Despite the very real threat that Trump will be voted back into power in little over a year given recent polls indicating a dead heat between Biden and Trump, the Trump years feel—at least to me—like a distant, nightmarish memory. But we appear to be staring, in a national fit of déjà vu, once more into the abyss. We confront an impending presidential election between two unpopular, aging candidates and two corrupt party establishments who will spend billions of dollars to court a negligible percentage of the population, a dubious elect whose members profess to be twisted into knots of indecision given the choice of a felonious, belligerent wannabe Mussolini on the one hand and a senescent, milquetoast centrist on the other. Biden has been disappointing in myriad ways, but at least he doesn’t demonstrate a wish to jail his political opposition and purge the ranks of the federal bureaucracy en masse. But unless liberals reckon with Bidenism’s many shortfalls and commit to upsetting our already antidemocratic status quo, we may get to see what Trump’s “retribution” agenda looks like in practice.
