We Can't Want A Savior

My son was finishing his excessively large scoops of chocolate brownie fudge ice cream when Donald Trump’s dripping orange face flashed on the TV.

A sixth grader with a sense of justice that makes his parents awfully proud, my kid turned to me, swallowed his last bite of ice cream and asked, “Do you think he’ll change?”

Trying not to shut down the conversation and make him feel silly for asking whether Trump would change – moderate, in cable news parlance – in his second term, I said I hoped so, but wouldn’t count on it. 

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My son scraped the bottom of his plastic yellow ice cream bowl for the last bits of brownie and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe he will.” 

I let him believe that for at least one night because he’s a kid and doesn’t deserve to be showered with doomerism from his chronically logged on father – or anyone, really. It was so sweetly naive for my kid – who has visceral reactions to Trump’s racism, both casual and overt – thought our elected leader might stop being such an incredible asshole during his second White House stint. 

That adorable naivety was familiar to me, for I was among the elder millennials who very much believed, in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s sweeping 2008 victory, that politics was over and we had won. We had found our savior and he was kind of nerdy and almost painfully earnest and well meaning and, of course, a generational political orator. This man from Illinois, who had made millennials perk up during his rousing 2004 DNC speech ahead of the party's inexplicable loss to George W. Bush, had saved us all. We volunteered for him, we came out for him in droves, and we won. This terrible little game was over. Our work here was done.

The book I wrote about a right-wing author touring the United States after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory is free today, if you’re into it. 

This naivety – my naivety, at least – somehow wasn’t extinguished after eight years of congressional Republicans squashing Obama’s agenda. Their intransigence had been a marvel to behold from a purely political standpoint; Republicans stymied him at nearly every turn. Obama would barely get a right-wing healthcare reform plan through Congress. He wasn't allowed to seat a Supreme Court justice that would have given liberals their first Court majority in generations. Executive actions were nixed by right-wing judges who had fully captured the federal courts. Yes, a seemingly transitional Democrat had won two terms, but he could not govern like a transitional figure, which is the whole point of the Republican project. 

I recall the deep-seated belief that Obama would not allow Trump to take power after his 2016 election victory. I had latched on to various conspiracy theories about Trump’s win and was certain Obama would do something – anything – to halt the transfer of power. He was our savior after all, and saviors do incredible things. Water into wine, things of that nature. 

Maybe you forget what 2016 was like. It was nothing like the 2024 election, with tech titans and the billionaire class and much of the mainstream press bowing before a thoroughly normalized Trump as he ran on the platform of dismantling multicultural democracy and using the law to torment his critics and opponents. Silicon Valley leaders did not fly to Trump’s Winter White House to grovel and kiss the ring and beg for sweet, sweet mercy after his 2016 win. The billionaire-controlled mainstream media in 2016 did not block criticism of Supreme Leader when it became clear he had a real shot, somehow, to win back the presidency. There was a shock and a sadness that pervaded everything in 2016. 

Today we see something quite different: Trump’s forced, psychotic smile on the magazine covers in grocery store checkouts; Democratic leaders shrugging their shoulders when asked about Trump’s dangerous, unqualified Cabinet picks; prominent folks from every sector rushing to congratulate Supreme Leader in his return to his rightful seat; and the entire finance world telling Americans to stop whining and enjoy the economic boom time of the new Roaring 20s.  

The weeks after the 2016 election were nothing like this. And in the stretch between Election Day and Inauguration Day, I was quite stupidly confident something would happen to ensure Trump would not take office. It all seemed far too unreal to actually happen. How could this shithead occupy the White House? It was, I thought, not possible. I don’t know what I thought Obama could do, but I assumed he would do What It Took to stop the country from falling into the hands of such an outwardly evil man, one clearly working for foreign powers.

I remember where I was when this delusion, this savior complex, was dispelled. I was at work on a Friday afternoon about two weeks before Trump was to take office and I saw a cell phone video of Obama striding along a street in New York City, reportedly on his way to a publisher’s office. He was putting the final touches on his post-presidency book, and was all smiles. He waved to adoring onlookers from across the street – people telling Obama they loved him, that they hope he’s doing well. One woman shouted, just before Obama vanished into a nearby building, “Save us!” 

In that moment, this person was all of us, or at least those of us who didn’t particularly want to take a high speed train straight into the jaws of fascist hell over the next four years. Save us, she cried. Do something. Stop this. And the president calmly walked out of view, ready to talk dollars and cents for whatever he planned on publishing in the coming months.  

Barack Obama was not our savior. Neither was Kamala Harris, though I fell under the savior spell for a while during the summer, when the Harris campaign knowingly or unknowingly deployed dilemma actions against the Trump campaign and made them more pathetic than frightening. She is the One, I thought for a fleeting moment. Someone who truly understands this system vs. anti-system political moment and what it takes to beat back the unstoppable incoherence of fascism. The bumbling, stumbling Biden had been swept aside and in came a candidate who could speak coherently about why Americans should keep the bad man out of power, and about her vision for how to bolster the nation's faltering democracy. Harris had come to save the day.

The day was not saved and here we are the precipice of another, much more organized team of fascists prepared to bulldoze representative democracy’s final guardrails. Harris was not a savior, just as Obama was not. Whoever comes next won’t be a savior either. 

The Savior's Appeal And Downside

Neither Harris nor Obama took the strongman approach favored by Trump and his fans and said only they could deliver the promise of America. Obama never even hinted that his presidency would be one of overwhelming executive action that would defang the powerful right wing. Harris, who campaigned for months with Dick Cheney's daughter, told us in word and deed that she was not going to save anyone from anything.

The American left's savior complex has to go. We have to stop pretending we live in a TV show waiting for a benevolent, all-powerful leader to show us the way and to defeat the bad guys. We have to stop wanting a savior because a savior is not coming.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said again and again during his 2008 campaign, an operation based on the vague promise of change, whatever that meant to you. Probably these are the words to which I should have held tight in the intervening years. Obama was telling me (us) that he was not a savior, nor did he have any intention on saving us. I – along with a generation of millennials who had been through the political meat grinder of the Bush years – did not want to hear this, so we didn't.

Finding and elevating a savior is so much easier than doing the hard work – getting involved in local and hyper-local politics, raising money for candidates in state-level races, creating a sense of community that will prove vital to beating back fascist cultural advances. Having someone storm into power and doing all the work for us, on behalf of us, would be worlds easier and seemingly more efficient than keeping our heads down and protecting vital institutions however we can in this age of democratic backsliding both in the US and abroad. 

Buying into the savior story is exactly what the American right has done over the past decade. Far too lazy to do the work, conservative activists and lawmakers have turned to one man to save them from the terrors of multicultural liberal democracy and Target ads featuring interracial couples and someone whose gender is not immediately clear. There is a strand of supreme laziness that runs through right-wing politics, and it is best seen in their reliance on a savior figure to deliver them the Promised Land. 

It’s a nice enough idea: Have one person shoulder the load and go about your life in this comfortable little dystopia we’ve created for ourselves. I get the appeal; maybe you do too. It’s also a deeply unstable arrangement. The savior leaves the scene and you have nothing left to hold together whatever loose coalition you’ve created. The entire project collapses. The savior had been the heavy coat of spray paint on the rusted-out shell of the movement or party. Underneath, there is nothing. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social