Nasce um líder

 

 

 

 

"Quem gosta de Covas é de-
funto. O povo gosta é do
Boulos”, repete, aos bra-
dos, um histriônico apoia-
dor do candidato do PSOL
à prefeitura de São Paulo,
em frente a uma padaria
na Estrada do M’Boi Mi-
rim, via estrutural de 16
quilômetros de extensão
que liga o Jardim Ângela ao Jardim São
Luís, na divisa com o município de Ita-
pecerica da Serra. Na chuvosa manhã da
terça-­feira 17, dezenas de militantes es-
premem-se na calçada à espera do Celti-
nha 2010 prata, o “veículo oficial do novo
prefeito”, como define um risonho profes-
sor presente no ato, sem deixar de sacudir
a bandeira da campanha por um segundo.

A algazarra só é interrompida após o
anfitrião da festa desembarcar do carro
popular e tomar o microfone. “Não dá pa-
ra aceitar que a cidade mais rica do Brasil
tenha gente, como eu vi agora no trajeto
para cá, revirando lixo à procura de co-
mida”, discursa. “Isso vai mudar. A par-
tir de janeiro, vai ter renda solidária para
quem precisa, vai ter frentes de trabalho
nas subprefeituras. Vamos inverter prio-
ridades. A periferia vai ser ouvida e es-
tará no centro do orçamento da cidade.”
Após conquistar mais de 1 milhão de
votos no domingo 15, Guilherme Bou-
los, de 38 anos, fazia o seu primeiro ato
de campanha nas ruas do segundo turno.

A escolha do local não foi aleatória. Em
uma das regiões mais populosas da capital
paulista, ele prometeu duplicar a avenida
e instalar um corredor de ônibus exclusi-
vo, de ponta a ponta. “O custo é de 450 mi-
lhões de reais, existe projeto aprovado, as-
sim como tem projeto aprovado de esten-
der o metrô do Capão Redondo para o Jar-
dim Ângela, mas o PSDB nunca tirou do
papel”, afirma. “Para fazer isso, basta re-
ver as prioridades. A prefeitura gastou 100
milhões de reais numa reforma desneces-
sária no Vale do Anhangabaú, está gastan-
do outros 250 milhões de reais para reme-
xer em calçadas do Centro. Por que não
investiu esse dinheiro na M’Boi Mirim?
Aqui, passa gente do Fundão, do Jardim
Aracati, do Vera Cruz, do Horizonte Azul,
do Capela, um pessoal que demora até três
horas para chegar ao trabalho em ônibus
lotados. É desumano.”

Boulos aposta todas as fichas no voto
da periferia para virar o jogo em São Pau-
lo. Às vésperas do primeiro turno, o can-
didato despontava na segunda colocação,
mas aparecia tecnicamente empatado
com o ex-governador Márcio França, do
PSB, e o deputado federal Celso Russo-
manno, do Republicanos, partido nascido
das costelas da Igreja Universal do Reino
de Deus. Com apenas 17 segundos no pro-
grama eleitoral gratuito, o coordenador
do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem
Teto atropelou os rivais na reta final. Ter-
minou a disputa com 20,24%, bem à fren-
te de França (13,64%) e com quase o do-
bro do porcentual obtido por Russoman-
no (10,5%), que liderava a corrida eleitoral
até Jair Bolsonaro, seu cabo eleitoral, “sa-
botar” a campanha. Além da constrange-
dora derrota imposta ao bolsonarismo,
Boulos conseguiu eleger seis vereadores
do PSOL, a terceira maior bancada da ci-
dade, atrás do PT e do PSDB.

]

“O resultado das urnas consagra Bou-
los como um grande líder do campo pro-
gressista”, avalia o cientista político Cláu-
dio Couto, professor da FGV de São Pau-
lo. “Nesse campo da esquerda, vejo um
entusiasmo com ele que talvez eu não
veja desde a primeira eleição do petista
Fernando Haddad. Mesmo não ganhan-
do a prefeitura, ele ganhou a eleição em
um certo sentido. Ele sai muito maior do
que entrou, assim como o PSOL.”

Nem por isso, Boulos se dá por satis-
feito com o desempenho obtido até aqui,
em uma pequena coligação com os nani-
cos PCB e UP, este último estreante nas
eleições. “Bruno Covas achou que iria
ganhar no primeiro turno, mas chegou
a 32%. Se a maioria quisesse a continui-
dade do projeto tucano, ele não teria me-
nos de um terço dos votos válidos na cida-
de”, afirma. Virar o jogo em São Paulo se-
rá, porém, uma tarefa complicada. Com
o apoio das máquinas municipal e esta-
dual, o candidato do PSDB venceu com
uma vantagem de mais de 673 mil votos,
liderando em todas as 58 zonas eleitorais
da cidade. Os melhores resultados foram
nos abastados bairros do Jardim Paulis-
ta, com 44,52% dos votos, e Indianópolis,
com 44,05%. O tucano também teve bom
desempenho em áreas periféricas, como
Capela do Socorro (33,15%), Cidade Ade-
mar (33,28%) e Rio Pequeno (33,54%).

Uma pesquisa Datafolha do fim
de outubro apontou, ainda, que
46% dos paulistanos conside-
ram a gestão do prefeito boa ou
ótima durante a pandemia do
coronavírus, ao passo que 18%
a classificaram como ruim ou péssima.
Claro que o tucano tem as suas fragilida-
des. Sem grandes realizações para apre-
sentar, Covas tenta a todo custo esconder
o padrinho João Doria, cuja gestão é con-
siderada ruim ou péssima por 49% dos
moradores da capital paulista. Não por
acaso, uma das estratégias da campanha
de Boulos é lembrar, sempre que possível,
que Covas só se tornou prefeito porque era
vice de Doria, e este abandonou a cidade
para disputar o governo estadual.

Uma conjunção de outros fatores ali-
menta as esperanças do campo progres-
sista. As sondagens eleitorais indicam
uma diferença menor que a projetada
antes de os paulistanos comparecerem
às urnas. De acordo com uma pesquisa
divulgada pelo Ibope na quarta-feira 18,
Covas iniciou o segundo turno com 58%
dos votos válidos, contra 42% de Boulos.

Além disso, 21% dos entrevistados res-
ponderam que ainda podem mudar o vo-
to. Ou seja, virar o jogo pode ser difícil,
mas não impossível.

Não por acaso, a tão sonhada frente
de esquerda materializou-se no segun-
do turno das eleições paulistanas. PT,
PCdoB, PDT e Rede anunciaram apoio a
Boulos. Somente o PSB ainda não havia
tomado a sua decisão até o fechamento
desta edição. “Esse apoio será fundamen-
tal para avançar sobre redutos de outros
partidos e manter a mobilização nas ruas,
até para o Boulos ter tempo de se prepa-
rar para os debates e gravar os programas
do horário eleitoral”, explica Juliano Me-
deiros, presidente do PSOL. Do outro la-
do, Covas só conseguiu angariar a adesão
de Russomanno, que terminou a dispu-
ta com menos votos que os conquistados
por ele mesmo em eleições anteriores.

Orlando Silva, do PCdoB, foi
um dos primeiros a unir-se
a Boulos. Mesmo contraria-
do com as pressões de inte-
grantes do próprio partido
para desistir da candidatura
no primeiro turno em favor do candidato
do PSOL, o petista Jilmar Tatto deixou o
ressentimento de lado e subiu no palan-
que com a dupla. “Não existe qualquer
mágoa nem nada do tipo. Ao contrário,
vamos entrar com tudo na campanha”,
tratou de esclarecer. Lula, Ciro Gomes
e o governador do Maranhão, Flávio Di-
no, devem marcar presença no programa
eleitoral, agora com uma divisão igualitá-
ria de tempo. “No primeiro turno, tínha-
mos apenas 17 segundos. Agora, teremos
10 minutos de tevê, quase um debate por
dia. Isso vai fazer com que a nossa men-
sagem chegue a todos”, anima-se Boulos.
Extremamente bem-sucedida no pri-
meiro turno, a estratégia nas redes so-
ciais seguirá a mesma. “Foi graças às
ações que desenvolvemos nessa área
que Boulos passou a liderar entre os
eleitores de 16 a 24 anos”, comenta Jo-
sué Rocha, coordenador da campanha
do PSOL. Para dialogar com os jovens,
Boulos chegou a participar de um reality
show de um dia, transmitido ao vivo pelo
YouTube, disputou partidas de Among
Us, popular jogo da internet, enquanto
respondia perguntas de seus oponentes,
e marcou presença no podcast Flow, que
atrai milhares de aficionados por video-
-games, uma turma não muito politizada

e pouco identificada com a esquerda.
Agora, um de seus mais aguerridos ca-
bos eleitorais é o youtuber Felipe Neto,
que tem mais de 40 milhões de inscri-
tos em seu canal. O jovem influenciador
chegou a bater boca com Covas pelas re-
des sociais e divulgar uma lista com 28
razões para não votar no atual prefeito.
As ações nas redes sociais não se res-
tringiram, porém, a esse público. Vídeos
curtos, mas muito bem elaborados, sua-
vizaram a imagem que o líder dos sem-
-teto tinha no imaginário de eleitores de
todas as idades. Em um deles, os pais de
Boulos, ambos infectologistas e profes-
sores da Faculdade de Medicina da USP,
contam a trajetória do filho, desde que ele
decidiu, aos 16 anos, abandonar o Colé-
gio Equipe, um dos mais tradicionais de
São Paulo, hoje com mensalidades supe-
riores a 2 mil reais, para matricular-se em
uma escola pública do bairro. Um mês de-
pois, o adolescente havia fundado um grê-
mio e liderado um motim dos estudantes

contra a obrigatoriedade do uso de uni-
forme. Tirou cópias do Estatuto da Crian-
ça e do Adolescente, que impede a proibi-
ção da entrada de alunos sem uniforme, e
seguiu com os colegas até a Delegacia Re-
gional de Ensino para protestar. Foi a sua
primeira mobilização vitoriosa.

