One of my favorite movie moments is in George Lucas’s wholesale ripoff of the Moses story mixed up with a little Star Wars and a little more Lord of the Rings. It’s called Willow and it’s brilliant. Anyway, there’s a scene where the young Warwick Davis, as the titular Willow, is being tested by his village’s wizard to see if he has the makings of a sorcerer. The old magician asks a number of candidates in which finger holds the power to change the universe. The hapless fools pick the wizard’s fingers seemingly at random, all failing, until we get to Willow… who does the same thing, only to fail similarly.
When talking with the wizard later, Willow confesses that his initial intuition was to say, “my own finger,” but that this was cheap and stupid. The old wizard laughs and says, “but that was the right answer all along!” This is an important part of Willow’s character arc as he learns to believe in himself and his own power, even though the world tells him that he is small and powerless.
It makes for fairly decent, if heavy-handed, thematic filmmaking, the sort of stuff that Lucas excels at. But it’s also eerily reminiscent of how the American liberal/left wing continually fucks itself over.
Like Willow, the American Left has spent so long on the outside of power that it doesn’t know how to act when it achieves moderate to strong electoral success. The electorate continually looks to figures, messianic in nature, to ride in and save them. This worked once, around 2008, when Barry Obama sailed into office off the joshing failstorm of the second Bush administration, righted the ship, and piloted us like a Predator drone above an innocent Pakistani wedding to eight comfortable years of Democratic smugness.
Since then, with the ascension of Trump’s bloated carcass to the Presidency and his sad sort of slide into irrelevance on OANN, American liberals have vaulted from messianic figure to messianic figure, hoping that this will be the one who restores Saturday brunch and lets American liberals get back to their ritual of the Daily Show and Maddow followed by smug superiority as they order bacon fat French toast with artisanal maple syrup sugar and bottomless mimosas. But that day is not coming, my libby friends, and you need to get over worrying at it.
I see this every day online, as my liberal friends long for the day when some virtuous prosecutor arises who will finally prosecute Trump, put the fat motherfucker behind bars, and then America can go back to the Way it Was.
You know who you sound like? You’ve found your own version of MAGA — Make America 2010 Again. But we can’t go back to 2010. We shouldn’t WANT to go back to 2010. 2010 was not a good year; you just liked it because it was better than 2006 and 2018, to say nothing of 2020.
Liberal desire for a strong paternalistic figure to enter stage left and restore the pre-Trump status quo is the same sort of mental disease as aging Boomers longing to go back to 1972 when they had access to Pablo’s private stash, endless disco, and cops who could kill black people with impunity. The past ain’t a place any more; you can’t go back there. You can only move forward.
And the American Left, longing for a cult of personality to subsume their will to, for a Leftist Trump Icon to appear and lead us to conquer under the symbol of empty champagne flutes with a dusting of orange pulp, is not going to appear. Remember when y’all thought it was Michael “Raid my Trust Account” Avenatti? Remember when it was Elizabeth “Should Have Nominated my Dog” Warren? Or Saint Bernard a Sanders? What about Robert “Registered Republican” Mueller? And now Cy “I am Literally a NYC Politician” Vance? Quit waiting for these flawed and avaricious idiots to ride in and save you!
The power to change the world is already in your own hands. Stand up and realize your power.