Nobody To Hate–The Biden Presidency And The Deflated Santa Claus Balloons Of The Left

Ooooh, it felt so good to hate Donald Trump, an unexpected gift to progressives who could never gin up much resentment, bile, or downright calumny for the likes of either of the Bushes or even Ronald Reagan.  Hatred of Nixon came close, and many a Washington liberal laughed at his five o’clock shadow, his in-your-face V finger salute, and cookies-and-milk wife.

They followed Watergate like an afternoon soap opera, howled against his dilatory insistence that he would end the War in Vietnam, considered him a war criminal and corrupter of the Constitution; but nothing, no one, and never before was there such bilious, intemperate, inchoate hatred of any President like Donald Trump.

Of course he thrived on such crazed, hysterical behavior.  The more the Left ranted on about his misogyny, racism, and homophobia, the more he threw it back in their face.  To hear him talk, liberals were twisted, deformed caricatures addled academics seduced by their own faux intellectualism; hopeless, Utopian, idealists; anti-historical dreamers; and fools.  He gave as good as he got, and the four years of the Trump presidency were the most fun ever.  

Never had the back pages of the New York Review of Books, airing nasty he-said, she-said smears and retorts, had America had so much fun.  The Left, desperately serious and determined to defame, discredit, and dishonor this smarmy, retrograde, hack politician and evil-doer, provided the lines.  They were the producers of the vaudeville stage, the facilitators, the eager, voluntary yes-men.   They, with their virulent hatred enabled Donald Trump and his best performances.

Trump had no patience for the Left’s sanctimony or preposterous righteousness.  For every holier-than-thou faux rectitude, Trump had a retort, a one-ups-manship par excellence.  The Black Lives Matter activists, to the Left the modern day Crusaders out to liberate Jerusalem from the heathen, but to Trump street bum criminal ne’er-do-wells with no higher purpose than to loot big screen TVs, phones, liquor, and computers.  

Gay rights advocates, to the Left the avant-garde of the New Wave of sexuality, on the front lines of the gender spectrum, the tsunami to finally inundate and destroy patriarchal sexual oppression; but to Trump sexual deviants and anti-Biblical apostates.  

Environmentalists to the Left were the Second Coming, the holy crusaders, the damning forces of right behavior, the sanctified barrier against human depredation.  To Trump they were tree-huggers, Chicken Little hysterics, and advocates without a sex life.

It was easy to love Donald Trump, a populist man of the people and enshrined example of lowbrow, bourgeois taste.  His supporters wanted no temperance, no ‘on the one hand, on the other’ considered opinions.  They wanted no Pablo Casals, Robert Frost, artsy-fartsy Rose Garden high-falutin’ posturing.  They wanted arm candy, yachts, resorts, braggadocio, silk suits, and insolence.  They wanted the Left to be humiliated for its European faux class and dismissive elitism.

It was also easy to hate him for this very dismissiveness, arrogance, and indifference to substance, things that mattered.  The Left hated him not only for his corrupt, incorrigible disgraceful character and personality, but for what he stood for – the white race, capitalist laissez-faire opportunism, and the foul indifference to hybrid sexuality. 

So the last four years have been ones of pure grand guignol, Barnum & Bailey big tops and side shows, vaudeville, carny barkers, snake oil salesmen, and Hollywood dream-makers.  Trump could have never asked for such a foil as progressive Democrats.  Had he faced Truman, Roosevelt, Carter, or even Bill Clinton, he would have had to write new scripts and screenplays, worked around national crises and searched for ways to ad hominem his opponents; but Jimmy Carter, all cardigans, love, and firesides would have been too easy a target; and Bill Clinton too much of an ally.  

Who, other than Bill Clinton could have invented Monica Lewinsky, ‘it depends on what is is’,  ‘I did not have sex with that woman’, and trailer trash sex with hookers? A political marriage made in heaven.

So, now what? With Trump gone, the air has gone out of the progressive balloon.  Liberal Democrats have defeated the enemy, removed the Evil One from office, and have cleared the decks for running; but politics abhors a vacuum.  Without hate, recriminations and virulent misogynist, racist, and homophobic messages, where is the party of Biden?

Oh yes, the country will return to ‘normal’; i.e. the dull, pedestrian, predictable agenda of love, participatory, compassionate community that Democrats have tried to impose on winners-and-losers capitalists, Biblical originalists, and apple-pie-and-motherhood Americans.

Trump country after four years of chattel-free expression, rejection of liberal cant and sanctimony, will not keep quiet.  Biden may have won the election but  by no means will he be courted.  His Rasputin, Kamala Harris, and her legions of liberal claques will give plenty of raw meat to the Right. They will soon see gay activism and gender-neutral sexuality spread throughout every public institution; private enterprise belittled; neutered, public education transformed; and gender-race-ethnicity first instituted as the de facto working principle of the New Democracy; and they will be incensed, motivated, and pissed.

The problem is not with the Right, but the Left.  It will be easy for conservatives to find something to hate.  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will give them plenty; but what about the liberal, progressive Left?  With the defeat of Trump they have been left empty-handed.  A movement which has been motivated not by principles but by high-minded moral assumptions has nothing left to stand on.  The border wall? Taxes? Gender reform?  OK, good enough for backstory policy papers, but without juice, beef, and salsa.

Bob Mutter, a longtime liberal activist, suckled at the breast of William Sloane Coffin and his anti-war sycophants, weaned at the hands of the anti-nuclear peaceniks, and embraced by modern day feminists and environmentalists, is worried.  While there is still salience in the causes of international accord, global warming, and the persistently durable glass ceiling, no one opposes them.  There is no Donald Trump to question the science of historical meteorology, the chauvinistic oppression of women, or the forces of international anarchy.  The issues alone cause no ripples, no interest, no Nielsen ratings.  What is a good liberal to do?

Number One, politics won’t be fun anymore.  Come on, admit it, the last four years have been as great a show as ever conceived by American politics.  A trophy wife, a drop-dead gorgeous, Hollywood-ready daughter, a coterie of the rich and famous, all shamelessly paraded as political assets? What could be better? Who among the Right can be the next Salem witch to be burned at the stake?  No one.  The party is over.

Number two, progressive issues are bo-ring.  There is no way to Hollywoodize elementary school curriculum, soup kitchens, or diversity.  Now, if Hollywood could ever shed its progressive mantel, there might be a good story of Salvadoran refugees now members of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) the most violent street gang in Los Angeles. A ‘Clockers’ with regional, international flavor.  A story of hardship, flight, family responsibilities, crime, and redemption. But Hollywood will simply pull up, pull back, love Joe Biden and let him write dulling, soporiphic documentaries better suited to PBS.

So we are in for four ‘Presidential’ years, more of the same lukewarm predictable compassionate policies of the past.  It won’t take long for people to yearn for a return to the halcyon, circus Trump years.  Life is short, after all, and given the repetitive, predictable  cycles of history, don’t we really want more Donald Trumps?

Of course we do.