On Monday January 20 next year the newly elected US president – the country’s 47th – will repeat this oath at the Capitol in Washington DC:
I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
It is a noble ambition to win the right to speak these words. This is the most important elected office in the world. But when we consider the ambition of the two presidential candidates we are confronted by two very different approaches to this role, two different concepts of leadership and service.
Vice-president Kamala Harris probably did not expect to be running as the Democratic party’s candidate until the end of June, when President Biden’s poor debate performance began a process which led to him withdrawing his candidacy less than a month later.
She could have been forgiven for being unprepared to take up this challenge. Her previous run for the nomination, four years earlier, had not gone well. And as vice-president, like many of her predecessors in that position, she had not been able to enhance her reputation.
But with freshness and vigour, and a canny choice of Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, as her running mate, Harris has surprised everyone, not least her opponent. She conveys and embodies ambition, but it is ambition for the common good: for her country and her fellow citizens. Her campaign does not feel like an ego trip – perhaps partly because she has not been standing centre stage until very recently. A race which had seemed lost to the Democrats is alive once again.
But what of the Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump? He too is ambitious, but principally, it seems, for adulation and gratitude. Unsettled by his new opponent, he has resorted to outlandish claims, asserting that he is “better looking” than the vice-president, and that all the criminal charges laid against him are nothing but a “witch hunt”. He seeks conflict rather than harmony.
His instant, admittedly adrenaline-fuelled, response to being shot at while giving a speech in Pennsylvania was to shout: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as he raised his fist in defiance. In recent days he entered the inner sanctum of the Arlington National Cemetery while his staff abused and pushed aside the female employee who, correctly, stated that no PR photos and videos should be created on the site.
Ambitious for change?
Trump is ambitious to turn the clock back. He wants to “make America great again”, implying that a formerly wonderful country has lost its way. He does not believe that there has been progress. His imagined America is really the country he grew up in many decades ago, where the white majority was still resoundingly in charge, and where opportunities were far from equal for women and people of colour. This is the world to which he is ambitious to return.
Vice-president Harris is looking forward. She is ambitious for America to be modern, outward-looking, fairer and more prosperous. She is a progressive. The coming election, she has said, is “a fight for the promise of America”. She hears what her opponent is offering and declares: “We are not going back.”
In my new book, Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition, I argue that Macbeth’s wife has a chilling but also a challenging view of the world. She says of her husband:
Thou wouldst be great, art not without ambition, But without the illness should attend it. (Act I sc 5)
Perhaps Donald Trump is the embodiment of what Lady Macbeth is getting at. He has an obsessive, relentless drive to succeed. He will say and do almost anything to win and to stay out of jail. He is in too deep to stop now. As Macbeth says later on in the play:
I am in blood Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er. (Act III sc 4)
Trump has the illness which should, according to Lady Macbeth, attend ambition. The task for Harris is to convince enough of her fellow citizens that a different, healthier form of ambition is at least as valid and attractive as Trump’s.
In January, one of the two candidates will get to promise to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. But only one of the candidates is genuinely ambitious to do this. The other one is simply in it for himself.
Will enough voters, living in the vital swing states, recognise this? For it is they who will decide whether the 2024 US Presidential election becomes a Shakespearean tragedy, or a case of All’s Well That Ends Well.
Stefan Stern does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
