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My takeaways so far:
A. Trumpism was not vigorously repudiated. Trump is gone, but his toxic ideology of racism, authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, endless grievance, and so on – call it ‘FoxNews-Breitbart-ism’ - hangs on. QAnon is now in Congress,e.g. The next challenge
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A. Trumpism was not vigorously repudiated. Trump is gone, but his toxic ideology of racism, authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, endless grievance, and so on – call it ‘FoxNews-Breitbart-ism’ - hangs on. QAnon is now in Congress,e.g. The next challenge
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is the Trumpist after Trump – Don, Jr.? Tom Cotton? The French National Front is the model here: We now in the stage of moving from bomb-thrower Jean-Marie LePen to the savvier Marine LePen.
B. Biden beat an incumbent, one willing to relentlessly break norms and rules
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B. Biden beat an incumbent, one willing to relentlessly break norms and rules
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(foreign interference, gross violations of the Hatch Act, voter suppression, endless lying & incendiary rhetoric). This is rare in American history and quite an achievement no one is talking about
C. The Democrats have won 7 of the last 8 popular vote counts. That has never
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C. The Democrats have won 7 of the last 8 popular vote counts. That has never
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happened before. The US is now a center-left country, and the GOP is pretty clearly a minority party. The long-term trend in the culture is to the moderate left: gay marriage is uncontroversial now, soft drug legalization is coming, voters want health care, etc.
D. The
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D. The
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Electoral College is now a major structural problem for the health of US democracy. It is keeping a minority party – the GOP – artificially competitive. (The structure of the Senate does this too.) This allows the GOP to not adapt, setting up much sharper ideological battles
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than if voting pressures pushed the GOP to moderate: https://twitter.com/Robert_E_Kelly/status/1323983970573299714.
E. The blue wave in Congress did not materialize. This is the biggest surprise to me, given the 2018 midterms and Trump’s consistently sub-45% approval ratings. We now have divided government, and
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E. The blue wave in Congress did not materialize. This is the biggest surprise to me, given the 2018 midterms and Trump’s consistently sub-45% approval ratings. We now have divided government, and
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Mitch McConnell will cripple everything Biden tries to do. So corona will get worse, and Biden will be sorely tempted to govern through executive order. This is why an immoderate, ideological GOP is so dysfunctional for the US; it makes governance under divided government
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nearly impossible.
F. The presidential vote came in pretty much the way we were told – same-day votes counted earliest for Trump, followed by mail-ins breaking for Biden. The real scandal is that some GOP legislatures purposely delayed the count of mail-ins to create the
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F. The presidential vote came in pretty much the way we were told – same-day votes counted earliest for Trump, followed by mail-ins breaking for Biden. The real scandal is that some GOP legislatures purposely delayed the count of mail-ins to create the
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early impression of a Trump victory – so that T could claim the election was being stolen by later mail-in votes & start his lawsuits. That's where we are now; the current mess was purposefully ginned up. The GOP works the refs relentlessly. This is terrible for democracy.
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