The meme election comes to a close

For most of American history, elections took a long time. Many of the gaps that still exist today between when counts begin, when certification happens, when electors meet and when the next winner is sworn in exist as a vestige of a past where lengthy travel and slow word of mouth meant people just did not know what had happened for quite some time. Election results happened at a distance. This created its own set of problems in the application of authority, but now we are dealing with something of a different nature: a demand for immediacy that throws patience aside and views every delay as suspicious. It’s one reason that we used to speak to each other in paragraphs, then in lines and phrases — now we can only manage memes.

The internet age has fundamentally changed the way we consider elections, far beyond democratizing the commentariat. There is a direct line from the 2008 general election — the Facebook election — to the even more rapid tone of 2016 — the Twitter election — to today, where campaigns speak less in statements than in memes. You don’t even debate to win debates anymore; you do it to get footage and imagery to spread across platforms in myriad ways for weeks, creating the illusion in the minds of voters that they saw the debate themselves instead of just seeing it clipped and cut in the interests of the campaign. Kamala Harris’s closing remarks last night were just over fifteen minutes long — and it’s because that’s all they needed to get the shot.

The brevity of this modern approach is at odds with every instinct of Donald Trump, which is to exhaust people in lengthy, multi-act displays featuring a plethora of guests, a carnival barker bringing out each act in turn to shock and amaze. He’s creating memes, too, a metric ton at a time — a super-sized approach to the attention-grabbing aspect of our overcrowded media landscape. It’s worked for him in the past — the question now is whether Americans have grown tired of it all.

Tonight, the Trump show’s conclusion could be triumphant or decrepit, but if this turns out to be the end, what a show it’s been. The number of shocking twists in a single political career can’t help but feel overwhelming at times, to sit back and just consider how many stories skyrocketed to the highest of concerns only to be topped again by something else. In the closing weeks of this campaign, some things seem like barely a blip. We’re really going to wrap things up talking about Kill Tony for two weeks? I guess we are.

As for Kamala Harris, her path to this point was an absolute grind of backstabbing and power plays that put her in this unique historical position. Democrats view her as a vehicle, a blocking method against the return of Trump — and not even her boss seems to care if she wins. Her aim has been to convince people that she represents a shift toward normality, away from the mummified lope of Bidenism and the spastic dance of the Orange Man. It’s been a hard task, but just maybe she’s done it — or at least convinced American women that she’s the best shot they’ll get at breaking this manosphere moment. Joe Rogan versus Taylor Swift isn’t the endorsement battle we expected, but it’s the one we got.

Tonight millions of Americans across the country will be doing the same things they do every election night — trying to get food on the table, deal with the kids, navigate the challenges of the workday, face disappointments, be surprised by joyful news. Their lives will go on regardless of the outcome and for the vast majority of them largely disconnected from it, a story that they are aware is happening but not, thankfully, happening directly to them. This is a good thing. For all the madness of our politics, and all the fractures it creates among us, it is still at arm’s length for most of us — and we have our founders to thank for that. We should care about election results. But we shouldn’t care so much that it distracts us from what really matters in life.