BIDEN’S WIN TRADES ONE POLITICAL FANTASY FOR ANOTHER – By Murtaza Hussain (The Intercept) / December 26 2020
The channel is merely being changed from Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” back to “The West Wing.”
IF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM is a virtual reality simulation, the presidency of Donald Trump is the moment that it finally glitched out. Trump mercilessly mocked the somber, self-reverent image of leadership traditionally expected of U.S. presidents, while embracing surrealism as a political style. Over the past four years, a disorienting number of political practices and behaviors were revealed by Trump to have been mere “norms” — the culture of a senescent elite whose decline was accelerated by and helped enable Trump’s rise. Since the elites’ old, pleasing simulation of American omnipotence went unexpectedly haywire, many liberals have dreamt of nothing less than smashing the reboot button, putting the whole ugly Trump spectacle behind them, and chalking up the past four years to a bug in the program that beta testers had regrettably failed to catch.
The election of Joe Biden seems to have granted a reprieve, at least temporarily, for champions of a liberal order, which includes almost all Democrats as well as many Republicans. Unlike a simulation or a science fiction movie, however, there are no memory erasers or reboot buttons taking you back to square one. Today, the liberal U.S. establishment is congratulating itself for having waged a resistance to authoritarianism, extinguishing a “slow-motion Reichstag Fire” and narrowly averting full-blown fascism. Conservatives outside of this liberal order, meanwhile, including more than a few Republican politicians, are immersing themselves in an even more powerful fantasy by claiming, yet critically not really acting as though, the election was stolen in a left-wing coup.
“Trump is a figure who, if his statements are interpreted literally, could be compared to a dictator. But he is not that, he is a virtual equivalent of that.”
The terms of public debate in the United States today have become less about how to wield power than a fight over defining basic premises of reality. It’s too early to say whether this means the end of American democracy, or what such a thing might look like. For the meantime, what is playing out is an increasingly extreme divergence of narrative from reality, on all sides: a phenomenon that some have termed “political virtualism,” or even “dreampolitik.”
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2020/12/26/biden-trump-political-fantasy/
