Every election is, in effect, a test of what will be carried over from one president to the next, or from one party to another. Nominations demonstrate which trends have staying power, and these are the ideas that define political periods. https://twitter.com/chrisdjackson/status/1263838110691004416

Take the 1940 Republican nomination, where the victory of Wendell Willkie’s nomination cemented the new deal and internationalism, or Dwight Eisenhower, who further enshrined them as postwar policies.

There was no scenario where democrats took nothing from Trump. Just by the natural act of reacting to a defeat you inherently take *something* the question was what. Would it be populism, radicalism and confrontational outsider politics?

The answer instead appears to be the defining charictaristics of this political period are nostalgia, conservatism, cults of personality around elderly political figures and a refusal to engage with criticism of your candidate.

It would be wrong to assume Biden is a refutation of trump. In many ways, of course, he would be. But the very idea that you can “refute” a politician, that through the election of a lesser evil you can purge politics of your anointed opposition is itself Trumpian.

You cannot slow the tide of historical development. It’s an absolutely hopeless task. Things will change, however, things *can* change into backward looking periods, if that makes sense. The new normal, it seems, is to be obsessed with a return to the old normal.

There will of course be different characterizations and manifestations of this trend. It will face internal opposition within political parties and most importantly it will be looking backwards to two very different periods. But it is fundamentally the same drive.