Joe Biden is the next president of the United States – and Kamala Harris has made history, becoming the first woman, and the first woman of color, to be elected vice-president. The pair shattered previous records, winning more votes in the presidential race than any candidates in American history.
The American people have disavowed four years of a thuggish presidency. They have chosen decency over dysfunction, fact over fiction, truth over lies and empathy over cruelty. They have rejected the last four years of ugliness, divisiveness, racism and sustained assaults on constitutional democracy. And even as Trump makes baseless and dangerous claims of fraud and plots legal challenges, it is clear that 75 million Americans are moving on.
But now, the real work begins.
Removing Trump from the White House is one thing – fixing America is quite another. There is a danger that progressives and liberals invest too much faith in Trump’s departure and too little in what will be needed to address the deep-rooted problems that will remain in place once he leaves Pennsylvania Avenue. Once the celebrations – spontaneous, glorious and moving – die down, there will need to be a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump, and his departure is no guarantee that the country will mend. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.
Two eight-year Democratic presidencies over the last 30 years have not significantly tackled these problems: a stark racial wealth gap, worsening school segregation, corrosive inequality, a climate crisis and a democratic deficit at the heart of America’s electoral college are but some of the systemic issues that confront the new president.
And while the election may have delivered defeat for Donald Trump, it did not deliver a resounding blow to Trumpism. And possibly not even Trump. About 70 million Americans took a good look at the last four years of racism, mendacity and cruelty – and voted for another four. He recorded the highest ever vote by a Republican presidential candidate.
Biden fought this campaign on a pledge to save the soul of the nation and return the country to normalcy. His bet was that Americans would look back at four years when the country was roiled, stressed, bruised and sometimes, literally, beaten – and would decide to course-correct. That did not happen. Seventy million Americans wanted it all over again.
In the months leading to the election there was a hope that the last four years were an aberration, a passing nightmare from which the country would awake and from which they would return to normalcy. The result of the election makes that seem unlikely. As the writer Fintan O’Toole said last week in a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books:
The Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this.
They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that they were broadly right. There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.
And, despite the Biden victory, the Democrats failed to get control of state legislatures across the country. Every 10 years, following a census, the outcome of state races dictate the shape of redistricting lines for congressional districts. The Republicans successfully targeted a wealth of states in 2010 after Obama’s victory and managed to draw up outrageously gerrymandered states.
This was no secret. The conservative political strategist Karl Rove outlined in the Wall Street Journal the plan to win majorities in state legislatures. “He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” read the subhead to Rove’s column. And they did.
This year the Democrats fought back – and lost. They targeted both chambers in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. In Iowa and Michigan they targeted the state houses and in Minnesota the senate. Unless late votes in Arizona change the Republican lead in the race for both legislatures (highly unlikely) then the Democrats will not have flipped a single state chamber.
And then there’s the US Senate.
The re-election of Trump’s allies, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, suggest that the Republican leadership that enabled Trump during his presidency was rewarded, not punished, for their loyalty. While the balance of power in the Senate won’t be determined until January, by two runoff elections in Georgia in races that were too close to call, the threat of a divided Congress means a Biden administration could face gridlock that weakens its ability to make progressive change.
Despite those electoral shortcomings, we welcome the opportunity to refocus our journalism on the opportunities that lie ahead for America: the opportunity to fix a broken healthcare system, to restore role of science in government, to repair global alliances, and to address the corrosive racial bias in our schools, criminal justice system, housing and other institutions.
We will continue to highlight corrosive inequality, and we will interrogate why America’s racial wealth gap continues to get worse. In 2016, Pew estimated the median wealth for black households was $17,100, 10 times worse than that for white households. We will report on the economic transition needed to stem climate change, and illustrate how it affects communities of color first, and hardest. And we will continue to question the unchecked power of corporations and big tech.
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