Da escola pública, Boulos passou di-
reto para o curso de Filosofia da USP.
Depois fez especialização em Psicolo-
gia Clínica e mestrado em Psiquiatria.

Na sua tese, dissertou sobre os efeitos
da participação em movimentos so-
ciais na redução dos sintomas da depres-
são. Àquela altura, havia participado de
programas de alfabetização de jovens e
adultos e estava engajado na luta por mo-
radia popular. Ainda com 19 anos, saiu
da casa dos pais, no bairro de Pinheiros,
para viver com os sem-teto em um acam-
pamento em Osasco. “Foi uma opção de-
le para sentir na pele a dificuldade que
aquelas pessoas estavam sentindo”, co-
menta o pai, Marcos Boulos.
Não se tratava de uma mera aventura.

O jovem Boulos dedicou a vida à luta por
moradia popular. Foi na ocupação Chi-
co Mendes, em Taboão da Serra, que ele
conheceu a sua esposa, Natalia Szerme-
ta, em 2005. Recém-casados, eles chega-
ram a morar próximo do córrego Piraju-
çara, que costuma transbordar sob chu-
va intensa. Depois, mudaram-se para o
Campo Limpo, onde os pais dela vivem.
Até hoje, o casal mora no mesmo bairro
periférico, com as filhas Sofia e Laura,
de 10 e 9 anos. Com a “sensibilidade so-
cial” adquirida em duas décadas de atua-
ção no movimento sem-teto, o candidato
do PSOL acredita ser possível conquis-
tar os votos dos moradores da periferia.
“Os tucanos estão habituados a tratá-los
como números, como estatísticas. Eu os
conheço pelo nome, são meus vizinhos,
meus companheiros de luta.”

Logo após a apuração dos votos no pri-
meiro turno, Covas fez um discurso que
entregou, logo de partida, uma das suas
estratégias na etapa decisiva: associar
Boulos ao radicalismo, de forma a insu-
flar o sentimento antipetista que preva-
leceu nas eleições de quatro anos atrás. No
debate promovido pela CNN Brasil, o tu-
cano voltou a insistir na tese. “O radicalis-
mo ideológico sabe criticar, mas não sabe
salvar vidas”, disse o candidato ainda no
primeiro bloco, ao falar sobre a pandemia
do novo coronavírus. “Ontem, fiquei até
assustado quando vi o seu discurso após
a apuração. Discurso cheio de raiva”, rea-
giu o adversário do PSOL. “Não sei. Talvez
porque você achou que a eleição estava ga-
nha, ficou preocupado com o crescimen-
to que nós tivemos, e agiu dessa forma.”

Em entrevista à Folha de S.Paulo,
Covas observou que o PSOL de
Boulos tomou o espaço antes
ocupado pelo PT, mas não se di-
ferencia muito dele. “É a mesma
raiz, a mesma linha, a mesma
matriz ideológica. Eles têm uma atuação
conjunta”, afirmou, sem perder a opor-
tunidade de expor a falta de experiência
administrativa do concorrente. O psolis-
ta rebate: “Tenho 20 anos de atuação no
movimento sem-teto, o que me deu uma
sensibilidade social que ele não tem. Além
disso, está ao meu lado Luiza Erundina,
que foi a melhor prefeita que esta cidade
teve. Com todas as dificuldades, ela criou
políticas públicas que geram frutos até ho-
je. E, obviamente, eu não vou governar so-
zinho, estarei com os especialistas que
ajudaram a construir o meu programa”.

A campanha do PSOL pretende dar
um destaque cada vez maior a esses
profissionais, para mostrar quem esta-
rá ao lado de Boulos na administração.
Na propaganda da tevê, o médico sanita-
rista Gastão Wagner e as urbanistas Ra-
quel Rolnik e Ermínia Maricato são pre-
senças quase certas. “No primeiro tur-
no, fomos alvo de fake news e de ataques
do Russomanno por 15 dias seguidos.
Ainda assim, continuamos crescendo e
até mesmo a taxa de rejeição diminuiu”,
observa Rocha, da coordenação da cam-
panha. Na avaliação da vice Erundina,
não é muito difícil expor a “falácia” por
trás do discurso de Covas. “Quando as-
sumi a prefeitura, eu também não tinha
experiência administrativa, mas tinha
uma equipe de altíssimo padrão. Paulo
Freire na Educação, Paul Singer no Pla-
nejamento, Eduardo Jorge na Saúde,
Marilena Chauí na Cultura, Lúcio Gre-
gori nos Transportes, Paulo Sandroni
na Economia. Enfim, tínhamos um mi-
nistério dos sonhos, que nenhum outro
governo brasileiro teve”, orgulha-se. “E
Boulos, mesmo sem ter o poder da cane-
ta, conseguiu viabilizar a construção de
23 mil unidades habitacionais, por meio
de sua luta no MTST.”

Perto de completar 86 anos de idade,
Erundina chegou a anunciar que não
disputaria mais cargos eletivos, mas
mudou de ideia com o convite para in-
tegrar a chapa de Boulos. Tornou-se uma
peça central na campanha. A bordo de
seu “Cata-Voto”, uma espécie de papa-
móvel, no qual a deputada se protege do
coronavírus por uma cúpula de acrílico,
ela percorreu numerosos bairros da pe-
riferia para conversar com os eleitores
e pedir votos. “Os sonhos não envelhe-
cem, ainda tenho muito a contribuir”,
diz a candidata, que também enfrentou
muito preconceito ao eleger-se prefeita
de São Paulo, em 1988. “Como eles não
têm muita coisa a dizer sobre o Boulos,
apelam para essas falácias. Dizem que
ele é radical, vai tomar a casa dos outros.
Na minha época, foi pior. Imagina, uma
mulher, nordestina e pobre, no comando
da cidade mais rica do País... Só faltou eu
ser negra para completar o combo da ex-
clusão. A reação foi feroz. Chegaram a
mandar cartas com fezes para a prefei-
tura, e não foi só uma vez, não.”

Em seu sexto mandato na Câmara dos
Deputados, Erundina não poupa elogios
ao jovem colega de chapa. “Boulos é uma
liderança que veio para ficar, e não ape-
nas em São Paulo. É uma liderança pa-
ra o País”, afiança. “Na escassez de qua-
dros políticos com uma visão mais global,
mais sistêmica, mais política no sentido
pleno do termo, ele é um desses. Não sei
se tem mais outro, não. E o melhor: Bou-
los não tem aquela arrogância dos líde-
res. É um modesto, simples, que convive
fraternalmente com todos. É um homem
do povo, empoderado pela sua formação
e pelo seu compromisso com o povo.”

Na avaliação da cientista políti-
ca Vera Chaia, professora da
PUC de São Paulo, Boulos de-
monstrou muita habilidade
para aglutinar, em torno de
si, as principais legendas do
campo progressista. “Mesmo que isso
não se traduza em uma vitória nas elei-
ções deste ano, fica o legado dessa arti-
culação para o futuro, quem sabe para
a formação da tão sonhada frente de es-
querda em 2022”, avalia. “O estilo de li-
derança de Boulos favorece muito essa
união. Ele é muito tranquilo, tem um jei-
to de se expor que não expressa radicali-
dade. Além disso, é bastante carismáti-
co, no sentido de conquistar a confian-
ça dos outros para o que se dispõe a fa-
zer. Digo isso pensando no conceito de
carisma formulado pelo sociólogo ale-
mão Max Weber. Boulos consegue des-
pertar a esperança de um amplo setor
da sociedade, e isso não é pouca coisa.” •

CARTA CAPITAL

Sérgio Augusto: Pé na cova

 

 

 SÉRGIO AUGUSTO

Vocês souberam da morte de Brigitte Bardot?

Nem eu.

Os franceses souberam em primeira mão; ao menos aqueles que acessaram o site da rádio estatal RFI, na manhã da última segunda-feira. Uma falha técnica no sistema de informática da emissora vazou para um rede um alentado necrológio que era para permanecer lacrado em seus arquivos, ao alcance exclusivo da redação da RFI.

Foi um morticínio. Além de BB, uma emissora “matou” Pelé. E também Elizabeth II, a rainha da Inglaterra. E mais Sophia Loren, Jimmy Carter, Raúl Castro, Pierre Cardin e Yoko Ono. No mundo do cinema, uma devastação: Clint Eastwood, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant e Roman Polanski. Nenhuma vítima - et pour cause - do coronavírus.

Nosso Pelé já deve estar acostumado a barrigas do gênero. A CNN o despachou para o além, seis anos atrás, alçando-o à concorrida casta de defuntos apócrifos, que inclui Karl Max (finado pela imprensa de 1871, com 12 anos de antecedência) a Beyoncé, passando por Mark Twain, Baudelaire, Bertrand Russell, Churchill, Josephine Baker, Hemingway, García Márquez e Bob Hope, entre muitos outros.

As páginas de obituários sempre foram as mais procuradas e lidas dos jornais. As pessoas não querem apenas saber quem morreu, mas também regozijar-se por ainda não ter chegado a sua hora de frequentar essas páginas. “Morreu, morreu, antes ele do que eu”, proclamava um despudorado sambinha dos meus tempos de menino, ilustração musical perfeita para o que Bruce Weber, calejado obituarista do New York Times , batizou de “schadenfreude recreativo”.

