A Personality Cult versus a Political Party

I’ve been trying, and failing, to keep up with writing about the political news.

The political news keeps coming, and I have a hard time catching up except by making quips on X/Twitter. I still have a draft responding to all the hysteria regarding Joe Biden’s stutter, and I’m sad that that just doesn’t seem to be relevant right now. But I want to take a moment to try to get astride of all the weekend’s developments.

On Thursday, we had the culmination of the Republican National Convention, with Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off, a rap performance by Kid Rock wearing a big silver cross, and the world record setting longest presidential nominee acceptance speech in United States history. Trump not only beat out Bill Clinton for that record, he beat his own self, having already broken the record with his two other previous acceptance speeches. He also broke the record in becoming the first United States presidential candidate to praise the judge who dismissed his felony criminal case during an acceptance speech.

Trump is also the first candidate to praise Hannibal Lecter in an acceptance speech.

No, I’m not making that up.  Trump has a bit he performs in every single campaign rally lately, where he mentions “The late great Hannibal Lecter, he’d love to have you for dinner!” and then segues into unfounded claims that large numbers of escapees from “mental institutions” are migrating to the United States illegally. It’s been suggested that he doesn’t understand what the term “asylum seekers” means, and that he believes it means “mentally ill persons seeking an insane asylum to live in.” But in any case, nobody predicted that he’d start ranting about Hannibal Lecter in his official Republican National Convention acceptance speech. We wished he would but thought he’d stick to the teleprompter. He didn’t. About a third of the speech was what was written on the teleprompter, and the other hour was a stream of consciousness. Convention attendees were seen leaving the convention center and falling asleep. The rant went on until midnight.

After the speech, I was confident that President Biden had a pretty good chance at a second four years in the White House. But it was not to be.

On Saturday afternoon I woke up from a nap, went to look at my phone, and the very first thing I saw was Joe Biden announcing that he was dropping out of the race. Moments later he was endorsing his vice president. And the rest of the day was a flurry of support for Kamal Harris. I hadn’t really noticed how very low the enthusiasm for Joe, but I certainly noticed the sudden wave of enthusiasm for Harris. I’ve never seen anything like it. EVERYONE on the Democratic side seemed to like Harris. A hundred million dollars was raised in an eye blink. The conservative pundits acted scared silly.

I tried to explain to my teenager who Kamala Harris is.

“She’s not ACTUALLY young, she’s 59, but she looks a lot younger. So, she’s young for a politician, and she always dresses really well, and she wears sneakers, and there are a lot of videos of her dancing around with high school students. So, probably not really cool, but a grownup’s idea of cool. Like a teacher who makes you roll your eyes but you like her anyway. That kind of cool.” Adrienne understood at once, probably better than I do.

And that’s really the extent of my opinion on Kamala Harris, so far. As late as Saturday I thought that the very worst thing the Democratic party could possibly do was throw in the towel on Biden and try to run somebody else at the last minute, and I’m beginning to think I might be wrong. The enthusiasm isn’t flagging here about 30 hours in. Everyone seems excited. Excitement is what we need. I still don’t think Biden had dementia, but I do recognize that he is exhausted and much, much older than he was in 2020. It will be nice to see someone who’s “a grownup’s idea of cool” doing battle with Trump.

Biden got on the phone at Harris’s big speech today and said “I’m watching you, Kid. I love you.” Normally I’d think it was cheeky for a male politician to call any 59-year-old woman “Kid,” but Biden has been in politics since Kamala was nine, so I guess it’s all right.

Again, I ponder: I don’t like the Democratic party very much, all things considered. I currently vote Democrat not because they’re fantastic, but because they are a political party, and the Republican party is not a political party. It’s currently a personality cult. The Democratic party has people in it who question whether they’re on the right path and will try to scrap a plan that isn’t working. It even has honorable people who will realize they’re not doing the best job at campaigning and cede the nomination to someone better. The Republican party is doubling down on Trump, Trumpism and the MAGA movement even though it makes them look absolutely ridiculous.

I believe in democracy and doing the best you can to see that your country is governed well, not revering a human being who’s set himself up as an idol. To me, that’s part of what it means to be a Christian: you must never burn incense to Caesar, and anybody asking to be treated like a Caesar is the enemy of Christianity. The Republican party has crowned a Caesar, and they’re smiling through the embarrassment. Meanwhile, the Democratic party remains a group of quarrelsome human beings who disagree about everything and get into squabbles and come up with new plans.

I don’t know what the results of all of this will be in November. But that’s where we stand today.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.