Normalcy isn't a real word and it definitely won't work

This morning I came across a very interesting conversation within the Democratic family. As Driftglass and Bluegal always like to say, the debates occurring now in Primary season are a family discussion. This is how it always goes during Primary season, there are a thousand or more points of view within the big tent of the Democratic Party and it takes a while to settle things down to just a few. The problem is when these conversations become arguments and the partisans within each group get entrenched and bitter. While the Republicans are almost entirely authoritarian at this point, RWAFs in the base and social dominators in leadership and wannabe leadership, the Democrats are not without authoritarians of the left-wing variety. Whereas right wing authoritarian followers prize conformity and obedience to power along with aggression against any out-groups, left wing authoritarians prize perpetual rebellion and individualism. Bernie bros and Naderites are the classic cases and they did plenty of damage with their purity tests and privilege of saying "let the Republican win, that will show 'em." Obviously it is a scale, there aren't hard and fast delinations marking each group. But each family fight has the potential of setting off LWAs and forming schisms within the party that can ruin elections.

So I have to try and temper any remarks because I don't want to fan a spark into a schism or empower LWAs at all. First and foremost, as I have mentioned before, I don't take positions in Primaries because the worst Democrat is always better than the best Republican. We have a pretty good group of competent, experienced candidates with good ideas that will all represent the Party and the non-insane majority of this country well. Joe Biden is the candidate at the heart of this conversation. It starts with Brother Charlie Pierce's column from August 26, arguing that Biden is the "return to normalcy" candidate with great similarity to Warren G. Harding. Rick Perlstein upped the ante by stating:

Ah, our very own James Buchanan: the rocky-steady candidate of experience, promising to bring back all that yummy, yummy normalcy. I'm sure it will all work out swell, just like 1856-60.

Now, both Harding and Buchanan are consistently ranked among the worst presidents this country has had in our history by professional historians. Personally I rank James K. Polk higher in the awfulness chart for waging an aggressive war of conquest against Mexico based on lies that empowered southern slave owners into forcing their demands for more slavery and more oppression onto the rest of the country. Maybe because the parallels with Dubya and Cheney's contempt for the rule of law and empowering the worst people in the country to shit all over democracy are just too strong. In my reading of history, Polk doused the country in gasoline with his splendid little war and gave boxes of matches to authoritarian slave owners. Sure, there was a short interregnum with Whig presidents (Zachary Taylor, hero of the war with Mexico then Fillmore) where the country could have gone in another direction but the same kind of normalcy set in once Franklin Pierce (no relation to Charlie, that I know of) took office. Pierce was a doughface, actually the poster child for doughfaces, who wasn't going to do anything about slavery because he saw the abolitionists as the problem.

There is no going back. WWI changed the country in many, many ways. Though Harding and his successors tried to go back to the federal government doing nothing and retreat from internationalism, the world and much of America did not really cooperate. Similarly, Buchanan just tried to ignore the simmering divisions and violent trends with a lighter touch on the doughface identity. But even an experienced, long-serving politician like Buchanan could not sweep things away by inaction, simply hoping that not making waves could patch things up so we could go back to arguing over tariffs and internal improvements instead of slavery and expansion.

So, no amount of hoping a Joe Biden could patch things up after doughfacedonny goes away will suffice. There is simply no going back. And according to FiveThirtyEight Biden's lead is shrinking, so it's possible that the issue of having to hash out who is right in their comparison won't persist into Primary season. I like and respect both Charlie and Rick, and I'm on board with their basic premise that trying to campaign on the return to normalcy will probably be a disaster. No schism here, if Biden gets the nomination I will obviously vote for him but then immediately go back to organizing and working to defeat authoritarianism. Even if that means watching Diamond Joe lead with his face into republican baseball bats.