Alex Brandon/AP Photo
People gather in Washington, D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 7, 2020, to celebrate President-elect Joe Biden’s win over Donald Trump.
After the “decision desks” and the news media called the presidential election on Saturday, people were celebrating in the streets in my part of America, the way some of their grandparents did in 1945 when the Allied victories were sealed over Germany and Japan, or when jubilant crowds in other countries have celebrated their liberation.
November 7, 2020, was another victory day, a liberation from the anxiety that we might lose our democracy and the hope of a decent society. But the terrible reality was that rather than defeating a common enemy, those of us who were celebrating had just defeated our own fellow citizens, the nearly half of Americans who even after four years of Donald Trump still support him.
Yes, Joe Biden’s vote was higher than Hillary Clinton’s four years earlier. But Trump’s 2020 vote was up over 2016 too.
That huge boost in turnout on both sides reflects how much was at stake in the election, for those who voted for Trump as well as those who voted against him. Everyone said this was a referendum on Trump, and it was. But it was also a referendum on the fundamental questions of morality and justice that are the deeper sources of the American divide.
Contemporary liberalism and progressivism have been trying to upend five separate sets of social relationships that have been the traditional basis of American society. White over Black has been the basis of the American racial order. Men over women has been the basis of gender relations. Straight over queer has been the basis of acceptable sexual orientation. Religion over irreligion has been the basis of acceptable public expressions about faith. The native-born have dominated immigrants.
This is all about social precedence: who stands higher, who comes first, whose values and interests are identified with the whole of America.
Any revolution has opponents. Five revolutions have lots of them, and Trump became their voice. White men may be the leading opponents, but the opposition is hardly limited to them. Many others understand their own identity and what is right and just on the basis of the traditional relations that liberals and progressives are attempting to alter. Equality may feel like a threat even if it’s on only some dimensions, or even just one, that you’ve stood higher, come first, and have always believed that this was how a just world must work.
It should be no surprise that the change that Democrats are asking Americans to make has inflamed a passionate countermovement. And it should be no surprise that the supporters of that countermovement are all the more desperate—all the more willing to accept someone so obviously dishonest and dishonorable as Trump—because they see control of American culture and politics slipping away from them. The elite cultural institutions are not on their side. Demographic change is going against them. The cities that are the center of the cultural and demographic shifts have been growing economically, while small-town and rural America have been stagnant or declining.
And so, on the day it became clear that Biden beat Trump, the cities erupted in celebration. One America defeated another, but the struggle over American society and culture has just entered a new phase. The sides are still too evenly matched for either one to give up, and the differences are too fundamental just to be patched over.
