By Opinion and Editorial editor James Mellen
If you have been following this DNC primary cycle like have, then your brain has most likely been completely destroyed from the utter pointlessness of it all. There are 15 identical candidates, then there’s Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang. This is not to say that any of those four candidates are good, it is just to say that they exist outside of the typical DNC establishment.
By and large, watching the campaigns of these four candidates develop has been pretty entertaining. Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang gained most of their popularity through memes, and I will forever think of Williamson as my “orb mom”. The Tulsi campaign has been even more entertaining to watch, she is the Eminem to Hillary Clinton’s Ja Rule. Of course Sander’s campaign has been the only campaign of the cycle to be good in the traditional sense. If you weren’t moved by his speech about fighting for someone you don’t know, then you are probably a heartless monster. His social media has been running the best out of any campaign as well. His videos featuring AOC, and AOC’s videos featuring Bernie, have been adorable.
On the other hand, the candidates that have been gaining the most attention by the establishment DNC and the establishment media, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren, have been consistently posting and doing the cringe. The newest example of this is the Pete Buttigieg ‘Panic at The Disco’ dance. If you haven’t seen the dance I recommend you save yourself, but trust me, it’s incredibly cringy.
Liz Warren’s campaign has certainly came in second in terms of cringe, although in her defense it is largely do to her culture-less white upper-class fan base. Recently her supporters built a huge parade float of her dog Bailey, a pleasant surprise to Warren who enthusiastically began to hug the giant dog. What happened next was a travesty. Her fan base began to chant the sentence “big structural Bailey”. This of course is meant to be a play on Warren’s promise of “big structural change”, but in reality it isn’t a play on anything, because you wouldn’t call a parade float of a turkey a “big structural turkey”.
When it comes to Joe Biden’s campaign, it is difficult to tell if he is posting cringe or if he is just old and completely detached from reality.
So why is The DNC so devoted to posting cringe?
It has become difficult to tell at this point in the campaign cycle if the overwhelming amount of cringe content being created from the center-right (Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are center-right) of the American political spectrum has come from the people who support this establishment or the politicians who perpetuate it.
However I don’t think it matters in any meaningful way, I think that the root cause of this cringey hysteria is a disorder (that I have invented) called “Trump Brain”. Here is the basic idea behind Trump brain, if you are white, cis and are currently making (or have parents who are making) over 65 thousand dollars a year then you have probably benefitted (or at least not been harmed by) the Trump presidency. However, it is extremely clear that Trump is bad. This has left a huge amount of cognitive dissonance to the white upper middle class liberal.
As a result, instead of leaning away from the cognitive dissonance, and realizing that Trump is a feature of the American culture and system, they lean into the cognitive dissonance and come to believe that they actually do not benefit from Trump because he does not have a Pete Buttigieg dance.
In other words, they unite on what they actually dislike about Trump, his vulgarity. They don’t dislike Trump’s politics, they dislike the fact that they can’t ignore the realities of Trump’s politics. So they reflexively move towards a candidate who hides their politics with a poorly choreographed dance to a Panic! At The Disco Song.