Reborn in the USA: A Redcoat’s Election Diary

2,748 words

November 4, Day 1

On the gathering storm comes a tall, handsome man
With a dusty black coat and a red right hand.
Nick Cave, Red Right Hand

 Watching The US Presidential Election as an Englishman, and watching it from Central America, I feel simultaneously close to the action and far removed from it. American elections, like that country’s politics in general, are vastly more complex than those of the UK. American politics is a Cadillac while Britain trots along in an old horse-drawn surrey. Also, although their elections have taken place in the same year, those of the UK and the US could not have differed more. The British General Election was like going to watch Real Madrid play your local club team. It was just a question of how many goals. The US equivalent, at the time of writing, is going to be decided with the last kick of the game, or so the pundits tell us.

To get into gear, I read Breitbart’s first European piece of the day. It points out that the whole tone of the Europeans has changed towards Trump in the election run-up this time around. In 2016, they scoffed at and insulted Trump quite openly. There isn’t any of that now. Some dandyish French Minister talked in 2016 of the “Trumpization” of culture (it probably sounds prettier in French), meaning the stupidity of Trump supporters. You won’t be hearing that from France’s Marine Le Pen, ascendant in the polls four years later, if Trump pulls this off. The Don has a number of new potential allies on the political Right in Europe, and this has alarmed the EU as well as causing the Western media to have a fit of the vapors. Just think of all those Nazi gauleiters polishing their jackboots, burnishing their Iron Crosses, and waiting, arms raised in the famous Roman salute, at Berlin Airport for Der Führer’s first state visit! Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a veteran, but apart from him and Le Pen there are now Georgia Meloni and Geert Wilders, who is often hailed as the “Dutch Trump”. If that sounds like something that might win a hand at cards, then Trump may soon be dealing – and counting – those cards.

As the day wears on I get oddly engrossed in the polling, the meta-polling, the indicators and legitimators and tilt states. The polls were famously, spectacularly wrong in 2016, but it’s not easy to see whether that vast margin of error showed incompetence or a level of political activism effectively tantamount to election interference. I had a brief look to see who regulates American political polling, but I must have missed something because I could find no regulatory body. It looks to me like these bean-counters are out there operating like Reiki therapists or life-coaches. Just download a diploma from the web and boom, you’re a pollster.

That said, polling has something I love, which is a co-axial language, a language within a language, using the same terms as the rest of us but co-opting them into its own separate system. Polling in Britain is just asking old biddies outside the church hall who they voted for. It doesn’t require a super-computer, just a spiral-bound notepad and a ballpoint pen. America seems to be the laboratory in which the fine arts of polling were best developed. It is a highly developed and utterly fascinating industry.

I forget which American election was called totally incorrectly because polling was conducted by telephone, and more Republicans than Democrats owned these new-fangled devices (one in the 1950s or 60s, I assume), but the problem of representative sampling is far more labyrinthine than just that oversight. There is the problem of voter response, for example, the fact that people voting for a candidate deemed socially unacceptable (guess who?) will lie about their real voting intentions. Well, it’s hardly bloody surprising, is it? This will increase concomitantly with the rise and rise of the surveillance state. Dependent on the result tomorrow, that is…

Watching the usual suspects warning an unsuspecting America of the white supremacist Reich they will usher in by voting for Orange Man, it is clear that the Left are terrified of a Trump victory. But, true to their racing form, they are even lying about the reason for their terror. They are claiming a second Trump term will be the equivalent of the Terror, the French 18^th-century one, the one with the guillotines and tumbrils and the Bastille. Even as a show of hysteria on the American Left, that’s an obvious fugazi. What really scares them is a Trump victory followed by none of the gulags, executions, and political imprisonments they have been shrieking about for so long. If Trump gets in and starts fixing things, they are going to look mighty stupid to a lot more people than just those on the Right.

