Now that we see the Democrats’ presidential ticket for 2020 in full, we can see how underwhelming it is. To me, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are political caricatures, gargoyles, in the grand old tradition of Charles Dickens.

It is fashionable for the cognoscenti to sneer at the improbability of the Dickensians, the arch-hypocrite Mr. Pecksniff, arch-slimeball Uriah Heep, and the alcoholic nurse Mrs. Gamp, but who could have predicted the arch-shallowness of bully Joe Biden, a New Deal liberal in an age of wokies? Or nasty Kamala Harris, the First Black Woman child of not-very-black Berkeley academics that’s supposed to embody all that is good and woke, but who is little more than the old-fashioned girl that slept her way to the top? Only in her case it wasn’t the old-fashioned millionaire of the song, but an old-fashioned political boss with the power to propel her into the United States Senate.

Remember, back in the day, how we were carefully taught that the Democrats were the party of the educated, a cut above the low-rent corruption of the urban political machine? And feminists -- hear me roar -- were “independent women,” above sucking up to powerful men, thank-you-very-much.

We’d better stop there, because Obama, the First Black President, was merely impregnated by a high-born Kenyan into an educated white woman that eventually handed him off to the white banker grandparents. Not exactly your pure-bred #ADOS darling.

Really, this pair is perfect proof of T.S. Eliot in “The Hollow Men:”

The world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Except that Eliot’s Hollow Men had “the realization, the humility and acknowledgement of their guilt and their status as broken, lost souls,” according to La Wik. I don’t think that Joe Biden has that kind of depth. Or Kamala Harris. Or the First Black President. They have no idea that their political movement is broken, lost, mindless -- oh, and cruel -- and that they are babbling idiots reciting slogans that had passed their sell-by date a generation ago.

Over the past four years we’ve had low-rent spying, low-rent coup plotting, low-rent coverup, low-rent lockdown.

Now it’s low-rent accusations of “sabotage” at the Post Office. What? No wreckers?

Dickens couldn’t come up with a better gargoyle to caricature Democratic politics than Joe “you ain’t black” Biden. That is the meaning of interest-group politics. If you don’t vote for the Democrat then you ain’t a worker, you ain’t a woman, you ain’t LGBT. Exactly: Democrats appeal to people who don’t identify as typical American.

As Michael Barone has written, under our two-party system the Republican Party has for decades been the party of people that think of themselves as typical Americans, and the Democratic Party has since whenever been the party of people that think of themselves first of all as Southern, or urban, or educated, or working-class, or black, or brown, or feminist, or global: anything but American.

I was born a Brit in India, raised in Britain, and came to the U.S. as a 22-year-old. But, let me tell you, what makes me weak at the knees is to think of our American Founders -- and especially my guy Alexander Hamilton, bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar -- and how, for a brief shining moment the usual run of idiots was interrupted by a moment of incandescent political genius.

Dickens couldn’t come up with a better gargoyle to caricature feminist bankruptcy than old-fashioned girl Kamala Harris. As with many old-fashioned girls, the mattress experience makes her nasty.

Apart from the mattress angle I think that women politicians -- how yer doin’, Hillary -- are nasty because women don’t do the open-outcry insult culture of politics and the public square very well. This is because, in the community of women, you don’t confront other women with bullying insults. Insults are a male thing, a preliminary to the ancient art of fisticuffs. With women, conflict begins with both parties taking offence: “I can’t believe she said that,” and ends with the guilty witch getting named, shamed, and canceled. The woman politician is acting the part, trying to appear as rough and tough while taking advantage of a woman’s right to be protected, as Hillary did at that debate with Rick Lazio in 2000. It all adds up to nasty.

On Saturday we were to Pub 282 on Camano Island, Washington, for lunch where the all-American menu featured all-American salads, invented by the Romans and Greeks; all-American pizzas, invented by the Neapolitans; and all-American hamburgers, probably invented right here in the good old USA.

Wherever you go out to eat in these United States, you are likely to get delicious all-American salads, pizza, and hamburgers. What a country!

Hey Joe and Kamala! What’s your Five Point Plan to keep the cotton-pickin’ hands of your lefty activists off of good old all-American pub food?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Flickr Commons