“Regardless of political party or ideology, Americans like the 2016 presidential election about as much as they like going into the dentist’s office for a root canal,” Quartz scribe Daniel R. DePetris wrote in the waning days of the 2016 election. Two weeks before Election Day, Ana Swanson wrote in the Washington Post, “If time flies when you’re having fun, this election season is the political equivalent of a visit to the dentist.” After it was over, Sarah L. Kaufman wondered, also in the Post, if the country would be able to “move on from this long, hideous root canal of an election we’ve suffered through.”
At the risk of taking this metaphor too literally: probably not. Last year, Roll Call’s Nathan Gonzales wrote a piece headlined: “Dentists on the March to Congress.” It detailed the several dentists in Congress cruising to re-election and a few more looking to join what Gonzales playfully called “the cavity caucus.”
So perhaps it was inevitable that the nascent 2020 campaign bound, gagged, and dragged this metaphor into reality. On Jan. 10, former congressman and Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, regarded as one of the party’s young stars because of his snappy use of social media and his “moral victory” loss to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, took his Instagram followers on a live-stream field trip to the dentist. He broadcast his dental cleaning on Instagram live, for reasons that are unclear but I assume to be part of a universal character-building exercise in which we all suffer together. Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative — we all now know what the inside of O’Rourke’s mouth looks like: disgusting. There is no red America or blue America; there is only nauseated America.
This is the future of politics and elections. Several Democratic women in Congress have garnered attention for live-streaming dinner preparation. This makes sense because people like food. They don’t like root canals. But the people don’t get a vote on this one.
Each new generation is more comfortable with turning their lives into a reality show. O’Rourke’s trip to the dentist is a lagging indicator: Society has already changed, and this is the result. Get used to it.
