insurgencies of late on the left. I think of the Occupy Movement in 2011, that drifted away once the tents were removed. The checks and balances system has practically collapsed. 2024 will be an object lesson in how far this collapse has gone.
I see an ideological turning, no matter who wins. I am guessing that Harris may actually continue to surprise, because so much energy is gathering around her. Trump is much weaker than he looks. Insane bluster is not courage, and a fury of lies is a movement bound to crash. Authoritarianism is perversely symbolic in American mythologies. Just look at action movies and westerns. So I also wonder if the insurgent hysteria is burning itself out, rather than hoping that Americans have come to their senses at last. Perhaps they have. I won’t sponsor more nihilism for the moment.
One fact is clear: a new constitutional machine for doing politics is beyond necessary. Most definitely 2024 will be a laboratory case. The full measure of where Americans land in 2024 will take twenty to fifty years. I don’t foresee a socialist alternative, but something may yet be afoot. I have decided to vote for the young people I see in my classes, and in my projects. They look so overwhelmed sometimes, but determined. I wish I had a way to deliver the last six hundred years in a backpack, to giver them as much energy and cultural range that America’s mad journey requires. I hope 2024 is a laboratory for some of the young voters. One thing is certain: the catastrophes ahead remind us of worldwide transformations in the past, even why 1968 did not take Americans where they needed to go. The Renaissance, for example, was a rotten time to live for ninety-five percent of Europeans. That is why a religious war began in 1516 that continued essentially for 140 years. 2024 will most certainly be the clearest example of a political and cultural civil war that America has ever faced. Young voters especially believe that our polyvalent crisis is grotesquely unfair. Its economic precarities verge on insane. But the moment itself, as a Renaissance that is a rotten time to live, will be the making of them.
Norman Klein is an urban historian and media-historian who has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts for more than forty years. One of his best books is about Los Angeles—The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997)—and he has, among other books, also written a history of special effects (The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects, 2004). He is currently at work on a book about the dismantling of the American psyche.
