In the context of the strangest presidential race of my lifetime, I've constructed a bit of a narrative for myself about this moment. I'm not a political scientist so don't expect conventional wisdom. I think it all started with the financial crash of 2008, 4 cycles ago (the second strangest presidential race of my lifetime). By weird coincidence, the victor of a tight race between Democrats was a relative unknown who chose as his slogan Change You Can Believe In. After 9/11 and 5 years of a catastrophic and criminal war in Iraq undertaken by the republican nepo baby president, and in the midst of a cratering economy, Hope and Change were in short supply, and the candidate who physically embodied both won (in spite of, if not aided by, his selection of the most entrenched Democrat-- a chronic unilateral bipartisan, performative punisher, and entitlement tinkerer with a Senate career stretching back to the days of Nixon-- as his running mate.) His solid victory over a media darling phony "Maverick" careerist whose ratfucking campaign cynically threatened to put an obtuse nutjob who happened to be a woman a frail elderly heartbeat away from the presidency just to fuck over the dems who had voted for the African American over the former first lady in the primary, was the closest I had ever been to elation about the outcome of a presidential election.
When Obama failed to deliver on either Hope or Change, opting instead to stay the course in affairs domestic and international and bail out the scoundrels whose profligacy with risk had engendered the financial crisis that he had been mandated to address while letting their underwater victims sink, it set in motion a discontent that set the stage for the populist shock of 2016 in which neoliberalism's anointed heir Hillary Clinton had to beat back a more serious left populist challenge from Bernie Sanders than anyone had anticipated in the primary only to go down in defeat (thanks in part to party defections on the part of disgruntled Sanders supporters, but more importantly to a surge in non-voters fed up with the process) to the right faux-populist juggernaut of Donald Trump in November. The Democratic response was to blame Russia. When that didn't work as expected, impeachment was tried. But as historically has happened whenever Democrats get their ass kicked by history, the ultimate effect of Trump's win was both an unhinged Trump derangement and the typical rightward lurch in an effort to court wayward suburbanites (something that seems guaranteed to happen when Republicans win, not Democrats, belying the theory of third party purity voting on the left).
The result in 2020 was Joe Biden, whom Obama strongarmed into the winner slot of the democratic nomination when the unimpeded progress of actual primary voters was strongly favoring a Bernie Sanders victory after several of the early primaries and caucuses. An early clue to how things might go could have been discerned from the trajectory of a number of candidates, several of whom, after beginnings more reflective of the desires of younger Democratically leaning voters were shepherded rightward by mysterious forces over the pre-primary debate season. Among them was Kamala Harris -- a rookie Senator with a problematic history as a California DA-- who had made her name by tough challenging of Brett Kavanaugh in his beer and tear soaked Senate hearings as Supreme Court nominee (he went on to be confirmed anyway) who had started her 2020 campaign in favor of Medicare for All, even through a first debate that many thought she won by making points at the expense of Joe Biden. With the faint whiff of the possibility of front runner status, she immediately started equivocating on how universal her universal healthcare would be, an indication of a readiness to sacrifice principles for ambition that probably contributed to the disintegration of her campaign before the first primary vote was cast-- and that likewise recommended her to be selected as Biden's running mate at the convention. Although conventional wisdom insisted the increasingly doddering Biden was the best Democrat to challenge Trump, the truth was he was the most acceptable to forces in the Democratic party that did not want to test polls that consistently showed Bernie beating Trump in the General. Having secured the nomination with the coordinated cooperation of the field of 2020 also-rans, the Biden campaign's strategy was heavily oriented toward suburban centrist voters, but Trump's mishandling of the COVID crisis may have destined him for a single term no matter who was at the top of the Democratic ticket. In 2020, more came to the polls to cancel the Trump show than to renew it for another season.
In spite of the recycled feeling of a Biden presidency and an insistence on the part of the old guard that it was Biden's neoliberal staleness that voters wanted, all signs seem to indicate that the order that Biden represents is done. In spite of a plenitude of the expected and promised deafness to those outside of the Beltway establishment (his role in encouraging Ukraine to scuttle peace talks early on and instead pursue a military victory over Putin's invasion in the spring of 2022 and his support of Israel's genocide in Gaza being prime cases-in-point) his own presidency especially in terms of domestic policy reflected the change in the air in a stealth under the radar quasi Rooseveltian agenda that his lifetime in politics could hardly have predicted. But while neoliberalism is experiencing death rattles that make Biden appear practically sprightly by comparison, its tentacles on the order of things refuse to let go. This is how we got here, with party and media elites turning a blind eye to Biden visibly "missing a step" (to be charitable) in order to prolong the farce of his re-election bid until it could no longer be ignored. And this is why, it could no longer be taken for granted that the defeat of the threat of Trump with his demonstrated knack for gaming the anti-neoliberal tide required a steady course into a second Biden term. And lastly this is why we can look for signs to indicate whether Biden's chosen replacement, his VP Kamala Harris, would be a last gasp of a dying order, the midwife of a new age or just an incompetent flop and we are not likely to get an answer in the 100 days we have left before the General Election. Especially if she has upped her campaigning game since 2019. We can dread. We can hope. We can wait and see.
You can't expect electoral democracy to fix itself. It won't happen. So while we await the sortition revolution, you have to take what you can get and make the best of it.
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