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      in US Politics

      'Whoa' – Fox News cuts off Kayleigh McEnany for 'illegal votes' spiel

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      Fox News has cut away from a briefing held by the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, during which she repeated Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the presidential election and doubled down on allegations of voter fraud, for which there is scant if any evidence.
      Speaking to media on Monday night in her “personal capacity” during what she said was a campaign event at the Republican National Committee headquarters, McEnany said Republicans want “every legal vote to be counted, and every illegal vote to be discarded”, prompting the conservative Fox News network to stop broadcasting the briefing.
      From the studio, host Neil Cavuto said: “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this.”
      He added: “I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up, but that’s an explosive charge to make, that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating. If she does bring proof of that, of course we’ll take you back. So far she has started saying, right at the outset – ‘welcoming fraud, welcoming illegal voting’. Not so fast.”
      The decision to cut away was Cavuto’s, the Washington Post reported, citing people familiar with the show.
      Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News has shifted away from its loyalty to Trump over the past week, instead seeming in what appears to be closely co-ordinated messaging to warn its readers that Trump has lost the election despite his claims to the contrary.
      Fox was one of the first news organisations to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
      Some senior Republican lawmakers have continued to refuse to recognise Biden as the election winner. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Monday that Trump was fully within his rights to look into alleged voting irregularities, and in a Senate speech did not acknowledge Biden as president-elect.

      Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting system lacked the oversight and verification applied to in-person voting and seeking an emergency injunction to stop state officials from certifying Biden’s victory in the state.
      The Trump campaign and Republicans have brought numerous lawsuits alleging election irregularities. Judges have already tossed out cases in Georgia and Michigan. More

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      in World Politics

      Will Joe Biden Succeed With America’s Second Reconstruction?

      by

      After four days of agonizing vote tabulations, interminable political commentary, overwrought election dissection and national public angst, Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the 2020 election as America’s next president. Biden partisans are entitled to some celebration. It was a hard-fought win against what seemed like impossible odds at the beginning of the year. But the politician who began his public life 50 years ago as a Wilmington, Delaware, councilman will now take on the biggest challenge of his life and of the nation he will lead.

      First, however, it’s important to call attention to all the things that went well for America this last week. And they’re vitally important for Americans — and non-Americans, too — to understand and appreciate as the nation and its new president invest themselves in this herculean challenge ahead.

      360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

      READ MORE

      For all the Sturm und Drang in the lead-up to the election, voting came off largely without a hitch. All voters who came to vote were able to do so. Waiting times were mercifully brief. Despite plenty of hiccups in primary voting that took place earlier in the year, national election day procedures and systems performed just as they were supposed to do. Early voting as well as mail-in and absentee voting, occurring in many states for the first time to minimize the dangers of COVID-19, also proceeded with few problems.

      Delays in ballot tabulation occurred in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and elsewhere largely because Republican-controlled legislatures prohibited starting the counting process until November 3 — voting day. In the end, that may have redounded against them and President Donald Trump. Also, to minimize voters’ exposure to COVID-19, many states were using mail-in voting and same-day voter registration for the first time, accounting for further delays.

      Vox Populi

      The success of the process was bolstered throughout the nation by competent election administrators and effective election systems, manned by armies of conscientious volunteers, Republicans, Democrats and independents. Donald Trump’s predictable, sore-loser accusations of fraud and manipulation are specious and groundless. His legal claims will likely go nowhere.

      Furthermore, fears of violence or public unrest at polling places or in cities never really materialized, from either the left or the right. There were few, if any, reports of voter intimidation. The American people seemed to understand that this most sacred and honored element of their much-bruised democracy was off-limits. It was their chance to express their views, wishes and wants in the most forceful and effective way possible in a democracy.

      The world may also take heart in the level of participation in this election. The voter participation rate — expected to reach nearly two-thirds of the population eligible to vote once all ballots are counted – will exceed the previous high of 65.7% set in the 1908 elections. In my home state of Colorado, voter turnout will reach an astounding 85%, the highest in the nation and the highest ever of any US state in modern election history.

