Being in a place where we can get mad and push back against the relatively small stuff is how we go about doin

This week, the biggest controversies on the political internet have been: A Wall Street Journal op-ed deriding Jill Biden for going by “Dr.” when she doesn’t have a medical degree; whether the New York Times should have published a vaguely sympathetic piece about a well-known man who accidentally masturbated on a work Zoom; Joe Biden’s selection of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg as transportation secretary; and whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
So this is what it’s like to feel almost normal again.

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The Trump era is, blessedly, in its last days, and as the attention shifts to an incoming Biden administration, we’re getting a little taste of what our day-to-day over the next four years might feel like. And it’s delightfully boring. The very highest-stakes problems haven’t ceased to exist, but very soon they will no longer be at five-alarm-fire levels of emergency. Donald Trump failed to steal the election and take American democracy down with it. Covid-19 continues to rampage across the nation, but a vaccine is being rolled out, and adults who take public health seriously will enter the White House in a month. A new president will mean a repeal of the most devastating and cruel Trump executive orders — which will, in turn, mean expanded rights for women around the world, more opportunities for refugees to find safe haven in the United States, and a renewed commitment to free speech rights, including in the diversity training this administration dislikes. We are far from out of these deep, dark woods, and a Biden administration is not going to fix America. But we can see the light filtering through, and we can start to move toward it.
That’s the fundamental shift here: For progressives, these last four years have brought a feeling of helplessness as the president and his party changed the rules of the game and pushed policies that were beyond extreme. No one expects that Biden will be a left-wing dream. But what a difference it makes to be thinking about how we push a president to do what we want (and perhaps wind up disappointed), rather than worrying how we can most effectively curtail the worst of the damage to America.
The emergence from a defensive crouch also seems to have given us the space to be angry about issues that are not insignificant, but also not matters of life and death. Take the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed, which condescendingly called Dr. Biden “kiddo” and “Dr. Jill” in arguing that no one other than medical doctors should use the title “Dr.” — and that Dr. Biden’s choice to use the honorific “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” It was a bad and sexist op-ed, and it deserved the critique it got. But compare it to the last opinion piece to generate this much fury and discussion: Sen. Tom Cotton’s New York Times op-ed arguing that Trump should deploy the military against citizens protesting the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans. The outrage was hot and sustained because the stakes were as high as can be: A U.S. senator was calling for military force to be turned against his own countrymen, under a president who was cruel, racist, and reckless enough that he just might do it.