“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos." Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA).
How is that not true? Well, we did elect him to get an infrastructure bill passed, a social safety net bill passed, a bill to combat climate change, and to end the COVID-19 epidemic--all things that he promised on the campaign trail. That would have made him FDR so didn't people vote for him "to be FDR"?
We elected a normal man to be a normal president, one who did not tweet sizes of nuclear buttons, who didn't embarrass the country among foreigners; one who was true to his oath to the Constitution, who paid attention to science and not quacks, who didn't recommend injecting bleach into their veins, who would work with existing domestic institutions and their procedures, not attack them in a coup d'etat. That would include the institutional procedure of the filibuster. There was no, "Do something, anything!" as faced FDR in 1932. There was no wide consensus among voters in 1932 that capitalism was broken--but it was. There was widespread consensus in 2020 that the economic and political systems were not broken, there was comfortable majority consensus that the man occupying the White House was broken. All we wanted, in Spanberger's way of thinking, was a return to normalcy. We would have been fine with taking an eraser to the four previous years and going back to Barack Obama. In fact, we chose his damn veep!
"Elect more liberals," Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) on how President Biden could get his agenda passed.
We could have nominated Bernie Sanders, right? If we had wanted a liberal like F.D.R. we could have had him. Jim Clyburn, largely, reset the Democrats' course.
However, the polity was broken, in 2016 and 2020. 46.1% voted for a broken man in 2016. 46.9% voted to reelect the broken man in 2020. We cannot take an eraser figurative or literal and go back to the America that was prior to Nov. 8, 2016. America knew exactly what it was getting when the Russians helped it elect the broken man in 2016. The polity was far different in 2016 than it was in 1932. Obviously. But I mean a less vapid point. The polity in 1932 wanted the system fixed in 1932. There was a national and worldwide emergency for which the economic system was responsible. The polity in 1932, as Democrats in 2020, could have elected a socialist, Norman Thomas then, Bernie Sanders in 2020 (or 2016). Norman Thomas got 2.23% of the vote. Democrats didn't even nominate Sanders. So it is not true that voters in 1932 would have voted for anyone who could fix or replace the broken system. In fact, they bought a pig-in-a-poke with FDR. He refused to get into specifics of what he would do (because he had no fucking idea himself). The polity in 1932 wanted a "normal" fix, not an overhaul. Rep. Spanberger is wrong, for in electing Franklin Delano Roosevelt the polity in 1932 had no idea it was electing "FDR", four-term president, would-be Supreme Court packer, war president. The polity in 2016 voted for drastic change to a system that was not broken. The polity was broken so it elected a broken man. It was completely abnormal. Abnormal became the new normal, continued through the 2020 election and down to the present day.
What does it mean then that one is a "normal" Democrat, that the polity voted for a return to a normal president in 2020? The polity did not shift much between 2016 and 2020; in fact, the broken man got a 0.8% greater share of the vote in 2020. In 1932 the polity shifted drastically, from 58.21% for Herbert Hoover in 1928 to 39.65%. If the polity in 2020 voted only for a return to normalcy, have they not gotten it in Joe Biden? It certainly didn't get a Sanders-The Squad agenda hoo-doggie! If Spanberger is right why did we lose the state house in her Virginia? Would Terry McAuliffe not have been a "normal"? He was the former governor for godssake. If Spanberger is right, how are things looking for "normal" Democrats in 2022? Not so peachy. Democrats gained nine seats in the Senate and nine seats in the House in the 1934 mid-term elections. That ain't happenin' in 2022.
The polity is abnormal is the difference between the FDR era and that at least since 2016. To me, this is the question: Can you fight an abnormal polity with normal? My answer is no. The cash value of that answer is that inter alia, the filibuster must be modified or done away with to pass voter protection legislation. The polity must change back to normal before the leadership can return to normal.