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      It may be fair to credit Donald Trump for wresting American voters from their traditional election lethargy. He unquestionably stirred deep and strong sentiments among supporters and critics alike. They responded as they should in a democratic society — by going to the polls. For America, vox populi prevailed.

      There is a related benefit to the increased voter turnout. It would be hard to find a period in recent US history when so many Americans took such a strong interest in public affairs. One could hardly go to the supermarket, walk through a parking garage, take a stroll through the neighborhood or sit in a classroom or office — at least those still functioning under COVID-19 restrictions — without hearing people talk about the political issues and the election. Political conversations — whether online, on social media, TV, radio, print or at the kitchen table — dominated like never before. Animated and even stressful at times, these are nevertheless heartening. It is essential that this communication take place in order to keep a democracy vibrant and innervated. An engaged citizenry makes for a stronger democracy.

      Finally, the much-feared tampering by outside “influencers” also failed to materialize, though not from want of trying. Federal, state and local agencies and authorities did in fact come together to ensure that these elections were largely interference-free and that the results do indeed reflect the genuine will of the people. Intelligence agencies tipped off Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies about fake social media accounts and posts in order to restrict the reach of bots and prevent the spread if false information. That was in spite of a president who has insisted for four years that outside agents had no influence in the 2016 election, when all three US intelligence agencies — the CIA, NSC and FBI — concluded otherwise.

      The upshot of the 2020 election process is that the core component of America’s democracy — the expression of the people’s will — proved strong, healthy and resilient. It worked.

      Now the Hard Part

      Despite that success, however, American democracy faces enormous pressures. The nation is plainly divided into two near-equal camps. Each seems unable and unwilling to listen or reach out to the opposite side, viewing the other as enemies rather than political adversaries. It is unhealthy and unsustainable. Democracy without compromise, almost a forbidden word in the rival camps, leads to stagnation and collapse. It will be President-elect Biden’s task to start the process to bridge this gaping chasm in American public life.

      Just how is America divided? Some argue, rather eloquently and persuasively, that it’s a conflict of classes. In one corner is a wealthy, entitled, well-educated and aloof stratum of elites divorced from and insensitive to the needs of what is essentially a working class. This working class, in the opposite corner, provides for the elite’s essential services, contributes the manual labor to build and maintain their glass-encased office complexes and luxury homes, grows and processes their food, makes and maintains the cars and machines they depend on, cleans their cities, operates and maintains the transportation networks, and fights and dies in their wars.

      The latter point bears elaboration because it is particularly illustrative of an apparent divide. Since 2001, America has been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which continue today. US forces remain present, though in fewer numbers today than five or 10 years ago, in both countries as well in other countries around the world. A recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations showed that 83% of American military recruits come from families or neighborhoods whose median incomes fall below $85, 850. Only 17% came from income levels above that.

      The median household income in the US was $68,703 in 2019. People of color are disproportionately represented in the enlisted ranks of the Army, Navy and Air Force (African Americans) and the Marine Corps (Hispanics). In fact, black Americans are far more likely to serve their country in uniform than their white counterparts.

      The United States turns to its middle and lower classes to defend itself and fight its wars pretty much like every civilization throughout history dating back to the Roman Empire. But none of those were democracies. So-called elites, who benefit substantially more than their lower-income fellow citizens in terms of legal protections, opportunity, privilege and rights, bear fewer of the burdens of defending and sustaining that system of rights than those who arguably profit less from it. One does not go to Harvard, Stanford or MIT in order to enlist or even seek an officer’s commission in America’s armed forces.

      Class or Geography?

      However, it is another statistical nugget in the CFR study that may allow one to argue that, in fact, it isn’t class that divides America. It’s geography. Data of state-by-state contributions to the enlisted ranks of the military indicate that states of the southeast, which are less affluent, are overly represented. The more well-off states of the northeast are underrepresented.

      With that in mind, consider the state-by-state electoral map. With the exception of Georgia, whose growing metropolis of Atlanta belatedly delivered the Southern state to Biden, the Southeast was Donald Trump territory. The Southeast and the Midwest, which also went for Trump, are disproportionately rural and host fewer large cities than the states along America’s two coasts, which gave their electoral votes to Joe Biden.

      Embed from Getty Images

      America’s electoral map has changed little since the end of the Civil War. The electoral maps of 1880, just 15 years after the war, and 1908, over 40 years afterward, are illustrative. (Note: In the 1880 map, the colors used to designate the parties is reversed from what it is today — Republicans were blue and Democrat states red.) There is one important consideration that dramatically altered the party alignment in the South. With the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Southern Democrats switched to Republican. Richard Nixon cleverly played the race card in 1968 at the height of the civil rights movement and again in 1973, cementing Southern loyalty for the Republican Party for the first time. It isn’t class that is at the heart of what divides America today. For one thing, Americans never bought into the old Marxist-Leninist argument of class warfare. It was an outmoded and unrelatable Old World argument. It didn’t apply to them.

      Classes most certainly exist in the US, and Americans know it. Except for the Native Americans, all US citizens find their roots among immigrants who came overwhelmingly from lower classes. Most immigrants who came to this country through the 1970s were poor and seeking the kind of opportunities not available to them in their countries of origin. What they sought, later defined as upward mobility, was in America where class may have existed but wouldn’t matter. Most Americans, with the exception of blacks, Native Americans and other people of color, believed that class warfare could not exist in their country. Their problems, like everything else about America, were different.

      The real division in America is urban versus rural, supplemented with a healthy dose of race. Two recent books make persuasive cases for class versus the urban-rural arguments. Michael Lind, in his well-researched “The New Class War,” makes the case for social class divisions in America. Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” makes the case for what I would describe as American tribalism, an almost political Hatfields against the McCoys. Only it’s Republicans versus Democrats. In her review and comparison of these two excellent publications, Professor Amy Chua writes that Klein’s categorization embraces religion, race and geography.

      But electoral politics suggest that geography, and not just on a national scale, may be the culprit and what really defines America’s current challenges. Even within predominantly Democratic states, rural counties typically were drawn to Donald Trump. Overwhelmingly Democrat California and New York — and Texas on the Republican side — illustrate the point. America’s differences on just about every public issue today — race, gender, abortion, guns, big government, religion, taxes … you name it — can almost always be sorted by the urban versus rural criteria.

      America’s Second Reconstruction

      How does Joe Biden begin to fix that? Judging from his 50 years in politics, he may be fairly well suited. He’s not an ideological iconoclast. Nor is he vindictive. He won’t launch a campaign to vanquish his opponents in the fashion of Donald Trump. His campaign rhetoric and post-election commentary all suggest that he’ll follow a moderate political course and look for compromise. And Biden comes from America’s working classes.

      That is all necessary. But it’s far from sufficient. Biden needs a second Reconstruction. The ideological brainchild of Abraham Lincoln following the American Civil War, reconstruction sought to bring the South back into the American fold, promote economic reintegration and development, eradicate the vestiges of slavery, and incorporate the freed slaves into American society. It was generally considered to be successful despite Andrew Johnson’s, Lincoln’s successor, efforts to weaken it. A pro-Reconstruction, Republican-controlled Congress and President Ulysses Grant ensured steady progress. Nevertheless, it was tragically cut short, sacrificed in the political horse-trading to win Southern Democrats’ support for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes following the disputed 1876 election.

      With it went a united nation, with black Americans finally getting a taste of the forbidden American fruit of opportunity and upward mobility. Jim Crow, segregation and lynching became the order of the day, effectively slavery without the formal system. Also lost were the South’s opportunity to capitalize on what would soon explode in the North and elsewhere — the Industrial Revolution. Like the Great Emancipator, his noble dream of Reconstruction followed Lincoln to an early grave.

      Reconstruction remains unfinished business in America. And not just in the South. Rural areas throughout America need reconstruction. They need capital, infrastructure, better health care, improved schools and opportunities, especially jobs. This must especially include areas of concentrations of black, brown and Indigenous Americans. To capitalize fully on its great bounty, America’s rural communities need to connect to their urban counterparts.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Donald Trump may have correctly read the frustrations and anxieties of rural America. But he manipulated those earnest feelings to advance the Trump brand. He offered no solutions. Instead, Americans heard verbal palliatives that made rural Americans feel that someone in Washington was finally listening. But the frustrations of being outside America’s prosperity are still with rural citizens and people of color.

      Biden will have to find a way to earn their trust and then begin a new reconstruction. His Build Back Better program, starting with coming to grips with the pandemic and getting it under control, may offer the broad outlines for a new Reconstruction. To earn that trust and start the healing process of his country, Biden may wish to refer to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. With a large dose of humility, grace and forgiveness, President-elect Biden must listen to rural Americans, especially to those of color, all of whom want not only to share in America’s bounty but also to preserve what is important to their cherished lifestyles. America’s diversity is an unquestionable strength of its democracy. That must include its urban-rural diversity, too.

      It may be historical irony that to heal a deeply divided nation, the newly elected president must look back to another president who sought to heal the much deeper divisions of a broken nation. This time, it must be made to work. The country’s future may depend on it.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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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 US Politics

      Stacey Abrams: Georgia's political heroine … and romance author

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      Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.Abrams published the novel under a pen name “to separate my fiction from more academic publications on tax policy”. Seven more novels would follow, including Never Tell, which sees criminal psychologist Dr Erin Abbott take on a New Orleans serial killer with the help of journalist Gabriel Moss; Hidden Sins, which follows Mara Reed as she reunites with the scientist whose heart she once broke in her hometown; and Reckless, in which top lawyer Kell Jameson faces her past when the head of her childhood orphanage is accused of murder.In 2018, when Abrams made an unsuccessful bid to become governor of Georgia, she told Entertainment Weekly that she believed she could tell her characters stories “in ways that are engaging, but are also reflective of the complexity of women’s lives”.“Whether I’m writing about an ethno-botanist or a woman who’s raising orphans in South Georgia, the challenge of telling their stories is the same challenge I face as a legislator who has to talk to someone about passing a bill on kinship care, helping grandparents raising grandchildren, or blocking a tax bill because I’m using expertise they don’t realise I have,” she said. “I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are. It respects the diversity of our experiences, and it creates space for broader conversations.”With Biden narrowly ahead in the Georgia recount, readers are now rushing to snap up Abrams’ books. US romance bookshop the Ripped Bodice sold 100 copies of her novels in just 12 hours. And as they pointed out on Twitter, “while [Abrams] was busy turning Georgia blue, she also wrote a new suspense novel”. While Justice Sleeps, out next May, follows a young law clerk, Avery Keene, who works for the legendary but cantankerous Justice Wynn. When Wynn slips into a coma, Avery discovers a conspiracy that has infiltrated the heart of US politics.“A decade ago, I wrote the first draft of a novel that explored an intriguing aspect of American democracy – the lifetime appointments to the US supreme court,” Abrams said in a statement. “Drawing on my own background as a lawyer and politician, While Justice Sleeps weaves between the supreme court, the White House and international intrigue to see what happens when a lowly law clerk controls the fate of a nation.”Abrams’ fellow romance writers, meanwhile, have launched an auction and fundraiser at Romancing the Runoff to help support the Georgia senate run-offs. “We’re here to help give 2020 a happily ever after,” they say. And they’ve already made $60,000 (£46,400). More

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      in World Politics

      The Future of the Semi-Victorious Democratic Party

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      New York Times reporter Astead W. Herndon introduced his post-election interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by reminding readers how the ebullient progressive Democrat has dutifully played the role the Democrats requested of her during the presidential election campaign. “For months,” he wrote, “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr as he sought to defeat President Trump.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Good soldier:

      A metaphor applied to anyone who obeys even ill-conceived orders commanded by an abusive authority and who will be valued not for their valor as a solider or their integrity as a citizen, but only for the number of enemies they have killed.

      Contextual Note

      Herndon’s choice of metaphor perfectly sums up the attitude of a party that, since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, has consistently glorified war. It is also a party that increasingly celebrates billionaires, Rhodes scholars, intelligence officers and generals while marginalizing the lowly, which includes bartenders, bus drivers and other “deplorables,” as well as its own loyal foot soldiers.

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began her wage-earning career as a bartender before demonstrating her talents as a political strategist. At the same time, she capitalized on her budding stardom by accepting to play the foot soldier for the Democrats. In the interview, she recounts her forays against the Republican enemy during this election campaign: “I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help.”

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      Mainstream Democrats see Republicans as their rivals and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as their enemy. And not only her, but the majority of Democratic voters, who polls tell us clamor for single-payer health insurance and free college. In the interview, Ocasio-Cortez tries to warn her colleagues that “their base is not the enemy.”

      Ocasio-Cortez exposes the fundamental issue both parties will have to deal with after Joe Biden’s victory: redefining their base. Do they even have one? Donald Trump proved that something resembling a base existed on the right side of the spectrum. He gave it a forceful voice. It appealed to xenophobia and a rejection of what might be called urban values in favor of an illusory small-town and suburban ideal that has always occupied a sentimental place in America’s imagination. How ironic that it was a wealthy Manhattan real estate mogul who managed to mobilize those energies. The Democrats have not even tried to define their base, hoping that people will assume it’s the working class.

      To the question, “What can we expect from you in the next four years?” Ocasio-Cortez replied: “I don’t know. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.” The party has shown no interest in understanding what it claims to be its working-class base. She expects the party to continue its “smothering approach” to anyone who seeks to respond to the increasingly evident needs of the base. She describes its effects: “It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy.”

      In his victory speech Saturday evening, Biden promised to unify the nation: “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now.” How about unifying the party? Will the party under Biden’s leadership end its demonizing of its own most dynamic members? Biden ended his victory speech with this idea: “Spread the faith.” “Spreading” — the faith, the truth or anything else — in Latin is “propagare,” from which the word “propaganda” is derived. Is that what Biden is proposing for the next four years: faith instead of action and moderate mainstream propaganda to replace Trump and Pompeo’s populist right-wing agenda?

      Historical Note

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wonders “whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost.” History tells us that’s unlikely. The experience following the 2016 election revealed the Democrats’ chronic incapacity to conduct an honest autopsy of their defeats. They condemned Donald Trump’s personal bombast and vanity. But the Democratic Party as a whole shares those vices. It targets different enemies, but its methods are similar. The vain and bombastic never admit past mistakes. Instead, they always seek someone else to blame for their own failures.

      Donald Trump set the tone when he began his first presidential campaign in 2015. He blamed the Mexican people for everything that was troubling a nation still reeling from a crisis engineered and precipitated a decade earlier, not by Latinos, but by the financial wizards of Wall Street. Once elected, Trump chose a new bugbear: Muslims. He did this even while kowtowing, on his first foreign visit, to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the despotic ruler of the oil-rich kingdom that had supplied 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. Finally, when a global pandemic wreaked havoc on the US economy, threatening his prospects for reelection, Trump blamed the Chinese.

      Trump’s consistency in blaming other groups of people manifestly inspired the Democrats. Taking the hint from Hillary Clinton after her ignominious defeat to the least qualified candidate in the history of American elections, the Democratic Party claimed that all the fault could be laid at the feet of the Russians. That produced three years of media and courtroom drama, culminating in a farcical impeachment that essentially revealed the inanity of the entire exercise and the futile absurdity of the Democrats’ strategy.

      Nothing beyond the anecdotal justified either Trump’s accusations against the nation of his choice or the Democrats’ demonization of Russia. Worse, this voluntary blindness allowed both Trump and the Democrats to avoid using the existing evidence to seek a deeper understanding of the weaknesses of the nation’s political culture. They preferred to deflect blame by promoting the blanket judgment of an entire nation, people or race.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In Saturday’s speech, Biden proclaimed: “The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another, it’s not some mysterious force beyond our control. It’s a decision. It’s a choice we make. And if we can decide not to cooperate, then we can decide to cooperate.”

      Has the president-elect’s absence from politics after his eight years as vice president and his retreat into the basement in 2020 blinded him from the reality of the growing instability within both parties? Defining the nation according to a simple binary opposition of Republicans vs. Democrats is a worn-out heritage of the 20th century, when people accepted and even clung to those labels. Both parties are now clearly divided, if not fragmented. The labels have lost their meaning.

      Large swaths of Americans now perceive both parties for what they are: two clubs of privileged oligarchs and moneyed interests that have acquired the habit of sharing the same resources, managing them in their common interest and disguising their collusion by bickering petulantly in public over trivialities. They thereby create the impression, exploited by the media, that they are dealing with serious issues. This political pantomime enables the parties to agree on “reasonable compromises” designed to obscure the real issues, at best papering over problems rather than addressing them. At worst, it means applying King Solomon’s justice literally by cutting the baby in two while offering the contending ladies their blessings and then wishing them better luck after the next election.

      Nothing today indicates that Joe Biden will even try to mobilize the resources and the political will needed to solve the pressing issues he has himself promised to address. Whether it’s COVID-19, the plight of working people in a crippled economy, climate change or racial injustice, the compromises Democrats and Republicans habitually make have long been the source of these problems rather than their solutions.

      The two parties are prisoners of a system of their own making that aggravates crises. And the crises listed above are all coursing toward a tipping point beyond which systemic implosion looks inevitable. Sudden collapse can no doubt be avoided, and Joe Biden should be better at avoiding it than Trump. But it can only be achieved at the price of acknowledging that collapse is actually threatening. That is something neither party will accept to do. 

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Goodbye Trump, hello Biden: how America is waving goodbye to a shocking, shameful era

      by

      As the result was finally called, the end of his presidency confirmed, Donald Trump teed off on a crisp, autumnal Saturday afternoon at his private golf club in Virginia.
      The president was in the midst of a four-day mission to spread baseless misinformation about election integrity in an attempt to subvert US democracy.
      “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” he tweeted, falsely, hours before hitting the fairway.
      Of the many false claims Trump has made over the past four years – lying about the size of his inauguration crowd, lying about the trajectory of a life-threatening hurricane, lying about the deadliness of the coronavirus – the lies about this election are the most farcical and grotesque.
      And they have not worked.
      A growing chorus of world leaders, some members of the Republican party, and tens of millions of Americans have already begun to move on. Trump cast a lonely figure as he returned to the White House after golfing, his motorcade met on the street by hundreds of protesters who simultaneously gave him the middle finger.
      At the time of writing, he has yet to concede the election; perhaps he never will. A number of spurious legal challenges remain outstanding as well. But on Saturday evening, celebrations in US cities continued into the night.
      That evening, president-elect Joe Biden jogged on to the stage in Wilmington, Delaware, and declared the beginning of a new political age. “Let this grim era of demonisation in America begin to end – here and now,” he told a crowd assembled in their cars, honking their horns, tears in their eyes. “Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. And what presidents say in this battle matters. It is time for our better angels to prevail.”
      Miles away I found myself at the front of a different Joe Biden celebration parade, in the city of Palm Beach, south Florida. This is one of the state’s most economically divided urban areas, with low-income, diverse neighbourhoods to the west and fabulous wealth to the east. Perhaps nothing is more ostentatious than Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago private members club – his self-described “winter White House”.
      The car convoy, of about 50 vehicles, crossed into the affluent suburbs, and wound around the tall palm-lined roads less than a mile from Trump’s club.
      “We did it! We did it!” shouted Wendy Bostic, 37, a preschool teacher, and one of the thousands of Black female organisers who helped Biden secure this victory. Bostic lost her job for six months during the pandemic and believes Biden offers a pathway to help rebuild her community. “It’s over. This darkness. It’s over.”
      She gestured to her two-year-old twin daughters, Nyla and Kyla, and said the months of community-organising had been to secure their future. The US will see its first female, first Black, first Asian-American vice-president, Kamala Harris, something that meant everything to Bostic. “It’s almost more important than Biden himself,” she said.
      Although Biden lost Florida, he secured the most votes of any presidential candidate in US history, more than 74.5 million. Exit polling suggests his coalition included nearly 90% of Black voters, two-thirds of Hispanic and Asian voters, more than 60% of younger people and over half of women. He appears to have won the popular vote by at least 4m.
      In most advanced democracies that would be a major mandate to govern. But the US Senate still hangs in the balance with two runoff elections in the state of Georgia set to decide who controls the chamber – a pivotal branch of government that could make or break the Biden administration’s legislative agenda.
      Still, the power of the presidency will allow Joe Biden to reverse some of the most extreme actions of the previous administration. He will take a more proactive approach to mitigating the effects of the pandemic. He will rejoin the Paris climate agreement. He will end the construction of Trump’s wall. All likely within the first few days of taking office.
      But policy reversals and soaring rhetoric will only get him so far. And failures to protect the most vulnerable in US society began well before Donald Trump.
      This has been a polarising four years, leaving the US a more damaged and fractured society. While the majority of the country voted for Biden, more than 70 million Americans cast their ballot for Donald Trump. The president has created a new political paradigm, partly rooted in the country’s oldest sins but also fostered by a climate of conspiracy theories, disinformation and a cult of personality.
      Reporting on this election has often felt like reporting on two different realities.
      I spent election night split between these two worlds. More precisely, I spent it peering into a packed party in Palm Beach, through the safety of a glass door. Inside, 500 Republican revellers, without masks or social-distancing, danced to the Village People and celebrated a Trump victory, even as it became increasingly clear the victor would not be decided on the night. Behind those doors it was as if the pandemic did not exist. And Donald Trump would remain president for eternity.
      But as the reality of a days-long wait began to dawn on the assembled crowd, some of whom had spent $500 to attend, the anger was palpable.
      “If Biden gets in, we are totally ducked,” said a woman, resisting the urge to swear as she left. “We’re ducked to the max because he’s going to shut everything down. He’s listening to the stupid scientists. They don’t understand everything.”
      I have often found myself at the centre of Trump’s darkest impulses over the past four years, reporting from the ground on the real-life consequences of his brutal policy decisions, his dangerous rhetoric and sheer incompetence.
      In 2018, I sat in a federal courthouse in McAllen, Texas, and watched a man named Ramón Villata, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, beg a US judge to be reunited with his two-year-old son. They had been ripped apart by the administration’s child-separation policy, perhaps the most damning indictment of the morality vacuum created by his presidency.
      In 2017, I was dispatched to Charlottesville, Virginia, a day after the murder of the antiracism activist Heather Heyer. I watched her friends and family weep after her death at the hands of a white supremacist terrorist, after torch-waving neo-Nazi thugs had screamed “Jews will not replace us” during a violent rally in her home town. Trump described “very fine people on both sides” in the immediate aftermath of a racist riot, an abhorrent nod to white supremacists.
      Later that year, I reported from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria claimed the lives of 3,057 Americans. As Trump tossed paper towels into a crowd in San Juan, the island’s capital, and professed his administration had done a “fantastic job” in the recovery, I sat with a family in a remote rural town in the centre of the island who had lost almost everything, forced to drink stream water and live by candlelight. They had received no federal aid, and the administration would continue to fail the island for months to come.
      And this year, in some of the poorest communities of colour in the US south, I have witnessed the tragedy of death, illness and economic hardship imposed by the pandemic on society’s most vulnerable. All amid antagonism against public health, objective science, and a culture war, instigated by the most powerful man on earth, over the simple act of wearing a face mask.
      Rhetoric, policy and competence are easy to rectify. But uniting the nation, restoring faith in institutions, facts and truth, and now the democratic process itself, will be the challenge of Joe Biden’s lifetime.
      He made a tentative first step towards that on Saturday night.
      “To make progress we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemy. They are not our enemies,” he said. “They are Americans.” More