America feels like a place where no one has a claim on a fixed identity any more, not, at least, until he or she becomes famous. At that point they harden, not into marble, but into wax. The permanently famous – Jack Nicholson, Martha Stewart – enter the wax museum.

This election is the first wax museum election in American history. At issue is whether the American voter will see beyond the logic of the wax museum, and choose (this is the new meme in the liberal American press) a flawed but normal candidate or an abnormal and dangerous one.
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Ms. Clinton has become, for both left and right, a stand-in for every anxiety we have about a fluid, maybe even collapsing world. To the left, she is a “neoliberal,” selling us down the rivers of global finance. To the right, she is the very devil itself, selling (white) American interests down the river to foreigners of one kind or another.

As a pragmatist standing between the fluidity of global capital, hyper-capitalism and the needs of local America, she can be neither fluid nor solid. I feel for her as I felt for her then. She is forced by impossible circumstances to be this awful simulacrum. To be true to reality, she has to be made of wax.