Minha primeira experiência como obituarista foi no Jornal do Brasil, por volta de 1966. Criou-se no pioneiro Departamento de Pesquisa do jornal um não menos setor pioneiro dedicado à produção de obituários antecipados, adrede apelidado “Pé na Cova”. Cada redator recebeu seu quinhão de macróbios para sobre cada um deles caprichar um perfil a ser guardado, um fim de evitar atropelos de última hora. Para mim reservaram, entre outros, o imperador japonês Hirohito e o jornalista e acadêmico Austregésilo de Athayde.

Pesquisávamos a vida e a obra da personalidade responsável e escrevíamos o necrológio, deixando em aberto a causa mortis e as minúcias a serem causadas quando o morto finalmente morresse. Dávamos aos textos títulos aleatórios, que poderiam ser ou não utilizados na data de sua publicação. Até em razão dessa incerteza e também para aliviar o clima mórbido da empreitada, costumávamos brincar um pouco, nos títulos, com nossos ilustres mortos-vivos.

Lembro de dois títulos que obviamente não foram reaproveitados pelo jornal quando o imperador japonês e o “presidente vitalício” da ABL deram seus últimos suspiros: “Hirohito, que morreu sem dar um grito” e “Austregésilo, enfim de ataúde”. O Jornal do Brasil não era o Pasquim .

O necrológio de Hirohito mofou 24 anos no arquivo do jornal; o de Austregésilo, 28. Surgiu ali a minha reputação de pé-quente, de emérito procrastinador de óbitos. “Escreva o meu; pago o que você quiser ”, implorou-me, de brincadeira, um amigo obituariável. Não atendi seu pedido, mas ele, para minha sorte também, continua vivo, até mais do que eu.

No início dos anos 1990, encomendaram-me, na Folha de S. Paulo , os obituários de Tom Jobim e das cantoras Marlene e Nora Ney, os três vendendo saúde. Marlene sobreviveria 22 anos ao meu texto e Nora Ney, consideráveis ​​sete verões.

Tom foi uma exceção lamentável. De procrastinador de óbitos passei a procrastinador de obituário. E logo o dele. Por motivos vários, remanchei tanto a feitura do necrológio, que Tom acabou morrendo, de repente, o que me obrigou a improvisar uma elegia a toque de caixa, ao sabor do choque e da tristeza pela perda de nossa maior glória musical. Até hoje me sinto um pouco culpado pela morte do maestro soberano.

Os obituários mais penosos são aqueles que nos pegam de surpresa ou, pior ainda, envolvem figuras cuja reputação nos inibe e atemoriza. É muita responsabilidade reduzir a um punhado de linhas vidas demasiado ricas de histórias e feitos.

Se Walt Disney não tivesse sido criogenado às pressas, eu poderia dizer que escrevi seu necrológio com o cadáver ainda morno, na tarde de 15 de dezembro de 1966 para a capa do Caderno B do Jornal do Brasil Isto É .

Poucas coisas são mais desafiadoras e dolorosas do que falar por obrigação da morte de um amigo que sabemos ainda vivo, embora mais pra lá do que pra cá. Todos os verbos conjugados no passado: “foi”, “era” - é muito esquisito, se não agourento. E a gente ainda fica torcendo para que o nosso texto, suspenso pela recuperação do presuntivo defunto, seja condenado ao ineditismo e arquivado indefinidamente.

Duas celebridades a mim ligadas e por todos nós admiradas quase sucumbiram a um piripaque, pouco tempo atrás, e não houve jeito de eu escapar da missão de obituá-las (ou seria obitoá-las?) Preventivamente, aqui no Estadão . Como elas continuam vivas, posso dizer que minha marca de pé-quente foi em parte restaurada. Estou aceitando encomendas.

 

Como o bolsonarismo se reorganizará depois do fracasso nas urnas de 2020

 

 

O horizonte da extrema-direita após o baque das eleições municipais 

 Natália Portinari e Naira Trindade, de Brasília, e Gustavo Schmitt e Guilherme Caetano, de São Paulo

O sábado 14, um dia antes do primeiro turno das eleições municipais, foi quando o presidente Jair Bolsonaro caiu em si. Apesar de ter passado a última semana fazendo lives em prol dos candidatos que apoiaria no dia seguinte, já sabia que o desfecho que se desenhava não era promissor. Suas principais apostas, Celso Russomanno, em São Paulo, e Marcelo Crivella, no Rio de Janeiro, amargavam números desanimadores, segundo as últimas pesquisas. Sem muita modéstia, atrelou o mau resultado dos aliados a sua própria ausência da corrida eleitoral — já que suas lives se tornaram frequentes apenas às vésperas do pleito. Mas reconheceu estar preocupado mesmo com outra coisa: o desempenho de seu filho Carlos Bolsonaro, candidato à reeleição para vereador no Rio de Janeiro.

Não se tratava, obviamente, do medo de que o zero dois não se elegesse. Carlos tinha sido o vereador com mais votos em 2016, e sua recondução ao cargo estava assegurada. O que deixava o presidente tenso era a possibilidade de sua votação ser abaixo do esperado. Bolsonaro atingiu em setembro o maior índice de aprovação numa pesquisa do Ibope desde que assumiu — 40% —, mas o respaldo dos eleitores ao filho serviria como um termômetro atualizado da popularidade do pai no reduto eleitoral da família. Abertas as urnas, ficou claro que os temores do presidente tinham, sim, fundamento. Carlos, que o acompanhou em carro aberto no dia da posse, acabou saindo menor do que entrou na campanha municipal. Em 2016, obteve 106 mil votos. Neste ano, não passou de 71 mil, uma queda de 33%. E, de quebra, o filho perdeu o posto de vereador mais votado da cidade para Tarcísio Motta, do PSOL.

Principais apostas de Bolsonaro nas duas maiores capitais do país, Celso Russomanno (à direita), em São Paulo, e Marcelo Crivella, no Rio de Janeiro, amargavam números desanimadores. Foto: Edilson Dantas / Agência O Globo

Esse foi o pior recado do pleito, mas não o único. Russomanno, que contou com o apoio expresso do presidente, largou na frente nas pesquisas. No começo da campanha, isso encheu de esperança o Palácio do Planalto, que anseia fincar raízes no reduto eleitoral de seu adversário, João Doria, governador de São Paulo. Na tarde nublada de 3 de outubro, na Zona Sul de São Paulo, após um evento de campanha de Russomanno, Fabio Wajngarten, secretário executivo da Secretaria Especial de Comunicação Social (Secom), era só otimismo. A bordo de um jipe Mercedes preto, disse a ÉPOCA, sorridente: “Ele (Russomanno) já está eleito”. E prosseguiu em sua análise: “De um lado, a esquerda está acabada por causa da Lava Jato. De outro, tem o PSDB desgastado em São Paulo. Ninguém aguenta mais. Foi assim em 2018”, apostou o secretário. Russomanno amargou o quarto lugar, com apenas 560 mil votos (10,5% do total), enquanto o adversário do tucano Bruno Covas no segundo turno será Guilherme Boulos, do PSOL — cenário que configura dupla derrota para o presidente, que há dois anos venceu na capital paulista com 60% dos votos.

Em todo o país, dos 44 candidatos que ganharam o aval do presidente, apenas nove se elegeram. Entre esses poucos sortudos não estão parentes de sobrenomes considerados ilustres no bolsonarismo, como o irmão da deputada federal Carla Zambelli (PSL-SP). Ela tem 1 milhão de seguidores no Twitter e 2,2 milhões no Facebook. Ele atraiu apenas 12 mil votos, abaixo da linha de corte para conseguir uma vaga na Câmara Municipal de São Paulo. O pai de Zambelli, candidato a vice-prefeito em Mairiporã, no interior paulista, tampouco prosperou. Edson Salomão, líder do Movimento Conservador e aliado do deputado federal Eduardo Bolsonaro (PSL-SP), o zero três, ficou de fora da Câmara de Vereadores de São Paulo. No Rio de Janeiro, Rogéria Bolsonaro, ex-mulher do presidente e mãe de seus três filhos mais velhos, não foi eleita, apesar do sobrenome e do empenho, principalmente de Carlos.

Antes de dormir, no dia 15, Bolsonaro tentou minimizar a contagem de mortos e feridos. Escreveu em sua conta no Twitter que sua “ajuda a alguns poucos candidatos a prefeito resumiu-se a 4 lives num total de 3 horas”, que a esquerda saiu derrotada e que a “onda conservadora chegou em 2018 para ficar”. Dois dias depois, ao se reunir com alguns parlamentares empenhados na criação de seu (ainda inexistente) partido, o Aliança pelo Brasil, compartilhou uma análise mais realista sobre o pleito. Para o presidente, a direita foi prejudicada em razão da pulverização partidária: “Quem saiu ganhando foi o pessoal do (Luciano) Huck”, vaticinou. A preocupação exposta naquela conversa não demorou a migrar para dentro do grupo de WhatsApp do Aliança pelo Brasil, onde deputados, senadores, ministros e integrantes do governo Bolsonaro debatem a criação do novo partido.

Russomanno terminou em quarto lugar na capital paulista com 10% dos votos válidos. O prefeito do Rio, Marcelo Crivella (na foto), candidato à reeleição, conseguiu ir para o segundo turno, mas aparece muito atrás de Eduardo Paes na primeira pesquisa divulgada na terça-feira 17. Foto: Brenno Carvalho / Agência O Globo

O sentimento geral, segundo um membro do grupo relatou a ÉPOCA, foi de um “choque de realidade” diante do que a cúpula da legenda reconhece ser uma derrota da extrema-direita. Sem um partido que abarcasse toda a direita radical, seus candidatos haviam ficado dispersos por várias siglas nas eleições municipais. “A direita bolsonarista aprendeu uma lição nesta eleição, a de que existe um eleitor de direita não necessariamente bolsonarista”, disse Alexandre Borges, analista político e proveniente de antigos círculos de estudo de Olavo de Carvalho. “É uma descoberta dura para o bolsonarismo, que se achava dono desse campo político.”

