Allison Meakem is an editorial fellow at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @allisonmeakem
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Well, there's more, and these issues are what face us now.
~ From Foreign Policy - with many more outstanding reports on the sidebar. Click the link !
Even If Biden Wins, It's Trump's America Now
Many thought 2016 was a fluke. That’s impossible to argue now.
"Whoever ends up winning the U.S. election—an answer we may get
tonight, or not for weeks if some state results get bogged down in
litigation—one of the most important takeaways from the race is that it
was so close. Far from the landslide that polls seemed to predict, it’s
come down to a nail-biter.
The big question now is what these results mean for the country.
Pundits have tried to explain away President Donald Trump’s show of
strength by pointing to lockdown fatigue or voters’ appreciation for his
perceived success on the economy—at least until the pandemic came along
and cratered it.
But these rationalizations don’t tell the whole story. Most
important, they don’t account for the fact that, whoever ultimately wins
the White House, nearly half of all U.S. voters endorsed a
white-nationalist serial liar who has spectacularly botched the most
serious health crisis in a century. They also knowingly ignored, or
willingly embraced, Trump’s flagrant cruelty and sexism, his lack of
curiosity or knowledge about the government and the world, his disdain
for traditional U.S. values such as fair play and the rule of law, and
his eagerness to tear down the institutions of governance at home and
abroad—institutions that, while flawed, have provided much peace and
prosperity over the years. Back in 2016, some Republicans voted for
Trump because they didn’t know much about him, or because they hoped
that the responsibilities of the office would transform him into a
statesman. No one can make that argument today. We all now know exactly
who Trump is.
When you factor in the facts that Trump has won more votes this time than in 2016, that he improved his standing among Latino and Black
voters, and that the Republican Party may well hold the Senate, you’re
left with one conclusion: 2016 was no fluke. Whoever wins this one,
we’re all living in Trump’s America now.
Why do I say that? For starters, Trump and his party’s show of
strength means that win or lose, Trump isn’t going away and the GOP
won’t abandon him after all. Before the election, the end of Trumpism
seemed like a sure thing. More and more Republicans were arguing,
quietly, that the party needed reform and that four more years of Trump
would doom them all. Even stalwart supporters such as Sen. John Cornyn
were starting to edge away from the president. Now that Trump, and
those supporters, have done so well, it’s hard to imagine many
Republicans giving up on Trump or Trumpism anytime soon.
With his party and close to half the public behind him, an empowered
Trump—whether as president, opposition leader, or freelance tweeter and
media star—will continue to draw huge levels of attention and support,
which he’ll use to hector and undermine Democrats and to push the same
peevish, counterfactual, us-versus-the-experts-and-everybody-else
message that he has for the past four years. Republican “Never
Trumpers”—former GOP officials dedicated to process, competent
governance, the importance of institutions, and at least some basic form
of national unity—will remain marginalized or will leave the party
altogether.
The results will be dire. Should the GOP win the White House, or lose
it but hold the Senate, the policy paralysis of the past four years
will continue—or even worsen. And things may not be much better under
former Vice President Joe Biden. Even presidents who control Congress
rarely get more than one or two big things done before their first
midterm election, when they often lose legislative support. It’s hard to
imagine that a President Biden, should he earn that title, will get
even that far unless he manages to eke out a Senate victory (which, as
of this writing, seems unlikely).
That’s a recipe for big trouble ahead. While Biden may seek to change
the tone in Washington, the years of Barack Obama’s presidency showed
that despite Biden’s lifelong dedication to bipartisanship, so long as
Republicans remain the party of no, the chances of achieving it are
close to zero. Under a divided government, we’re likely to see more
inaction on huge problems such as the pandemic (though Biden could make
some improvements using his executive authority) and the economy (where
he can’t do much without Congress). Should Biden fail to pass major
pandemic relief and other government spending, markets will flounder and
financial instability will increase. Without coordinated action by all branches of the U.S. government, the pandemic will get much worse.
Thus no matter who wins the White House, Trump’s America—a country
that has now spurned its best chance to resoundingly repudiate him—will
mean more self-perpetuating dysfunction. Rage at the failure of
government to help, or Republicans’ rage at the government’s attempts
to help (through restrictions meant to limit the spread of the virus)
will only intensify the country’s already vicious polarization, further
reducing the chances for bipartisan cooperation and possibly leading to
violence.
Biden’s goal of healing the nation’s divisions and governing in a way
that brings everyone together seems like a very tall order now. Obama’s
attempts to do the same only fueled Republicans’ obstreperousness and
drove a large share of the public into the dangerous fantasy land of
birtherism and other conspiracy theories (some of which ultimately
morphed into QAnon). Now that Trump’s approach, for all its ugliness,
has received a dramatic embrace from nearly half the country, it’s hard
to imagine a President Biden making things better enough to make a
difference. And it’s impossible to imagine a President Trump even
trying.
Jonathan Tepperman is the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.
Twitter: @j_tepperman
~~~~~
~ From Truthout:
Trumpism Is Alive and Well - And It Won't Go Away Even If Trump Does
"The final results of the 2020 presidential and congressional
elections remain unresolved this morning. Even absent an outcome, there
are many in the U.S. and around the world who will call Tuesday’s
closer-than-expected election a disaster, an abject national
humiliation, and a punch in the throat to every medical professional who
waded into Donald Trump’s pandemic wearing trash bags and masks dipped
in Lysol so they could help save lives.
How very quickly we forget.
No, this is not 2016, when half the country voted “couch” instead of
heading out to their polling places. In fact, one of the bright spots of
the night is that turnout was the highest
it has been in 120 years. Just under 67 percent, the country
outperformed its turnout mark for the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon election. You
can’t, and won’t, do much better than that these days.
