First, an apology. I had meant to post an election wrap-up piece days ago, but the wrap-up process, like everything else in Trumpland, is continuing to make a bad-faith effort to descend into chaos. Nevertheless, at this point, there are obviously some big and important things that we know. So, without further ado ...
Roughly four years ago, I wrote and published this. I have often wondered during the awful interval between then and now if I would have to write something similar in the wake of events on Election Day of this year.
Thankfully, the answer is no. We will have a new President and Vice President as of January 20, 2021. As a consequence, we've got at least a puncher's chance of returning to an acceptable level of sanity and legality in the executive branch of the federal government. Equally important--and, in some ways, more so--the glass ceiling we all thought would be broken four years ago was, in fact, broken this time, and in spectacular fashion, with the election of a black, Asian, Indian woman (with a Jewish husband and a step-family) to the office that is the proverbial heartbeat away from the most powerful position on Earth. Rejoice, progressives: Kamala Harris will be a truly intersectional Vice President. And she will be working closely with the most experience President ever to take the office, someone who understands that the job requires serving the people, and not himself. On top of that, they will both be working with the first woman elected and re-elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, with a shot at legislation that would end the Trump pandemic and begin to advance progressive values.
Perhaps most importantly for the sake of democracy generally, turnout was epic, and the process itself was, despite legitimate and justifiable fears to the contrary, free of fraud and manipulation. And, I might add, despite volumes of effort by Trump and his cronies, including firing the official who made the assessment of the election's integrity, to convince everyone otherwise.
That's a fair amount of good news, and I wanted to make sure that I began by recapping it as fully as possible. And it's just as well. Because there's still a more-than-fair amount of bad news as well.
Despite a strong class of candidates and an epic level of grass-roots fundraising, Democrats did not flip the Senate. They did pick up two seats in Colorado and Arizona, but lost one in Alabama, and the balance of power in the chamber now rests with the run-off races for the two seats in Georgia, a state where run-off races have not been kind to Democrats. They lost, as of this writing, a net of seven seats in the House, just barely clinging on to control. Perhaps worst of all, and relative to the House races, they were unable to flip any state legislatures, which ensures that the 2020 redistricting process, like the 2010 process before it, will be abusively controlled by the Republicans.
Perhaps, for me personally, and for many others, the most revolting, mind-numbing fact is simply this one. Joe Biden received the most votes of any presidential candidate in history, but Donald Trump received the second-most votes of any presidential candidate in history. Yes, Biden had a decisive victory, but not the blowout that the polls showed he might have. And the polls, which also seemed to guarantee the existence of a Democratic-controlled Senate next January, missed public opinion on that front by a large margin as well.
For me, for all of us, we have to face the future of American politics by confronting an ugly reality. Despite epic levels of public corruption and threats to people of color, combined with a pandemic that has claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives, with no end in sight and the likelihood of an acceleration between now and Inauguration Day, more than 72 million Americans looked at the status quo, went to the polls, and said "steady as she goes."
It's a level of disconnect between reality and reaction that almost defies description as well as belief.
And so, as we the people pick up the cards that this election has dealt us, we need to wrap our hearts and minds around a few realities as well, if we are ever to get back to the point at which our politics actually reflects and responds to our desires and needs.
First, and to borrow a phrase I have heard and read many times, Donald Trump is not a disease, but a symptom.
It has been axiomatic for decades that turnout favored Democratic candidates, that Republican candidates did well when turnout was low. Given the fact that the Democrats were successful in taking two of the three political levers of national power, and that there gains in the Senate, as of this point, are literally by a two-to-one margin, a case could be made that the epic turnout this year proved that point. But the more significant point is this: the gap between the Democrats and Republicans in gains is not nearly as close as previous high-turnout elections. The presidential outcome this year illustrates this. Biden was leading in the polls by 8 to 10 points but, as of this writing, it looks like he will win by somewhere between 3 to 4 points.
There is only one way of explaining this. Trump has brought into the national electorate a large number of people who are extremely conservative, even delusionally so given that Trump is not really anything but a narcissist, who are now wedded to him personally and will do and vote for anyone and anything he endorses or otherwise supports. These people had stayed home on election day in the past, because they were too far out on the fringe to be moved by conventional conservative appeals. Trump came along and changed all of that.
