“Let’s go, Brandon” has become the catch-cry of the moment after a US sportscaster thought he heard a crowd chanting the essentially meaningless phrase.
They were in fact chanting “fuck Joe Biden”.
The meme got rolled into something else when a Southwest Airlines pilot used it as a sign-off to passengers before take off. Which then initiated a new round of debate about free speech, and on and on…
Nevertheless, the Democrats got their “let’s go, Brandon” moment in the round of elections this year. There’s a handful of state and city elections that land out of cycle, a year after presidential election years, which act as a useful test of how the parties are faring.
That test has now been performed for the Democrats and the left in Virginia, New York and elsewhere, and the results have been universally terrible. They got shellacked everywhere they turned out, and the politics turned largely on culture wars — which, somewhat abated here, show no sign of cessation in the US. Indeed even when the Dems won the left lost.
Brandon got going, whoever he is.
The headline result was in Virginia where both the governor and state assembly races were delivered to the Republican party after a decade of Democrat dominance. Governor Terry McAuliffe, once spoken of as a Hillary vice-presidential potential pick — and do kisses get any deathier than that? — started the race about five points up, before being steadily worn down by a relentless campaign by equity trader Glenn Youngkin, based substantially around the issues of education, curriculum, critical race theory and gender and bathroom use in schools. The works.
The very local matters they used for raw material — incredibly complex and tangled stories about education department memos, anti-racist book lists, allegedly unreported assaults, single complaints by parents about school curricula — was bundled up into a campaign specifically aimed at a few white suburban counties that had been trending Dem-wards over three election cycles, especially so during the Trump period.
Youngkin’s campaign steered clear of Trumpian style (though The Donald endorsed Youngkin, unasked) and instead focused on the notion of parent choice in schools, making it an issue of family autonomy and best practice, appealing to college-educated whites.
McAuliffe and the Democrats were caught defenceless by the ferocity and popularity of the campaign, and they never managed to rally against Youngkin. Treating the concerns as dog whistle stuff, a new version of race politics, McAuliffe doubled down on ridiculing the charges, rather than making any concession to concerns about institutional power.
Affirming parent choice may have taken the air out of Youngkin’s campaign — but that may be what the Yanks call “Monday morning quarter-backing”, and such concessions might have set off a landslide. They would certainly have been unacceptable to the state party’s POC and progressive/left contingent.
The added difficulty for McAuliffe in trying to steer the campaign back to standard big politics and the Biden program was that the Biden program is stuck deep in the mud, with two Democrat senators — Joe Manchin from very Republican West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona — refusing to wave through a $350-billion-a-year (usually conveyed with its 10 year total $3.5 trillion) social program giving paid family leave, childcare, and much more that is standard for anywhere outside the US.
The program is in the process of being gutted and still may fail. The Dems had hoped it would be “announceable” by now in some form or other; a flag to rally to. With Biden doing the usual Dem vanishing trick — refusing to sell or spruik his politics substantially — it was always going to be a tough battle in Virginia.
But it was bad everywhere for team left. The Dems had a predictable win in the New York City mayoral race, with ex-cop Eric Adams winning, but that had been a loss for the left in the primaries — Adam representing a centrist repudiation of the somewhat progressive trends of outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio.
In Minneapolis a “ballot measure” proposal (i.e. electoral referendum) to “defund the police” in the wake of the hideous police execution of George Floyd failed — even though it was not an “abolish the police” measure. (It reduced police funds, but more crucially removed police autonomy, placing them within the city administration.)
And perhaps most disappointingly, in Buffalo, New York, socialist candidate for mayor India Walton, who had won the Democratic primary, lost to Democrat incumbent Byron Brown, who had run as a write-in independent.
There’s really no good news for the Democrats in the results, especially as regards the 2022 midterms, which they are virtually certain to lose, and lose big in.
