America’s Short-Term Memory May Be Its Saving Grace

Our near-sightedness led to the country’s current predicament. Here’s how it could offer a ladder out

Photo by Pinho . on Unsplash

There are any number of reasons that people cite in the discussion about why Democrats lost the 2024 election. Harris didn’t campaign hard enough. She didn’t strategize well enough. The strategies she did employ were too little too late. She wasn’t centrist enough. She wasn’t progressive enough.

If only Joe Biden had dropped out sooner. If only he’d never run for reelection. If only he’d handed the baton to Harris earlier. If only he’d allowed the American people to choose his Democratic successor, rather than simply anointing Harris as the party’s torchbearer.

She was the wrong choice. She was the right choice, but in the wrong way. She was too similar to Biden. She was too different from Biden. She was too tan. Too minority. Too woman. Too foolish for ever thinking she had a shot of being elected leader of our racist, misogynistic country.

In nearly every explanation offered for why Harris lost the 2024 election, I can’t help but see a kernel of truth. If circumstances were different, the country might have swung for her instead of Trump. But whether it was the weaponization of media and the effectiveness of Trump’s misinformation campaign or Harris’ own missteps and shortcomings as a candidate, it’s all but impossible to know what factors led to our current crossroads, and in what proportions. There’s no way to disentangle the major drivers from the minor ones. It’s not even particularly useful attempting to.

The debate over who and what are to blame for Harris’ loss is rarely more pragmatic than a hindsight competition. There were countless interlocking factors at play, and anyone claiming one change alone would have secured a Harris victory is shrinking a complex machine down to a single point of failure. It’s when we broaden our aperture and look at the shape of our culture at large that it becomes easier to process how the events of 2024 fit into the grand arc of our politics.

One perspective I’ve found helpful for understanding where we are today within modern American history is that we’re both victims and beneficiaries of our collective short-term memory.

In every election of the past decade, the results were more a reflection of the present moment and our perceived struggles than the promises of how the opposition planned to address them. Trump’s initial win in 2016 had little to do with enthusiasm for what he was selling. It had more to do with a quietly building resentment of Barack Obama than either of the two candidates running to replace him.

People thought that electing someone so different from Obama would suddenly ease all of the turmoil that people knew in 2016 America. It didn’t matter that, by most measures, life had improved for the average American in the 8 years since he took office. We were so steeped in the adversities of the day that many lost touch with why they voted out Republicans to begin with.

In 2020, we elected Biden by sweeping margins, and it wasn’t simply because he was white, male, and Christian enough to appeal to the broader electorate. It was because he represented something — anything — different from what led our nation to become the epicenter of the first pandemic in a century. It wasn’t an expression of enthusiasm for Biden that he earned over 81 million votes. It was a resounding admission that the Trump experiment had failed us and it was time for the pendulum to swing back.

Almost no one I knew was excited by the prospect of Biden’s presidency when they cast their votes for him back in 2020. All of his promises and rhetoric were largely inconsequential. What drove people out to polls on Election Day was the hope that we could replace the leader we had. We weren’t standing in record-breaking lines across the country to express any real delight in the fact that a septuagenarian Joe Biden would be the man to assume our nation’s highest office after Trump.

Biden’s victory, similar to Trump’s first win, was the American people’s way of arguing against the climate we’d come to know. In 2020, we were so attuned to the realities of pandemic living — of racial divisions and escalating unrest over everything from masks and vaccines to mail-in voting— that we recognized we needed a change in leadership. It was why such a historic number of us voted, despite all of the unique challenges that year’s election presented.

But by 2024, those fraught days of the pandemic were so far in our rear-view mirrors that we’d lost sight of them almost completely. Entire years removed from the Tiger King-watching, toilet paper hoarding hysteria of those early lockdown days, we were free to set our sights on less existential frustrations, like the economy and immigration. The boogeymen of the past were granted permission to become small.

It wasn’t because immigrants or the price of eggs represented a greater threat to our country’s way of life that we chose to repudiate Democrats again in 2024 and re-elect Trump. It was, more than anything else, a product of our recency bias. We have a reflexive tendency to reject the status quo. People were discontent with the America we knew last year, and once again, a vote for different was deemed by much of the country as a vote for better. The lows that came with Trump’s first term in office were minimized by the new pariahs of the week. Caravans full of illegal aliens, the proliferation of pronouns, and trans people on sporting teams stole the spots of masks, quarantines, and searing racial tensions.

Now with Trump back in office, we’re watching the cycle repeat itself. Despite the energy Trump and his administration have put into quashing dissent and weakening our democratic institutions, the American people’s broad dissatisfaction with our current state of affairs sold the November 2025 election to Democrats. Creeping concerns that our democracy had already collapsed were nullified as results trickled in. People were so entrenched in the snowballing stories around Epstein, tariffs, SNAP benefits, and ICE, that they voted overwhelmingly blue. Even key blocs of Trump supporters voted against his agenda.

