is there a Biden Era?
Maybe it is fitting for the Biden Era, whatever that will come to mean, that in practice this kind of aesthetic is a hallmark less of history and tradition than of the last 15 years of popular media: digitized “texture” that feels cheap, tired, and adrift from the time it tries to evoke. It illustrates an irony that feels at least thematically close to Biden’s own career: though he has been around forever, he could only be president now.
Is there even a Biden Era? Would it even be worthwhile to summon one? In this newsletter, I have been interested in Biden’s bizarreness, in part because his supporters are reluctant to name it, rightfully anxious about his age and lack of clear succession. But it also feels like the Biden Era doesn’t exist, or at least that it is notably un-theorized, particularly compared to Trump. Perhaps Eras are defined by crises, which Trump seemed to embody in his very person, and Biden’s mumbling appeals to normalcy feel less era-defining than climate chaos, AI, war.
The Trump years were so full of real-time analysis and culture-crit pablum that it made the discourse seem even more trivial and leant even more power to the man himself. Trump Derangement Syndrome, initially a pejorative term used by Trump fans against Trump haters, eventually came to mean the general derangement of all things in his orbit, as if some dark aura had warped the minds of election-deniers and never-Trumpers alike. Though his presidency has generated some moments of deranging incoherence, Biden has no Derangement Syndrome. There is the fact of his feebleness, but none of the palace intrigue and photo-ops and narcissism that came to define the Trump years.
It’s only the start of a thought, but what if the Trump Era and Trump Derangement Syndrome are just mutually constitutive fictions? What if the search for a Biden Era is not useful at all? What if the Biden years seem resistant to meaningful periodization because the very way the Trump Era was periodized—mythologized, really, in real time—has become the dominant model for culture writing at large? Like so much crap written during the Trump years, commentary quickly descends from useful interpretation into a game of who-said-it-cleverest. What if needless neologisms just wall off the past? What if Eras are just clickbait timekeeping, shorthand for a recurring American amnesia?
Like Make America Great Again, which is in fact a slogan from the Reagan Era, Trump Derangement Syndrome comes from an earlier term, this time from the Bush Era: Charles Krauthammer coined Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003. If we’re living in an Era, it began a long time ago.
ben tapeworm