On February 2nd, 2020, the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers played in the Super Bowl. It was a pretty good game, with the Chiefs coming back from a 20-10 deficit in the final ten minutes, eventually winning 31-20 to capture Kansas City’s first Super Bowl in 50 years. But I didn’t actually watch — one of two Super Bowls in my adult life that I did not watch at all, owing to my sense of unease with the ethics of football.
The next day was the Iowa caucus, the first contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, and that I did watch. Like many socialists around the country, I was very invested in Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign, and he had staked a lot on his performance in Iowa. There was, for a brief moment there that February, a real hope that Sanders’ campaign might actually prevail. That the 2020 election might hold the promise of real change — the kind of change that Trump’s election four years earlier had demonstrated the need for.
In the end, of course, that’s not what happened. The Democratic establishment coalesced around Joe Biden, preferring to run a Return to Normalcy campaign against Donald Trump than promise any substantive changes. It worked, I guess — I mean, Biden did win — but nobody was particularly excited to vote for Joe Biden, or for his presidency.
And now, four years later, as the Chiefs and 49ers gear up for a Super Bowl rematch, Biden and Trump are careening for a rematch of their own. Assuming neither drops dead (not a small assumption this year, granted) we are left with the same nominees nobody wants yet again. Don’t worry: I am not going to go on some elaborate tangent where I point out which candidate is the Chiefs and which one is the 49ers (although I get why you’d think that). But I do think there is a lesson there.
“There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” —Vladimir Lenin
When you look backwards at history, it is tempting to think that everything that happened had to happen as it did. That all events were controlled by destiny or larger structural forces beyond the power of any person alive at the moment. And often that is probably true. But there are some historical moments that really are thick with possibility, and 2020 was full of moments like that, starting with a Patrick Mahomes pass to Tyreek Hill in the Super Bowl.
Before that pass, Mahomes was already a star. He had burst into the NFL the previous year in a way nobody ever had before: In his first year as a starter, he threw for 50 touchdowns and over 5,000 yards, winning MVP and Offensive Player of the Year. He was only 23 and people were already talking about him as potentially the greatest quarterback ever.
But quarterbacks are, fairly or not, judged on wins and losses — especially quarterbacks who put up gaudy individual numbers like Mahomes. An inability to win the Super Bowl dogged Dan Marino for his whole career, and Peyton Manning for years. It feels silly, in retrospect, to imagine a world where people doubt Mahomes’ ability to “win the big one,” but that certainly would have been his fate had Super Bowl LIV gone differently. After all, Mahomes is one pass to Hill and one questionable defensive holding flag away from being 0-3 in Super Bowls. Instead, of course, Mahomes will go for his third ring on Sunday; people are already debating whether he’ll catch Brady’s seemingly uncatchable record of 7 Super Bowl rings.
That is what I mean when I talk about moments being thick with possibility. Even something like the Chiefs dynasty, which seems inevitable now, could so easily have not happened at all. It’s a lesson we learned over and over again in 2020…
At this point it is more than a cliché to point out how eventful a year 2020 was. But it wasn’t just that a lot of stuff happened — it was all the historical What if?-moments that came with those events. After the dashed promise of the Sanders presidential campaign we had, in quite rapid succession, the social response to Covid-19, the George Floyd protests, and then obviously the general election itself. Each one presented a real range of possibilities, so much that looking back it is hard to know how seriously to take them. Was defunding the police ever politically feasible? Would Bernie have won the general election? Could pandemic-era social services have been made permanent? Everyone has thoughts but we’ll never really know.
These questions are particularly important for the left, and not just because Sanders ran as a socialist and the George Floyd protests were radical racial justice protests. Obviously the content was important, but just as important — at least in retrospect — is posing the questions themselves. Because cynics and reactionaries will insist it was dumb to ever believe those things were realistic, but what distinguishes the left is the belief that a better world is in fact possible.
I’ve written this before in this newsletter, but it often feels like the hardest part about being a socialist is not convincing people to support socialist policies. Most people, it turns out, do not want to go bankrupt if they get sick, or end up homeless when they lose their job, or spend their lives fleeing various climate disasters. But they don’t really believe it’s possible to fix those things. After all, if it were, wouldn’t someone have done so by now?
So at times when people actually are open to a range of new possibilities, it is important to kindle those moments of hope, to preserve them against the political nihilists who insist this awful status quo is just the way things have to be. In 2020, despite all the crises we were facing, it felt possible to point to something better.
So the disappointment of 2024, and the impending general election rematch of Trump and Biden, is not just about the candidates themselves. Yes, voters will be asked to choose between frightening and uninspiring, but that’s pretty much always the choice — but now it’s a reminder of just how little has changed, even after everything that happened in 2020. It’s almost like a finger in the eye, a punishment for ever hoping things would get better.
OK, back to football: If you want to hear about What Could Have Been, then talk to a San Francisco 49ers fan. I don’t exactly feel bad for the Niners, who have won more Super Bowls than all but three other NFL franchises; but their last ring came 29 years ago, and the last few seasons have been a series of What If?-moments. San Francisco has always seemed on the cusp of breaking through, but always falling just a little short. If not for a few badly timed injuries and a couple blown leads in big games, we’d be talking about a 49ers dynasty as much as a Chiefs dynasty.
Which partially explains why this rematch feels a little weird. San Francisco is not really a David looking to take down Kansas City’s Goliath — they’re technically the favorites, actually. Nor does it seem like a potential “passing of the torch” to a new dominant team, since both teams have been great and will likely continue to be great next season.
In other words, this Super Bowl does not feel like a turning point in NFL history the way it did four years ago. Super Bowl LIV could have been the start of a 49ers dynasty — instead it was the dawn of the Mahomes Era. This Sunday will likely be remembered as either another notch on Mahomes’ belt or an overdue triumph for Kyle Shanahan.
But maybe not! That’s how I remember Super Bowl LIV, but what did I really know at the time? Like I said, I didn’t even watch that game — it’s always easy to know something in hindsight. And the flip side of that is that we are often blind to possibilities in the moment. Perhaps we will remember this weekend as the dawn of the Brock Purdy Era, or as Andy Reid’s final game. It is important to always be open to possibilities no matter how remote. There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen… but it’s not always obvious which one you’re in at the time.