Kamikaze Politics

Kamikaze tactics, it turns out, are just as unproductive in politics as they were in WWII.

In the late stages of World War II, the Japanese military adopted a new tactic for use against Allied warships — the kamikaze attack. Instead of trying to shoot at or bomb enemy ships, the kamikaze pilots conducted suicide attacks, flyng their bomb-laden planes directly into the ships. The idea was to achieve greater accuracy and efficiency in destroying enemy vessels. 

This began in October of 1944. By the end of the war 11 months later 3,800 kamikaze pilots had died. There were a few spectacular successes, but on average, each suicide attack killed two enemy sailors. It was a terrible tactic, not only because it didn’t work, but because each attack reduced the number of aircraft and pilots remaining to conduct the war. It was, in fact, a tactic that could have been embraced only by a country that knew it was losing the war, and had decided to fight to the death while doing so.

In the late stages of the American Empire, one of the country’s two political parties adopted voter suppression as a principal tactic for winning elections. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the Republican party did everything it could, everywhere it held some power, to make voting, and registering to vote, more difficult, especially for those not likely to vote Republican.

This is a terrible tactic for a political party. It is not clear that the measures taken actually work — many of them were in place for the 2020 elections, which had a record voter turnout. A concerted effort to discourage voting seems to have the effect of motivating voters. Secondly, it is impossible to discourage only “their” voters without inconveniencing “our” voters as well. A party that makes it a policy to reduce the number of people voting is a kamikaze party. And it is also a party that knows that it cannot win elections by appealing to people to vote for it, because it has no program to do so. It is, in other words, a party that knows it is losing the war.

Similarly, Donald Trump is a kamikaze candidate. He has never deigned to do the basic work of all politicians — to reach out to new people, to “grow the base.” Instead he has formulated positions and statements so extreme that while they make his most ardent supporters salivate and scream — instant gratification for him at his rallies — they tend to repel ordinary people, even ordinary Republicans. He never achieved an approval rating of 50%, and left office with 34% approval, ten points later than when he took office. 

In other ways large and small the Republican Party seems bent on self immolation. It has encouraged an anti-mask, anti-vaccine response to the COVID pandemic with the result that most of the people now dying from the disease are Republicans. It has flirted openly with white supremacists, militias, racists and rioters, to the disgust of a majority of voters. It has adopted as its premiere operating principle that it will approve of nothing — no matter how desirable or beneficial to the American people — for which any Democrat anywhere might get some credit. 

And it has taken to lying, so gratuitously and brazenly that everyone knows they are lying, yet they persist. In his book Landslide, Michael Wolff reports that in the waning days of Trump’s presidency there was not one single person among his most loyal supporters who believed the election had been “stolen” by the Democrats. Yet even today his handlers and those who seek to feed off of him continue to repeat the lie.

There’s an old saying in politics to the effect that when your opponent is destroying himself, don’t get in the way. In the realm of politics, not government, probably the best thing the Democratic Party can do right now is pop some popcorn and enjoy the show.