Barring great reversals, both the House and Senate will revert to Republican control and that will give the increasingly Trumpified party free rein to cause mayhem. Whichever gutted Biden program emerges from current negotiations may well be as good as it gets. Biden has been left of Obama to date on a number of issues, but one suspects he is less likely than O to push the limit on executive powers, to get things done.
Curiously, however, a bout of Republican mayhem may be just what the Democrats need for 2024 — especially of the Trumpian variety. In Virginia, Youngkin won with a politics that was notable for swinging round almost entirely to what we call “the biopolitical”. Rather than the politics of “who gets what when how” — i.e. the politics of formed citizens — biopolitics, in an expanded sense, is about how people come to be formed, what sort of citizens we make.
Hence the huge focus on curriculum in recent decades, something which had been a matter for specialists. It would appear that the progressives’ approach of laying on a certain educational program to shift social categories of race over time is less sophisticated than the new politics of parent choice.
To a degree the contradictions of the progressive program are appearing: a sole parent’s complaint about a school book list including Toni Morrison’s Beloved was based on the suggestion that the book had traumatised her child. Well, Beloved is harrowing; it wouldn’t work as a novel if it wasn’t.
But if you’ve developed discourses of precarious subjectivity, with trigger warnings, etc, then “harrowing” becomes “traumatising” and the complaint has an arguable framework.
What does all that mean for left politics in the US? The single, simplest takeaway is that there has been a “let’s go, Brandon” level of mishearing across the country.
Americans will support left stuff — $15 minimum wage proposals have been voted up in multiple red states — but they are wary of whole programs. And the notion that the left projects of being insurgents on cultural matters drives them wild.
It’s progressives who are seen as the masters in these matters now. If they want to get a progressive program going they will have to come to some level of self-reflected understanding about such. They won’t.
The message is too garbled. To the midterms! Let’s go Brandon, Brandon let’s go!
The Virginia result was entirely predictable. When Biden won the presidential election and scraped home in both houses of Congress I described the result as a dead cat bounce for the Democrats. They would not make any worthwhile use of the political power they had gained so they would lose control of Congress in the mid-terms and the Republicans will retake the presidency too in 2024.
Sure enough the Democrats have dropped or fumbled just about every important issue. They have done nothing effective to impede the Republicans’ use of voter suppression and gerrymandering. The investigations of Trump and others for corruption and subversion, including the 6th Jan insurrection, are plodding along at a pace that makes it likely nothing much will happen before the new Republican administration pulls the plug on it all in 2024 if not sooner. Nothing has been done about the packing of the Supreme Court. The big spending bills for infrastructure and so on have been gutted by Democrat renegades siding with the Republican minority. The outrageous filibuster rule in the Senate has been left untouched. And so on.
The Republicans will be back in full control soon, and they will never again let mere voting remove them. The Democrats do not have what it takes to stop them. There are various aspects to that but the most important is a lack of united will.
Indeed the march of the authoritarian right wing is on (same as this time last century) and the Neville Chamberlainesk weak and feckless Democrats with their lack of insight are going to hand over the reigns to the neo-fascist G.O.P. for the foreseeable future. It’s a worry, we are all going to feel this…scary real stuff, forget about all the nuanced issues and moments that made this happen and who predicted what and when it will mean nothing soon, just get ready for the dark storm that’s coming!
Not much “neo” about the trend – except perhaps in the Matrix (non)sense.
They have gone shtumm on the abolition of the filibuster in the Senate which is an indication that they are not serious about any change – it was barely used until the partisan 70s and has become a permanent block to altering the status quo.
Even if it were of such venerable age that its cessation would be an affront to the worship of the Holy Founding Fathers, it should be recalled that the antiquity of an abuse is poor justification for its continuation.
Country is going down rapidly in all spheres of life. Biggest prison population, poor/absent health services, education for the dumb, transport & infrastructure declining,housing and homelessness problems always a bad situation, media woeful (pockets of sanity in some places), and biggest failure is their “democracy”. It’s non existent even though world’s media touts the country as some kind of beacon for us to follow. They have the worst industrial, environmental and life expectancy for the richest nation. .