Entre os que aproveitaram o fraco desempenho dos aliados do Planalto nas urnas para criticar o presidente, ninguém se compara aos que o ajudaram a se eleger em 2018 e depois romperam. “O grande derrotado dessas eleições é o bolsonarismo. O presidente virou o Mick Jagger. Ele apoiava alguém e o cara morria (nas pesquisas) no dia seguinte”, disse o Major Olimpio, senador do PSL por São Paulo, referindo-se à fama de pé-frio do vocalista dos Rolling Stones. O senador defende um “expurgo” de bolsonaristas do PSL e cita a deputada Zambelli como alvo. “A direita, na verdade, por princípio, respeita o indivíduo e a individualidade. O autoritarismo não convive com uma filosofia direitista. A lógica bolsonarista é muito mais próxima de Stálin, que perseguiu seus principais apoiadores”, disse a deputada estadual Janaina Paschoal (PSL-SP), convidada para ser a vice na chapa de Bolsonaro em 2018 e hoje uma feroz crítica. Mesmo dentro do bolsonarismo não faltou virulência.

“Torna-se cada vez mais concreta a possibilidade de Bolsonaro se filiar a um partido do centrão para concorrer em 2022, como PP, PL ou Republicanos — este último é onde estão abrigados seus filhos Carlos e Flávio Bolsonaro desde que deixaram o PSL”

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Parafraseando a máxima do escritor russo Tolstói, quando vencem, todos os grupos políticos se parecem, mas, quando perdem, cada um perde a sua maneira. Isso ficou evidente após a eleição. Os apoiadores do presidente deram início a um processo de busca de causas e explicações com características bem bolsonaristas. Não faltaram dissimulações e uma facção apontando o dedo contra a outra. O presidente logo engatou uma segunda marcha e passou a defender a interlocutores que o pleito municipal não serve como previsão do que ocorrerá na eleição presidencial de 2022. Mas a tentativa de baixar a temperatura não evitou uma lavagem de roupa suja e o fogo amigo.

Mateus Colombo Mendes, diretor do Departamento de Conteúdo e Gestão de Canais Digitais da Secom, escreveu uma longa análise e desabafo em sua rede social. “Chega do pensamento mágico de confiar apenas na imagem do presidente e de se ficar sempre esperando que o presidente resolva tudo sozinho, enquanto o restante fica resmungando nas redes, cada um na sua.” Filipe Martins, assessor especial da Presidência, compartilhou a postagem, logo depois de fazer sua própria reflexão, expondo indiretamente seu chefe. “Muitos se perguntam por que candidatos apoiados por cabos eleitorais de peso foram derrotados. A resposta é simples: perderam porque eleição municipal é base, é construção, não é improviso. Não adianta chegar às vésperas da eleição e dar carteirada nem tentar levar no grito”, escreveu.

O guru de Martins e do bolsonarismo, Olavo de Carvalho, aproveitou o momento de fragilidade para endurecer as críticas aos alvos de sempre: os militares, que ele acredita terem um projeto próprio de poder que não inclui necessariamente Bolsonaro e o núcleo ideológico de seu governo. “O péssimo desempenho dos bolsonaristas na eleição não tem mistério nenhum. Ludibriado pela conversa mole de generais-melancias, o presidente confiou demais no sucesso inevitável da sua liderança pessoal, sem perceber que ela não passava, precisamente, disso: uma liderança pessoal sem respaldo militante e incapaz, por isso, de transmitir seu prestígio a qualquer aliado.” “Melancia”, no vocabulário da direita extremada é sinônimo de quem é vermelho (comunista) por dentro.

Se as projeções se confirmarem, as eleições de Eduardo Paes, no Rio, e Bruno Covas (foto abaixo), em São Paulo, vão consolidar o crescimento de partidos alinhados ao centro político nas eleições 2020. Foto: Andre Coelho / AFP

Para a fúria ainda maior dos mais radicais da extrema-direita, Luiz Eduardo Ramos, ministro da Secretaria de Governo e, aparentemente, um dos “melancias” na visão de Carvalho, foi às redes comemorar o desempenho do centrão nas eleições. Ramos disse que o PT foi mal e frisou que PSD, PP, DEM e MDB vão governar mais prefeituras do que o partido do ex-presidente Lula. Para os olavistas, o centrão é o problema, não a solução. Para a ala mais pragmática do governo, o caminho após o fracasso eleitoral é mais, e não menos, centrão. A aposta é que, nas eleições presidenciais de 2022, a base de sustentação da campanha de Bolsonaro será formada por partidos tradicionais, os mesmos que o apoiam hoje no Congresso.

Como num roteiro de série de TV, os principais atores do bolsonarismo vivem um drama que envolve passado e futuro. Muitos apoiadores não acreditam que Bolsonaro conseguirá se firmar como um candidato competitivo à reeleição seguindo a fórmula adotada em 2018, com foco quase que exclusivo nas redes sociais. Para os defensores dessa tese, as eleições municipais deram algumas evidências favoráveis ao mostrar que forças de diferentes pontos do espectro político acordaram para a necessidade de ocupar espaços nas redes sociais. WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram e Twitter já não são uma raia exclusiva do bolsonarismo. Isso aconteceu, por exemplo, na campanha para a prefeitura de São Paulo. Trabalhar nas redes sociais foi o que fizeram tanto Guilherme Boulos como Arthur do Val, o Mamãe Falei, ligado ao Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), que atraiu 10% dos votos. “Nós trabalhamos bem com a rede. O PT apanhou e perdeu espaço para o PSOL porque ainda está na lógica ‘meio acadêmico, sindicato e Igreja’. O PSOL fez uma campanha virtual boa”, reconheceu o deputado federal Kim Kataguiri (DEM-SP), um dos fundadores do MBL.

Enquanto o campo virtual tem sido povoado por diferentes nuances partidárias, o mundo real ainda carece de ser compreendido pelos políticos da nova direita advinda do bolsonarismo — fraqueza que muitos enxergam como a principal ameaça à continuidade de um projeto conservador no Brasil. Estrategistas políticos que trabalharam em campanhas de candidatos ditos conservadores nestas eleições relataram a ÉPOCA as dificuldades em convencer seus clientes da importância de articulação política e dos atos de rua. “Eu disse a eles: ‘Saiam da internet’. Mas eles não entendiam. Diziam que o Jair Bolsonaro tinha sido eleito pela força das redes sociais e que em 2020 seria assim de novo. Diziam que não precisavam de coligação porque o PSL não havia feito isso em 2018”, afirmou Rodrigo Morais, que trabalhou no governo de transição de Bolsonaro e hoje tem uma consultoria política.

­ Foto: Patricia Monteiro / Bloomberg via Getty Images

No entorno do presidente, é ruidoso o grupo que, ao contrário do general Ramos, defende que o bolsonarismo precisa de um partido para chamar de seu. Daí as tentativas, até agora infrutíferas, de criar o Aliança pelo Brasil. Bolsonaro nunca foi dirigente partidário, tampouco seus filhos. A dinâmica maçante da formação de uma sigla e seus diretórios é o que garante musculatura para que candidatos disputem cargos a cada dois anos. Sem isso, não surpreende que o presidente não tenha conseguido engajar eleitores para o pleito municipal. A burocracia partidária e seus dissabores — incluindo divergências políticas — foi o que ajudou a azedar a relação de Bolsonaro com sua legenda anterior, o PSL. Mas quem apoia o presidente hoje diz que, quando ele tiver seu próprio partido, tudo será diferente. “A eleição municipal deixa claro a desvantagem da direita em relação à esquerda, já que falta estrutura partidária. Fora isso, a esquerda tem ONGs, centro de estudo e de formação de pensamento. A direita também tem de ter isso”, disse o empresário Otávio Fakhoury, aliado de primeira hora de Bolsonaro e hoje investigado nos inquéritos das fake news e da promoção de atos não democráticos.

Um ano depois de sua concepção, o plano de fundar o Aliança não conseguiu reunir nem 10% das 492 mil assinaturas necessárias para o registro da legenda junto ao Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE). E as trocas de farpas entre bolsonaristas durante todo o processo denota que a concordância ideológica não se converte em harmonia na hora de dividir o poder. Integrantes do grupo rivalizam entre si por protagonismo e sofrem com uma ausência de definição, da parte de Bolsonaro, de quem é o verdadeiro responsável pelo Aliança. Quem vem assumindo as rédeas do projeto é o advogado Luis Felipe Belmonte, que coordenou viagens e eventos em prol da sigla nos últimos meses. Mas o futuro do Aliança é ainda incerto. Parte da base de apoiadores nos estados se voltou contra os organizadores, como Belmonte e os também advogados Karina Kufa e Admar Gonzaga. As brigas dificultam ainda mais a criação da legenda e a coleta de assinaturas. Oficialmente, porém, o grupo atribui à pandemia e às eleições municipais a demora do registro dos apoiamentos no TSE.

