"Biden was Supposed to be FDR"
"Biden was Supposed to be JFK"
"Biden was Supposed to be the Pope"
"Biden was Supposed to be Jesus"
National headlines, basically
Democratic presidents face this stuff, not just b/c their coalitions are partial, but also b/c there is a conservative impulse in the legacy media to want them to fail.
They can't accuse Uncle Joe of being foreign-born, so they offer a tyranny of too-high expectations.
This is also a logical consequence of news coverage that focuses on personal narrative/personality instead of structural history/analysis. Democrats get tarred & feathered b/c they want nuance *instead* of sound bites. It would be better to have BOTH.
But white civility keeps them from crowing about legit achievements. That said, I suspect that Biden is also letting the GOP tank themselves on voting rights. If/when the Senate fails to pass an omnibus bill, it will be a major driver of the midterm campaigns.
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At some point we need to talk about emotional and social dysregulation as a feature of the MAGA crowd.
You can be pissed that they exist but there are a LOT of them and they are in your families and sit in your church pews and process your paychecks and work in your schools.
In the 60s, communication scholars shied away from studying social movements because they freaked about: Black activists, women, queers people, and labor folks making emotional appeals
They also bought into a bunch of (mostly pop) psychology about how social movements created groupthink and cults of personality.
Also: when liberals/lefties produce fantasies about a potential coup, they are participating in REALIZING A COUP.
That's why professors of rhetoric CAUTION against that kind of SPECULATION. It makes the possibility more likely because people see it as a legitimate outcome.
People want to Be Prepared. I get it. But it's been 4 years. Read some Siskind, FFS. These are not new shenanigans.
But the power is in the FANTASIZING about a MORE destabilized federal government and that's EXACTLY what's going down with the QAnoners and the Parler fascists.
Cool, calm, collected is how you manage the outrage machine. You don't doing by freaking out the anxious libs. You do it by calmly asserting power.
Combatting the misinformation of Trump Administration (even in the transition) has to be focused on:
1.) repeating the facts (Biden won, Biden won with the most votes ever, Biden won the EC, there is no legal standing for the frivolous lawsuits, etc.)
2.) reasserting organizational norms about the secretaries of state and election commissioners across the US and their deep investment in fair elections
3.) shoring up support for US marshals to remove Trump from the White House, if they need to
I wrote an essay in 2016 about how Bernie channeled white rage in a way that stole energy from Trump and short-circuited the fascist impulse among the mad-sad whites.
But the democratic party didn't choose to channel the mad-sad, it picked technocrat, nuance pantsuit lady.
And the mad-sad fascists multiplied under the incompetent narcissist tv fellow.