I write this on early Sunday morning 1 November (damned switch away from DST!). I write now because on the final day of the election ("Election Day"), as we await the verdict of the American voting public, I'll be too keyed-up to write anything coherent. As a lawyer, I've waited for many a verdict, and it doesn't get any easier even as you've been through it many times. Each case is unique; each time a significant change in the future awaits the outcome. This case, the case of Donald J. Trump, has now reached to point of closing arguments to the American voters (i.e., those who don't shirk their "jury duty"). This election is about whether this "jury" decides to free itself and open its future to better outcomes, or we chose to condemn ourselves to a future marked by fear, anger, and resentment, and the "leadership" of an incompetent, vile, and threatening man.
If, when you read this, you have sound grounds to believe that Joe Biden has been elected president, then by all means (reasonable and legal) celebrate. However, I suspect most, like me, will more likely simply feel a sense of relief. We have not condemned ourselves. We will sigh and say "Thank goodness!" (For it is a sense of goodness that would allow such an outcome.) We will go to bed or if late enough, on to our daily activities, with a sense of ease, at least in the sense of reduced anxiety.
So what can we expect with a President-elect Biden? Will we awaken to a scene of rainbows and unicorns and people joining around the campfire to sing Kumbaya together?
No.
In electing Biden--and even if he gets a Democratic Congress--we should understand as a nation that we have only broken the fever, that Trump is not the underlying cause of this dis-ease in our body politic. Trump is only an opportunistic secondary infection. Voters have acted as the antibodies to this infection, working to drive this infection away. But the body politic isn't cured once and for all of this dis-ease. Underlying Trump is a chronic dis-ease that allowed our nation to succumb to this secondary infection. Although the American voters have vanquished Trump, Trumpism, the syndrome that he embodies, will remain. American has suffered this infection of right-wing extremism for almost its entire 245 years. Sometimes the infection has been acute (the Civil War as the worst outbreak), but there have been other manifestations, such as the Klu Klux Klan uprisings during Reconstruction and the 1920s; Joe McCarthy and witch-hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Civil Rights movement backlash and the candidacy of George Wallace, to name just a few examples of outbreaks. This politics of fear, anger, and resentment from the "right" has always been far more important than anything coming from the "left." Radicalism and violence have arisen from the left, but these outbreaks tend to be acute although sometimes intense infections that don't continue too long and that don't usually translate into electoral clout. The violence that we've seen in American cities this year has been the result of acute, intense frustration with police killings and brutality and all of the underlying conditions that allow such wrongdoing to continue. But never in my lifetime has the radical left gained any lasting power, but not so the right, especially to the degree manifest by Trump's administration.
If we're lucky, we'll get something approaching politics as usual, only with a New Deal-like shift. We can hope for a change in policies that will begin some fundamental changes in the American political scene. A "Green New Deal" (of some sort) to address climate change and environmental degradation is a must. Also, we badly need significant reforms of our electoral system to end voter suppression schemes and to allow fair and proportional representation. (The Supreme Court required the states to practice "one person one vote" back in 1962 in Baker v. Carr. We should apply this principle to all elections.) A respect for minority rights is baked into the American Constitution even as they're too often ignored in practice. However, there's no brief for minority rule, which has become increasingly common. Only once have Republicans won the popular vote for president after 1988: Bush in 2004. And yet, in 2000 and 2016 Republicans won the presidency despite having lost the popular vote.
In short, we live in a time of troubles. We know this even as we don't want to acknowledge it or we can't quite understand it. The human herd is spooked. This is a time when dictators and radical movements ferment and often gain power. And by "radical movements" in this instance I mean those who eschew politics, speech, and persuasion in favor of violence. There can be peaceful radical movements, such as the American Civil Rights movement as led by Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to name but one prominent example; and there have been many less well-known but nevertheless potent peaceful movements. We can expect--and no doubt need--some (peaceful) radical movements. Indeed, the change we need isn't generated or pushed by traditional political discourse, but it swells up into political discourse from below. We need to radically (to the root) re-think our relationships with each other, with others around the world, and with Mother Nature herself. The journey of modernity is over, and we need to move on to something better (and I'm not talking about silly "post-modernism). What that "better" consists of we must hash-out continually as we progress. We have to turn to prophets, but not those who scare us with hellfire and brimstone, but the whose who provide us with a vision, a new way of seeing and understanding ourselves and our world. Only when the prophets do their work, and the people convert can this change be channeled into the political sphere. I think (hope) that we have a start on it. If we don't make some very immediate--and yes, drastic--changes very soon, I fear that we'll be in a hell of a fix. (And I mean that in a literal sense as well.)
So, yes, celebrate, and then let's get to work.
Post Script: Monday 9 November 2020
I've decided to post the above. Nothing has changed my mind. The repudiation of Trump was not nearly as overwhelming as I'd hoped, and few Trump enablers--virtually the entire Republican Party--paid an electoral price. But otherwise, the post seems on point. We still have to deal with the problems of Trumpism or perhaps its more lethal (to democracy & our lives) mutations.
