America's Normie Nightmare: How Centrist Voters Ushered in Their Own Dystopia

Photo: Journal of Democracy

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” This sentence, wrongfully attributed to Sinclair Lewis, has been a staple of Left discourse for decades. The election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence to the highest offices in the land made these words - whoever’s they actually are - seem awfully prophetic. And despite President Biden’s promise to “restore the soul” of our nation upon his inauguration, America went into this year’s midterms poised to reinvest in Trumpism, with predictions of “red waves” abound.

However, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, economic anxiety, fear of violent crime, and runaway inflation, incumbents fared surprisingly well in Tuesday’s elections, making the 2022 cycle an unusually good one for the party in power. There are many explanations for this, ranging from the Dobbs decision, to candidate quality, to the fact that the Republicans offered no credible solutions of their own to any of the aforementioned problems. But whatever theory one ascribes to the Democrats’ relative show of strength, the fact remains that America is in real trouble, and most people know it. Therefore, these midterm results present us with a puzzling contradiction in which voters signed off on what they themselves find to be an untenable status quo.

This all brings to mind George Carlin’s variation on the opening mystery quote, which he recited on a Bill Maher panel in 2005. He proclaimed, “When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.” Capitalism, he contended, when unleashed upon the world with no formidable ideological opposition after the fall of the Soviet Union, would inevitably lead to a post-democratic era ushered in with willful ignorance and bliss by a population brought to heel as brainwashed servants of market masters.

And in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, Carlin’s vision of American fascism seems - for now, at least - more prescient than that often accredited to Lewis. Americans sense our country’s steep and rapid decline, but are ill-equipped to make the necessary course correction adjustments. To be clear, it is not my opinion that the GOP offered a better path forward that voters should have chosen. Rather, my claim is that the American system, as Carlin predicted, has rendered its electorate void of the imagination, courage, and will power to dig ourselves out of this hole we all know we’re in, even as we sink further and further into it.

The Democratic establishment, in two consecutive elections, neutralized the Bernie Sanders campaigns with such ease and effectiveness that Bernie himself is now their loyal foot soldier. The George Floyd protests which bravely and forcefully demanded not just a restorative, but a redistributive approach to criminal justice reform, have been invalidated by the predictable demonization of their organically crafted and perfectly rational rallying cry to defund the police. Even the most modest of initiatives - paid family leave, universal pre-K, and Medicare expansion - were deemed beyond the pale by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who received little pushback and no discipline from within the national Democratic caucus.

All challenges to the system from the Left, whether major or minor, have been deemed illegitimate. From Not Me Us, to Black Lives Matter, to Build Back Better, all of it was intolerable to entrenched power, and so all of it was destroyed. On the Right, the MAGA phenomenon had its day in the sun, but seems now to be running on fumes after years of incoming from every which way.

And so, with the establishment’s mission to dull both the Left and Right edges of post-2008 populism seemingly accomplished, the remaining hordes of normie moderate voters have been deputized as enforcers of their own American dystopia. The bipartisan center achieved this not by proving their own virtue through persuasion and debate, but rather by insisting at every turn that no real change is possible, shrinking the Overton window to a pinhole’s width.

Only a populace so deliberately and decisively demoralized by the brute force of state and corporate power - also known as fascism - could be made so hopeless as to consent to its own destruction in such humiliating fashion. That incumbents could be so immune from consequence after presiding over such degradation proves that American voters, for the most part, are resigned to their fate. Just as a dying animal assumes the crouch position when it knows it can’t go on any longer and just wants to live its last moments as quietly and stilly as possible, the centrist majority has been stripped of both the desire and the fortitude to even imagine a better world, much less fight for one.

Instead, seeing no better option in the Republican Party, Americans made what tragically seemed the only sensible decision: to double down on the “lesser evil” and play out the endgame with the devil they know, despite being fairly certain of the result.

This outcome represents not a triumph of democracy over authoritarianism, but rather the defeat of one variety of fascism at the other’s hand. For now, the momentum of theocratic nationalism has been stalled. The “flag and cross” volume has been shelved. In its place, just enough Nike shoes and Smiley shirts to numb the pain of societal collapse under familiar management and elite supervision.