President Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 3 November election, which appear to be over, provided his opponents with a source of sadistic amusement. Trump’s self-humiliation in the eyes of the liberal world is complete. To his followers, of course, the fight goes on. And his Republican colleagues have reason to be cheerful. We should not allow the schadenfreude to distract us from this basic fact. Yes, Biden defeated Trump. But in that same election the Democrats failed to gain the majority of seats that the new president needs to actually put an end to the era of Republican dominance. Things might still go right in Georgia, but that would leave the Senate hanging by a thread.
Four times, at moments of historic crisis, the US electorate has handed the White House to a Democrat – 1916, 1932, 2008 and 2020. But this year is the first time it has done so without also handing the Democrats a clear majority in Congress. The basic difference between Biden and his predecessors is that he lacks a solid political basis from which to wield power.
The details of state-level politics across the US may seem pettifogging. What is a Senate runoff in Georgia compared to a global pandemic, or the challenge of the rise of China? This incommensurability is jarring, but it is what defines the US as a democratic superpower. The scale of the US economy, its fiscal capacity and military might make it the most powerful state on the planet. But who controls that power depends on fickle and often trivial whims of local political circumstance and on the infighting between the divided branches of US government.
America’s rise to global power occurred in a crucial 20-year period between 1932 and 1952 in which, except for a brief two-year hiatus, the Democratic party controlled both the White House and Congress. That dominance defined a new image of the US as a driver of global progress, but that external face was founded at home on an incongruous coalition in which the “solid South” provided the necessary votes in Congress. Jim Crow segregation was the price. The Democrats remained the dominant power in Congress through the early 1990s, but there was never to be another period quite like the mid-century decades.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
