It will be a relief not to be embarrassed internationally by our president, to be deluged with floods of misinformation from Trump’s endless tweets, and to have some sort of consistency coming from the presidency. But Democrats need to get real about this election. While Biden won the popular vote by many millions, it is the electoral college vote that matters, and he won those by the slimmest of margins – just over 81,000 votes in four battleground states (Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia) gave him the presidency, just very slightly more than the razor-thin margin by which Trump won the 2016 election. And Democrats performed miserably in the House and Senate races, and disastrously at the state level.
Looked at that way, Democrats have by the slimmest of margins won a short 4-year window to try to reverse their fortunes. If they don’t the next president is likely not to be a Democrat, is very likely to be another populist, and might even be Trump again.
There is a palpable sense of relief among the chattering classes that Washington is hopefully going to return to “normal” again. But Robert Reich, who was U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997, and served in the administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, wrote an article recently entitled Beware going 'back to normal' thoughts – normal gave us Trump. (if you don't want to read his book, you can watch his 12-minute video on YouTube summarizing his book here , or you can watch his hour-long movie Saving Capitalism on Netflix - it covers much the same argument) He has a point worth considering, a point he has been arguing in a series of good books, the latest of which is The System: Who Rigged it, How We Fix It (2020). His argument is that the American system is currently rigged for the rich elite, and the rest of the country is in the process of revolting against them (a point I have been making as well).
Biden is filling his top spots, naturally, with the experienced people he has been working with for years. The problem is that these same experienced people are the ones who got us into and kept us in the endless Middle East wars, who promoted the globalization that has put out of work and impoverished million in Middle America, who abetted the disastrous CIA ”rendition” and torture programs, whose policies helped the Chinese to exploit the world's trading rules to their advantage, who arranged after 2008 for the “too-big-to-fail” banks to get even bigger, who promoted the probably-illegal drone assassinations, and who failed to understand or deal with the destruction of the American middle class. As Reich argues, this “normal” was what gave us Trump in the first place. And if we return to it we may be setting the stage for another Trump, or worse.
The question is whether Biden and the Democratic party will understand that they won by the slimmest of margins and could well lose the next election if they don’t pull up their socks and pay attention to the unrest in the country that produced a record number of votes for Trump in this election. I’m not hopeful. The party didn’t appear to learn much from the 2016 election, and managed to delude themselves thoroughly before this election.
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