On normality – Adam Tooze in LRB:

“The usual debate about the future of the Democrats has begun. The party’s left-wing gadfly, Bernie Sanders, has come out with a sharp denunciation of its abandonment of the working class. Historical associations range from the still painful memory of 2016 to the reorientation of the party personified by Bill Clinton in the 1990s; from Stuart Hall on the right turn in 1970s Britain to Bertolt Brecht writing from 1930s exile. But there are two distinct strands in all the opinion and argument. From the left, Gabriel Winant in Dissent pinpoints the ‘solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom’, which could barely wait to return to the losing playbook of Hillary’s Clinton’s doomed campaign against Trump: Witnessing Biden’s stubbornness [and] Harris’s unaccountable refusal even to allow a token Palestinian American to deliver a pre-vetted speech at the Convention ... one had to ask whether these politicians even cared whether they won or lost. They alternated between calling Republicans a mortal threat and promising to include them in the cabinet; they paused their warnings of fascist encroachment only to give cover to the world’s most militarily aggressive far-right and racist regime.
The Democrats, in other words, comprehensively failed to set the terms of ideological debate in any respect. Their defensiveness and hypocrisy served only to give encouragement to Trump while demobilising their own voters, whom they will no doubt now blame – as though millions of disaggregated, disorganised individuals can constitute a culpable agent in the same way a political party’s leadership can.
Winant’s critique of Democratic centrism offers him a context within which to locate Kamala Harris, who personifies the high-achieving, insincere, vacuous incoherence that thrives at the top of the American political class.
This was evident in 2019 during her ill-fated run for the presidential nomination. It became even more apparent in 2024 when she seemed in her stage-managed interviews to be under the control of an algorithm struggling to compute the least offensive combination of phrases and buzzwords, rather than a person with actual beliefs and positions.”

(...)

“The defining feature of US politics in the current era is how small the margins are. This election saw large movements in specific groups: Latino men to Trump; college graduates to Harris; better-off voters to the Democrats; working-class Americans to the Republicans. But it remains a matter of a few percentage points, with the vast majority of the electorate entrenched in two camps and most of the country barely contested. What moves those voters who do change their minds from election to election remains obscure. Both parties presented the electoral choice as one of extremes. They contended most fiercely in the swing states, fighting for a few hundred thousand voters who, despite the stark differences between the candidates and both parties’ alarmist rhetoric, apparently remained undecided. Hence the paradoxical spectacle of modest bread and butter inducements being offered in an attempt to win support for grand causes such as MAGA, or saving US democracy from Trump’s tyranny.”

(…)

“The fact that 32 per cent of voters identified the economy as their number one issue in this election, and of that group 80 per cent voted Trump, should be taken for precisely what it is, a close association. The question of causation remains open. People have real economic problems, but we should not underestimate voters. If in this election you chose to say that the economy was your top concern, you were first and foremost rejecting the rhetoric of democratic emergency that dominated the Harris campaign. If this election was for you about bread and butter issues, you were not enrolling in the resistance. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find such a large majority in this group in favour of Trump.”

(…)

“n 2020 what America needed above all was to be reassured that normality was still within reach. But as Biden’s term went on, what came increasingly to the fore was his version of returning the US to its pre-Trump greatness. The Biden presidency was restorationist and Harris promised to continue in that vein. Essentially, they wanted to rerun 2020 and found themselves, instead, in 2016. They were defeated by Trump’s charismatic, free-wheeling, undisciplined promise of nationalist, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic radicalism. It may be that by 2026 the electorate will have tired of this. The economy may not play in Trump’s favour in the way it did after 2017; it is already now close to full stretch. Foreign policy is more vexed than in his first term: Ukraine could become what Afghanistan was for Biden, a humiliating defeat. And despite his calls for peace, his positioning on the Middle East points in the opposite direction. By 2028 a fresh team of Democrats may fancy their chances. Being the party of normality has its appeal, but it reinforces precisely the wrong instinct. The polycrisis that is unfolding demands not a return to the status quo but urgent, progressive answers both at home and abroad. To formulate and articulate those, the Democrats need politicians, not algorithms.”

Read the article here.

The margins are narrow, but at least half of the American electorate wants a revolution, and it’s a nationalistic, rightwing revolution.

How revolutionary the revolution has to be is open for debate?

Also, normality has lost its appeal, especially for those people who feel betrayed by normality. With or without reason.

The status quo became toxic.

Change comes from the right these decades. And change is not always what those who want to make the world a better had in mind.
Let’s put it this way: a better place for us not for them, is apparently more appealing than, a better place for all of us.