Depois dos desentendimentos passados com Luciano Bivar, presidente do PSL, o presidente parece estar reticente diante da possibilidade de “entregar” seu partido às mãos de alguém que não seja um de seus filhos. Bolsonaro também teme que o gesto de alavancar o Aliança desagrade ao centrão, que hoje é a base de seu governo, sobretudo diante da possibilidade, cada vez mais concreta, de que ele se filie a um partido tradicional para concorrer em 2022, como o PP, o PL e Republicanos, que é onde estão abrigados seus filhos Carlos e Flávio Bolsonaro. Sem a onda antipolítica alimentada pela Operação Lava Jato e com poder de fogo das redes sociais reduzido, o caminho para a direita bolsonarista a partir de 2021 é incerto porque requer diálogo — item escasso por aquelas bandas.

 

Robert Johnson: The Devil had nothing to do with it

 

Greil Marcus

There's an old blues metaphor. You know, Robert Johnson found his sound at the crossroad when he made a deal with the devil. It seems to me that the country is at a crossroad, whether we are going to continue to invest and double down on the ugliness of our racist commitments, or [we'll] finally leave this behind. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr. 

The blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, grew up in Memphis, and was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband during a performance at a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. He recorded twenty-nine of his own songs for the Vocalion label in San Antonio in 1936 and in Dallas in 1937. In 1938, with the blues musician Johnny Shines, he traversed most of the eastern part of the country, playing from St. Louis to Chicago to Detroit to Harlem. Later that year the producer John Hammond, who had celebrated his recordings in New Masses , knew Johnson had to perform at his historic “Spirituals to Swing”concert at Carnegie Hall; learning of his death, Hammond played two of his songs on a phonograph on the stage. 

Within the school of Mississippi Delta blues—where on a nearly fixed structure of verses and melodies a singer was called to craft an imaginative fiction using a persona who claimed to testify to the vicissitudes of his or her life—Johnson made music that went farther than that of anyone else. In 1931 Constance Rourke upended the boundaries of American speech in American Humor: A Study of the National Character , in which she found “lines from forbidden”slave songs in blackface minstrel tunes (“O I'se sorry I sold myself to the debbil”). The hauntings that were left in the American imagination after the first waves of the Great Awakening receded echo through Johnson's songs, and the most distinctive of them—“Me and the Devil Blues,”“Stones in My Passway,”“Cross Road Blues,”“Come on in My Kitchen,”“Hellhound on My Trail”—mirror Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown”as much as any other blues. 

Johnson's life was tangled. His mother's first husband, Charles Dodds, escaped a Hazlehurst lynch mob in 1908 after a dispute with a white neighbor. He settled in Memphis and changed his name to Spencer, leaving his wife Julia behind with their younger children. Robert Leroy Johnson was born from her affair with a farm worker named Noah Johnson, though when she left him at the Spencer household in Memphis at the age of five or seven, according to different memories, he was taken in as a Spencer and used that name until, sometime in his mid-teens, his mother told him of his actual parentage, and he began to use the name Johnson.

 He started playing music as a child; Charles Spencer, who played many instruments, was his first guitar teacher. Johnson began performing for audiences when he was seventeen, but at that age he married fourteen-year-old Virginia Travis and left music behind for work as a farmer. Within a year his wife and baby died in childbirth, and he tried to make his way in the sophisticated milieu of such older blues players as Charley Patton, Son House, and Willie Brown, in and around the Mississippi Delta towns of Clarksdale and Robinsonville, only to be turned away, House recalled, as a hopeless amateur. 

He left for Hazlehurst, as if to reconstruct his life, looking for his spectral father. Instead he was taken in by the local guitarist Ike Zimmerman, whose sound all but silenced anything Johnson had heard before. Zimmerman liked to tutor unformed guitar players in a graveyard at midnight; some called him the devil for his ability to turn apparently unremarkable young men and women into masters. In 1930, while Johnson was still living with Zimmerman, he and a sixteen-year-old woman named Virgie Jane Smith may have conceived a child who, though he was raised and lived his life under another last name, would turn up more than sixty years later as Claud Johnson to successfully claim an estate by then worth millions of dollars. Turned away by Smith before her son's birth, Johnson married an older woman, Caletta Craft, whom he almost immediately abandoned; she died soon after. In Memphis he was a beloved and responsible member of the Spencer family; outside of it, drinking constantly and pursuing women, playing plantation jukes or on the street, he was a hobo, a bum, a classic bohemian with dissipation his path to art. 

When, after a year or more away, Johnson returned to Robinsonville, he so shocked those who heard his new music that more than three decades later, in 1966, Son House was still shaking his head. “He sold his soul to the devil in exchange for learning to play like that,”the blues writer Pete Welding quoted him as saying. Except for his first, “Terraplane Blues,”Johnson's records did not sell well, even if he heard them himself on jukeboxes in Harlem. He was mostly forgotten after his death. Though some of his songs were taken up by others, his name was not attached to them. 

In 1961 John Hammond assembled sixteen of Johnson's recordings and released them on a Columbia LP bluntly titled King of the Delta Blues Singers. Though there were no facts about Johnson's life and no photograph or even likeness on the jacket, the album caused a slowly rolling tremor that shook musicians and listeners around the world and has never come to rest. “I was already aware of the ‘myth’of Robert Johnson, of selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads,”the singer and guitarist Jack White said of encountering Johnson's music, long after his songs had captivated millions of people in recordings by the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and countless others. “After finally listening to it, I could believe it.

”Three decades after King of the Delta Blues Singers appeared, facts had been gathered, photographs had been published. In 1990 Columbia released the annotated and illustrated Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings , which included the twenty-nine songs and twelve alternate takes. It won a Grammy and sold more than a million copies. In 1994 Johnson appeared on a US postage stamp. In 2012 his song “Sweet Home Chicago”was sung at the White House by President Obama. In 2017, in an attempt to capitalize on Johnson's fame, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump announced that they would open a hotel in Clarksdale as part of the since-abandoned venture they trademarked as “American Idea.”

And yet the fascination Johnson's music provokes has never lessened, or been contained by knowledge of who, what, when, where, and how—because “why”can never be reduced to a fact. “Robert Johnson shaped an art,”Stanley Crouch wrote in 1994, “that elevated his work from the amorphous world of Delta Ned Buntlines to that of fish stories lining up to march on the universe of Moby Dick .”In his own way, Bob Dylan said much the same thing this past June:

 Robert was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time. But he probably had no audience to speak of. He was so far ahead of his time that we still haven't caught up with him. His status today couldn't be any higher. Yet in his day, his songs must have confused people. 

Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson , by the longtime blues researchers Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, is a comprehensive and often wonderfully detailed book. The Robert Johnson we meet in these pages is fitted with glasses as a child to correct the effects of a recurrent cataract. He receives a first-class education in segregated schools in Memphis, in music as well as English and history. He listens to songs though an open window on a radio in a neighbor's house while conversing about something else and plays more than one at a show that same night. In New York he seeks an audition for the Major Bowes Amateur Hour , the premier talent showcase in the country, where, we're told, Frank Sinatra got his start with the Hoboken Four quartet in 1935. Bob Dylan to the contrary on Johnson's lack of an audience (not that Dylan isn't onto something when he summons the distance Johnson's music seems to place between itself and anyone listening), there are thrilling stories of his playing on town streets or even an open highway and drawing such crowds that he stopped traffic. We see Ike Zimmerman pushing Johnson through the door of a Robinsonville juke joint as he returns to make his mark: “I taught you.”

But ultimately the book is charmless and hollow. Attempts to bring Johnson into focus as a person dissolve in glibness and an unintentional but thoughtless condescension: “Robert”(he is always Robert, sometimes with such proprietary familiarity that you wonder why the authors don't just call him Bob) “didn't have to talk much about himself because his music revealed him as a vulnerable, deeply feeling man. And that's what allowed him to have such success with the women.”As Annye C. Anderson, Johnson's stepsister, states plainly in her Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson , “Being on a first-name basis is designed to avoid giving black people the respect they're due. Using a first name is a privilege and not a right.”What remains is an account of a highly talented 1930s blues singer and guitarist who lived a short but colorful life. There is no sense of what in his life or art would compel anyone to spend years researching and writing such a book, or why anyone would read it. 

From the start, there is a certain distaste and a leaning into conjecture that undermine the certainty of particular descriptions. “The night in Hazlehurst,”Conforth and Wardlow write, “was filled with men and women dancing and drinking, whooping and hollering, pairing up for a night of partying and sex. They frolicked until Robert either went home with one of the women or collapsed drunk on the floor of the store to sleep it off”—which means they have no idea what Johnson did that night. He could have gone back to Ike Zimmerman's to read Cane . 

There are attempts at vivid recreations of the scenes Johnson would have encountered in Chicago and Harlem in 1938. They fade against the drawings in the Mezzo and J.M. Dupont graphic novel Love in Vain: Robert Johnson, 1911–1938 —in lurid blacks and whites, so that even in the daytime scenes it seems to be night, with Johnson often in a pinstripe suit so bright it seems on the verge of bursting into flame—that show him in the same places.

 Across the top half of a page in a single long image, Johnson is seen from behind at the far left of the panel, in his blazing suit and a broad-brimmed hat, looking up at posters advertising Louis Armstrong and the blues singer Victoria Spivey on the South Side of Chicago. Then it's as if the reader's eye is drawn by a tracking shot as it rolls down the block, passing a movie theater marquee announcing Harlem on the Prairie and Oscar Micheaux's Underworld , passing a man in a suit aiming a guitar like a rifle at two men sitting on a sedan in suits and Stetsons with their own drawn pistols, reaching a newsboy hawking the Chicago Defender with FREE THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS in a banner headline in front of more well-dressed black men, and behind them a poster reading JOIN THE NAACP SMASH RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. 

This is the work of scholarly fans trusting their imagination. In 2014, when their book first appeared, they could hardly have known, as Anderson relates in Brother Robert , published this past June, that Johnson “knew about the NAACP and kept up with the Scottsboro Boys case—the people involved had been hoboing to Memphis, just like Brother Robert often did.” 