Democrats have been losing their base supporters for couple of decades (around Clinton’s era). Republicans still follow the Tea Party and Moral Majority beliefs – and all are elected with superior funded lobby groups to maintain their financial positions.
Small govt works well for the USA elites.
Trump back in power next election for sure.
Sadly, I agree.
Golly AF, you make me so glad being in Australia – which with our Keystone Kops-grade PM, takes some doing.
Although it does give me chills when the LNP tries to be mini-me Trump, regardless of how questionable their execution might be.
Yes but Labor is like the Dems. No fire and ability to prosecute a policy. They’ve got plenty good, just too limp to sell it..
You’d think the progressives in the US would have learnt by now that if they want their progressive agenda taken seriously, they have to get wider support among the general population. Watching the US from afar, it seems almost surreal to see those on the political left act as if they are divinely-ordained to be the spokespeople of America’s conscience, only to fall flat when it comes to the ballot box.
It’s easy to blame a right-wing media, or the role of corporate money, or racism / ignorance, but even in defeat these same progressives act as if they are the sole legitimate voices of what it means to be American. Democracies are won or lost on engaging the wider population, and that means knowing when and how to compromise to make your ideas more palatable to those who might somewhat agree.
America. Ugh. But the Right everywhere appears to be dumping democracy – as the system most likely to promote progress through the peaceful competition of ideas – into bins and napalming it. It’s being reduced to ashes right now. The Right lies and dupes its way into power and while there moves swiftly to undermine remaining democratic foundations – the independence of the judiciary, voting rights and so on. The Right has powerful allies in powerful media companies that are distorting the information disseminated to the people. What should be a free flowing of ideas, has been reduced to a one-way flood.
The Right’s end game is power in perpetuity. One party states. Other political outfits who do not identify as far right, MUST grasp this. It must be called out loudly and relentlessly. They must grasp the Right’s tactics and use them.
The ‘long game’ that Nancy MacLean had warned of in ‘Democracy in Chains’: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America’ (2017), from Good Reads:
‘Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance.’
Yes – this is now painfully obvious, there is no doubt, shame or guilt. The Republicans and their corporate backers just want power. Any notion of the US being a Democracy will be gone in the aftermath of the 2022 mid term elections. What can the Democrats do???
Impose a (party) term limit and, dare one suggest it, a retirement age?
If anyone recall the old jibes at the gerontocacries that ruled China & the USSR (Japan’s even older governing cohort escaped such comment) back in the day might want to have a look at the ages of the leading Congress critters, of whom I think Pelosi is the oldest.
And as Margaret Thatcher said ‘ECONOMICS ARE THE METHOD: THE OBJECT IS TO CHANGE THE SOUL’
Is it that the US Progressives are tone-deaf to criticism from the white middle-class, or more that the centre of gravity in US politics is a long, long way to the right?
When Biden seems straight out of John Howard-era Australian Liberal casting, you’ve got to wonder what the quagmire to the right of Biden looks like. But with the number of Trump supporters dreaming of a retro but alt-right la la land, there really isn’t much space for Progressives to have a conversation.
So maybe it’s both…
“or more that the centre of gravity in US politics is a long, long way to the right?”
A few weeks (months?) back, the New York Times had one of those political spectrum surveys. In comparing where I was in Australian politics with the ABC’s vote spectrum, the US definitely has a rightward shift to it. I saw Europeans making the same observation.
well it depends what you mean by “progressive”, doesn’t it? and what you mean by “left” and “right”? … a lot of the “identity” stuff is perfectly compatible with neoliberalism, indeed is in some ways the expression of such — the individualisation of a (once) collective tradition … conversely, some of Trump’s economic policies were (ostensibly) quite interventionist, in the way that one might have expected to see on the “left” of politics in decades gone by … the left-right dichotomy was always limited, but now it’s almost completely useless in explaining what’s going on, imo
Depends what you mean by ‘well it depends’
Or we could go full Klinton re Monica & the blue dress – “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is‘ is.”