I know nobody's memory is long enough, but so much of the current election feels like 2004
A president who only won the electoral college the first time, who stole an election (people forget Bush didn't need to talk the talk, he walked the walk and got his brother and SCOTUS to gove him the presidency), whose first term experience an unprecedented crisis that he responded to in the worst possible ways, and who constantly did illegal awful shit.
Who then comes in and wins re-election with the popular vote this time.
It felt so fucking hopeless. Democracy was fucking dead, it was over. Kerry was a nice guy who was not up to the job of beating the charismatic right wing fuck.
And then when the Dems retook congress in the midterms in 2006, it felt like the fucking liberation of France, the wave of relief and hope was insane. We had finally fucking won something.
And it was through that long, horrible experience that we got to 2008 and the results you see here. Yeah Obama turned out to be a disappointment, but we got something like 12 years of forward cultural progress between 2008 and 2020. The level of cultural conservatism now, even with everything happening, is still leaps and bounds better than what things were like in the 2000s. And it took the long, horrible process of the Bush years to get there.