The Bums Lost, Lebowski
2024 is not 2020
It’s hard to gauge “vibes”. Reporters try to gauge them by interviewing Some Random Dork At A Bob Evans, and pollsters try by asking people about issues they haven’t thought about for a nanosecond in their entire lives. These methods are flawed, as are all other methods. Any article about “vibes” or “political climate” — whatever you want to call it — is bound to be a guess based on a few data points. Which is to say: If you decide to skip this article and just watch this turtle cleaning its ass on a toothbrush, I don’t really blame you.
For those of you choosing to plow forward: The Democratic National Convention is providing clear signs that the wave of…whatever the fuck that was that crested in 2020 — wokeness, left-ism, pick a term — has washed back out. In the late 2010s, it looked like Obama-era liberalism was DVDs, and vaguely revolutionary leftism was streaming, and that the old would permanently give way to the new. But this turned out to be the wrong metaphor (unless DVDs suddenly make a comeback). The revolution has fizzled. As guy who may have been pretending to need a wheelchair once said: “The bums lost, Lebowski.”
The Democratic convention is a major data point making me feel that way. This convention is already very different from the last one, and also from the 2020 campaign, generally, which shocked people with how much it resembled the stage banter at a Sleater-Kinney concert. In 2020, the candidates competed to: 1) Dismantle all barriers to immigration; 2) Design the most expensive health care system in the galaxy; and 3) Drown in an ocean of identity-based progressive speak faster than their competitors. The fact that the winner ended up being the guy who was the least swept away by the left-wing riptide did little to blunt the feeling that the Democrats’ future was to the left of the left of the left.