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Joe Biden is the next president of the United States, and Kamala Harris has made history by becoming the first woman and the first woman of color to be elected vice president. The couple broke previous records, winning more votes in the presidential race than any candidate in American history.
The American people have repudiated four years of a bully presidency. They have chosen decency over dysfunction, reality over fiction, truth over lies, and empathy over cruelty. They have rejected the last four years of ugliness, division, racism and sustained attacks on constitutional democracy. And even as Trump makes unfounded and dangerous claims of fraud and plots legal challenges, it is clear that 75 million Americans are moving forward.
But now the real work begins.
Getting Trump out of the White House is one thing, fixing America is quite another. There is a danger that progressives and liberals will invest too much faith in Trump’s exit and too little in what it will take to address the deep-seated issues that will remain in place once he leaves Pennsylvania Avenue. Once the spontaneous, glorious and moving celebrations die down, it will be necessary to acknowledge that the United States was broken long before it elected Trump, and his departure is no guarantee that the country will repair itself. Many of the systemic problems afflicting America predate Trump.
Two eight-year Democratic presidencies over the past 30 years have failed to significantly address these issues: a stark racial wealth gap, worsening school segregation, corrosive inequality, a climate crisis, and a democratic deficit at the heart of the electoral college The United States is just a few of the systemic problems facing the new president.
And while the elections may have resulted in a defeat for Donald Trump, they did not deal a forceful blow to Trumpism. And possibly not even Trump. About 70 million Americans took a hard look at the past four years of racism, mendacity, and cruelty, and voted for another four. He achieved the highest vote ever cast by a Republican presidential candidate.
Biden fought this campaign committed to saving the soul of the nation and returning the country to normalcy. His bet was that Americans would look back at four years in which the country was shaken, stressed, bruised, and sometimes literally battered, and decide to correct course. That did not happen. Seventy million Americans wanted him again.
In the months leading up to the elections, there was hope that the past four years were an aberration, a passing nightmare from which the country would wake up and return to normal. The outcome of the elections makes that seem unlikely. As writer Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books:
The Trump presidency has not been a nightmare. It has been crime in the light of day, its transgressions of democratic values on a lurid display in all its corruption, cruelty, and deadly incompetence. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all this.
They saw it all and let it happen. In electoral terms, moreover, it turns out that in general they were right. There was no repulsion among the rank and file of the party. 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 and highly committed democratic movement behind it.
And despite Biden’s victory, Democrats failed to control state legislatures across the country. Every 10 years after a census, the outcome of state races dictates the shape of the electoral redistricting lines. Republicans successfully attacked a large number of states in 2010 after Obama’s victory and managed to draft outrageously rigged states.
This was no secret. Conservative political strategist Karl Rove outlined in the Wall Street Journal the plan to win majorities in state legislatures. “Whoever Controls Redistricting Can Control Congress,” read the caption for Rove’s column. And they did.
This year, the Democrats fought back and lost. They targeted both cameras in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Kansas. In Iowa and Michigan they targeted the state chambers and in Minnesota the senate. Unless late votes in Arizona change the Republican leadership in the race for both legislatures (highly unlikely), Democrats will not have changed a single state chamber.
And then there is the United States Senate.
The re-election of Trump’s allies, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, suggests that the Republican leadership that allowed Trump during his presidency was rewarded, not punished, for its loyalty. While the balance of power in the Senate won’t be determined until January, for two runoff elections in Georgia in races that were too close to calling, the threat of a divided Congress means a Biden administration could face a debilitating stalemate. your 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, restore the role of science in government, repair alliances. global and address corrosive prejudice in our schools, criminal justice system, housing and other institutions.
We will continue to highlight corrosive inequality and ask why America’s racial wealth gap continues to worsen. In 2016, Pew estimated that the median wealth of black households was $ 17,100, 10 times worse than that of white households. We will report on the economic transition needed to stop climate change and illustrate how it affects communities of color first and hardest. And we will continue to question the uncontrolled power of corporations and big technology.
But we cannot do this alone. We need your support to carry out this essential work. We depend more and more on our readers, both for the moral strength to continue doing journalism at a time like this, and for the financial strength to facilitate that report.
We are all in this together. We are driven by your incredible support and your passions and interests. We would love for you to continue to be a part of that. You can contribute to The Guardian for as little as $ 1. It may not sound like much, but it means a lot to us. Thank you.
