The explosion occurred almost instantly on social media. At Sunday’s neo-fascist Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe’s routine sucked up a lot of oxygen. There was clip after clip of Hinchcliffe commenting on Latinos and their “love of making babies,” suggesting that he carved watermelons with a black contestant and calling Puerto Rico a “floating trash island.” The reaction was swift and it seemed certain that blatant racism would destroy Donald Trump’s electoral chances.

While Hinchcliffe bears the brunt of this criticism, Trump’s entire rally was full of nonsense. Speakers called Kamala Harris the Antichrist, constantly stoking fear of immigrants, and Trump himself played all of his greatest hits, calling the press “enemies of the people” and citing “dark forces” and an “enemy within.” His final appeal to voters is a torrent of hate and division.

As we approach next Tuesday’s election, it’s time to face the facts.

Racism is anything but an exclusion criterion in the United States of America.

Despite liberal hand-wringing and protestations that love or whatever will automatically triumph over hate, it’s pretty clear that this is delusional thinking. After all, we’ve already seen Donald Trump win the presidency; 2016 should have been the moment when even the most die-hard citizens finally let their guard down and realized that, despite protestations to the contrary, America is largely motivated by racist, sexist, xenophobic and hateful energies. And it’s nothing new. It has been one of America’s founding principles since its founding.

We’ve been watching hate gain traction for almost a decade now, and despite these very, very obvious facts, I still see people commenting on the size of the Kamala Harris crowd, the amount of meaningless celebrity endorsements, and themselves lying that partnering with the Dick Cheneys and Alberto Gonzalez’s of the world is a “smart political strategy.”

Even though it has become liberal orthodoxy to fully admit that America’s history is riddled with white supremacy and intentional inequality, there is a deep desire to believe that all of this poison is somehow ineffective or self-defeating as it continues to fester since ours Founding.

This folly of a campaign was intended to make these notions disappear. Trump was a devastating disaster. His intellectual acuity weakens by the second, allowing him to rant wildly and turn every question asked of him into a hodgepodge of nativist babble. He was essentially bought and manipulated by a tech fascist determined to take control of the federal budget and operate Trump’s corpse like a rotting puppet. This support led to the adoption of one of the most unpopular vice presidents in history. Their chorus of racist dog whistles and lying campaigns has led to the targeting of legal immigrants and violence across the country.

And yet there is still a strong chance that Trump will win back the presidency.

Why?

Because these racist, sexist and xenophobic instincts are currently the only form of populist discontent that any of the major parties are citing. This space has been ceded by the Democratic Party to such an extent that charlatans like JD Vance and Josh Hawley have been able to weasel their way into the ideological space and position themselves as obnoxious sycophants of the financial elite as the last remaining underclass warriors of Americans. Liberals even bought JD Vance’s book in droves that supposedly explained this kind of anger to them.

What a shame that is. And what an insult.

If Harris loses on Tuesday, which is entirely possible, then this is why this was all possible. This campaign failed to stand on principles, particularly against the genocide in Gaza. The increasing precarity of American life, affirmed by so many Americans in survey after survey, has been met with the nebulous promise of an “opportunity economy” that is largely a reshaping of the neoliberal status quo, and this has led to a Election becomes a thorny issue from what should be an absolute defeat and a mandate for the Democratic Party to do great things.

We are watching the Democrats’ great cognitive dissonance being exposed. As America continues its rightward trend, we should be alarmed by this country’s willingness to tolerate atrocities against immigrants, its almost total rejection of gays and transgender people, and the eagerness with which war criminals like Cheney and George W. Bush have been rehabilitated. As we read polls about what “issues” matter most to voters, we must remember that the obsession with “the economy” and “illegal immigrants” are signs of a growing cultural nihilism and narcissism driven by the Republican Party, our accomplice, a media and a Democratic Party that seemed unwilling and uninterested in reformulating the state of affairs.

What matters to many is not Trump’s agenda, but his aesthetics. The cruelty and exploitation is fine. That’s what Trump says. This is how Trump and his followers behave. Political orthodoxy is about accepting the countless indignities of empire, but doing so with plausible deniability and, at best, a well-worn set of benevolent gestures. What was on display at Madison Square Garden, and has been visible to everyone for at least a decade, is a gleeful endorsement of the kind of brutality that nearly half of voters applaud, while the other half finds it more comfortable to simply express disapproval even though I’m not really against it am.

In other words, our political sphere is less a battlefield of ideas and more about good manners and being nice to those in power.

This does not have to be the case. Economic populism is popular and effective, but it requires a willingness on the part of the Democratic Party to change the status quo and distance itself from its business donors and supporters. That’s why it’s so disheartening to see Harris repeatedly fall back on support from companies like Goldman Sachs – it’s a clear sign that what’s being communicated is a protection of the status quo the unwillingness to actually bring about the kind of change that would reverse the current state of affairs.

And so the Republican Party is allowed to continue to sell itself as a fighter in the fight against the elite, while at the same time lining its pockets with the blood money of this elite. Populism is so effective that Trump and his MAGA project succeeded simply by adopting the aesthetics of populism while redirecting populist energies away from the elite and toward vulnerable communities.

What Harris has run so far is a campaign about feeling “better” than Trump’s. We still hear the warmongering, the calls for a robust military and law enforcement apparatus. We are still inundated with calls to “strengthen” the border, even though our economy and its stakeholders are based on the exploitation of immigrants and nothing will change that except for a paradigm shift like we hope for.

This battle over morals obscures something incredibly important that is continually overlooked in liberal circles. While much of the politics has morphed into cultural and consumer battles, a war for power still lurks beneath the surface. Republicans have, consciously and unconsciously, failed to understand this glaring fact. This is why they are able to overlook or gloss over Trump’s litany of contradictions. They never actually cared about “family values,” “fiscal conservatism,” “patriotism,” or “small government.” They were clubs that could be drawn whenever the situation and the struggle for power required it. It is a complicated but powerful policy tool that has failed us in these bizarre and dangerous times.

The question now is whether the Democratic Party will understand that its only way forward is to mobilize deserved anger over what the financial elites have done to this country. And I suppose another question is whether they will even have the courage and courage to put this insight into action.

Hand-wringing over racist discourse leads to nothing other than a sense of moral superiority. Demagogues like Trump and hate mongers like Hinchcliffe recognize the benefits of using hate as a weapon. At the heart of this appeal, however, is at least the communication that power can be seized and used in the service of a political project. Whether Trump or any Republican actually does this is another story, but it is undeniably an appeal that has had an impact.

It’s quite another to anchor your “political” worldview in a notion of civility that doesn’t resonate particularly well outside of Washington DC. Whether intentional or not, this superficial appeal gives a broad electorate a level of comfort with a status quo that oppresses them. It prioritizes “decency,” which is easily perceived as staid consolation when millions upon millions seek an adequate response to the crisis that is continually communicated.

They want someone to offer them bloody knuckles and be willing to get dirty with those in power to get relief. And in the middle of a fight, they don’t worry about what anyone says. They focus on who stays in the dirt and who stays standing.