And in one poetic line, Mezzo and Dupont say as much about the murderous and inescapable racism of Johnson's world as anything in Conforth and Wardlow, even their report that Johnny Shines refused to set foot in Mississippi for fear of death: “It could be fatal for a black man to catch a white man's eye.”

The same inability to bring Johnson to life is there when Conforth and Wardlow turn to his songs. Probably their most sustained and successful presentation comes with “Kind Hearted Woman Blues.”“It was both musically and lyrically aligned with Leroy Carr's ‘Mean Mistreater Mama,’”they write, and Bumble Bee Slim's “Cruel Hearted Woman Blues.”

But Robert's genius was beyond just knowing good songs to copy: he rewrote them, changed the tempo, synced his guitar more closely with his vocal than those who preceeded him, added a guitar riff, and literally remade the piece. Although inspired by the original, the new song was really all his. Several aspects of his playing accentuated his ownership. First, Robert saw “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”as a complete composition. The song's lyrics are thematically cohesive and the overall effect is of a musical whole, and not the type of whole that one would normally hear in a juke joint. This wasn't a rollicking good-time piece designed to keep jukers dancing. On the contrary, “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”was a well-thought-out composition with a beginning, middle, and end. 

With its words tired before they can complete the first sentence, there is no feeling for anything in the music that could produce the shock that runs from Son House in 1931 to Bob Dylan when he first heard King of the Delta Blues Singers in 1961 (“From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window…. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard”), a shock that could seize up anyone discovering Johnson a hundred years from now. And there is no sense of what actually happens in the song at that moment when, emerging from the verses as if from sleep, Johnson's voice rises, and then seems to rise again into an uncanny falsetto as a line comes out of nowhere and in the same moment returns to it, leaving the singer stranded, as if no one will ever hear him: “Oh babe”—and then slowly, each word standing alone—“my life don't feel the same.”

Now ninety-four, Annye C. Anderson, Johnson's youngest stepsibling—her mother, Mollie Winston Spencer, was Charles Spencer's third and last wife—is quoted briefly and to little consequence (except for a nice story about a neighborhood Terraplane that Johnson admired) by Conforth and Wardlow, from an interview published twenty years ago. “At this point,”they say in their first pages, as if to place a KICK ME sticker on the back cover of their own book, “whatever remains unknown about Robert Johnson will probably remain unknown forever. Although this will almost certainly not be the last book on Robert Johnson,”they write, “the possibility of any new revelations surfacing seems extremely remote.”“So it comes back to me,”Anderson says: everyone else is dead. 

She was born in 1926; she was twelve when Johnson died. She dropped out of high school to work, made her way to join her and Johnson's half-sister Carrie Thompson in Maryland, worked in Washington for the government, married a scientist, got her degrees, moved with her husband to Cambridge, and taught business classes in Boston high schools; now she lives in Amherst. She describes the last time Johnson played in Memphis, on June 22, 1938, at a family house party with everyone gathered around the radio to hear the second Louis-Schmeling fight: 

You should have seen him in his white sharkskin suit, Panama hat, and patent leather shoes…. 

That night, Brother Robert performed “Terraplane,”“Sweet Home Chicago,”“Kind Hearted Woman,”he and [his older half-brother] Son did “44 Blues.”My father took me home, because Brother Robert was going to play all night…. 

That night of the big fight was the last time I saw him. I wish you could have seen him jump for joy in his white suit. It looked like his legs about went up to the ceiling. 

Anderson told her story to Preston Lauterbach, author of fine books on Memphis and the Memphis photographer Ernest C. Withers, and he edited her words into a seamless whole that despite its attention to the most quotidian details can read like a fable. 

Her Robert Johnson, as she grows up in the Memphis houses he would light in, leave, come back to, and leave again as the years went on, is always making music. Just to hear the songs, along with all of those he recorded, that Anderson remembers him singing and playing to and with other family members, for little children, at house parties, in cafés—she and Thompson bought Johnson's first record at Woolworth's but never knew, until decades later, that there were any others—is to fully enter one version of the world of Robert Johnson.

There is Jimmie Rodgers's “Waiting for a Train,”which Anderson and Johnson sang together again and again (“Brother Robert would do a double-take on ‘get off, get off, you railroad bum’”), Bing Crosby's versions of “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking”and “Pennies from Heaven,”Bessie Smith's “You've Been a Good Old Wagon,”Gene Autry's “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine”(“Buck Jones and Tom Mix were Brother Robert's favorite cowboys,”Anderson says, noting too his love for Mae West and Erroll Flynn). 

There are the folk and jazz standards “Salty Dog Blues,”“Trouble in Mind,”and “Careless Love”; “Take a Little Walk with Me”(an unrecorded Johnson composition he used to end house parties); and the unrecorded “Little Boy Blue.”There are children's songs and folk songs and gospel songs, from “Little Sally Walker,”“Mary Had a Little Lamb,”“Humpty Dumpty,”and “She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain”to “Mr. Froggie Went to Courting,”“John Henry”(“he made the guitar sound like a sledgehammer”), “Casey Jones,”“John Brown's Body,”“Loch Lomond,”and “St. James Infirmary”to “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,”“Dry Bones,”“Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,”and “Precious Lord (Take My Hand).”

There is the street music and radio music and movie theater music of W.C. Handy's “Memphis Blues”and “Beale Street Blues,”“My Bonnie,”“Annie Laurie,”the Mississippi Sheiks’“Sitting on Top of the World,”Paul Robeson in Showboat , James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson's “Lift Every Voice and Sing,”known in the years since its composition as “The Negro National Anthem,”Ethel Waters's “Am I Blue?,”“Coon Shine Baby,”Ginger Rogers's “Let Yourself Go”from the Astaire-Rogers film Follow the Fleet (Johnson helped Anderson work out an arrangement of the song for her performance on a radio amateur show, then listened at home with the rest of the family), the unrecorded “1937 Waters,”and perhaps the foundation stone of the blues, “Poor Boy a Long Way from Home.”At family gatherings, he'd raise his guitar: “What's your pleasure?”On the street, like any drop-a-dime blues singer, he took requests. 

As Lauterbach writes in his introduction to Brother Robert , Johnson “kept his road life quiet around his family, and he kept his family life quiet on the road.”Anderson never saw him drunk. But even as a young girl, she could glimpse what the women Johnson never brought home could see plainly, and so the great artist comes to life in a way that he never quite has before, with an intimacy to which no one else, not even girlfriends from the 1930s interviewed thirty or fifty years later, has ever given voice: 

Brother Robert kept his hair neat, using Dixie Peach pomade. He didn't have nappy hair. He could put it anywhere he wanted. He greased Vaseline on his arms and legs to keep his skin from getting cruddy or scaly. Looking up at him, I noticed that his skin had a beautiful reddish undertone. 

He was tall, slender, and built like the way women like men, especially black men, to be built. He had the African physique. He didn't have overly broad shoulders, he was high-hipped, had narrow hips. 

When she retells the family stories of her father's flight from Hazlehurst, the account matches that in Conforth and Wardlow, but again there is an intimacy that fires the story to life: 

Marchetti came to my father's barbershop, accosted him, and cut him with a long blade knife on the left side of his jaw. Being a barber, my father carried a razor on his left side, and cut Marchetti back. 

When Spencer, disguised as a woman, is waiting for the train to Memphis, with white men stalking him around the depot, you are still frozen in suspense over what might happen, as with a movie you have seen before. And just as Anderson can judge the racist power she has encountered wherever she has found herself (“It must be known that there is only one region in the United States, you're either up South or down South”), she can judge the incident that sent her father to Memphis just as sharply: “Neither me nor Brother Robert would've come into this world without that knife fight in Hazlehurst.”

The second part of Anderson's book is Bleak House : the nearly thirty-year struggle of Carrie Thompson, and finally Anderson herself, to hold on to Johnson's legacy—the photographs they loaned sharpsters who never returned them (one sent back an empty envelope), a paper with Johnson's last words, the fortune they would never touch—a struggle that ended in 2000 when a Mississippi judge cut the family, by then only Anderson living, off from its own story. It is an awful story; when Anderson quotes a long letter from Carrie Thompson about a nightmare Dickens—or for that matter Jordan Peele—would have killed for, you may feel you will never get out of it. 

There is far more. I have only scratched the surface of this short, rich book. I haven't mentioned the photo of Johnson, never seen before, from a visit he and Anderson made to a twenty-five-cent photo booth, on the cover. But the person she has described, too, is not someone whom, through the thousands of pages that have been written about him, or even through the recognitions and fantasies of the millions of people who have listened to him, anyone else has really seen before: an ordinary young black man who even had he lived might never have escaped the backwaters where he made a living, cultivating a spirit that was his alone, making his way through the main currents of American culture, the devil take the hindmost—as if it were that simple. 

“The stories about his dealing with the devil took away from his real talent,”Anderson writes. That really ought to be the last word on the notion—but of course it won't be. Near the end of Curtis Sittenfeld's novel Rodham , an alternative history published last spring, it's 2015. Hillary Rodham, having broken up with Bill Clinton in 1971, is at the end of her fourth term as a senator from Illinois, and in her third run for the presidency. Her main opponent in the Democratic primary is Bill Clinton, who after his presidential campaign collapsed in scandal in 1992 became a Silicon Valley billionaire and has now pulled ahead in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

 To cut him off, Rodham inveigles Donald Trump into endorsing her, flattering him that he should run himself, and then sits squirming, watching him on TV as he does so: “We've been very close for some time,”Trump says, after saying in another interview that he'd never met her. “I'm one of her most trusted advisors.”“Donald,”asks the host, “have you left the door open even a crack to running yourself?”“I'd be so good at it,”Trump says. “I'd be better than Hillary if I'm being honest. But I have other things to do.”“Who's the blues musician who supposedly sold his soul to the devil?”Rodham asks an aide. “Robert Johnson,”she answers, “but have you ever listened to his stuff? It was totally worth it.”.

