John Minchillo/AP Photo
The party has begun in Philadelphia, pictured here, and across the country.
The initial reaction, the instantaneous response, was relief. Relief that the long week’s wait was over, relief that the four-year-long unendurable presidency of Donald Trump was over, too.
Then, jubilation. In my Dupont Circle neighborhood, about one mile from the White House, horns began honking, cheers rose from those out walking (it’s a beautiful day in D.C., weatherwise and politically). The moral arc of the universe was, at least for now, bending away from idiocy, cruelty, and racist bigotry. And at absolute minimum, toward decency.
For those who hope for more than decency, Joe Biden’s brief remarks on Friday night—his last remarks before he became president-elect late Saturday morning—were distinctly encouraging. His four priorities as president, he said, would be the pandemic, the economy, racial justice, and the climate crisis. He didn’t need to say that the man he was about to defeat had blown off three of those four challenges, and claimed only to have delivered a terrific economy, which was certainly true for the wealthy, if false for everyone else.
How much Biden can deliver on the economy, racial justice, and the climate crisis depends to considerable degree on the outcome of January’s Senate runoffs in Georgia. Nonetheless, as the Prospect’s Day One Agenda lays out in detail, there’s a good deal he can do by executive order and regulation, even if Mitch McConnell still rules the Senate.
Speaking of Republicans, Biden’s victory poses an immediate as well as a long-term conundrum for them. As I write on Saturday afternoon, I’m not aware of any Republican elected official who has acknowledged Biden’s victory yet. President Trump, to no one’s surprise, has tweeted that Biden’s triumph will be overturned in the courts. When it’s not, however, there are some immediate challenges Republican congressmembers will face. Like, do they attend and participate in Biden’s inauguration? (Several Democrats boycotted Trump’s, but inaugurations have been largely bipartisan events for at least 150 years.) Do they dare to hear his speech? (Apologies to Prufrock.) Will they risk Fox News’s ferocious condemnation by showing up?
Biden’s victory has enabled the major news media to release their inevitable insider accounts of the campaign, which they’ve been restlessly sitting on for the past week. According to an account that Politico posted today, Trump’s defeat was a doom foretold as far back as February, when his then–campaign manager, Brad Parscale, raised the prospect of electoral trouble if Trump didn’t deal with the virus that was beginning to sweep the land:
“Sir, regardless, this is coming. It’s the only thing that could take down your presidency,” Parscale told the president.
Trump snapped.
“This fucking virus,” Trump asked dismissively, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange, “what does it have to do with me getting reelected?”
Some on the right have argued that but for COVID-19 Trump would have been re-elected, as if this exogenous event disrupted the nation’s new, natural political order, which was decisively Trumpian. This kind of “but for” argument is usually adduced as a way of regarding the opposing candidate’s victory as a one-off aberration.
Except we’ve had a lot of “but for” elections and “but for” presidencies. But for the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt would not have been elected. But for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, by which the South expanded its power over the free-state North in the years leading up to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln would not have been elected. Events change the “natural order” of politics, as the pandemic and the president’s failure to respond to it led to Joe Biden’s victory.
But it wasn’t only the pandemic. Trump, we should always remember, never attained an approval rating of even 50 percent. There never was a Trumpian, or even a Republican, natural order in the past four years. There wasn’t one in the 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes than Trump. This year, when all the votes from California and elsewhere are finally counted, Biden will have won at least 5.5 or even six million more votes than Trump. If our nation truly adhered to the one person, one vote standard (by which standard, we’d abolish the Senate), the “natural order” would clearly reflect a Democratic majority in seven of the past eight presidential elections.
What kind of Democratic majority exists remains a question. In the wake of the party’s diminished standing in the House, centrists are blaming progressives and vice versa. It’s certainly true that the politics of the Squad don’t play well in most of rural America, and it’s just as certainly true that, absent the high urban turnout among progressives and the increasingly radical young, Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency. In a sense, the Democrats’ problems are a reflection of their strength. With the leftward movement of tens of millions of their partisans, and with the anti-Trump sentiments of tens of millions of more centrist Americans, the party now spans a vast ideological space. Legendary Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill once remarked that if you moved the Democratic Party to Europe, with its multiparty parliamentary systems, it would quickly splinter into five separate parties. I’m not sure about five, but I’m absolutely sure that Tip would be even more right today about its splintering.
That said, the Democrats still unite around the four issues Biden cited on Friday night. As Florida voters made clear when they overwhelmingly approved a $15 minimum wage initiative on Tuesday, a large number of Republican rank-and-filers join in supporting measures that economically benefit non-rich Americans. If Republicans do control the Senate for the next two years, Democrats should repeatedly raise such issues, and compel Republicans to oppose them. That’s one thing that should stand the Democrats in good stead going into a favorable Senate map in the 2022 midterm elections.
Today, though, is a day as much for history as for political calculations (though they’re hardly mutually exclusive). An Indian/Black daughter of immigrants (with a Marxist economist father, no less, and a Jewish husband to boot) will be our new vice president. A career pol who never strayed far from the center of his party, and who this year understood that meant embracing a host of progressive positions, has ousted the most dangerous president this nation has ever had to endure. At the very least, decency defeated evil, and that’s no small thing.
