On the Biden-Harris Victory

 

On the Biden-Harris Victory

Sunday, November 8, 2020

 

All the news outfits have proclaimed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the winners of the 2020 presidential election. They’re calling them President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris. On Saturday, November 7, Huffington Post had a big banner headline that began “ IT’S OFFICIAL.” Of course it isn’t official. It won’t be official until the Electoral College votes on December 14. There is a theoretical possibility that the Electoral College vote could differ from the popular vote and make Donald Trump and Mike Pence the winners. I can’t quite imagine that actually happening, and I will assume for now that it won’t. Come January 20, 2021, we will have a moderate Democrat as president and a more of less moderate Democrat as vice president. That we will is exceptionally good news. It is good news first of all because it means that Donald Trump, America’s (so far) only fascist president, will be out of office. He and his presidency have been nothing but a national disgrace. I’ve chronicled some of his personal and political sins elsewhere. I won’t bother with them here. I want instead to reflect here on what the apparent Biden-Harris victory means and just as importantly what it does not mean for our country in the time ahead.

That Joe Biden will be president means first of all that personal decency equal to Barack Obama’s will return to the White House. Joe Biden is a faithful Roman Catholic Christian in his personal life. He is a faithful husband quite unlike Donald Trump who is, as we know, a serial adulterer. Biden has been a remarkably good father to his children. He has lived through unspeakable personal tragedy and come out of it with an empathy for people who suffer formed in his own crucible of suffering. He was never my first choice as Democratic nominee for president, or even my second or third; but I have never doubted his fundamental human decency.

The Biden-Harris victory means that our nation will be led by people who are deeply committed to the human dignity, civil rights, and an end to American racism, including the systemic racism that Biden specifically mentioned in his remarks on the evening of Saturday, November 7, the day the media declared him president-elect. Joe Biden will never call white supremacists fine people like Donald Trump so notoriously did. Biden said on Saturday that his administration will look like America. I trust he means it. He did after all choose a woman of African and south Indian descent as his running mate. We’ve been governed almost exclusively by white people (mostly by far men) for far too long. Biden is himself a white man, but his vice president is neither white nor a man, and that is a very good thing indeed. The Biden administration will, I’m sure, work to expand the number of voters not work to suppress the vote the way Trump and his supporters in various states have done, and that is a very good thing too.

With Joe Biden as president we will have an administration that believes the scientists when they present the results of scientific research on issues including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. He has already named the heads of his coronavirus taskforce, both of them experienced and respected public health experts. Biden will do what Trump should have done to combat the coronavirus but did not. He won’t make absurd claims about the virus just disappearing. He won’t tell Americans to drink bleach as a cure the way Trump did. By the time Biden becomes president he will have had nearly a year of gross leadership failure at the federal level (and in several of the states too) with regard to the pandemic, so his task of getting the pandemic under control will be harder than it should be. Even so he will do a much better job of dealing with it than Trump did, not that doing better than Trump did would be all that hard. Trump set the bar awfully low. Biden will take climate change seriously. He will get us back in the Paris climate accords. I trust that he and his people will put back in place as many of the numerous environmental regulations that Trump and his minions repealed much to the damage of our country and the world as they can.

There are a great many more things that will improve under Biden. He will end discrimination against Muslims in our immigration laws. He won’t tear children away from their parents and keep them in cages. The Dreamers will get to stay. We’ll have a Department of Education that actually believes in public education and is led by professional educators. Depending on which party controls the Senate Biden may be able to reverse the catastrophic Trump tax cuts for the very wealthy. Our standing in the world both with allies and with our adversaries will improve. A great many things will be better under Biden than they were (and still are) under Trump.

All of that being true, it is sadly also true that Trump’s defeat in this election doesn’t mean we’re through with him or with both the more traditional and the more radical, fanatical elements among his supporters. He’ll still be president for more than two months. Lord only knows what damage he’ll inflict on us during that time. He’s just petty enough to want to destroy the country that has rejected him as president as completely as he can. Trump is not a traditional American politician. He is a fascist. He is the leader of a movement of angry white supremacists. Yes, many traditional Republicans voted for him too (for reasons I will never comprehend). They are dangerous enough with their economic ideology that benefits only the wealthy and their anti-government blindness that leaves the vulnerable among us to the tender mercies of the market and keeps this country from doing what every other so-called advanced country in the world has done to make life better for all of their people. They will do all they can to stop the Biden administration from doing what is right. They represent a real threat to the wellbeing of this country.

