The election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United states was received across much of the world with a mixture of relief and exuberance, though ofttimes laced with anticipation. A mutual theme in news headlines and Twitter feeds was that normal service was being resumed in the US and in international affairs.

In French republic, the paper Le Monde ran with the headline: "American Elections 2020: Joe Biden'south victory sparks huge relief in Europe." On Twitter, Paris' mayor, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted out: "Welcome Back, America."

In Frg, the encompass of the news mag Der Spiegel depicted Biden putting the severed caput of the Statue of Liberty back on the torso (referencing an infamous cover from 2022 that depicted Trump severing the caput). The prototype is accompanied past the ironic text "Make America Groovy Again."

The theme of an American restoration was repeated in news and social media beyond the earth. The symbolism is stiff, but it is less articulate what is being restored.

In this information technology echoes the "return to normalcy" theme in Biden'due south ballot campaign in the US, a nostalgic nostrum that vaguely promises a reset of American principles and policies. What is at issue in these desires to become back to a pre-Trump America?

In the US, the desire for normalcy surrounding the ballot of Biden reflects an existential anxiety – that Trump ignited a devastating assail on liberal republic that may bear witness epochal.

The contradictions and tensions in American liberal democracy accept been forcefully revealed with his presidency, which took advantage of the gap between declared liberal values and political reality. Trump non simply exploited that gap, he spoke to latent desires and emboldened expressions of identity in both politics and people that had long been marginalised or silenced.

With Trump's ousting, the liberal want for a return to normality has been amped up via the figure of Joe Biden. Information technology was conspicuously articulated by the new president at his inauguration, in his pleas for national unity and his hope to end the "uncivil war" in the Us. David Sanger, in the New York Times, noted that: "Mr Biden's inauguration was notable for its normalcy, the sense of relief that permeated the capital over an era of constant turmoil and falsehood ending."

But at that place was little that was normal in the scene of a scaled-down inauguration taking place with only a handful of socially distant, masked participants and surrounded by the militarised landscape of a mail-riot Capitol. The epitome was not of national healing but of a national emergency.

An art enthusiast paints on a canvas the confront of US Vice President Kamala Harris outside a drawing school in Mumbai. Photo credit: Indranil Mukherjee / AFP

Accompanying the desire for normalcy and the sense of relief is the implication that the "Trump era" was an aberration, a temporary divergence in the natural political order of things.

This is an attractive and tempting palliative for those who resisted Trump's spell and disavow the significance of his political rise and appeal to millions of Americans. In this view, Trump was "the cat in the hat" – an unwelcome company and unruly avatar of instincts for a disorder, evicted one time the parents return. Enter Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

But Trump (and Trumpism) was and is something more than a temporary eruption in the guild of things or mere symptom of a malaise in American public life. Trump unleashed the libidinal forces of "illiberal democracy", undermining America's commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of police and private rights. He supported these forces in the US and encouraged them elsewhere, transforming the landscapes of American political culture and foreign diplomacy in means we are however trying to empathize.

American myopia

Americans pay fiddling mind to external perspectives on their country and mostly do non respond well to critical views of information technology or of their leaders. That may exist viewed as stubbornly patriotic, simply it is more fundamentally due to a deep-seated ignorance founded on a myth of national exceptionalism, a myopia that is quintessentially American.

Trump's presidency should remind Americans of the fragility of the social and political order that and then many take for granted. Is it non a little shocking that Americans should need to exist reminded of this? Perhaps not, perhaps the amnesia is a component of the American worldview, which ordinarily displaces the near serious challenges to democracy on to others elsewhere.

Equally the American writer Tom Wolfe in one case quipped, the "dark night of fascism is always descending in the U.s. and yet lands only in Europe". Of course, "it tin can non happen here".

Might it be that the importance of Trump's election and presidency has been better or at least more than readily understood in other countries where in that location is a living memory of the pains of populist authoritarianism, where people are more familiar with how reality can be dismantled?

The Slovenian-American author Aleksandar Hemon suggests as much when, in the wake of Trump'due south election, he commented: "In America, a comfortable entitlement blunts and deactivates imagination – it is hard to imagine that this American life is not the only life possible, that there could be any reason to undo it.

Hemon filters his perspective through his experiences and insights from living in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war "through a time when what cannot possibly happen begins to happen, rapidly and everywhere". Observing the disorienting bear upon of the early days of Trump'south presidency, he wryly notes that: "'Reality' has finally earned its quotation marks."

Reality did indeed earn its quotation marks in "Trump'southward America", a fantasy world in which Trump supporters imaginatively and emotionally invest. It is a world in which conspiracy theory and social media combine to create an alternative reality, a world that is cocky-contained and cocky-reinforcing – and impervious to facts.

Galvanised by Trump's well-nigh messianic leadership, the fantasy has become pervasive and is deeply embedded in the imaginations – the fears and desires – of millions of Americans. It cannot just or swiftly exist undone.

Back to reality

"America is dorsum, ready to lead the globe, non retreat from it", Biden stated in November equally he introduced his foreign policy team. The "America is dorsum" refrain has been repeated advertizement nauseum by Biden's surrogates in the past few months.

What it means in terms of policy remains unclear. More symbolically, it is declared as a rebuttal of Trumpist foreign policy, infamously sloganed every bit "America Offset", suggesting a renewed era of The states global appointment and leadership. Only the meaning remains open and opaque and, every bit Julian Borger observes in The Guardian: "How a slogan equally all-encompassing as 'America is Back' is received around the world volition inevitably be a Rorschach test for what is perceived to exist the 'existent America' that has been absent-minded in the by 4 years."

How The Conversation covered the inauguration of Joe Biden. Photo credit: The Chat

The perception of what constitutes the "existent America" is both a domestic and foreign policy dilemma for the US. Assumptions about liberal democracy at home and about a liberal world order abroad are no longer acts of faith.

Equally we head into a "post-American world", global enthusiasm for democracy cannot be assumed, nor can the ability of the U.s. to set an example, for that has been undone past the glasses of ceremonious unrest and the disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The domestic "uncivil war" will, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama warns, have "consequences for global republic in the coming years".

Biden's foreign policy team are talking upwardly democratic solidarity between states equally the basis for a new internationalism but this cannot be a restoration of liberal hegemony. It must reckon not only with the damage washed by the starkly nationalist "America First" doctrine: information technology must likewise acknowledge the failings of liberal internationalism before Trump became president.

After all, neoliberal globalisation gave rise to the political and cultural blowback called Trumpism in the Usa and its ethnonationalist cousins across the world.

Making a fetish of normalcy is a form of American exceptionalism. "America is back" may prove as myopic and delusional every bit "Make America Cracking Again".

Liam Kennedy is a Professor of American Studies at the University College Dublin.

This commodity first appeared on The Conversation.