Post-Election Post 2: Outcomes

Bye, Don: it is a major outcome. It is not easy to defeat an incumbent POTUS, especially one who leaves ethics and legalities behind to misuse the office for his own personal and political purposes.

 Joe Biden’s victory is impressive by many measures. His popular vote totals and margin (currently crossing 5 million votes and 50.8%) are historic. According to Ben Mathis-Lilley in Slate: “ Per current estimates, he will receive something like 51.3 percent of the national popular vote, 3 percentage points more than Hillary Clinton and a higher total than any candidate challenging an incumbent president since FDR got 57 percent against Herbert Hoover in 1932. That’s more than Ronald Reagan got (50.7 percent) in his 1980 win over Jimmy Carter, which is still (accurately!) heralded as a paradigm shift in American politics.. When you factor in how high turnout was, Biden will likely end up getting a higher share of all the votes that were theoretically available than Reagan did in his 1984 reelection landslide or Barack Obama did in 2008.” 

 Biden will be President partly because Kamela Harris will be Vice President, and that’s damn good history as well. And they did it in concert with voters who overcame Republican voter suppression, and if you’ve forgotten, some of it is detailed here.

Then there are all the other insidious creeps Trump takes with him. Slate ran a series of short essay goodbyes to his family members. Soon to be gone (at least for awhile) are the family androids: Jared, Ivanka and Melania. In addition, it’s goodbye to the Nazi lawyer Bill Barr and the fundie Nazi android White House flack Kaleigh whatshername.

 Farewell, Betsy De Vos!  Bye Bye Rudy ("a noun and a verb and 9-11") G!  Sayonara, Mike Pomepo—and if Dickens were here to turn this pompous hypocrite into a character, he wouldn’t need to change his name. And what joy to tell Louis De Joy his last federal paycheck is in the mail, after he used the US Postal Service to slow everyone's elses, delay and suppress votes while enriching his own company.

 Oil lobbyist in charge of the Interior David Bernhardt and coal industry minion Andrew Wheeler running EPA, Baby Scalia at Labor, the illegally serving heads of National Intelligence and Homeland Security, John Radcliffe and Chad Wolf, the White House idiots including Chief of Racism Stephen Miller and Chief Virus Enhancer Scott Atlas—don’t let the door smack you in the ass as you leave, no doubt after defecating on your desks. And others too numerous to mention—I can’t wait to forget their names forever.

 (As for exits, I’m still giving good odds that Trump will resign so Pence can pardon him, and he can avoid being around for Biden’s Inaugural. In any case, he’ll be out of the White House long before 1/20.)

 So all that is significant and to the good. President Biden will bring sanity, decorum, ethics and empathy to the White House, as well as non-blonde women and people of color. We’ll get photos of children hugging the President and some good White House concerts again.  And all that will be very welcome.

 But the Blue Tsunami, let alone a blue mini-wave, did not happen, and the consequences are profound. Democrats did not win the Senate majority, and though they could get crucial committee control by winning two run-off elections in Georgia, it’s a longshot.

 I don’t want to prejudge the Biden presidency, and I hope the more optimistic analysts like Politico’s John R. Harris are right.  But without the Senate it seems the Biden presidency can do little but undo some of the administrative damage and otherwise inch forward by executive order and diplomacy (which, given Biden’s knowledge of the federal government and the considerable expertise at his disposal, is not nothing.)

 But he is highly unlikely to get much legislation passed, especially because voters returned prime obstructionist Republican assholes to Congress like Lindsay Graham and Devin Nunes, and most especially because Kentucky voters returned Mitch McConnell to the Senate and therefore Senate leadership. For there is absolutely nothing the amoral McConnell will ever do that isn’t completely to the partisan political benefit of Republicans, especially in the Senate. He did his best to destroy the Obama presidency regardless of consequences to the country and its people, and he will do the same to Biden. His sententious hypocrisy is only a stylistic difference--he's a deadlier Trump. He probably has an even better chance of success against Biden, because Obama had his first two years with congressional majorities.  

While the Trump administration will do as much damage to the federal government as they can on their way out, McConnell will do what he considerably can to sink the economy further, sow chaos in the states and country, and prevent a contrasting single federal response to the covid crisis, regardless of the damage to American lives and civic structures, just so Joe Biden and the Democrats will look bad.

 Democrats theoretically could take the Senate in two years, though the results of this election don’t bode well for that. What they cannot do is undo the damage of failing to take back majorities in state legislatures this year, which is the year that they redistrict. That alone means 10 more long years with Republicans retaining their gerrymandered advantages and perhaps expanding them, to ensure that they hold more power than the raw number of votes they receive would justify, by a lot.

 Further, it is in state legislatures and in state governments that most of the targeted voter suppression efforts begin and take hold. So those structural barriers will also remain, and voting will not be fair, let alone easy, for the foreseeable future.

 Until Election Day, it was possible to see the 2016 Trump victory as a fluke, which voters would repudiate. But now it’s even worse. Because in the past four years, Trump remade the Republican party in his image, and that transformed R party did quite well across the country. So now the Rs have no reason other than their vaporized consciences to repudiate Trumpism, and plenty of reasons to embrace it because it worked for them.

Among its darker features is the liberation of racial and other prejudices, especially very old ones.  Right now Republicans pin their Georgia hopes on the resonance of the name Chuck Schumer in winning those Senate seats and preventing the New York Jew from becoming Majority Leader.  As well as the Blacks taking over Georgia.