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

illustration Mezzo/J.M. Dupont Robert Johnson; from Mezzo and J.M. Dupont’s graphic novel Love in Vain

Democracy's Afterlife

 

FINTAN O'TOOLE

It is an infallible law that if Seamus Heaney is the Irish poet of choice, things are looking up, but if W.B. Yeats is in the air, they look ominous. Joe Biden at the National Democratic Convention in August created great expectations with Heaney's “once in a lifetime/…longed-for tidal wave/Of justice.”But there is no blue tsunami. Instead, we must turn, fretfully, to Yeats: “We are closed in, and the key is turned/On our uncertainty.”That key was always in the hands of Donald Trump. It has been obvious for many months that his strategy for retaining power would center on the generation of a force field of radical indecision. As Barton Gellman put it in The Atlantic , “He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all.”

At 2:23 AM on the morning after Election Day, Trump turned the key and locked American democracy into an undetermined, perhaps indeterminable, condition. When he declared an election that was still very much alive to be a dead thing, over and done with—“Frankly we did win this election”—he made the United States a liminal space in which a supposedly epic moment in its history both happened and did not happen. 

Trump has long framed the immediate post-election period as a temporal no-man's-land. Neither in his first nor in his second campaigns for the presidency did he ever commit himself clearly to accepting the result of the vote. Asked in the third presidential debate of 2016 whether he would do so, he replied, “What I'm saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense. Okay?”What is being suspended now is both the disbelief of his supporters in the possibility of his defeat and the very concept of a transition of power.

 In this frame of mind, there can never be a result of the 2020 election. One thing we can be sure of is that for Trump and his followers there are not five stages of grief, leading from denial to acceptance. The furthest their sense of it can go is to the second stage, anger. Just as there is “long Covid,”there is long Trump. The staying power of his destructiveness lies in the way that disputed defeat suits him almost as much as victory. It vindicates the self-pity that he has encouraged among his supporters, the belief that everything is rigged against them, that the world is a plot to steal from them their natural due as Americans. 

He has created for them a wide space to occupy, that great prairie of paranoia that stretches between what happened and what really happened. What really happened is what always occurs in every Trump story: he won big. Losing, for Trump, is not possible. It pertains to a category of humanity that he calls in The Art of the Deal “life's losers.”As he exclaimed to his fans at one of his final rallies in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after showing them a video of Joe Biden stammering, “The concept of losing to this guy!”When you define your opponent as a contemptible wretch, that thought is inconceivable. 

Usually, at this point, we get the postmortem. But there is no body. The malignant presidency of Donald Trump seems moribund, but also vigorously alive. Trumpism, after all, is a narrative of death and resurrection, in which bankruptcy becomes The Art of the Comeback and American carnage becomes American renaissance. Life after death is Trumpism's governing trope. On its mental map, the point of no return can never be marked. We have, after all, already witnessed the Good Friday and Easter Sunday of Donald Trump. In a grotesque parody of the Christian narrative, Trump presented his contraction of Covid-19 not as a consequence of his own narcissistic recklessness but as a Jesus-like self-sacrifice—he caught the virus on behalf of the people. Trump “died,”was in the “tomb”of Walter Reed hospital for three days and then rose again and appeared to many. This fable seems to have worked for his supporters, electrifying them with its evidence of their leader's indefatigability. The deaths of others—230,000 victims of Covid-19 by election day—did not prompt a turn against the president who presided over them. His base acted, rather, as the foil for his miraculous, manic display of vivacity in the last days of the campaign.

 Joe Biden was also, albeit in very different ways, a postmortem candidate. Politically, he has always defined himself as a relict of 1960s progressivism, a survivor of the murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Personally, he carries the cross of the deaths of his wife and daughter in 1972 and of his son Beau in 2015. 1 During the pandemic, Trump defied death but did not acknowledge it; Biden acknowledged death but did not pretend to defy it. Trump's demeanor and bluster sought to suggest that the US had barely been touched by the virus, Biden's to show that he himself had been deeply touched by the suffering it had inflicted. These were physical contrasts—swagger versus caution, masked against unmasked. But they also played out as starkly different attitudes toward death and time. Trump, at his first rally after his resurrection, posed as an immortal. (“I went through it. Now they say I'm immune. I feel so powerful.”) 

This is entirely appropriate. In the Treason Act that remains in force in the United Kingdom, it is treasonous to “compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King.”If the king's death cannot be imagined, there can be no interregnum. Biden's whole bearing, on the other hand, spoke of vulnerability and mortality. This dichotomy may have been accidental but is also highly expressive of a deeper divergence: autocracy (as it imagines itself) is forever; democracy's outcomes are always temporary. This is where the election has ended up, as a clash between Trump's immunity to its results and Biden's fragile appeal to democratic decency. 

It is impossible not to think, in this inbetween moment, of Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”Something is dying, but we do not yet know what. Is it the basic idea of majority rule or is it the most coherent attempt to destroy that idea since the secession of the Confederacy? Something is trying to be born, but we cannot yet say what it is either. Is it an American version of the “managed democracy”or “electoral autocracy”that is the most rapidly expanding political form around the world? Or is it a radically renewed republic that can finally deal with the unfinished business of its history? The old is in a state of suspended animation; the new stands at a threshold it cannot yet cross. 

In 1974 upon his inauguration as president, just half an hour after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”He implied that the lawlessness and derangement of Nixon's presidency, laid bare in the Watergate scandal, had been more traumatic for the United States even than the violence of the Vietnam War, its wounds “more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars.”Yet he also suggested that Nixon's departure had left the country in a good place: “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”With its institutions intact, the US could quickly return to its natural condition of mutual benevolence: “Let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.”If you had an air to that speech you could sing it: 

For the house fell on her head 

And the coroner pronounced her dead 

And thru the town the joyous news was spread 

Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

 Many Americans imagined themselves singing that national anthem on the morning of November 4. But long national nightmares do not end in real life as they do in Oz. Donald Trump himself crawled out of Nixon's political grave, more lawless, more shameless, more openly unhinged. And he will not lie down. Joe Biden, like Ford before him, hoped to arrive in the Oval Office, not just as a healer, but as an exorcist, driving out the evil spirits of suspicion and hate. For many of those who voted for him, the end of the Trump regime, like the banishing of Nixon, would prove that, after all, “our Constitution works.”There could be a great sigh of relief: the system has corrected itself. That was not really true in 1974 and it is emphatically false now. 

The established, uplifting alternative to the long national nightmare is the American Dream. Biden evoked it in his acceptance speech at the virtual Democratic convention in August when he insisted that the opportunity for every American “to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them”is one “we can never lose.”But this is a hazy kind of reverie, and it could not stand up to Trump's Gothic horror version of the trope. In announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in June 2015, he both performed its funeral rites and dragged it out of the grave: “Sadly the American dream is dead, but if I get elected president, I will bring it back. Bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”While Biden was insisting that the dream was undying, Trump's promise to resuscitate its cadaver was, for so many of those who have experienced the demise of industrial America, a much more potent image. 

It has, moreover, its own nightmarish history. As Sarah Churchwell points out in her illuminating exploration of the term, in her book Behold, America (2018), the first widely disseminated use of “American dream,”in the sense that later became such a staple of political rhetoric, appeared in the New York Post in 1900. It was in fact a warning about the threat posed by super-rich tycoons to the very existence of the American system of government. “Discontented multimillionaires,”it warned, form the “greatest risk”to “every republic.”All previous republics, it noted, had been “overthrown by rich men”and this could happen too in America, where the tycoons were “deriding the constitution, unrebuked by the executive or by public opinion.”If they had their way “it would be the end of the American dream.”This—and not a woolly appeal to its benign power—is the sense in which the term should resonate now. The American republic has come close to being overthrown by a discontented multimillionaire. Biden failed to say with sufficient force that America needed not to go from nightmare to dream, but to wake up to the urgent meaning of that threat. 

Biden also failed in his framing of Trumpism as a merely temporary departure, not just from sanity and decency, but from the true course of American history. He posited a normality to which the country would return after November 3. Jeff Flake, the former Republican

senator of Arizona, proclaimed, in the run-up to the election, that Trump's brand of politics had no future. “There are no illusions about where the party is going under Trumpism. This is a dead end. This is a demographic cul-de-sac.”

This has turned out to be (pardon the pun) dead wrong. The election has shattered the Democratic illusion that demography is destiny. A farright nativism can appeal to many voters (including those of Hispanic and African-American ethnicity) who were assumed to be part of an emerging left-of-center consensus. The cul-de-sac is an open road. Trump, win or lose, doesn't merely have a post–November 3 afterlife. As a political force he has never been anything but an afterlife. One of the reasons there cannot be a postmortem on Trumpism is that Trumpism is postmortem. 

Its core appeal is necromantic. It promised to make a buried world rise again: coal mines would reopen in West Virginia, lost car plants would return to Detroit. Good, secure, unionized muscle jobs would come back. The unquestionable privilege of being white and male and native would be restored. Trump did not manage to do any of this, of course. But, in a sense, that very failure keeps the promise pure, unadulterated by the complexities of reality. We have seen in Trump's triumph in Ohio and very strong performance in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that it still has great purchase on the imagination of millions. 

