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Hollow Man | Issue 48 | n+1 | The Editors

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The Intellectual Situation, an anthology of the best of n+1’s second decade, is out now. Order it from our online shop. NOTHING SO POSSESSES the American imagination as presidential elections. Straightforward materialist explanations — the absence of laws limiting the length of campaign seasons; millionaires and billionaires increasingly unbound by campaign finance legislation; a vapid media class fixated on the horse race above all else — can’t quite account for our misplaced obsession. Has any other national literature produced a text as deliriously election-pilled as Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, which devotes a thousand pages to the emotional lives of the 1988 primary contenders? (“Michael [Dukakis] was a man who was never depressed — not for one day in his forty-five years. He never took more than one aspirin!”) In other countries, the great writers have better things to focus on. In this context, the role Joe Biden occupied during the 2020 presidential election was unusual.

Nothing so possesses the American imagination as presidential elections. Straightforward materialist explanations — the absence of laws limiting the length of campaign seasons; millionaires and billionaires increasingly unbound by campaign finance legislation; a vapid media class fixated on the horse race above all else — can’t quite account for our misplaced obsession. Has any other national literature produced a text as deliriously election-pilled as Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, which devotes a thousand pages to the emotional lives of the 1988 primary contenders? (“Michael [Dukakis]…

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