US President Joe Biden (Image: EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo)

“Let’s go, Brandon” has become the catch-cry of the moment after a US sportscaster thought he heard a crowd chanting the essentially meaningless phrase. 

They were in fact chanting “fuck Joe Biden”.

The meme got rolled into something else when a Southwest Airlines pilot used it as a sign-off to passengers before take off. Which then initiated a new round of debate about free speech, and on and on…

Nevertheless, the Democrats got their “let’s go, Brandon” moment in the round of elections this year. There’s a handful of state and city elections that land out of cycle, a year after presidential election years, which act as a useful test of how the parties are faring.

That test has now been performed for the Democrats and the left in Virginia, New York and elsewhere, and the results have been universally terrible. They got shellacked everywhere they turned out, and the politics turned largely on culture wars — which, somewhat abated here, show no sign of cessation in the US. Indeed even when the Dems won the left lost.

Brandon got going, whoever he is.

The headline result was in Virginia where both the governor and state assembly races were delivered to the Republican party after a decade of Democrat dominance. Governor Terry McAuliffe, once spoken of as a Hillary vice-presidential potential pick — and do kisses get any deathier than that? — started the race about five points up, before being steadily worn down by a relentless campaign by equity trader Glenn Youngkin, based substantially around the issues of education, curriculum, critical race theory and gender and bathroom use in schools. The works.

The very local matters they used for raw material — incredibly complex and tangled stories about education department memos, anti-racist book lists, allegedly unreported assaults, single complaints by parents about school curricula — was bundled up into a campaign specifically aimed at a few white suburban counties that had been trending Dem-wards over three election cycles, especially so during the Trump period.

Youngkin’s campaign steered clear of Trumpian style (though The Donald endorsed Youngkin, unasked) and instead focused on the notion of parent choice in schools, making it an issue of family autonomy and best practice, appealing to college-educated whites.

McAuliffe and the Democrats were caught defenceless by the ferocity and popularity of the campaign, and they never managed to rally against Youngkin. Treating the concerns as dog whistle stuff, a new version of race politics, McAuliffe doubled down on ridiculing the charges, rather than making any concession to concerns about institutional power.

Affirming parent choice may have taken the air out of Youngkin’s campaign — but that may be what the Yanks call “Monday morning quarter-backing”, and such concessions might have set off a landslide. They would certainly have been unacceptable to the state party’s POC and progressive/left contingent.

The added difficulty for McAuliffe in trying to steer the campaign back to standard big politics and the Biden program was that the Biden program is stuck deep in the mud, with two Democrat senators — Joe Manchin from very Republican West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona — refusing to wave through a $350-billion-a-year (usually conveyed with its 10 year total $3.5 trillion) social program giving paid family leave, childcare, and much more that is standard for anywhere outside the US.

The program is in the process of being gutted and still may fail. The Dems had hoped it would be “announceable” by now in some form or other; a flag to rally to. With Biden doing the usual Dem vanishing trick — refusing to sell or spruik his politics substantially — it was always going to be a tough battle in Virginia.

But it was bad everywhere for team left. The Dems had a predictable win in the New York City mayoral race, with ex-cop Eric Adams winning, but that had been a loss for the left in the primaries — Adam representing a centrist repudiation of the somewhat progressive trends of outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio.

In Minneapolis a “ballot measure” proposal (i.e. electoral referendum) to “defund the police” in the wake of the hideous police execution of George Floyd failed — even though it was not an “abolish the police” measure. (It reduced police funds, but more crucially removed police autonomy, placing them within the city administration.)

And perhaps most disappointingly, in Buffalo, New York, socialist candidate for mayor India Walton, who had won the Democratic primary, lost to Democrat incumbent Byron Brown, who had run as a write-in independent. 

There’s really no good news for the Democrats in the results, especially as regards the 2022 midterms, which they are virtually certain to lose, and lose big in.

Barring great reversals, both the House and Senate will revert to Republican control and that will give the increasingly Trumpified party free rein to cause mayhem. Whichever gutted Biden program emerges from current negotiations may well be as good as it gets. Biden has been left of Obama to date on a number of issues, but one suspects he is less likely than O to push the limit on executive powers, to get things done. 

Curiously, however, a bout of Republican mayhem may be just what the Democrats need for 2024 — especially of the Trumpian variety. In Virginia, Youngkin won with a politics that was notable for swinging round almost entirely to what we call “the biopolitical”. Rather than the politics of “who gets what when how” — i.e. the politics of formed citizens — biopolitics, in an expanded sense, is about how people come to be formed, what sort of citizens we make.

Hence the huge focus on curriculum in recent decades, something which had been a matter for specialists. It would appear that the progressives’ approach of laying on a certain educational program to shift social categories of race over time is less sophisticated than the new politics of parent choice.

To a degree the contradictions of the progressive program are appearing: a sole parent’s complaint about a school book list including Toni Morrison’s Beloved was based on the suggestion that the book had traumatised her child. Well, Beloved is harrowing; it wouldn’t work as a novel if it wasn’t.

But if you’ve developed discourses of precarious subjectivity, with trigger warnings, etc, then “harrowing” becomes “traumatising” and the complaint has an arguable framework. 

What does all that mean for left politics in the US? The single, simplest takeaway is that there has been a “let’s go, Brandon” level of mishearing across the country.

Americans will support left stuff — $15 minimum wage proposals have been voted up in multiple red states — but they are wary of whole programs. And the notion that the left projects of being insurgents on cultural matters drives them wild.

It’s progressives who are seen as the masters in these matters now. If they want to get a progressive program going they will have to come to some level of self-reflected understanding about such. They won’t.

The message is too garbled. To the midterms! Let’s go Brandon, Brandon let’s go!