In praise of RFK Jr, America’s holy fool

Few would deny that this has been an extremely strange election campaign in the United States. The last couple of months have been particularly surreal — highly enjoyable for connoisseurs of imperial decline and hallucinatory strangeness, perhaps, but less so for everybody else.

First came June’s presidential debate and the panic as a campaign built on an obvious lie collapsed in real time. There was the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, followed by the defenestration of a half-alive Joe Biden, and then the overnight retconning of a deeply unpopular Vice President as the living embodiment of “joy”. Indeed, there was so much irrational exuberance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week that it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if they had ended it by climbing on the roof to await the descent of electoral victory from the heavens after selling all their possessions.