And right there comes the nasty little turn. Many devoutly believed
Trump needed to be thoroughly and unquestionably routed last night, and
not just to avoid a protracted and messy legal battle that could wind up
before a badly compromised Supreme Court. More than that, the hope for a
full Trump routing last night was also a hope that the entire
grotesquerie that is Trumpism itself might be torn down, burned and
buried under salted earth before the watching eyes of the whole wide
world.
Well, after a huge turnout, that did not happen. Instead, an election
that many expected to be a Democratic “Blue Wave” has become a nip and
tuck affair that has seen Democrats actually lose seats in the House of
Representatives. Democrats still hold the majority in that chamber, but
it is a slimmer one today, and the GOP minority will surely be
emboldened after outstripping expectations. Dreams of a Democratic
Senate majority are slowly but surely falling to dust.
Ah, yes. Expectations, otherwise known as “polls,” form an entire industry that has once again proven itself unequal to the task
it claims expertise in. I’m not one to casually quote neoconservative
fiends like John Podhoretz, but in this specific instance, he cuts it
right down to the bone.
“Political polling is a fraud,” Podhoretz correctly declares.
“It claims to measure something that, it is now unmistakably clear,
cannot be accurately measured. Polling’s seductive promise is that it
will take the guesswork out of understanding a complex and changing set
of circumstances and replace that uncertainly with something that looks
like science. But it’s less like the physics that helps us shoot rockets
into space and more like the set of the spaceship on ‘Star Trek.’ It’s
shiny. It has a lot of dials and lights. Things beep. But if you put it
on the Cape Canaveral launchpad and lit it on fire, you would just burn
to death.”
I pledge to you upon this day, November 4, 2020, that I will never
again stain this page with numbers from a poll, and I apologize abjectly
for having done so in the past. Polls are the Wonder Bread of political
journalism; they help fatten articles and hit deadlines, but as far as
valuable information goes, they have the caloric equivalent of gravel.
Never again, you have my word.
The race at present is down to a white-knuckle clutch of seven
states: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin,
Nevada and Arizona. The last of those, Arizona, was called late last
night by Fox News in favor of Joe Biden, which motivated Trump to erupt in a frenzy of fraud accusations
and authoritarian victory declarations that, impossibly but surely,
stained this elaborate debacle even more deeply. “We’ll be going to the
U.S. Supreme Court,” he railed. “We want all voting to stop.”
The outstanding districts in those states are almost all urban
centers that contain millions of uncounted votes. Tallying those ballots
is what Trump wants stopped, and what will likely motivate him to bring
this election to court if Biden eventually prevails. At the end of that
path lies the Supreme Court, clearly what Trump is hoping for.
To be sure, there were a great many joyful victories recorded last
night. Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez obliterated their
opponents to secure a second term for themselves, and Jamaal Bowman won
the seat for New York’s 16th district. Sarah McBride won her race for
Delaware state senate, making her the highest-ranking transgender
official in government.
All small-time drug possession in Oregon has been decriminalized.
Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota legalized marijuana.
Mississippi approved the removal of the Confederate banner from its
state flag. Florida passed a $15 minimum wage. Nebraska and Utah passed
measures closing the loophole that allowed slavery to continue for those
convicted of a crime.
But Lindsey Graham still has a job, as does Mitch
McConnell, and probably as majority leader to boot. The “Blue Wave” was
transmogrified into lost ground in both the House and Senate, and if
Biden wins this thing, it will be by a whisper-thin margin that can
fully expect to spend the next couple of months in court. In any event,
the counting goes on and it will probably be days before a final result
is reached.
We will be spending a long time picking apart the details that led to
last night, the missed clues and overstated chances. Was Joe Biden the
best choice as a nominee, or just another in a seemingly endless line of
doomed DNC Dembots straight out of central casting? Certainly, Biden
has not lost yet, and may well prevail… but the moment begs a question:
Would we be here if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were standing in
Biden’s place? We will never know, and now we wait.
Two facts stand out: First, the urban/rural voter split is more
pronounced than ever, and the urban voters are surprisingly evenly
matched in numbers with their rural brethren. There is no blaming
turnout this time, not after matching a 120-year-old high mark. We
appear to be as evenly divided a nation as we’ve been hearing we are,
and this newest nose count underscores the grim truth of it.
Second, and more importantly: Despite the horrors of the COVID-19
pandemic and his ridiculous handling of the crisis, despite the
shattered economy, the ceaseless bombast, the overt racism, all of it,
Donald Trump remains popular enough to make a razor-thin contest out of
what many (hand raised) expected would be a blowout. More people voted
in this election than ever before in all our history, and at least half
of them think Trump is worthy of a second term. Maybe more, if the deal
goes down his way.
As election officials steadily process the ballots before them, I am
processing the meaning of last night’s results. I gravely misunderstood
the nature of my country coming into this contest, something I felt I’ve
had a handle on for years. Nearly 66 million people surveyed the
roiling, hateful, plague-raddled disaster zone the nation has become
under Trump’s administration and decided he should have another four
years to do more of the same.
It’s not over yet, but no matter the final outcome, this feels very
much like a resounding setback, if not a defeat in its own right. Even
if Biden wins, he would need a Democratic majority in the Senate in
order to effectively govern. The ground was ripe for the Democrats to do
much better last night, with the surrounding circumstances altogether
vehement in their pressing relevance… and then, this.
It is going to be a very long week, again. Stout hearts."
~~~~~
It's scary.