CEDAR RAPIDS, IA—There were 19 Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa this past weekend, and every one of them came to the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Hall of Fame reception on Sunday afternoon. They were given five minutes each to speak. If they ran long even to 5:01, they got played off the stage as though it were the Tonys that were being handed out a half-a-continent away. The music was merciless.

All day, First Avenue up and down and around the U.S. Cellular Center was alive and raucous with cheers, chanting and, at last, a parade led by Bernie Sanders, who marched with some striking McDonald's workers and with a whole battalion of people from The Young Turks, which is apparently going to be a thing this time around. As this procession noisily made its way into the arena, Tim Ryan got out of a silver sedan and, unnoticed and unremarked, walked into the lobby of the attached hotel.

In truth, it was a fine day for a carnival, and there was a remarkable sense of good feeling about the event, which was universally considered if not the first serious hootenanny of the 2020 election cycle, then certainly the first one in Iowa. The campaign is not yet the drudgery it will be when winter sets in on the farms and factories. But, as the hit-and-run program got rolling, and the Bullocks and DiBlasios blended into one another, most people were talking about the first serious polling from the Des Moines Register, which polled only people who said they planned to caucus next year, and that seemed for the first time to have broken the sprawling field into distinct tiers.

Joe Biden believes in the Return to Normal. Dustin Chambers Getty Images

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were both still one-two, but Pete Buttigieg and Senator Professor Warren both had surged to the point where Warren is virtually tied with Sanders, while Buttigieg picked up 15 points since the last time anyone took a survey here. More significantly, Biden had dropped below 30 percent. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris had the middle tier all to herself, while everyone else was in single digits except for Bill De Blasio and Wayne Messum, whom not a single respondent named as their first or second choice.

(This measure provides Harris with a solid base for a move herself. She was named by 52 percent of those polled as either their first or second choice, leaving her tied with Buttigieg.)

However, the second overriding notion that all the candidates had in common, and with which the entire hall seemed to agree, was that conventional metrics—hell, conventional anything related to politics—may well be unsuited to the current political moment, that with the election of this particular president* and with the animatronic zombie thrill-ride on which he's taken the government, the country may have passed some kind of point of no return. This would mean bad news for Biden, who seems to be campaigning mainly on the theme of bringing back the golden age of 2009. Political historians would note that the "return to normalcy" was the theme on which Warren Harding was elected in 1920, and was explained by him as:

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

A lot of this is the pure flummery common to the politics of the era—"Not experiment, but equipoise"?—but the appeal to a country just emerging from the carnage of World War I was obvious. The problem was that "normalcy" papered over the giddy economics that already were headed for the Great Depression, the continued moral morass of Jim Crow, violent labor strife, and some militaristic stirring on both sides of the globe. By the time all of these chickens came home to roost, "normalcy" looked like at best an anesthetic, and, at worst, some sort of sleeping sickness that had deadened the country to serious threats to its continued survival.

Bernie Sanders finds himself in the top tier in Iowa polling. Scott Olson Getty Images

On Sunday, Pete Buttigieg summed up the problem of returning to whatever we had before the country elected a vulgar talking yam,

We're not going to win by playing it safe, or promising a return to normal. We are where we are because normal...broke. We Democrats can no more promise a return to the '90s -- [Ed. Note: Hi, Joe!] -- than the Republicans can deliver on a promise to return us to the 1950s.

Running against this president* is bound to be a brutal business. It was a brutal business in 2016, and that was before he'd been dogged by Congress and special prosecutors, and haunted by his own sleazy and possibly criminal past, and stuck by a million slights, real or imagined, on the part of everyone from Elijah Cummings to Bette Midler. He's a wounded animal now, with all the money he needs and with the power of the presidency behind him. He has cowed the Congress and he has converted the Department of Justice into a mob law firm. We passed normal when the networks called Michigan in 2016, and it is now as distant as Alpha Centauri.

Kamala Harris is in a position to make moves. Scott Olson Getty Images

There was an undeniable sense that the people gathered here, candidates and supporters alike, recognize the truth of what Buttigieg said. You could feel it in the noisy claque following Bernie Sanders, demanding that candidates sign a pledge that includes a Letter to Santa list of progressive goodies, to Senator Professor Warren's now iconic "I've got a plan for that," to Jay Inslee's pounding on the need for a debate strictly on the climate crisis, and even to the preposterous but fascinating candidacy of Marianne Williamson, who explained her presence in the race thusly:

These are some really smart people and I really admire them, but I think this idea of this club that gets to control the thing. To me, it doesn't seem American...There are many of us who realize, we're living in the 21st Century, and this whole-person perspective is now mainstream in American culture. It's in education. It's in medicine. It's in science. It's in business. Only politics...politics is the only major institution in the country that's stuck in this mid-20th century paradigm where everything is about the external symptoms and very little discussion of cause. Everything is about these external happenings and very little about the psychological and emotional that underlie politics...I want to transform the country in a way that only a civilizational thinker can.

The current president* already has established one unique political paradigm. The only way to campaign against him is to design one of your own. Normal is a luxury now. It can come later.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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