Over the weekend there was a spate of mainstream punditry touching on the idea that a significant portion of the swing or Democratic party electorate wants more than anything “a return to normalcy” as the goal of the 2020 presidential election (middle of the road blah blah columnist David Brooks said exactly that on Meet the Press yesterday in explaining Pete Buttigieg’s appeal, New York Times had a piece on people being tired of “fighting”). My husband brought to my attention that exactly 100 years ago, Warren G. Harding had “a return to normalcy” as his slogan in his successful bid for the presidency after World War I. Not to carry the analogy too far but perhaps if the world hadn’t “returned to normalcy” so soon it could have avoided some things like, I don’t know, the Great Depression and World War II (which most historians believe was a direct result of hasty resolution of bloody bloody World War I)?
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| Warren G. Harding: A Return to Normalcy |
So let’s assume we want to return to something called “normalcy.” What then was “normalcy” pre current administration? Obviously normal must have been different for different people. Do we just want to go back to being asleep to what is going on? Do we want to escape from Donald Trump or do we want to escape from his ripping us out of denial and into actually seeing how and what this country has become? Were we under the illusion that prior to this administration America was a country that worked for everyone? Many of us did not notice when the Obama administration was ramping up deportations and being hardline against immigrants, reauthorizing the Patriot Act, spying on Americans, not shutting down Gitmo (off shore torture and detention without rule of law), shoring up concentrating wealth and power in huge monopolies, enabling 9 million home foreclosures, doing nothing to stop mass incarceration or police racism. Some of us, whether we were post industrial midwesterners scrambling to survive or families of color being victimized by racists policies never left our normal. Some of us who voted for the current administration because we wanted to return to our normal, a normal where we didn’t encounter many people who had different skin, sexual orientation, gender ideas than we did. We had all of these normals and yearnings in the Obama administration and we still have them now. Others of us are only noticing these policies and their effects now. Do we want to just stop noticing? or do we want things to change?
This happens in my personal life too. Something (a car break down, a job loss, an illness) disrupts my normal routine, and all I want is to return to normal even if my normal contained much I didn’t care for.
Bernie Sanders and his errant apostle Elizabeth Warren are the only major candidates who are campaigning to address the conditions that actually created and emboldened the current administration. Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar are campaigning on being “reasonable” and “moderate” and living in the “real world.” All Democrats want the “change” of regimes but some disagree on whether they want any change other than regimes.
There is another related group of voters that years for a mythical fantasy time of nonpartisanship and “reaching across the aisle.” There aren’t many of these voters but because they are disproportionately swing voters, they perhaps achieve outsize importance and the mainstream cable pundits LOVE to talk about this fantasy. What most voters and pundits fail to realize is that in the current polarized environment Democrats could reach until their arms are stretched for miles and not catch a Republican hand–there are none outstretched because the base would eat them alive for addressing the issues bipartisanship would lend itself to.
Likewise anybody who has negotiated anything at all has to realize that it makes no sense to ratchet down expectations in advance of a legislative battle. Warren’s recent move from Medicare for All to Medicare for More makes it less likely that she would even achieve Medicare for More let along Medicare for All. I worked in the arena of health care politics in Washington and Sacramento for years and this is NOT how it works. You can’t negotiate against your end goal. To get to where you want to go, you’ve got to do what Sanders is doing, build a real movement for what we truly want, the whole enchilada, and then figure out how you’re going to get there when you’ve got momentum and pressure to bear.
Woah, this post has swung around a little, what’s the point here? the point is that we need to be careful not to tell ourselves stories about some mythical time when bipartisanship and flowers grew in the Congress and presidents were presidential and all was well.