In a lone tavern, America’s ‘likely but undecided voters’ wax conspiratorial

In the Railway Tavern, Joe Biden’s on TV saying this election is a fight for democracy, pleading for support from that vanishing type: the likely but undecided voter.

“Sure is,” mutters someone beneath a cap, suggesting they may not agree with Joe’s idea of what to do about that. By now I’ve given up on finding a Democrat in a pub with stools at the bar, a neon Budweiser sign and ESPN on. 

“I like AOC,” says Merk the bartender, tall, thin, black, ex-Marine. “Well, my girlfriend does. I hate Democrats.”

“Why?” 

“Pussies, man, they’re pussies.”

“So the Republicans…”

“They’re assholes. No heart. I drive past their big houses and think ‘You don’t care people can’t buy insulin.’ Like, why do we need a social security number?”

Obama was in Arizona last night, repeating the death-of-democracy line, and Bernie Sanders is charging through the Rust Belt rallying on the line that the Republicans will destroy Medicare, Obamacare, Social Security, and the paltry union rights that exist. Merk… is what they’re up against.

With days to go, the Democrats have really pivoted to Big Fear, away from abortion rights as the major carrier of the idea that Republicans are some sort of monsters. Polls seem to indicate that around 15-20% of Democrats rate this issue as the most important. They are fighting against a huge enthusiasm gap between the two parties: Democrat enthusiasm is down at 24%. Shades of 2010, when Republicans couldn’t wait to get out and put a rocket up Obama, and quite a few people who voted for him didn’t even know there were such things as midterm elections. The counter to that is the reports that a lot of young people have been voting early.

So who knows? The results, if they go clearly in either direction, will tell us which country won: TV America or TikTok nation, or whatever is two clicks beyond TikTok now. One of the reasons polling may have collapsed is that it may simply be impossible for pollsters to keep up with shifting patterns of media and networking. There’s never been a midterms like this. There have been right-wing revenge fests, relying on high turnout among the white and old, but there has never been a midterms where both sides were slugging it out like it was a presidential.

Both sides are putting everything on the field. Sign up to a candidate’s website to get info, and you are bombarded with a stream of requests, phone banking, donations, like nothing I have ever seen before. Thousands of groups on both sides have mobilisation efforts, in the way America does it. By and large you don’t campaign as a party rep — you campaign as Pro-Choice Texas for Beto, or We The People of Florida for Ron DeSantis.

The door-to-door canvass is still done, but there’s a lot less of it compared to phone banking or messaging. The phone banking is virtual, of course; the old bank of phones in the back of a borrowed office is gone. Now you don’t even get to go there and do it with other people. Just get a log-in code and away you go. Most candidates keep their events a deep secret, doing flying visits to nursing homes and farmers’ markets with dedicated media in tow.

The point is to avoid the opponent’s videographers, who will have the slightest slip, angry local or sea of empty chairs up in a YouTube ad or a TikTok within an hour of it being recorded. You can make one of those ads on your phone, and they do. The whole subculture of everyday politics, in place, in varying forms for decades, is breaking up, dissolving.

But then so is America. The Jetsons’ world is finally here. Vast areas of life are now contactless, staffless and automated in a way that has shot far ahead of Australia. Hotels have skeleton staff, stations and airports run on machines. The Ubers are plentiful, mostly cheap and glide from door to door. The old pretence that this was “rideshare” — ha, remember that? — when you had to chat with your driver about their hopes and aspirations, well, that’s long gone. There’s no need to request a “quiet ride”, that appalling innovation. No one wants to talk anyway. It’s all actually happened. 

The result is that everything that still involves necessary human contact seems hopelessly archaic. The line has been crossed where this is all new and exciting amid the old world of tickets, paper reservations, shops you had to go to, crowded shopping streets, malls. COVID must have supercharged this, I guess, but it was going that way anyway.

