The Messiah Effect

Right now, we need heroes more than technocrats. But we still have to hold them to standards.

In August of 2022, President Joe Biden announced he was giving student loan relief to every American with outstanding loans.

Twenty thousand dollars. Each. To help ease the burden of paying for a cost of living that included necessities that either didn’t exist or are far more expensive now than when many people went to college.*

In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that Biden couldn’t give that loan relief.

I’m going to ignore the speciousness of the Court’s argument, or how this same Court has bent over backwards to give Trump almost everything he wants on the very grounds that they denied Biden’s student loan relief.

The issue for me is that large numbers of people in this country heard in 2022 that $20,000 of their loans would be forgiven. Then they heard in 2023 that the program was canceled.

They didn’t know the details about why.

Moreover, they didn’t care about the why.

They just knew that something good was finally going to happen for them to ease the lopsideness of their income versus their bills.

And then that promise was taken away, which left them disillusioned and angry at the government.

It didn’t matter that Biden and his team endeavored to give people student loan relief anyway, in piecemeal fashion.

Those details weren’t as important to most Americans as the big picture: the government promised them something and then took it away.

Off with their heads!

Biden did a lot of small policy things like that. You have no idea how happy I was to find that he was cracking down on the fees that industries like airlines, cable, internet providers and TICKETMASTER could (over)charge us.

But I’m a nerd, who looks at stuff that most people won’t notice at all. We get angry when a fee is added on that we don’t think should be there. We don’t notice when what we don’t think should be there is, in fact, not there.

Biden was a technocratic leader. As were Obama and Clinton. And the Bushes. They all tinkered with policy, setting a direction that would have large impacts down the road, but amounted to changing the direction of a laser by a sixteenth of an inch at the source.

It’s like the Butterfly Effect. Nobody notices the butterfly. We all notice the effect, years, decades later. But only the nerds who study butterflies can try to calculate how much a wing flap affected the future.

I’ve been thinking again, in the wake of the Graham Platner debacle, about Joe Biden’s positive but quiet direction-setting

Platner isn’t quiet. And he had no specific policies to fix things. But oh does he have a talent for articulating what needs to be fixed. And in doing so, he made folks feel seen. He validated them. He validated their anger and discontent. Then told them a vote for him (or money to buy advertising to convince voters) would help alleviate that anger and discontent.

Right now, when so many Americans have adopted nihilism as their life outlook, we need leaders to step up and help us dream of a better future - or any future at all.

I’m not saying we don’t need leaders with solutions. I was fully expecting Platner to arrive at the Senate and caucus with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I fully expect that the progressives in the House are interfacing with the progressives in the Senate, and include progressives in cities, to come up with solutions that will help their constituents, along with the strategies to implement them.

I expect progressives who care about issues of class and economic inequality to work together.

And I expect progressives who vote to also insist that progressivism deals with racism and sexism.

We cannot move forward if we undermine people’s basic humanity.

But we cannot reach a better destination without first seeing the destination in our mind’s eye. If all we see are leaders tinkering with the mechanics of a vessel that is sinking, then we are not inspired to even think a better life is possible.

I have heard people in the last week decry that Platner supporters were misguided in looking for a messiah, or even just a charismatic, well-spoken leader.

Please point to the last Democratic president who wasn’t also incredibly charismatic? Johnson? Who replaced the charismatic but neophyte Kennedy? Truman? Who replaced the man who harnessed new communication technology to chat with the nation and coax them into a world war in a friendly, fatherly way?

Honestly, I still think there are people on the left who think Obama had good policy, when it fact he had neoliberal policies that extended our suffering. But boy is that man charismatic.

Imagine all the good he could have done if his policies had matched his rhetoric. If he had fought for a bigger financial bailout, which would have healed the economy faster, and kept so many of us from falling through the cracks. If he had insisted on universal healthcare, and dismantled the giant monopolistic insurance companies. If he had prosecuted big banks rather than telling the world’s most powerful CEO’s that he wanted to work with them.

Let’s be clear, we don’t need Graham Platner to be the one articulating those policies. A man who doesn’t take no for an answer, who pulls off his condom and jokes about it, who blames others when his actions catch up to him, is not someone I trust to make good decisions for the country.

Would be that we had felt the same about Bill Clinton, who ruined a 23-year-old intern’s life before he threw his constituents under the bus by, to cite three examples, dismantling welfare, signing NAFTA, and tying CEO pay to stock prices.

We need leaders talking about fixing health care and lowering housing costs and raising the minimum wage and giving us reproductive control over our own bodies.

We need leaders who see us all, not just white men.

We need those leaders to make their promises happen. And tell us what they’re doing. It’s a constant dialogue between voters and leaders.

One of the reasons Alexandra Occasio Cortez does so well is that she has casual social media conversations in which she talks about the underlying causes of how we got into the economic mess we’re in today. She doesn’t lecture. She shares her inner dialogue, gives viewers a chance to ask questions, and recommends further ways viewers can become better educated.

She knows people will listen to her. But she also knows she has a responsibility to say something worth listening to.

Most of us only hear politicians when they want our vote. Not when they’re trying to get us to understand the issues in order to help them affect policy.

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be exploring the ideas that many of our leaders are articulating, and explore how that can be made into a movement.

Please join me.

*Cell phones now cost about $60 a month per phone, mostly because you have to pay for the phone as well as the service, and each person in the family has a phone. In the 1980s and 1990s, you had a phone line, for which you paid about $15 a month.

Not that I lament the invention of cell phones. But the cost of connecdtion is undeniably - and unnecessarily - higher than it was 30 years ago.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, we also watched TV for free. We simply had to buy the box with the vacuum tube.

Now, we pay around $120 a month.

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