Just how dangerous these traditional republicans will be depends on whether they end up controlling the Senate. If they do they will block everything Biden tries to do that requires legislation or Senate confirmation. When Barack Obama became president in 2009 Mitch McConnell, who controlled the Senate as majority leader then as he may well do again, vowed to obstruct everything Obama tried to do. He will do the same to Biden if he can. He may not hate Biden as much as he hated Obama. Biden is after all white. Biden is however a Democrat and a reasonable human being. That’s all it will take for McConnell to refuse even to negotiate with him though he be President of the United States. I won’t be surprised if McConnell refuses to give any of Obama’s judicial appointments even a hearing much less actual confirmation. If the Republicans control the Senate we are in for at least two more years of stagnation in the area of federal legislation. Actually probably four more years, for the party in the White House rarely gains seats in Congress in an off-year election.

Yet these establishment Republicans are not the most dangerous element of Trump’s supporters. They least are not likely to become violent in their opposition to the Biden administration. There is however among Trump’s supporters an element of extreme crazies who are clearly prone to violence. They speak (often in code incomprehensible to outsiders) of starting a new civil war to preserve white power. They’re armed with assault style rifles and other deadly weapons. Some of them form themselves into armed terrorist cells that they style as militias. They are hardcore racists and anti-Semites. The admire Adolf Hitler. We cannot rule out the possibility that they will resort to terrorist tactics the way Timothy McVeigh did when he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. He was after all very much of their ilk. Trump has played to these potential domestic terrorists throughout his presidency. When these crazies conducted a mass demonstration that became violent in Richmond, Virginia, he said there were fine people among them, which there clearly were not. When a group of violence prone supporters of his call the “Proud Boys” were terrorizing Portland, Oregon, he didn’t condemn them. He told them to “stand back and stand by,” a clear so-called dog whistle that said to them he supports them, that their violence wasn’t needed now, but they should stay ready because he may call on them for violence later. That we have a president who curries the support of these extremist elements rather than denounce them as the detestable, hate filled extremists that they are is one of the saddest aspects of the Trump presidency.

There is no way to know what Trump’s most extreme supporters will do in light of his loss of the 2020 presidential election. There is one thing we know for sure. Neither Trump nor Trumpism is going to go away any time soon. It won’t magically disappear the way Trump said the coronavirus would. Trump will be out of office, but as long as he’s alive he will not be silent. (And please don’t read that statement as a call for violence against him. It isn’t. I never have and never will call for violence against anyone.) Trump will continue lying and making outrageous claims for which there is no evidence. He will continue to send his terrorist supporters dog whistles that may well incite them to violence. Even the broader Trumpist movement of fascist populism will live on. It may even out live Trump himself.

America is changing in some radical ways. Soon we white Americans will no longer be a majority in our country but only a plurality. Poor, undereducated whites whose only way to claim worth has been through white supremacy believe themselves to be radically threatened by the country’s demographic changes. They will continue to lash out against those changes, against what they see of their loss of place and power, and against the people of color they blame for that perceived loss. I don’t believe that they will be able to start the new civil war of which they dream, but they will be able do to a great amount of harm to our country and to innocent people if they decide to do so. Trump won’t try to stop them. He may well incite them to do it. He doesn’t have Hitler’s brown shirts or Mussolini’s black shirts, but he does have armed white supremacist terrorist groups who know he supports them. They will respond to his dog whistles, and that will be very bad for all decent people in this country.

That Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election is a very good thing. His winning it would have been a disaster for this country and for the world. Many things will improve with Joe Biden as president. Yet the changes and problems in the United States that produced Trump and the Trumpist movement remain. Threats of violence from right-wing racist extremists remain as well. We must all remain on guard. We must do everything we can, nonviolently, to stop the harm those groups may well try to impose on us. It won’t be easy. It will be necessary.