Post Election Purgatory Chat

Well...at least Trump lost. Eventually.

Having made the incredibly foolish decision to stay glued to the election results as they came in, I got to experience the turbulent roller coaster ride that was watching Biden’s odds flip back and forth on a seemingly hourly basis. In the end he just about managed to win, but the victory is far from the sweeping landslide that many had hoped for. The Senate is still up for grabs by a two-seat margin, the Democrats lost seats in the House, and to top it all off human/snapping turtle hybrid Mitch McConnell not only won reelection, but has yet to be vaporized by a bolt of lightning.

The mood on the biggest mainstream political opinion stage in the world--by which I mean my twitter feed--has been mixed these last few days. This is the outcome people were hoping for, but there’s a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction. To be honest, I think some people would have preferred a Trump win to what we got, because we at least know what that would look like. Right now, the future is a lot more uncertain.

The uncomfortable reality is that the Republicans’ ability to enact Trumpian policies hasn’t been limited as much as it might seem. Trump’s supreme court appointees are going to be a long term problem, if the Democrats lose the Senate it will let Republicans engage in the obstructionism they love so much, and the House is only weakly under Democrat control. But more importantly, Biden is in an extremely precarious position as far as re-election, which as we all know is usually a politician’s first and only concern as soon as they take office.

Biden won this by such a narrow margin that it could easily be explained as a random statistical fluctuation. Some of the key swing states came down to razor-thin margins on the county level (this was very relaxing and not at all stressful to watch play out in real time). Under the Democrats’ current political strategy, that gives him basically zero wiggle room as far as taking actions that might turn away centrist and right-leaning supporters.

This really just drives home something that I and many other left-wing commentators have been saying for a long time, which is that the Democrats’ reliance on swaying undecided voters and siphoning off moderate Republicans in order to gain tiny footholds is a loser’s strategy. There’s a much larger and potentially more loyal well of further-left voters who they could be tapping into instead, but so far they’ve refused to acknowledge that these people even exist, except to vilify them.

Case in point, there were a swathe of progressive wins in this election. Marijuana legalization was on the docket all over the country, and voters overwhelmingly voted in favour of it. Oregon voted to decriminalize possession of small quantities of multiple hard drugs, including heroin, as well as psilocybin. The District of Columbia also voted to legalize psilocybin. In fact, every drug decriminalization ballot passed, usually by a landslide.

All four members of “the Squad”--the lineup of progressive female House members of colour, who took office over the last four years despite being opposed by their own party--were re-elected. Multiple trans and nonbinary candidates won local or state elections. Nearly all of the Democratic Socialists’ candidates won elections.

Now, I’m not a political analyst or an expert in any of this, but to me this all suggests several obvious strategies going forward. Make drug legalization a key component of your platform, throw your full support behind politicians like AOC and Ilhan Omar, try to entice people currently part of organizations like the DSA to join you, move firmly to the left in general. I imagine that if one were to suggest these things to someone like Nancy Pelosi, her response would be incredulous: “We can’t support drug legalization, what would Republicans say???”

To which my response would be that it doesn’t matter what Republicans think, because they’re your political enemies, not your coworkers. The liberal obsession with working together, reaching across the aisle, bipartisanship and compromise--which Biden was already starting in on before he had officially won--makes no sense in a political environment where the opposing party fundamentally disagrees about what the purpose of society is and what role the government should take in shaping it. There can be no bipartisanship on an issue like climate change when one side refuses to even acknowledge that the problem is real.

I said it in my last post, and I’ll say it again: the Republican party views the mere existence of the political left as illegitimate. The reason they were so quick to embrace conspiracy theories about electoral fraud is because they think liberals running for office in the first place is cheating. They treat politics like warfare, and now that they’re (sort of) on the weaker foot, they’re going to conduct themselves like a guerilla insurgency, just as they did during Obama’s terms in office. But this time the stakes are far higher, and the Democrats’ ability to fight back is severely curtailed.

All of the above is speaking to the practical realities of the election, but there’s also the question of what this means philosophically. This election was--just about, barely--a repudiation of Trump, but it wasn’t at all a repudiation of Trump’s politics. Half of America told the world that they’re either sympathetic to a party rapidly sliding towards fascism, or are actively in favour of it. Hell, he gained ground in some areas and demographic groups.

I said that the Democrats’ path forward seems obvious, but it’s even more obvious what the Republicans should do next: find another Trump, but make sure this one will actually get the job done. This is not a scenario that bodes well for anyone, American or not. Many people were hoping that this election would put an end to their fears of a fascist United States, but my worry in that regard has only increased. We are entering a very dangerous period of history.

So what do you, the concerned citizen (and I’m speaking mostly to Americans here, although not exclusively) do about this?

In a word, organize. Just as I predicted, Trump’s militant supporters made some scattered public appearances as the conspiracies spread across social media, but they have so far not come out in force. A lot of this will be due to the fact that at the end of the day they’re far more bark than bite, but it may also be because Trump’s brownshirts were always a haphazard jumble of casual extremists rather than an actual political movement. The work of opposing fascism can’t be done by keyboard warriors the way boosting Trump was. Neither can pushing the political establishment into taking the radical action needed to combat climate change.

In 2016 I saw many people claim that Trump’s election had radicalized them. I was always confused about what they meant by this, since the overwhelming majority of these people seemed to still be firmly behind the mainstream Democratic party; the only thing that changed is that they started hating Trump even more than they already had. 

But this time--this time!--a line has been crossed! Now, say the American liberals, they have truly been radicalized! Rise up, comrades, the time for action has come!

Sure. Great. That sounds swell. If you could actually, you know, do something this time, that would be neat. Maybe start exploring political positions beyond America’s extremely skewed overton window. Pick a different political party--because there are actually more than two operating in the US--and throw your support behind them. Find an antifascist group in your area and join it. Demand that Democrat politicians cut ties with billionaires and corporations and start actually representing the people.

Liberals are already blaming anyone left of Biden for the Democrats’ poor performance. Many are claiming that the Democrats must abandon progressivism--and, I guess, transform into the Republican party--if they want to have a future. Since there’s a significant chance that the Democrats will in fact do this, America needs another party to take up those causes. The midterms are in two years, so get out there and make that happen.