It must be remembered, too, that in 2013, the Republican Party, then chaired by Reince Priebus (who would go on to be Trump's first White House chief of staff), issued what was widely called an “autopsy”report on itself, the very word acknowledging the death of what the party had once been. Facing the fact that “Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections”(now seven of the last eight), it concluded that the GOP is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future…. Devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.

 As part of the autopsy, the party conducted focus groups among disillusioned former Republicans in Ohio and Iowa. “Asked to describe Republicans, they said that the Party is ‘scary,’‘narrow minded,’and ‘out of touch’and that we were a Party of ‘stuffy old men.’”Three years later, the Republican candidate won Ohio by eight points and Iowa by nine. And four years after that, he has pretty much repeated the performance.

 If they had been told that this would happen, the authors of the autopsy report would have been sure that this was because the corpse had been galvanized in the way they had recommended—by welcoming female, Black, Asian, and Latinx voters and candidates and by emphasizing a technocratic style of competent governance. What they could not have imagined is the paradox that the candidate who would restore the body on the gurney to life would be the one who had the audacity to declare it irretrievably dead. 

Trump, in 2016, was the child in Hans Christian Andersen's “The Emperor's New Clothes,”with the twist that rather than blurting out that the monarch was walking around naked, he shouted out the truth that, as a force capable of winning presidential elections, the Republican Party was extinct. He held its cadaver up before his baying crowds. And he presented himself as its sweet (or rather extremely sour) hereafter. Whatever else the 2020 election shows, it proves that he was right. 

Trumpism now is the GOP's death warmed over. Like a political remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers , it has fully assimilated the outward appearances and forms of the dead Republican Party to a new body, a duplicate that looks the same but that has in fact been hollowed out. Trump's White House speech on election night made explicit that what has been excised in this process is the most basic assumption of electoral democracy: that the majority wins and the minority, however, disappointed, accepts the legitimacy of its victory and its right to govern. 

This invasion is thrilling for Republicans because it is also a kind of liberation. As the agonized tone of the 2013 autopsy report makes clear, the transformations of gender, class, race, and ethnicity necessary for them to be reborn as the voice of a genuine national majority, even if they had been possible, would have been extremely painful. Trump's delivery of the death certificate freed the GOP from this torment. There was nothing to revive. What Trump stumbled on was that the solution to the party's chronic inability to win a majority of voters in presidential elections was to stop trying and instead to embrace and enforce minority rule. This possibility is built into the American system. The electoral college, the massive imbalance in representation in the Senate, the ability to gerrymander congressional districts, voter suppression, and the politicization of the Supreme Court—these methods for imposing on the majority the will of the minority have always been available. Trump transformed them from tactical tools to permanent, strategic necessities. 

As we are now seeing, the difference for a democracy is existential. A tactic of maneuvering to hold power against the wishes of the majority of voters is contingent, opportunistic, reactive. It is innately time-limited. It will advance when it can and retreat when it must. But when the tactic becomes the strategy, there can be no retreat. A program of consolidating the means by which a minority can gain and retain power must try to institutionalize itself, to become so embedded that it can withstand the majority's anger. To do that, it must not merely evade the consequences of losing the popular vote in this or that election. It must, insofar as it can, make those elections irrelevant. 

This is the most important thing to understand about the postmortem Republican Party. The logic is not that a permanently minority party may move toward authoritarianism but that it must . Holding power

against the wishes of most citizens is an innately despotic act. From 2016 onward, the GOP has become not so much the RINO Party, Republican in name only. It is the RIP party, repressive in perpetuity. When Trump said on Fox & Friends at the end of March that Democrats want “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again,”he was openly redefining the meaning of the vote. Voting, in this formulation, is something to be “agreed to”—or not—by Trump himself. Democracy is no longer rooted in the consent of the governed, but in the contingent permission of the indispensable leader. 

In all the noise of the 2020 election, it was easy to miss the signal that was not being sent. The incumbent president made no effort even to go through the motions of presenting a future open to deliberation by citizens. He had no policy agenda for a second term—the GOP merely readopted its platform from 2016, without even bothering to delete its multiple attacks on “the current president.”Why? Because arguments about policy are the vestiges of a notion that Trump has killed off: the idea that an election is a contest for the support, or at least the consent, of a majority of voters. Such arguments implicitly concede the possibility that there is another, equally legitimate choice. That is precisely what the posthumous Republican Party cannot and does not accept. 

This refusal is shaped by a functioning redefinition of “we, the people.”When Trump spoke on election night about “a fraud on the American public,”he meant that the “public”consists only of his voters. In 1953, after a failed uprising in Berlin, Bertolt Brecht noted in his sardonic poem “The Solution”that the authorities had declared that “the people/Had forfeited the confidence of the government”: 

Would it not be easier 

In that case for the government 

To dissolve the people 

And elect another? 

This is the election behind the election—the GOP's decision to imaginatively dissolve the American majority and elect another. This has been done in two ways, coarsely and a little more subtly. The coarse method is to simply deny that the majority exists. This is what Trump did on election night and the probability is that his supporters believe it to be true. After the 2016 election, he obliterated the majority by claiming that “in addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”A plurality of his voters actually believed that there was no “if”about it. A Politico/Morning Consult poll of Trump voters in July 2017 found that 49 percent believed that he really did win the popular vote. Now, in 2020, it is not just that the majority does not count, it is that it is actively criminal, engaged as it is in a vast conspiracy to steal his victory. 

This could be written off as the usual despotic delusion were it not buttressed by the slightly subtler method of choosing another “people.”The method is to shift between two implicitly contradictory meanings of the same word: elect. Without a capital E, it indicates what is supposed to happen in a democracy—all citizens can vote and whoever wins the most votes is the president. Capitalize the initial letter and it signifies the righteous, those chosen by God for salvation. The real Trumpian transition is from the first to the second. He himself generally does this in a secular form: the typical populist slippage from “the people”to “the real people.”Before he ran for president, when Trump tweeted about “Patriots,”it was almost always in relation to the football team. After 2015, it was almost always about the “Great American Patriots”who attend his rallies. The anti-Trump majority is neither great, nor patriotic, nor in fact American.

 That exclusion overlaps with a religious version promulgated most notably by the attorney general, William Barr, according to whom religious belief is the entire foundation of the American political community, so those who are not religious (in a very narrow sense) cannot properly belong in the polity. 2 In effect, of course, the secular and religious versions overlap and support each other. The majority, deficient in both patriotism and sanctity, is unworthy. If it seems to have won, that can only be because, being outside the polity, it has subverted the real polity by fraud. To deny its validity is both patriotic and righteous. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the use of the Supreme Court to hand electoral victories to the Republicans are no longer dirty tricks. They are patriotic imperatives. They are not last resorts but first principles. 

The great comfort of this mentality is that, when the majority can be conjured out of existence, so can the whole idea of defeat. The old norm, whereby the beaten party retreats into a period of reflection and considers why it lost, is gone. The only possible response to Biden's apparent victory is that of Satan in Paradise Lost : 

What though the field be lost?

 All is not lost; the unconquerable will,

 And study of revenge, immortal hate, 

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome? ‘

 If Trump is eventually removed from the Oval Office, the study of revenge and immortal hate, not sober self-criticism, will be the response in Trumpworld. There will be no chastening, just a further injection of resentment and conspiracy-mongering. 

This is zombie politics—the life-after-death of a former conservative party. And as Gothic stories tell us, it is very hard to kill the undead. One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state. This reality has to be recognized, and a crucial aspect of that recognition is to accept that the claim Ford could make in 1974—“Our Constitution works”—no longer applies. After the long national nightmare of Watergate, America could rub its eyes and awaken to a renewed confidence in its system of checks and balances. 

But the Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There may be much we do not yet know, but what is known (and in most cases openly flaunted) is more than enough: the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal, the flagrant selfdealing, the tax evasion, the children stolen from their parents, the encouragement of neo-Nazis, Trump's admission that he deliberately played down the seriousness of the coronavirus. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this. They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that they were broadly right. There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it. 

Two different kinds of liminality are in play in the very notion of “transition”that is supposed to govern the time between November 4 and January 20, the next presidential inauguration. Trump will try to keep the US “in suspense”between cause and effect, between the votes as cast and their consequence for the holding of power. But Biden, by contrast, is explicitly transitory. In April he said: “I view myself as a transition candidate.”

His reasons did not need to be stated. His candidacy most obviously compassed and imagined his own death. It is entirely understood that, because of his age, he surely cannot, even if he serves a first term, hope for a second one, and indeed that he could die in office. It is not just that a Biden presidency would, presumably, accept the limits placed on the office by constitutional propriety and common decency. It is that it is limited by the remorseless effects of time on the body. 

Yet in this very temporal constraint, there is a danger. The idea of a transitional presidency implies a drawing of breath, a period of calm after the Trumpian tempest, America as a giant field hospital devoted to the binding of wounds. This would be a reprise of Ford's emollient speech in 1974: our self-correcting system has worked its magic and now we may all love one another again. Biden's entire political persona has been shaping itself toward such a moment. But it cannot be. Trump will not allow it, and the whole structure of permanent minority rule that he has brought to the fore works against it. Biden must continue to fight Trump and, if and when he takes power, he must dismantle that structure, piece by piece.

 The historic question that must be addressed is: Who is the aberration? Biden and perhaps most of his voters believe that the answer could not be more obvious. It is Trump. But this has been shown to be the wrong answer. The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy. As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one—the long posterity of Donald Trump. —

November 4, 2020 

1 See my “The Designated Mourner”in these pages, January 16, 2020. 2 See my “Enabler in Chief,”November 5, 2020. © Barbara Jones-Hogu/Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Alexander Massouras Alexander Massouras ■

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 

illustration : BARBARA JAMES-HOGU

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