2024: Debbie Downer versus Sunshine?

04 May 2023

People ask me whether Joe Biden can win in 2024. The context is usually something about his golden oldie-ness. The occasion is usually some kind of concern-trolling that’s been published by one of the country’s most lucrative media properties. My answer is everyone is overthinking it.

First, Biden is the incumbent. They almost never lose, unless there are extraordinary conditions beyond anyone’s control. Republican George HW Bush could not keep Ross Perot from running in 1992. An independent rich man who stroked the Republican sweet spot, he took just enough voters away from Bush for the Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton, to beat him.

Incumbents can’t control fluke moments. Neither can they control seismic shifts in the electorate. The time before George HW Bush’s defeat was Jimmy Carter’s in 1980, and that Democratic president’s loss – ask any political historian – was a consequence of major shifts in the national mood, particularly a double-edged backlash against the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the glory of a decade’s worth of reform movements.

The liberal consensus had exhausted itself.

From that arose a new “conservative” era.

Fast forward to today, and you can see that the conservative consensus is now taking its turn. From its exhaustion will arise a new “liberal” era. What “liberal era” means is hard to say, but we can say that, whatever it comes to mean, it will exhibit the values, character and attitude of the first president of that new era, that is, Joe Biden. Anything can happen. God forbid he dies before reelection! But everything about politics right now is bending forward to the reelection of a president who’s leading us out of the past.

Meanwhile, the other candidate is stuck in the past. Instead of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of his failed campaign, building on the good, getting rid of the bad, adding and modifying where he can, Donald Trump is leaning into this new era (in which a tolerable liberalism is going to become the mainstream consensus view), as if history has no consequence at all.

That makes sense, actually. Donald Trump inhabits an Eternal Present Tense. He does not and will not hold himself responsible for anything he’s done or said. Whatever he said yesterday, well, it never happened. All that matters to his alum-powder mind is what he’s saying right now, and maybe not even then, given his childish refusal to take responsibility for anything while scrambling to take credit for everything. On a metabolic level, Trump is incapable of leading anyone, much less a country, out of the past, because the past isn’t the past. There’s nothing to lead the country out of.

Yet even as he fails to lead the country out of the past, he keeps reminding us the present has left him behind. Forgive me for repeating myself but the criminal former president compels: the Republican Party used to be the party that claims to protect individual liberty from the scourge of Big Government. Under Trump, however, it became Big Government's biggest cheerleader, overshadowing the greenest greenie’s longest longing for it.

Consider this, from the Post: “Trump’s emerging platform marks a sharp departure from traditional conservative orthodoxy emphasizing small government, which was famously summed up in Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: ‘Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ Trump, by contrast, is proposing to apply government power, centralized under his authority, toward a vast range of issues that have long remained outside the scope of federal control.”

The Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf and Jeff Stein reported from the Conservative Political Action Conference, where Trump said, in March: “In 2016, I declared I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

As Arnsdorf and Stein said, Trump keeps doing this, over and over, adding new sediments and layers, building a theme, heightening tension, upward and outward toward what we can only presume is a climax of some kind to his encephalitic reality-TV mind, whose only possible impact is on the here and now. While he does this, he reminds us, again and again, of two factors:

One, that the things he did to become president the first time (2016) didn’t work the second time (2020), yet he’s running for a third time in the same way he ran the first time, because, well, history never really happened.

Two, that history really did happen on account of Donald Trump sounding nothing like the Republicans of old, who said they stood united against the very things he’s calling for. In this sense, Trump is deepening the feeling in the electorate that the old ways are gone, that new ways must come from the old, and that those new ways are not going to come from Trump.

The 2024 election is shaping up to be a contest between two very old men with very different views. One looks to the future and sees problems, but hope. One looks to see doom and gloom. Americans value cheeriness so much, it’s unlikely they will tolerate another four years of President Debbie Downer. Biden, the incumbent, is President Sunshine. Don’t overthink it.

From Your Site Articles