The 2020 Democratic Primary Feels Normal
A common thread that I’ve heard regarding this election cycle is this: most anti-Trump Americans just want things to feel normal again.
To expand on that idea: they don’t have a particular ideology, and aren’t actually open to any sort of radical change. They just perceive, correctly, that Trump disrupted the culture. Maybe they incorrectly perceive that Trump is unprecedentedly evil and dumb as a president. Maybe they correctly perceive that Trump’s personality has disrupted the culture in a way that is unprecedented in the lifetimes of nearly everyone alive today. In any case, they’ve been shaken and understandably want things to feel normal again.
A president, a government, and a general political movement based around injecting botox into a decaying America seems dangerous and (pun intended) toxic. That stuff is fine for your faces! But not for a whole culture! Nonetheless, I relate to it. I too want things to feel normal again. And, for myself, the 2020 Democrat primary has already made things feel normal again. It’s botox into the rough face of electoral politics.
As soon as the 2020 primary season started, I already started to feel that way, and couldn’t put my finger on why. But now I think I know: it’s because the 2016 election season was uniquely weird among elections in my lifetime, and 2020 is a bit more like ones that I’ve seen before.
In 2016, two things happened, and there is a chicken-and-egg connection between them. Those two things were Trump defeating all other Republicans and the democrats clearing the primary field for Hillary. Trump campaigned against Clinton from the beginning, and the Clinton campaign ran a “pied piper” strategy to try to make Trump the Republican nominee via media coverage. From the beginning, they wanted to face each other, and you could feel it as a spectator.
When I was growing up, primaries weren’t like that. Primaries were when several similar democrats ran against each other, and people splintered into micro-identities based on them. When the primary ended, they coalesced into a macro-identity again, and some just voted for the Republican or the protest vote. It was normal that some dude would split for Ross Perot. He was just an asshole, and his vote that you judged him for was just an effect of democracy.
In 2016, the field was cleared for Hillary Clinton. No other women ran, because they were paving the way for Hillary to be the historic first. No other DNC insider dems duked it out, because they were paving the way for the ultimate DNC insider. We were left with only the types of candidates, who, in a normal election season, would have declared and then gained no traction. Chaffee, who seemed to be running out of a desire to stay awake. Webb, who seemed to be running out of a sense of destiny as an old Virginian that even this cleared field and his lack of fans couldn’t stop. O’Malley, a governor of a “purple” state, the type who usually runs just to boost his career and doesn’t even stick around long enough to get into the debates. And, finally, Bernie, the protest candidate. The Dennis Kucinich type. The type who runs to shake things up, boost their career and maybe make the world a better place by reminding voters that there is a world of politics to the left of corporate dems.
The activist candidate usually doesn’t make it far, but in 2016 he did. For all the positive things that you can say about Bernie, his success did not feel normal. It was a sign that the world was changing in ways that we were only beginning to process.
In the context of what more normal democratic primaries look like, though, Bernie seems like less of an anomaly. If Joe Biden, or even John Kerry, or Dick Gephardt, or any of the other classic corporate dems had gone for it in 2016, I really think that Bernie would have been the Dennis of the race and dropped out. If there had been a greater semblance of democratic competition, and Hillary had beaten a gauntlet of other corporate dems, I think that many of the people who voted for Bernie — including me, and including many people who are more passionate about him than I am —would have had an easier time swallowing the pill in the end.
And by “swallowing the pill,” I don’t mean voting, because we all voted for her anyway. Voting is painless. I mean that it wouldn’t have felt like such a dramatic contest, and like such a slap in the face to progressive politics. It would have been a more familiar way of watching progressive hopes peter out. In other words, it would have felt normal.