Some societies have a greater degree of internalised resistance to the transformation of the everyday. Took a long time to introduce counter-and-queue, Starbucks-style cafes to France, and the Japanese still (or did until fairly recently) use cash. But in America, innovation has a spiritual role, is an expression of the aspiration that made the country in the first place. Thomas Jefferson invented not only the United States but also the office swivel chair, the Lazy Susan, an automatic writing-copying system, and, ironically, vanilla as flavouring. 

So everything gets taken up at a furious rate, like QR menus in cafes. Or rather, cafes with only QR menus. Take it or leave it. There is absolutely no economic advantage to much of this insistence. It is the American spirit pushing through. But in doing so, it is steadily undoing the basic social substructure that America is — or any society is. The basic connection with others through hundreds of acts of mundane reciprocal exchange that are steadily being removed, putting the onus on voluntary connection, the offer of self, which involves risk of rejection, or a simple failure to communicate — and hence a drawing back in. Shared meanings fragment, become unmoored from any place or space. The consequence of this, done at such furious pace, is that a lot of people are going a little crazy, and a few are going very, very crazy indeed. 

Your correspondent had come to the rolling hills of Virginia to go to a school board meeting, one to be attended by a chapter of Moms For Liberty, a part-real, mostly astroturfed group formed around the increasing number of pushes for book removal from libraries that arose in the wake of COVID — when parents got a chance to see what their kids were being taught.

Turned out to be a fizzer. A half-hour either way through endless no-place exurbs — “This wasn’t here 10 years ago!” the Uber driver said proudly, as vast lit 7-Elevens reared up in the night — and the whole point they were going to have a stoush on, whether parents should be notified of all invited school performers, was agreed to by their opponents on the grounds that it was already on the books.

Their leader — a bloke, big, trucker cap, “I don’t co-parent with the government” T-shirt — gave a speech on social-emotional learning or SEL, something they say was invented by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum to soften up kids for critical race theory, and ran out of time before he could get to that bit. It was a shambles and I had to sit through three hours of building and school calendar debates to find that out. Your correspondent prides himself on being able to get 800 words out of a dog farting in a parking lot, but this was the limit. Still, there was actual society there, a dozen people on the board, 15 in the audience. And six security guards and a metal detector.

It’s just that there’s a roiling sea of madness beneath it all. Hours before I’d been watching the sentencing of Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland mass shooter, a very damaged, impaired, violent kid who had talked of guns for five years and of doing a school shooting for three before he actually did it. Spared the death penalty, he was given life without parole, to rot in a concrete box until he is all madness.

The sentencing session was the time for victim impact statements. In Australian courts these are done as answers to questions, to keep things on track a bit. Not here. One distraught relative after another came to the lectern to more or less enact a series of deranged, understandable but deranged, homicidal fantasies. “I hope you are miserable for every second of your miserable existence for decades, every single second,” said one. “When someone takes you out, and they will, I hope you think of her face, her face…” “I’d like us all to shoot you and only one bullet would be real, and watch your terror as you face death…”

Interspersed with ads for adult diapers and anti-depressants. They came up against the impossibility of punishment for someone so numbed he had to kill to feel — that quintessential American figure, the young, asocial man with an assault rifle and 1000 rounds. In the land that invented the penitentiary, hosted fantasies of drawing and quartering are all the state can offer. 

Back in the Tavern, after the boring meeting, Merk was expounding a worldview.

“Man, look, if you know who ran the world, man, you know a lot of people would have to die, that would just have to happen,” he said, refreshing my root beer. “Like who invented the credit score? Bam bam.”

His solution to replacing government was a mix of Uber and the 1908 military occupation of the Philippines. Of course, this was just tavern talk. The trouble was it was essentially psychotic, like a TV left burbling to void at 3 am. It was fantasies of violence and messianic redemption picked up like a handful of free bar nuts, boredom snacking on death.

So is this what is? A nation divided between 25 people who can sit through an hour-long ombudswoman’s report on a cold fall night, and guys in taverns who want to behead the secretary of agriculture, and no one in between? Merk was a smiling, friendly, happy guy, yet nothing in his ideas fit with any way that society worked, and fantasy violence held it together. In America there’s a term for that: the likely but undecided voter.