Trump’s Culture Wars Were Meant to Distract From the Crisis. It Didn’t Work.
If Joe Biden managed to pull off a victory despite his lackluster campaign, it’s in part because the electorate felt the urgent need for a president who would focus on the coronavirus crisis instead of railing against a series of cultural bogeymen. No wonder: most people care more about their material conditions than the partisan culture wars.
A Donald Trump supporter holding a QAnon flag visits Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
If indeed Donald Trump’s presidency has been cut short after just one term, then the next several months will be devoted to defining Trumpism and interpreting the country’s repudiation of it.
The theories will be diverse, but one to anticipate is that Joe Biden’s victory suggests the rehabilitation of political centrism, which has sustained challenges by perceived outsiders of all stripes over the last decade. The window for experimental alternatives to sanctioned establishment politics — represented in the minds of many moderates by Trump and Bernie Sanders alike, never mind the diametrically opposite politics of the Right and the Left — will be declared closed.
That explanation is attractive in its simplicity, and especially seductive for anyone with a major stake in restoring popular confidence in the existing political elite. But it doesn’t accurately reflect the nature of the race. Biden as the establishment versus Trump as the gate-crasher is a throwback to the last election, when Trump was a real estate mogul and reality television star with no political experience, not the incumbent presiding over a nightmarish series of interlocking crises.
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