Yesterday, Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden for president, mainly with the uncertain promise of defeating Trump. Liberals who enthusiastically support Biden often say they just want to “get back to normal”. So let’s unpack that idea, shall we?
Democratic voters with permanently broken brains from 2016 have a singular, unrelenting focus: the big strong daddy figure defeating the bad Twitter person that caused all known problems in the world the day he took office. This is myopic given the scale of the issues we face. Trump is a nihilist existential terror who’s done serious damage, but to think that his presidency somehow uniquely created the economic and social situation we’re in is an act of self-mindwipe.
The phrase “back to normal” has the whiff of “Make America Great Again”. “Back to normal” refers to the good ol’ days of President Obama, where everything was good and the right person was in charge and we were living in some of political utopian terrarium? If all you care about is how you personally feel about a President, liberals had a dreamboat in Obama. A charismatic, intellectual man with a photogenic family, who reassured us or politely chided his opponents to be better people and to think of America. His message of transformational change rhymed nicely with his historical candidacy, and enough people seem to believe that change actually happened, and wasn’t just feel-feels.
It was a fantasy.
MAGA is about returning to an undetermined time when the cultural focus was on white property-owning nuclear families, when America had a dominate position in geopolitics, when war and death and disease were very far away. This never a specific year so to speak, rather a time period of empowerment. MAGA seeks to violently rip social progress away from those they deem weak or undeserving, leaving only the spoils for “real” Americans.
This is also fantasy.
Fantasy is the problem.
The emotional draw to both of these ideas is identical: political nostalgia in the face of existential anxiety. The right couldn’t comprehend a black man with actual power, and liberals can’t comprehend every preconception they had about qualifications, polling, and pop culture blowing up in their face in 2016. Liberals don’t overtly share the same outright xenophobia or racism, and their desire to return to the womb is not about individual identity empowerment, but a political aesthetic of civility and harmony that just fucking didn’t exist. The Obama presidency was not “normal”, nor should it ever be considered normal.
In general, liberal politics has devolved into a media spectacle about celebrity and personality, the individual candidate who magically embodies their aspirations. Just like their favorite TV characters, they take the place of a parent, a mentor, a pop culture icon with a premade set of iconography. The candidate is the American Dream, an exception to the rule, destined for the throne purely by the nature of their glory.
Because they chose the Correct Candidate, the liberal voter is therefore the smartest person in the room, the most refined and upstanding because they have ascribed to the right cultural artifacts. They bought the right soda, they watch the right shows. They are on the right side of history because of who they are, not what they believe in. It’s a type of political mystification.
This is why nothing changes with these milquetoast centrist candidates: they bring nothing more than their persona to the table, and then spend their time building a type of political brand and fundraising to do it all over again.
Mainstream media focuses on personality clashes because they wish to make an abstract problem like healthcare inequality more personable. It’s easier to get ratings if you can structure a dramatic narrative: Trump vs Biden, China vs USA, Coke vs Pepsi. Who’s winning, who’s losing, who’s up, who’s down. Line go up? Line go down! Left or right. Black or white. Cops and robbers. Two sides, clear to communicate, simply to understand!
Liberalism and broken Democratic Party politics also follows this simplistic dynamic. If there’s any rightwing meme that actually has some credence, it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is caused by a subservience to image and surface-level rhetoric dependent on a ballot checkbox instead of actual political engagement, such as mutual aid, labor organizing, and direct action outside of electoralism.
“When they do it, it’s bad. When we do it, it’s good because we had no choice or it was a lesser evil. We are always on the side of righteousness, since the system is fundamentally good, because we are in it.” This is the creed.
The worship of the Obama era as something we should and even must return to is the core conceit. Most perplexing is that liberals lived through the Obama presidency, it’s a concrete period of time, meanwhile the MAGA crowd yearns for a fuzzy time period. Unless you’re in grade school, it happened within the majority of people’s lifetimes.
This is the “normal” that liberals want to return to:
– Electoral loss of 11 Senators, 62 House seats, 12 governors, 958 state legislature seats, 21 states with a GOP trifecta
– Obstruction of a SCOTUS judge appointment
– Half of all black wealth evaporated
– A “recovery” that created a fragile gig-based Uberconomy with a permanent underclass
– A bailout of banks who returned to higher profitability than before the crash
– Bombings in 7 countries (that we knew of)
– Illegal surveillance on a mass scale
– Deportation of 3 million people
– Expansion of the carceral state
– More whistleblower prosecutions under the Espionage Act than every other White House combined
– Not one person responsible for the crimes of the Iraq War, financial crisis, torture, or illegal surveillance was ever held accountable
But he was eloquent and thoughtful, showed actual human emotion, and wasn’t prone to screeds or bizarre lies about which models he slept with or lies about other lies that he didn’t need to make. He was an actual person, not a collection of grievances and neuroses. Obama was the polar opposite personality wise: the collegiate candidate who could talk in complete sentences and didn’t inspire mass murderers. (As a good imperial manager, he left the mass murder to the drone pilots where it belonged.)
Liberals intentionally ignore these facts even when presented with them because Obama has an unearned aura around him. They just felt good back then because they weren’t paying attention or looked the other way. (There’s also the political minefield of critiquing the first black president.) His election was such a win for people, it smashed through a barrier some thought impossible, that his voters accidentally thought he actually solved any of those problems he described. Since Obama took few risks after the passage of the ACA and dismantled his organizing structure, he had nothing to gain or lose by doing little. His lack of political backbone is now legendary, culminating in the failure to recess appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in the face of obvious Senate obstruction. Sort of digs against the argument that we need to supremely think about the Supreme Court when we supremely vote, doesn’t it?
Obama’s base loved him because he represented everything they thought they wanted, but only in image. He just didn’t have to diddle kids or snort meth off a urinal to be held above the standard lowest common denominator of his opponents. Liberals care about image, conservatives care about power. Since politics has become personality, comparing Trump’s grotesqueries to Obama’s liberal prom king persona must feel like a psychic orgasm.
Joe Biden has a faded afterglow and a promise of a better tomorrow based on a fake yesterday, a promise which has yet to be fulfilled. Much like Trump’s disgusting appeals to white-centric nostalgia, Biden is offering just as much hot air, a return to a time that never existed except in the imagination of people who read too much Harry Potter and think Marvel movies have serious politics.
The “Soul of America” isn’t a thing that exists, countries don’t have personalities or opinions. They are filled with individuals with competing agendas, and only conglomerations of those like-minded agendas, such as the working class, actually fulfill change. Not an individual candidate, not a phantom moment in time. There is no normal to return to.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.