This is a movement that, sadly, will almost certainly survive Trump's Presidency. And so long as he is alive, and even if he is in prison (a topic for another day), they will act out any right-wing fantasy he promotes. Indeed, the Trump movement seems likely to survive Trump himself; his children could and probably will easily find a way to transfer his popularity to themselves, and there is clearly a large raft of hangers-on in his Administration and in Congress who will try to do so themselves, even if that means trashing any reputation that they had before that. I'm not alone in this view: you can find it discussed in detail elsewhere on the Web (with three examples here, here and here).
And no one can afford to think that hiding from these people is any kind of a solution. When they are confronted in any way, even an unintentional way, they are prone to using or threatening violence to acting out their political fantasies. And this is true whether the people in question are private actors or public officials.
This is the end result of a slow-burning fuse in our body politic that was lit many decades ago by Ronald Reagan, who declared his political opposition to be "so far left" it had "left America," and before him by Richard Nixon, who declared every Democrat a Communist if that Democrat stood in his path to power. And, while Ronald Reagan lit the fuse of our self-destruction, the fuse was already there. Post-World War II prosperity help to turn us into a nation of lotus eaters, thinking that nothing, including mutual sacrifice for the common good, should stand in the way of our individual prosperity. I knew even then, as I know now, that we lost our appetite for doing big things, as well as our faith that we could accomplish them. We lost them, or rather we forfeited them, because they got in the way of our personal comfort.
Too many Americans use what they see as the government's mistakes as an excuse for accepting anarchy, and otherwise see live as a zero-sum game in which only individual survival matters. However, that government occasionally makes mistakes, and I concede that it does, is neither an excuse nor a justification for arbitrarily shackling its reach. That’s why we have elections: to tell government when it’s gone off track, not to permanently derail the train. That latter desire comes from citizens who have essentially abandoned the responsibilities of citizenship, who think those responsibilities are a joke for suckers, and that the only purpose of life is to scratch your personal itch. The millions of Americans who have suffered, sacrificed, and even died for the sake of this country would respectfully beg to differ.
It’s hard for me, after watching this nightmare play out over four decades, over almost my entire adult life, to escape the conclusion that, as a nation, we’re doomed. At times, in fact, escaping it feels pretty much impossible. But, as I noted in my last post, each of us owes a debt to the past and the future, And, regardless of how things look on the ground, I still intend to pay my share.
I'm hoping that my fellow Democrats and other progressives share that commitment. At times, however, I have my doubts. The failure of the Democratic Party to take a majority in the Senate, or flip state legislatures, combined with losses in its House majority, has already placed prominent party members in a familiar position in sifting through these failures: that of a circular firing squad.
Was ticket-splitting an issue with regard to the Senate and statehouse races? At least a possibility. Biden was in a commanding position in the polls for several weeks before the election. That might have lead some voters to think about choosing the outcome that they have chosen so often in national elections: divided government. Some of the movement in the Senate polls during the final pre-election weeks suggest that this might have been happening. On the other hand, turnout on both sides of the party divide was off the charts, perhaps falling outside of the modeling of the pollsters. And again, thanks to the Georgia outcome, a Democratic Congress is still not out of the question.
Was messaging a problem? This is a perennial Democratic headache, reflecting the ying and the yang of the parties progressive and moderate wings. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most prominent member of the former wing, thinks that the party's digital efforts to organize and motivate voters fell short because of the party's unwillingness to use the best digital companies due to their progressive connections. Moderates, on the other hand, thought that rhetoric about "defunding the police" and a "Green New Deal" may have been a much bigger problem. Which, in turn, leads to another perennial question: should Democrats try to be more moderate?
One is forced to wonder: what does it even mean to be a moderate in this political climate? Where is the middle ground between fighting climate change and denying that it exists? Where is the middle ground between law enforcement reform and giving the police unquestioned support? Where is the middle ground between the need in a pandemic to wear face masks in public, and pretending that the pandemic is a hoax? AOC won a district and won it again that had been held by a powerful, high-ranking moderate, a man once viewed as a potential replacement for Pelosi. She's made that point herself, in the wake of the election.
And progressive have a point when they say that, when people understand the details of progressive ideas and programs, the objections tend to fall away, leading both to enactment of progressive policies and election of progressive officials. On the other hand, running away from ideas that are popular, far from being seen as a moderate course of action, is likely to be seen as a cowardly one that costs the support of voters who are essential to moving progressive ideals forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment