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      in US Politics

      Biden is far from perfect – but we should still take a moment to savour his victory | Suzanne Moore

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      There are many things Joe Biden is not. He is not young. He is not an anti-establishment peacenik. He is not unbeholden to huge, anonymous donors. He is not free of accusations of using male privilege to be gropey with women. He is neither a radical, nor exciting. He is not a brilliant orator. He is not Bernie Sanders. And on it goes: the disappointments pile up thick and fast.
      But he is not a loser – and he is not Donald Trump. So let us have a moment, however brief, of celebration.
      Is the left so downright miserable that it cannot accept winning if the winner is imperfect or even worse than Trump, as I have seen some Instagram revolutionaries claim? Can we not luxuriate in Trump’s ongoing golf strop while creepy Rudy Giuliani rummages around in a car park next to a sex shop for a so-called press conference? Can we not speculate that Melania Trump already has the lawyers in? That pre-nup won’t go to waste.
      The left is so accustomed to losing that a strange phenomenon has occurred: we have become sore winners. Biden did not win by enough, the complaints go, nor did he immediately acknowledge the groundwork by the left, nor the part played by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his victory. Biden will be hamstrung, as the Democrats are unlikely to take control of the Senate, which hangs on the traditionally Republican vote in Georgia. The normality that Biden wants to restore is profoundly unequal … and on it goes.
      Then there is Kamala Harris, who is also not good enough, apparently, because of her former role as a prosecutor, in which she ended up incarcerating a lot of black men. Yet here she is telling us that she is the first – but not the last – woman of colour to be vice-president. If that doesn’t gladden your heart, I don’t know what will.
      God knows what damage Trump will do in the next months, assuming it is illegal to Taser him during his terrible swing and cart him off in a buggy. I imagine there will be lots of pardons for those still bobbing about in the cesspit. He is friendless, in denial and in enormous debt, apparently rejecting the advice of family members to concede. It is said that he screamed at Rupert Murdoch when Fox News called Arizona for Biden. Covid death figures mean nothing, ratings everything. His interior landscape seems to be a void.
      Seventy million votes for Trump and these people are not going away – and don’t we know it?
      Shops and offices are boarded up. The armed militias that Trump tells to stand by are still there. Many remain fearful. It strikes me that hope and fear are more intimately connected than we acknowledge. Many of us were afraid to hope for a Biden win because, lately, hopes have been dashed repeatedly. Yet, as the composer Ernest Bloch said: “Hope can learn and become smarter through damaging experience, but it can never be driven off course.” Hope, he said, is “characteristically daring”.
      Biden has a huge mandate. In terms of the environment, surely the most important issue, he has room for manoeuvre: he can develop Barack Obama’s clean power plan; he can rejoin international accords; he can, in short, act as if the climate emergency is real. This is no small thing.
      This election emphasised the gulf between the urban and rural populations of the US. The gulf is huge because the US is huge. I have read far too many leftist takes by those for whom New York, San Francisco and Washington DC constitute the US. Alabama, Montana, Kentucky, anyone?
      The coastal elites are as ignorant of their own country as Europeans are. One of the shocks about the US is that the media remains local, rather than national. Trump worked this well, utilising what the historian Timothy Snyder has called “sadopopulism”, in which the state is not about governing, but about making others suffer more – hence the ever-expanding list of enemies, from Mexican “rapists” to journalists to the post office.
      Covid exacerbated this. Mask wearers and people who told the truth about the disease were to be added to the long list of un-Americans. The delusion that “vulnerability is for losers” penetrated the psyches of those who were losing. The fantasy of winning back jobs is more appealing than the truth that some jobs can’t be won back. Trump voters remind me of something an MP in a leave constituency told me about Brexit: “You have to understand, it’s the first time they have been on the winning side in their lives.”
      It is easy enough to mock that, but I wouldn’t. It is also easy enough to say Biden is not the revolution. Now that Trump is a gouged-out egomaniac, his narcissism has metastasised to many parts of the US, where the malignancy grows.
      None of this easy, but a little light has got in. Celebrate the feeling while it lasts. The virus continues. Almost half of the US supports Trump, but something is changing. Take a deep breath. Inhale the hope, while you can.
      Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist More

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      in Elections

      Make no mistake: Biden's success is an important win for the world | Cas Mudde

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the popular vote with a record number of votes. That is worth celebratingSo, it wasn’t a landslide, but it will be a decisive victory after all. With an estimated 306 electoral college votes, Biden will even be two votes above Trump’s “biggest electoral college victory since Reagan” in 2016.But seriously, it will be weird to have a president again who will live in our reality rather than his own. I wonder how long we will enjoy it. People forget fast, and media and pundits even faster. How long before we will all complain about how “boring” and “predictable” Biden is, two of the characteristics that helped him win the election. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      'She's made us proud': Kamala Harris's ancestral village celebrates election win – video

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      The small Indian village of Thulasendrapuram burst into celebration after waking up to the news that Kamala Harris will become the first woman and the first person of south-Asian descent to become US vice-president. People set off firecrackers, played music and shared food in the village, where Harris’s maternal grandfather was born. ‘We take immense pride in her victory, and who she has become,’ said one resident
      Kamala Harris: joy in south India at victory for ‘daughter of our village’
      The meaning of Kamala Harris: the woman who will break new ground as vice-president More

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      in US Politics

      Can Biden and Harris put a bitterly divided America back together again?

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      The end of the Trump era will in theory look like this. At midday on Wednesday 21 January, Joe Biden will stand on the west front of the United States Capitol, place his left hand on a Bible, raise his right and utter 35 words: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States.”
      With that oath of office Biden will become the 46th president and power will drain from his predecessor, who will become a common citizen, an ex-president, number 45, no longer commander-in-chief, head of state or Oval Office occupier. The moment will thrum with pomp and pageantry. There will be drums, a bugle, the Hail to the Chief anthem and a 21-gun salute. A polished choreography, originating from George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, to symbolise the continuity of democratic rule and the peaceful transition of power.
      Of course, this assumes that, despite Donald Trump challenging the results of last week’s election, Biden and Kamala Harris will be able to take office the conventional way. If that happens, millions of viewers around the world will celebrate and a socially distanced crowd on the National Mall will cheer the end of what they consider a four-year nightmare.
      And then an urgent question will crystallise: can Biden and Harris put America back together? Can they end an era of hyper-polarisation and economic inequality that has degraded democracy and turned Americans against each other; that has shredded the idea of America?
      “Many Republicans and Democrats believe the other side isn’t just mistaken but evil,” says John Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College political scientist. Cultural, ethnic, geographic and racial divisions underpin party affiliations as never before, producing ideological polarisation in Congress not seen since the civil war. More

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      in Elections

      'Let us be the nation we know we can be': Biden speaks after defeating Trump – US election 2020 live updates

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      Key events

      Show

      10.17am EST10:17
      Trump goes golfing, again

      9.30am EST09:30
      Romney – Trump is ‘900lb gorilla in the Republican party’

      8.49am EST08:49
      US sees fourth consecutive record daily total of new Covid cases

      Live feed

      Show

      10.17am EST10:17

      Trump goes golfing, again

      Hello. Oliver Holmes here, taking over the live blog for the next few hours.
      ‘Surely, this election is over’, I hear millions of fatigued voices cry out. Well, yes, it is. Joe Biden is president-elect after winning the election, but the full count has still not finished and Donald Trump has hunkered down, refusing to concede.
      The latest update is that the current president appears to have gone golfing for the second day in a row. His motorcade recently arrived at Trump National Golf Club, in Sterling, Virginia, according to a White House reporter.
      A handful of demonstrators lined the sidewalks near the entrance of the club. Two signs read: “ORANGE CRUSHED” and “TRUMPTY DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL.”

      Updated
      at 10.19am EST

      10.00am EST10:00

      Michael Goldfarb, former London bureau chief of NPR and fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, has written for us today. He says that Trump was no accident, and the America that made him is still with us.

      It’s a measure of the bizarre, outsize impact of the man that pundits are already speaking of Trumpism. Liberal leftish types anticipate his return like Brian de Palma movie devotees anticipate Carrie’s hand coming out of the grave – Trump’s coming to drag them into the darkness. Rightwing radicals – conservative doesn’t seem the right term any more — speak of Trumpism because he was the person who energised their disparate coalition in a way no other person has. I almost typed politician rather than person but Trump is not a pol. He is a “leader”, someone on whom people project their own desires.
      Trump’s presidency was the end product of two strands of American life coming together after a quarter of a century of independent development. First, the Republican party’s evolution from a bloc of diverse interests into a radical faction built around a single idea: winning absolute power and making America a one-party state ruled by people dedicated to tax cuts for the wealthy and stacking the federal courts with judges who would roll back the New Deal/civil rights-era social contract.
      The former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, began this process more than a quarter of a century ago. He was the first prominent Republican to see in Donald Trump the man who could fulfil the modern party’s dreams. Gingrich later wrote, in 2018: “Trump’s America and the post-American society that the anti-Trump coalition represents are incapable of coexisting. One will simply defeat the other. There is no room for compromise. Trump has understood this perfectly since day one.”

      Read more here: Michael Goldfarb – Trump was no accident. And the America that made him is still with us
      And I’m done for the day – I’ll see you again tomorrow. Oliver Holmes will be with you shorty…

      9.58am EST09:58

      You are going to see this attack line from Republicans a lot in the coming days. Here’s conservative radio and TV host Mark Simone.

      MARK SIMONE
      (@MarkSimoneNY)
      Didn’t they keep saying Russia tampered with the election, that 17 intelligence agencies, 4 committees confirmed it and all news organizations were investigating it.Now we hear there’s never been any voter fraud and it’s impossible to tamper with an election. #election

      November 8, 2020

      Donald Trump Jr made a similar point earlier.

      Donald Trump Jr.
      (@DonaldJTrumpJr)
      We went from 4 years of Russia rigged the election, to elections can’t be rigged really fast didn’t we???

      November 8, 2020

      It bears repeating that despite team Trump repeatedly dismissing it as the ‘Russian hoax’ and similar, the CIA did find in December 2016 that Russia had interfered to try and help Trump win. Here’s the details:

      Officials briefed on the matter were told that intelligence agencies had found that individuals linked to the Russian government had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of confidential emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and others.
      The people involved were known to US intelligence and acted as part of a Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt the chances of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” one said.
      The emails were steadily leaked via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton’s White House run by revealing that DNC figures had colluded to harm the chances of her nomination rival Bernie Sanders.
      A separate report in the New York Times, also sourced to unnamed officials, claimed US intelligence agencies had discovered that Russian hackers had also penetrated the Republican National Committee’s networks, but conspicuously chose to release only the information stolen from the Democrats.
      A third report, by Reuters, said intelligence agencies assessed that as the campaign drew on, Russian government officials devoted increasing attention to assisting Trump’s effort to win the election. Virtually all the emails they released publicly were potentially damaging to Clinton and the Democrats.

      Important to note one key thing there – the Russian interference was all about the selective leaking of stolen and hacked information to assist Donald Trump, not changing the counting of votes. There was no evidence found that Russia hacked voting machines or faked ballot papers.

      9.49am EST09:49

      Trump’s campaign staff don’t seem in any mood to concede this morning.

      Tim Murtaugh
      (@TimMurtaugh)
      Greeting staff at @TeamTrump HQ this morning, a reminder that the media doesn’t select the President. pic.twitter.com/3ACjkBhxVn

      November 8, 2020

      A reminder that as it stands, Joe Biden has won over over 75m votes, some 4.3m more than the incumbent. He is projected to win at least 290 electoral college votes, and will be the 46th president of the United States.
      In 2000, while Bush did indeed prevail after those earlier calls for Gore, the election ended up hinging on just 537 votes in Florida. In order to prevent Biden reaching the White House, the Trump campaign are going to have to proved evidence that tens of thousands of votes in multiple states should be discounted as fraudulent.
      The 45th president, meanwhile, departed the White House at 9.15 this morning. The press pool were not informed where he was headed. Yesterday’s unscheduled trip was to play golf, during which Trump was informed that he had lost. More

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      in Elections

      'I won't be the last': Kamala Harris, first woman elected US vice-president, accepts place in history

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      Kamala Harris accepted her place in history on Saturday night with a speech honoring the women who she said “paved the way for this moment tonight”, when the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants would stand before the nation as the vice-president-elect of the United States.
      With her ascension to the nation’s second highest office, Harris, 56, will become the first woman and the first woman of color to be elected vice president, a reality that shaped her speech and brought tears to the eyes of many women and girls watching from the hoods of their cars that had gathered in the parking lot of a convention center in Wilmington, Delaware.
      Wearing an all-white pantsuit, in an apparent tribute to the suffragists who fought for a woman’s right to vote, Harris smiled, exultant, as she waved from the podium waiting for the blare of car horns and cheers to subside. Joe Biden, the president-elect, would speak next. But this was a moment all her own.
      She began her remarks with a tribute to the legacy of the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis.
      “Protecting our democracy takes struggle,” Harris said, speaking from a stage outside the Chase Center on the Riverfront in Wilmington. “It takes sacrifice. But there is joy in it. And there is progress. Because we, the people, have the power to build a better future.”

      With Harris poised to become the highest-ranking woman in the history of American government, this milestone marks the extraordinary arc of a political career that has broken racial and gender barriers at nearly every turn. As a prosecutor, she rose to become the first Black woman attorney general of California. When she was elected to the Senate in 2016, she became only the second Black woman in history to serve in the chamber.
      In her remarks, Harris paid tribute to the women across the country – and throughout history – who made this moment possible.
      “I reflect on their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision, to see what can be, unburdened by what has been,” she said. “I stand on their shoulders.”
      She specifically honored the contributions of Black women to the struggle for suffrage, equality and civil rights – leaders who are “too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy”.
      As a candidate for president, Harris spoke often of her childhood spent attending civil rights marches with her parents, who were students at the University of California, Berkeley. When protests erupted in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd this summer, Harris joined activists in the streets to demand an end to police brutality and racial injustice.
      As Biden searched for a running mate, pressure built to choose a Black woman in recognition not only of the role they played in salvaging his presidential campaign – which Biden acknowledged in his remarks on Saturday night – but of their significance to the party as a whole. Yet a narrative began to form that Harris was a somewhat conventional choice, a senator and one-time Democratic rival who brought generational, ideological and racial balance to the Democratic ticket. More