The dangerous seduction of back to ‘normal’
“Life is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised last week in a Thanksgiving address to the nation. He was talking about life after COVID-19, but you could be forgiven if you thought he was also making a promise about life after Donald Trump.
It’s almost impossible to separate the two. To the extent that voters gave Biden a mandate, it was to end both scourges and make America normal again.
Despite the grim resurgence of COVID19, Dr. Anthony Fauci — the public health official Trump ignored and then muzzled, with whom Biden’s staff is now conferring — sounded guardedly optimistic last week. He said vaccines will allow “a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go by as we get well into 2021.”
Normal. You could almost hear America’s giant sigh of relief, similar to the one felt when Trump implicitly conceded the election by allowing the transition to begin. them, no Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.ItiscomfortingtothinkofbothCOVID
19 and Trump as intrusions into normality, For the same reasons, they’re unlikely to aberrations from routines that prevailed stir strong opposition from Republicans — before. a necessity for Senate confirmation, partic
When Biden entered the presidential ularly if Democrats fail to win the two race last year, he said history would look Senate runoffs in Georgia on Jan. 5. back on Trump as an “aberrant moment in Boring, reassuring, normal — these are time.” Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be
The end of both aberrations conjures up careful. They could also be his great weaka former America that, by contrast, might nesses. appear quiet and safe, even boring. That’s because any return to “normal”
Biden’s early choices for his Cabinet and would be disastrous for America. senior staff fit the same mold —“all boring Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the picks,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Graeme coronavirus.
Wood, referring to Biden’s foreign policy Normal is four decades of stagnant team, “who, if you shook them awake and wages and widening inequality when appointed them in the middle of the night almost all economic gains went to the top. at any time in the last decade, could have Normal is 40 years of shredded safety nets, reported to their new jobs and started and the most expensive but least adequate work competently by dawn.” health care system in the modern world. Hallelujah. Normal is worsening police brutality.
All of Biden’s designees, including Janet Normal is a GOP that for years has been Yellen for Treasury secretary and Antony actively suppressing minority votes and Blinken for secretary of state, are experiembracing white supremacists. Normal is enced and competent — refreshing, espea Democratic Party that for years has been cially after Trump’s goon squads. abandoning the working class.
They also stand out for their abilities not Given the road we were on, Trump and to stand out. There is no firebrand among COVID-19 were not aberrations. They were inevitabilities. The moment we are now in — with Trump virtually gone, Biden assembling his Cabinet, and most of the nation starting to feel a bit of relief — is a temporary reprieve.
If the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see. And health and environmental crises that make the coronavirus another step toward Armageddon.
Hence the paradox. America wants to return to a reassuring normal, but Biden can’t allow it. Complacency would be deadly. He has to both calm the waters and stir the pot.
It’s a mistake to see this challenge as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. It’s about dealing with problems that have worsened for decades and if left unattended much longer will be enormously destructive.
So the central question: In an exhausted and divided America that desperately wants a return to normal, can Biden find the energy and political will for bold changes that are imperative?