Hyperpolitics

What a difference eight years makes. When Donald Trump was first elected to the American presidency, the liberal and progressive left threw a collective tantrum.

It was, to say the least, embarrassing. Hundreds of thousands of women massed in the streets of Washington, adorned with what they called pussy hats, proclaiming that the Donald needed to be defeated, destroyed and obliterated lest they suffer pains that were worse than labor pains.

Writing in the New York Times, journalist Ross Barkan calls it an era of hyperpolitics. Those who lost the election believed that the nation was about to be destroyed, and that they needed to take control of politics. To them, everything was politics. Worse yet, politics was everything. 

If winning an election will solve all of your problems, and if losing an election will create all of your problems-- surely, it beats working for a living.

They started by impeaching Donald Trump, before he had done anything to merit impeachment.

The bad old days are now a distant memory, but Barkan evokes them:

But if Washington had been so frigid eight years ago, it’s easy to imagine that liberals would have been willing to risk frostbite. Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, was countered by the Women’s March, which brought nearly 500,000 people to Washington alone, making fleeting icons out of its chief organizers and standing, at the time, as the largest single day of mass protest in American history….

Just a few months into Trump’s presidency, Al Green, a representative from Texas, called for his impeachment, and rank-and-file Democrats reveled in the speed at which the new, incendiary president might be undone. Not a day went by, it seemed, when there wasn’t a mass march or calls for a fresh demonstration. Twitter and Instagram were hothouses for anti-Trump activism.

One might suggest that the American left had gotten itself caught up in a Biblical narrative. Their messiah, Obama, was going to save the nation from… who knows what. When Donald Trump, the anti-Obama came along to shatter their dreams by repudiating their god, they lost it. 

Truth be told, years of attacks against Trump, whether on the streets or in the courts, did nothing more than to make him stronger. By the time 2024 rolled around, Trump was electorally unbeatable.

Democrats do not seem as anguished or animated by this Trump Restoration as they were by his ascension; neither are they howling about their own party’s future. The left — looking up after eight years of resisting Trump and finding that in fact, he has expanded his vote share in each general election — is recalibrating. Some progressives have signaled their willingness to work with Trump if he embraces their policy aims, while centrists fret that the Republicans have outflanked them on too many cultural issues. Border policies that were decried as fascistic in Trump’s first term are gradually being embraced, or at least no longer resisted. The old discourse around the “normalization” of Trump is dead; businesses that once stood at a remove from Trump giddily treat him as an ordinary president now.

To put it in simpler terms, their frenzied hysteria about Trump fell flat. If the best you can offer after governing for four years, is a subliterate reformed courtesan, you ought to be in another business. 

In other terms, if your hysteria starts looking like madness it reflects on you, not on the target you have chosen. The more the left called Trump Hitler and a fascist the more people recalled that when Trump was in office he did not do the terrible things the ladies of The View predicted.

Moreover, the lawfare against Trump, the absurd charges and appalling convictions produced sympathy for him and opprobrium for those who chose to use the justice system to advance their goals.

Barkan offered this analysis:

The drama surrounding antifascism faded; now it can seem tired and alarmist to warn that Trump will end free elections. Another standard reflex, under hyperpolitics, was to attribute much of Trump’s popularity to racism, but that argument has struggled to sustain itself: Trump has, in each successive general election, increased his vote share with nonwhite working-class voters, flipping majority-Latino counties, attracting far more Asian voters and even making inroads with Black men.

What lies ahead, it seems, is a cooling, characterized less by dejection than by a sober realization that whatever was tried before simply didn’t work. It is challenging, after all, to maintain a perpetual state of alarm and tell voters that every election might be the last one. The anti-Trump resistance, on its own terms, was a failure. Trump is here, yet again, and he’s a popular vote champion this time.

And let us not overlook the Musk factor. Let us not forget that the wealthiest people in the country were present at the Trump inauguration, providing a patina of legitimacy and of success.

It's one thing to torment yourself over whether or not you should allow Sarah Huckabee Sanders to have dinner in peace. It’s quite another to try the same trick with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.

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