I try and sleep, excited as a boy before Christmas, but unsure as to who will be coming down the chimney. I can’t vote, of course, but then the American Presidential Election won’t affect me, or Costa Rica. Except it will. A stronger economy – and I fail to see how the business-minded Trump can preside over a worse one – will benefit Latin America as a whole. And America already helps out Costa Rica in little, useful, very real ways. There are yellow school buses here, the ones Kamala Harris loves, and they are gifted by American schools. All the vehicles used here in construction (and there is a lot of construction going on) are Mack trucks, with the famous bulldog crest. The boats the guardacostas use to try to stem the tide of cocaine passing through Costa Rican waters are all hand-me-downs from the American coastguard. And me? How could a strong American economy possibly benefit me? Well, the two magazines that still employ me (one folded this year and another one fired me) are American, and when the music season starts next month and I play in bars and restaurants, the majority of the tourists paying my wages and tipping me will be from what people here call “North America”. So, yes. The election will affect me. Small world.

November 5, Day 2

You would think such a day would tremble to begin.
Thomas Harris, Hannibal

So, here it is. I get up at kick-off time, 4am CST, just as the first polls are opening in Vermont at 5am ET. It’s a two-horse race to 270, and the runners and riders are under starter’s orders. The early voting returns come through in Pennsylvania, and although the Democrats have superior figures, they are way down from 2020. A dinky little town called Dixville Notch is called early as a tie. As only about a dozen people live there – I expect they still refer to themselves as “the townsfolk” – and six votes are cast, this looks more like a football rather than an electoral result at 3-3. I guess Ma won’t be talkin’ to Pa at the dinner table. A YouTuber makes the excellent point that even black-pilled Republicans in deep blue states should get out and vote because it increases the popular vote, and the GOP hardly ever wins that.

Florida updates its voting stats every five minutes and, although it will remain cherry red, the difference in the Democrat performance compared with 2020 is yet another indicator of the likely outcome. Also, more Republicans have fled Democrat-run states for Florida in the last four years, which shows that white flight is also electorally powerful. I go to the Yahoo! page to check email and the headline in the news section informs me that a baby hippopotamus has predicted who will become president. I don’t take the clickbait. I make another bowl of strong coffee instead. There is no doubt that this election is a very American affair. It is dizzying but ultimately revealing beneath the razzmatazz. Just look at the endorsements.

The cultural backers for both candidates, and the culture those approvals themselves implicitly endorse, is an indicator of the governments likely to form under either Harris or Trump. 45/47 read the cultural room to a nicety, while Harris dragged a vulgar roster of has-been rappers up to cavort and prance onstage. The Joe Rogan endorsement of Trump fazed me at first, not because it was a surprise, but because it was the day before the election. Are Joe Rogan’s many fans that malleable that they will follow the guru’s every command 24 hours before making their minds up which way to vote? Critics of politicians often accuse them of thinking people are stupid. They don’t. They know, however, that people are suggestible.

I fall asleep intermittently while a pollster chatters in and out of my consciousness. I don’t remember what I dreamt but I bet that dream had polls in it. My favorite graph moment was when a CNN pollster was asked to bring up a map showing the states in which Harris 2024 was out-performing Biden 2020 and the map came up completely gray. “Holy smokes!” said the other guy, a charming piece of old Americana.

I can see patchwork quilts of states when I close my eyes. Actually, the last couple of days has improved my knowledge of the geography of the US immeasurably. Before the election I sort of knew what was above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. Now, I can casually toss around phrases such as rustbelt, flyover country, the Midwest, the Great Lake states, and actually know what I am talking about, or at least where I am talking about. As I doze off, I recall a line from the film Performance: “Tomorrow he finds out what’s true and what’s not.”

November 6, Day 3

We’re gonna win this one!
Take the country by storm!
We’re gonna be elected!
Alice Cooper, Elected

In the end, after failing to get any sleep worth the name for two nights, when Wisconsin was called I was asleep. I woke and the laptop had frozen, which meant it would take half an hour to thaw. I don’t have a lot of luck with IT, and my laptop is what computer buffs would call “troubled”. When I finally fired it up, there was the magic number, 277. It was over. Trump had won. The election was too big to rig and Donald Trump was too big to fail. There was a late attempt at dirty work at the crossroads, allegedly, with reports of Google only showing hits for “Where can I vote for Kamala?” and not “Where can I vote for Trump?” and voting machines going down – like Kamala, in more ways than one, by all accounts – across the key battleground of Pennsylvania, but Trump aced it anyway. If the Dems cheated, no one noticed.

The magnitude of this victory is going to become more vast by the day. It will be like hiking up a hill and seeing more and more of the landscape hoving into view beneath you. America has not only dodged a bullet by rejecting the extraordinary Harris woman, they have elected a man who dodged a real bullet a few weeks earlier. Perhaps God did have a hand in proceedings in Butler. Is that Divine Election interference? That’s one for the theologians.

