One of the most underestimated differences in the Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump presidential competition is the question of time. Yes Donald Trump was born in 1946 and Kamala Harris in 1964, so there is an obvious generation gap between them. But beyond the obvious question of age and generations is the larger question of their concept of time. Trump wants to make America great again, a nostalgic return to U.S. dominance at the end of World War II. While Harris’s policies are not significantly different from President Biden’s, her very candidacy represents significant change and a temporal move away from the past. Trump is mired in what was, Harris suggests what is and could be.
Time can easily be measured by clocks and watches. That is physical time. There is also biological time which can also be measured easily. But concepts of psychological time are difficult to measure and grasp. In that sense, the French philosopher Paul Virilio’s chronopolitics is significant, and unfortunately less analyzed than the British geographer Halford MacKinder’s geopolitics. And for good reason. Understanding how the past affects the present and future is more complicated than studying dominant land masses, the location of crucial mineral deposits, freedom to travel primary maritime trade routes or access to warm water ports.
There are several current examples of how the past resonates in today’s politics. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin imagines himself a tsar trying to return Russia to its glorious past, more Peter the Great than Mikhail Gorbachev. In Ankara, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is convinced that Türkiye’s role in today’s world is tied to its hegemonic Ottoman Empire past with him as a modern day Suleiman the Magnificent rather than Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. China’s imperial past is certainly part of Xi Jinping’s coveting Taiwan as well as the Belt and Road Initiative’s global projection. Israel continues illegally occupying territory on the West Bank, referring to it by its Biblical names Judea and Samaria.
All of the above represent nostalgic examples of chronopolitics. Today’s geopolitical realities in the United States, Russia, Türkiye, China and Israel are interwoven with remembrances of each country’s historical past. The present never stands alone.
And well beyond current geopolitical crises, chronopolitics is also changing. Information technology and biological technology have accelerated time. While web wizards and expert neuroscientists form an elite living in the new world of accelerated time, most average citizens, me included, cannot grasp these rapid changes.
The changes are dramatic. For example, in today’s psychological time, we cannot know who controls what we are reading or listening to. Are you sure Daniel Warner wrote this article instead of ChatGPT? Politically, who controls the technology has become as important as geopolitical state leaders, hence the prominent role of the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs. While there once were captains on trains and boats or pilots guiding airplanes, there are now non-physical algorithms in control.
How does this confrontation between nostalgia for the past and accelerated time play out in the current election? With Trump it is obvious. His MAGA is an attempt to return to American images of U.S. domination and a rejection of change. While Trump himself may not be the best example, his campaign’s image of white America with few immigrants or people of color harkens back to “Leave it to Beaver” and “Ozzie and Harriet.” Trump advertises himself as Mr. 1950s, with him as the dominant patriarch of a dominant United States.
And Harris? Her identity symbolizes change. A woman as president? The daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian immigrant mother sitting in the Oval Office? A non-nuclear reconstructed family with the children of the first gentleman rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn? No need to cite the statistics about interracial marriages in the U.S. or the number of first- or second-generation Americans. No need to cite the number of women now in important political positions. Those are statistics, not emotional reality.
So the competition between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is not about economic or foreign policy, just as the election in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had nothing to do with the hotly debated subject of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu off of Taiwan.
This election is all about nostalgia vs change. Trump is just another populist leader like Putin, Erdogan, Xi, and Netanyahu playing into nostalgia. Nostalgia vs change is not part of global competition between democracy vs autocracy. Nor is it about liberalism vs communism or fascism. It’s about today and tomorrow versus yesterday.
If time is the major issue in the election, why is Harris afraid to run on a platform of real change? Why has she returned to centrist positions different from her earlier campaign’s more radical rhetoric? She believes, and her advisors recommend, that the majority of voters are not prepared for radical change. They are not prepared to accept that the United States is no longer the white, Christian, dominating world power. Already a woman of immigrant parents married into a reconstructed family pushes the envelope.
Accelerated time is destabilizing. It unsettles much of what we learned before. Quantum physics? Superconductors? Brain implants to change how we see and feel? Real time vs virtual time? Wow, not so fast.
Unlike watches and clocks, lines of latitude and longitude or tree rings, there is no way to calculate chronopolitics. But the upcoming U.S. election will suggest how strongly voters long for the past or are willing to accept intimations of the future.
