I Hate Everyone

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 22, 2024

 

How can I put this in a way that exudes nuance, finesse, love, and understanding? Oh, to hell with it: In this presidential election, in the year of our Lord 2024, I hate absolutely everyone.

 

I’m not angry about it. I’m not even upset. Somehow, I’ve remained cheerful and calm, despite the onslaught of irritation. Nevertheless, I hate everyone. I hate Donald Trump and J. D. Vance. I hate Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I hate President Biden. Since I moved to the United States in 2011, I have never once liked the president, so, in a sense, I’m used to this. But, even by those standards, this is a dire predicament. Of my own volition, I’m watching the unfolding of an election in which the two dumbest presidential nominees in American history vie to take over the White House from the dumbest president in American history. This contest has no redeeming features. It’s not amusing. It’s not edifying. It’s not even over — which would be a blessing in itself. It’s an endless, attritional, propaganda-infused slog. America, which is a wonderful country full of wonderful people, does not deserve this indignity.

 

As with all such evaluations, this one will attract exasperation and condemnation from the handful of partisans who are able to take it seriously. They will complain that the two sides “aren’t the same!” I agree. They will insist that there are real stakes to go along with all the fluff. I agree. They will propose that, the stakes supposedly being what they are, those who display contempt ought to be banished from polite society. Okay — do your worst. The thing is, though, I still . . . well, hate everyone. That premise is a fixture, a constant, a fact. It can be returned, as in a call-and-response in a church, to whatever is thrown its way. “But Donald Trump . . .” / “I hate everyone.” “But Kamala Harris . . .” / “I hate everyone.” “What about . . .” / “I hate everyone.”

 

We have come to take it for granted, but consider, if you dare, that the greatest predictor of a shift in vibes and polling this year is a candidate’s silence. Donald Trump put himself in a leading position by shutting up and then being shot by a madman. Kamala Harris overtook him by repudiating all aspects of her past via proxies and then allowing the press to turn her into an emoji. J. D. Vance would be better off if his catalog of internet-edgelordery had been scrubbed, and Tim Walz can’t speak without being trapped in a ridiculous lie. Were one of the two tickets to buy a bucket-shop vacation to Tahiti, they’d rise ten points in the polls. Elementary though it might seem, the optimal accessory for presidential candidates in the year 2024 might well be an industrial-sized roll of duct tape.

 

The ancillary parts of this matchup are, if anything, even worse than the candidates. We rightly mock the media for playing the Prussians to Wellington’s regulars, but the sheer scale of its corruption and obsequiousness is no longer a laughing matter. The two conventions have both been duds, with their architects clearly of the view that Americans live their lives online and thus come pre-steeped in the lore and nonsense that sustains the zealots on both sides of the aisle. And behind it all — back in the real world, of constitutions and law and power and risk — we have a president who is too senile to do the job, but whose incapacities have been ignored since he was removed as an electoral risk. Lest I digress, let me convey it once more: I hate everyone.

 

Everyone, that is, except the sizeable majority of my fellow countrymen that is simply refusing to play along with the spectacle. Within the balloon that is Election 2024, it is accepted as an article of faith that, thanks to the other team’s myopic perfidy, everything in America is ill. This is false, and it is good that it is such. We face problems — some of which are the direct product of our feckless political class — but we are still the greatest, kindest, most exciting, most dynamic society that has ever existed on this earth. Our politics are eschatological, but the civilization they pretend to serve is fine. Not perfect, not catastrophic, fine. What is being served up by the political postulants of Washington, D.C., and beyond is a disgrace that does not intersect with the electorate. I hate them — all of them. Perhaps one day, I won’t.