The sweeping upset of this most recent election speaks to a damning aspect of life in America. We’re the country that rabidly obsesses over celebrities just to forget about their affairs a week later. When we vote, we vote not with an understanding of the ten years in politics that have paved the road to our current predicaments. Our ballots are often just a mirror of events in the 10 days leading up to our elections. Sometimes we’re damned to empower candidates who actively work against our interests, and sometimes our dissatisfaction with our leaders inspires us to vote in better ones. But rarely is the American vote well-informed or carefully considered.

This bleak perspective on our politics isn’t new. Each election cycle, we return like clockwork to our concerns about October surprises; we know deep down that last-minute scandals spell who wins and loses. Even the fateful, early days of November are now famous for throwing wrenches into our races. In the hearts of swing voters, there’s seemingly no such thing as too late in the election season for some half-baked controversy to dictate their decisions.

Given that we’re the country that follows The Simpsons more than our branches of government— who has, historically, voted more in American Idol contests than in presidential elections — perhaps none of this is shocking. Our short-term memory may be more American than apple pie. Sometimes, it renders our politics into a competition even more spectacle-driven than a professional sports season. Candidates tirelessly claw and connive for the top spot — but only the final minutes before votes are cast matter in the eyes of the swing voters who so often decide our elections.

All of the toiling and politicking is a moot point in the end. The years-long campaigns for president that we’ve grown accustomed to— all of the televised debates over whose policies will help the nation— are exercises in theater. We’re granted pageantry — the illusion of choice, and of people who carefully mull over their options before choosing. But as we cast our ballots, it’s the price of gas, groceries, and our memory of the days and hours up to voting that determines our winners.

This shift can be fairly called a product of our era. It’s been a bad time for incumbent leaders across the globe, not just in America. As we consume more media as a species, I think we’re simply more caught up in the woes of today and more detached from what ailed us in the past. What might imperil us in the future. It’s become easier and easier for us to have such shallow relationships with our politics, and that trend is unlikely to reverse — regardless of who we elect.

If democracy prevails, the United States’ next few presidents may each be only one-term leaders who come and go like passing fads. They’ll take turns erasing each other’s legacies, scrambling to claim accomplishments of their own, and succumbing to the whims of people who crave to see their problems fixed overnight.

Ironically, it’s my jaded view of America’s political cycle that’s become one of my greatest sources of hope as our troubles have mounted this past year. We’re a mercurial people. We’re reactive and we make our anger known.

If the 2025 election was a firm rebuke of the Trumpian movement, I expect that 2026 will bring the same. If the American people are already mired in the hardships of this administration, I don’t believe that Trump will do much in the next year to rectify that.

So much of his current struggle to maintain favor with his base stems from the fundamental impossibility of what he promised on the campaign trail. He can’t pair a stronger economy with suffocating tariffs or the removal of millions of workers our country relies on. We can’t achieve global dominance as we alienate our closest allies. Trump won’t be the man to deliver the national unity or prosperity that he promised.

As Trump’s guarantees continue falling flat, the discontent among his base will only grow. Unless his policies can make a palpable improvement in the lives of his supporters, I expect these upcoming elections will continue serving as the same fickle, mood-driven barometers we’ve come to know them as.

We vote based on the read of the room today, and while midterms are still an entire year out, it’s hard to imagine that Trump will fulfill enough of his mutually exclusive campaign promises to satisfy his base. If he rids the country of immigrants — both legal and illegal — then he crashes our nation’s economy. And if he crashes our economy and betrays the millions who voted for him for financial reasons, then this midterm election is unlikely to fare better for him than it did during his first term.

One of my biggest fears is that democracy will erode enough by next November — and the even further goalpost of the 2028 presidential election — that the results of upcoming races will be products of intimidation or suppression rather than the democratic process playing out. I worry that route is more likely to come to pass than Trump is to compromise, cooperate, or right this sinking ship. But if it can stay afloat until the elections ahead, America might live to see a new era of progressivism comparable to the one that arrived in the aftermath of the Gilded Age.

If Project 2025 is this administration’s roadmap, I don’t believe it’s being followed efficiently enough to make the difference its authors had hoped it would. And if it’s followed too closely, Trump risks tanking his approval ratings even further and jeopardizing the seats of his staunchest allies.

Whatever path forward he decides on, Republicans seem poised to fall victim to the very condition that saw their 2024 victory. If this administration doesn’t change course — or even if it does — the same short-term memory that lifted MAGA members back to power may be the force that sweeps them out of it. Our volatility cuts both ways, and in the contests ahead, it may well be our saving grace.

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