The rest of the day was (sur)really enjoyable. I’ve been conned by politicians so many times I’ve got their boot-marks all over my back, but I was surprised at my own enthusiasm for Trump. President 47 is not the answer to the problems of the Dissident Right, but he won. Trump is going to keep cosying up to Israel, but he won. Trump won’t be able to slap the black caucus into line any time soon, but he won. And it’s not just that he won but who he beat, because it wasn’t only the Democrats and their ridiculous candidate. Trump beat the media, which is effectively the official opposition party to the Republicans.

I heard Trump say in two separate interviews before the election that the first time he was in office he did not know the people he chose as his inner elect – and who would mostly betray him for his trust in them – and that he did not know Washington. It was a surprisingly humble admission from this supposed raging egomaniac, with the President-elect effectively labelling himself a rube in 2016. The people he surrounded himself with, from Pence down, were not trustworthy and did not deliver. This time, it feels more like “Avengers assemble!” Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, J. D. Vance. These are obviously talented and intelligent individuals. But it’s not just the fact that this titanic (I’m going to forgive myself hyperbole today) triumph should and must galvanize the Republican Party, it’s that it may sober up some on the pussy-whipped Democratic side of the great divide.

Not every white Democrat who voted believes that boys should be able to use girls’ toilets, all whites are racist, and Donald Trump is a fascist dictator, and these comprise the bloc who may defect back to reality over the next four years and bolster something like Vance/Gabbard 2028. The real world is calling once again, and those who are done with the Left and its version of what reality should be may heed the call. Some Muslims don’t talk about conversion to Islam, they talk of “reversion”, the idea being that everyone was always already Islamic, but some let it slide or forgot to observe. Time to go back, to revert. This is just what the Left who are not hard-line lunatics will do, revert to where they started, that place being reality.

As for identity blocs, those fish got shot in the barrel. In terms of racial identity politics, Harris ran on the split personality of Asian and black, and would not shut up about it. But Trump knows the art of diplomacy and ran on his white identity. He just didn’t say so. As for the “gender gap”, if men came out to vote for Trump and women for Harris, perhaps there might be a lesson there. Trump’s beaten two women now – both of whom went into post-defeat hiding – and this might be a sign that we are all done with the feminization of the West and now, in the immortal words of Phil Lynott, the boys are back in town. The Dems are not exactly respectful of women, even black ones. Note the the sly program of back-stabbing (in full Brutus style) that the Bidens carried out on Harris during the late stages of the campaign. “Hey Joe”, as Hendrix sang, “I heard you shot your woman down.”

Next come the treats and rewards part of my 72-hour onscreen marathon, the steady flow of Liberal tears. Frazzled by polls, I kick back and watch the Leftists melt down like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy throws a pail of water on her. “Help! I’m melting doooooown…” It would be an afternoon of memes, thwarted schemes, and shattered dreams. If you are unfamiliar with the “Hitler rants parodies”, incidentally, based on the film Downfall, this is a good place to start, as Hitler is told about Trump’s victory.

That class of Rightists once labelled “conspiracy theorists” but increasingly recognized as “those who have been paying attention” have extremists of their own, and they are already saying that Trump was the globalists’ choice this time around. Kamala was a jobber, a patsy, put into the ring to lose as arranged with the mob pre-fight. I’d like to see the workings on that one. But Trump is in, even though Harris wasn’t gracious enough to concede and didn’t even show up to her own party’s party. One of Harris’ senior staffers called the defeated VP “classless” for her no-show at her own university to speak to supporters and staffers in the wake of defeat. And classless she is and will remain, while Trump has class by the golf bag.

In the end, I had one of the most enjoyable three days in recent memory. You want to know why? Because the United States of America does politics like no other nation on earth and this was the greatest show on earth. And now there is a sense of cosmic justice, a feeling that the disturbance in the Force has been corrected. America performed a great service to the West on November 5, and I hope the West can answer the call. November 5 was also Bonfire Night in the UK, and we may be about to see similar conflagrations in the US, the country we kick-started but which ultimately turned on its creator and went it alone. It is devoutly to be wished that America will now enjoy at least four years of bonfires. Of the vanities.