 Political pros and media continue to wag their fingers at current fascistic tendencies to deny that votes for Democratic candidates could possibly be legitimate, warning that it will “damage the Republican brand” or do “ serious long-term harm” to the party. Nonsense. This election proved it will not. The R enablers of our relentless baby psychopath chief executive, our apprentice dictator, our Homegrown Hitler, didn’t pay a price for enabling him. They were rewarded. We can fully expect this to continue, as Republicans do everything in their considerable power to thwart Biden on every issue, no matter how many people suffer as a consequence.

 Trump leaves him with a government depleted of talent, experience and confidence, infiltrated by devious zealots with a taste for anarchy. He leaves behind a raging pandemic and deeply wounded economy because of his inaction, and by February 1 Republicans will be castigating Biden for ineffective leadership, for pandemic deaths and for a by then more obviously weak economy. And they will do everything that can to make sure there is no recovery from either, so they can keep the Senate and retake the House in two years, and retake the White House in four. And right now, I would not bet against them. Especially since Democrats are already at war with each other, engaged in ideological recriminations as a result of electoral failures.

 But even if the Biden administration works some minor miracles, as we devoutly wish that it will, the prospects of a longer term future were significantly dimmed by this election and what it revealed. What America needed was a new coalition sweeping into power, ushering in an administration as transformational as FDR’s New Deal. We needed it for the next four years and even more for the future ahead.

 It may be that the climate crisis is so far advanced that nothing will prevent the collapse of civilizations and the end of the web of life as we know it on this planet in the next century or two. But with an organized, concerted effort, and a galvanized country concentrating on solving common problems rather than fighting for stupid partisan advantage (though with plenty of room for dissent and alternatives), perhaps we had a chance. We need that kind of cohesion just to face the effects of the climate crisis we are feeling now and will feel more and more in greater scope and extremes. But it is clear we don’t have that now. 

 This election once again proves the enduring power of denial. Although exit polls may be as bullshit as polling in general was this year, they did indicate that presidential voters more often voted on economic issues than the pandemic. So Trump may have succeeded in talking down the pandemic, because that’s what people want to hear: it’s overblown, it’s a hoax, get back to normal.

 For the animal reaction to even a visible danger like the covid crisis is not only fight or flight. There is also the deer in the headlights. Humans consciously experience this sometimes as they witness something awful and feel, “this isn’t happening.” That might well be the animal seed of human denial.  The rest is a complex interaction of individual psychologies with reinforcement from culture and social groups to which humans desperately cling.

 If nothing else, the silence of the polls suggests that more and more, when a lot of people stare at a secret ballot, they go into a dark place. And we’re not even at the end of this logical chain of consequences. 

 The twisted and heavily leveraged interpretation of the Second Amendment that quickly resulted in AK-47s at political demonstrations (not to mention bars) has already blinded half the country to the tragedies as well as the implications of the massacres of children, Blacks and Jews. Now a prominent R politician in Florida advocates citizens be legally permitted to shoot to kill demonstrators and trespassers.

 How long will it be before the impulse of ordinary Americans to come to the aid of disaster victims begins to falter based on whether the disaster happens in a blue or red state? (Ask poor people and/or people of color about that.) 

 In any case, a little less than half of the country thinks the rest of it is evil, if not willing participants in kidnapping and eating children. And a little more than half thinks the rest of it is, one way or another, crazy. They share increasingly fewer facts, evaluations, assumptions, world views and even values. It’s a lot more than red or blue.

 So we can rejoice at the election of Biden-Harris and the changes that it brings. But we can also note, along with Tom Nichols in the Atlantic that “a large portion of the electorate chose the sociopath.”

 So we had a barely literate, incompetent sociopath on display for four years, completely without ethics or empathy, and transparently concerned only with himself. He presided over a non-response to a pandemic that has killed more Americans than any recent war plus acts of terrorism that so inflamed the country that it gave away some of its freedoms, and still stands in airport lines with belts and shoes in hand, or it would if flying didn't infect you.  He allowed the economy to sink into untold depths, persecuted brown immigrants and children, all of which is still causing immense suffering and will have lasting effects for at least a generation. He lacerated civic norms, robbed the federal treasury and his own followers, made a mockery of the law, and severely wounded the institutions of governance. He is an obvious con man and grifter, a convicted thief (if only in civil cases so far), a serial liar who makes absurd claims without even bothering to organize credible evidence, and a loudmouth lout.  He made the White House the tragic laughingstock of the world for four years.   He was the 21st century Richard III.  And he got 70 million votes. The party that supported him remains a powerful and destructive force.

 So what would it take? We had the most powerful and widespread wild fires in history, more hurricanes than the alphabet has letters,  and oppressive and killing weather caused by the climate crisis, plus a global pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and disrupting the economy and society for most people. This wasn’t enough? 

 We had a coalition of races, of the youngest and oldest voters, of women generally, with the unprecedented support of prominent Republicans of the recent past. This wasn’t enough? 

 We had a cartoon psychopath as president, who brought ruin, incompetence and corruption so obvious,  racist hate so stark and simplistic, and this wasn’t enough? To repudiate him completely, as well as all those moral cowards who followed and enabled him?

 Then what would be enough? 

 Maybe there’s time. Time for some other catastrophe to force recognition of the need to foresee before disaster, or even see a disaster for what it is. Time for demography to reshape the political landscape. Time for a new America. But maybe it’s not just my time to see it that’s running out.