Hauntology: Dems Try To Lay The Ghosts They Raised

‘We will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.’ said Kamala Harris (6 November.) The next day President Biden assured Trump of ‘a peaceful and orderly transition.’

All very proper, and traditionally after a hard-fought electoral contest the winner has to try to reunite the nation, as he did in this case: ‘We're going to help our country heal… Every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future.’

However the current President and VP may also have been hinting at the contrast with what we saw on January 6, 2001 - the ‘insurrection’ of Trump supporters in the State Capitol when they felt the electoral result had been a fix.

That was an amateurish affair, a disorganised March of the Morons through the building - the ‘horned hat’ freak was even escorted round the place by two police. Nevertheless it was definitely a serious incident. Many were injured and six people died: one demonstrator (shot); one policeman (of a stroke, but triggered by the events, according to the coroner); one of a drug overdose and three of natural causes. Something bad will often happen at a mass meeting - three died at Woodstock in 1969 - especially if it is disorderly and without provision for emergencies.

There may be another reason for the stress on peace this time. Ever since Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign in 2016 the Democrats have been raising fears of right-wingery, fascism, and latterly even the spectre of Adolf Hitler - a recent Trump public meeting was compared to a Nuremberg rally. After calling the candidate a threat to democracy and worse, how to calm things down again?

Playing on people’s emotions is highly dangerous. When Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997 the explosion of grief and its partial redirection into anger threatened to bring down the British monarchy more suddenly than even Tony Blair had planned. The outburst was powered by the feelings and dreams that had been fostered in the brains of the populace by relentless media coverage of the beautiful and fashionable Princess. She had been part of the toy theatre in our heads and the play had been cut short without warning. The response to that tragedy took even the Press by surprise; they hadn’t realised what they had created.

In late 1930s Germany the use of mass communication was positively malign. A TV programme years ago showed as an example Nazi documentary footage of ghetto Jews intercut with clips of rats scurrying down street gutters. The evil propaganda was in the papers, on the stage, in cinema… The German people were skilfully conditioned. They may not generally have been prompted to attack Jews themselves but their sympathies were systematically truncated so they would at least look the other way.

Now see the reaction of (seemingly many) young people to the Trump victory: the screaming and weeping, a shockingly infantile display. Again, in the fairyland inside the skull a great ogre had appeared and triumphed. Even on TV commentators were struggling to contain their distress; the staff on The Guardian newspaper (UK) have been offered ‘support services.’

What would you not do to prevent the dramatic takeover of your country by Satanic evil?

In July 2024 there was an assassination attempt on Trump that very nearly blew out his brains; and another a month later, foiled only because the would-be killer’s rifle was spotted protruding from a bush at the golf club where Trump was playing.

The political parties can be tempted to play for keeps. In October 1963 Adlai Stevenson the US Ambassador to the UN was physically attacked in Dallas, Texas by local supporters of a right-wing Army general who saw JFK as a Marxist threat. Kennedy decided he had to go there for campaign reasons despite warnings; posters of him headed ‘Wanted for Treason’ were circulating for days before his visit; the rest the world knows.

Today the culture in American schools, universities, mass entertainment, major businesses, much of the news media and even organs of the State leans decidedly to the Left. The other side is almost literally demonised. So a while before November 5 Lionel Shriver, who voted for Biden in 2020 and was ‘relieved’ when he won, told us she feared that in the event of Trump’s winning this time ‘the Left would be likely to go bananas.’

It is early days yet, but the potential for major disorder and even civil war has been developed in the fantasy and emotional worlds of millions of citizens. There are those on the American Right who must be strongly restrained if the country is not to be torn apart, but the Democrat establishment - and its institutional and corporate supporters - must also work hard to lay the chaotic ghosts they have raised.