Michael Walsh's "
Good-Bye to All That" makes that case.
Despite the polls, which at this point only offer a choice between two superannuated, erratic geriatrics, the voting public understands that neither Trump nor Biden is the way forward. Both are running in large part on resentment of the other, and of the nearly -- nearly -- 50 percent of Americans who, at the moment, support them. But there is a near-zero chance that either man will be on the ballot in November of 2024 when the only poll that matters takes place. (Ask Hillary Clinton if she disagrees.) Biden is visibly crumbling before everybody's eyes, while Trump's King Lear imitation on his vanity social-media platform, Truth Social, has become a national embarrassment.
Further, the increasingly surly Biden's performance in office is the best argument against returning him to power, while Trump's disgraceful final year in office, which includes both turning the country over to the sinister Tony Fauci and summoning the demons of January 6 to challenge an election even his closet advisers later admitted under oath they knew was lost, disqualifies him from another turn in the Oval Office.
The two presidential opponents are particularly bad. Their cohort is past its sell-by date. We saw something similar
as the G.I. politicians aged out.
Thus Generations begins with a comparison of President Kennedy's inaugural parade with that of President Bush the elder. Both Presidents served with distinction in World War II, and their inaugural parades were slices in time of the G. I. Generation in rising middle age and in elderhood. Working hypothesis: epochal events shape cohorts of individuals, in the case of the G.I.s a massive coming of age challenge combining economic distress and global war.
At the time, Jimmy Carter was preseasonal, according to that logic, and failed. Joe Biden is postseasonal, whether it is he doing the failing or his minders isn't relevant. What comes next has a Fourth Turning vibe to it,
irregular cadences of history notwithstanding.
With neither octogenarian (Trump would be 82 at the close of a hypothetical second term) in the race, the way would be clear for a long-overdue changing of the Boomer and even pre-Boomer guard that has long dominated U.S. politics. A Trump- and Biden-free election opens up vast new vistas for a rapidly changing country, allowing frank if not always friendly discussion about today's particularly thorny problems, including the untrammeled invasion across the southern border, the rolling back of Critical Theory and all its unholy spawns, and returning the libertine genie of "non-binary" sexuality to its bottle and burying it at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
That might be so, and Mr Walsh hopes for a restoration of a state of good order.
The removal of Trump and Biden from the lists would also immediately make clear the stark distinctions between the parties, unencumbered by their outsized, media-fueled personalities. On the left, the death of modern Liberalism, which began with the McGovern campaign of 1972, would be laid bare, and the "woke" minority exposed for the malignant civilization-killers they are. On the right, the post-presidential poison of Trumpism would dissipate into the atmosphere, to be replaced by a fair contest among Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence (representing some form of Trumpism minus Trump), and perhaps even Glenn Youngkin, currently lurking in plain sight.
Possibly, although there are
four political parties stuffed into those two major parties, and the people controlling Dementia Joe are going to continue to have to placate the True Believers, no matter how much destruction of the big cities there will be, and the populists calling themselves Republicans will find other champions. Mr Walsh might exhort, "So imagine a world without Biden or Trump; it's easy if you try. Now go out there and make it happen." That new saecular order might still hold surprises.
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