We should have President Biden by the middle of the day tomorrow. (<knock on wood>) I'm not expecting Dear Leader to be able to throw a last minute monkey wrench into things. I expect him to slink off to Mar-a-Lago still without admitting he lost, and without any class or dignity whatsoever.
But it isn't over. Not by a long stretch.
Dear Leader has always been a symptom of the problems in the United States even more than he's been a source of them (and he's been a pretty big source of them). The systemic racism and structural inequality aren't going to go away with him. The minority rule and corporate money that are part of our system of government aren't going away with him. Things will be better with someone other than a narcissistic, selfish, racist, staggeringly stupid ass in the Oval Office, but it's only the barest beginning of what this country needs.
So what would I like to see? Things fall into several categories.
I'd like to see a return to majority rule in this country. I know this makes me a radical antifa Communist and all, but I'd like proposals with solid majority support to be able to become laws. I'd like a tiny minority to not have veto power. In practical terms, I'd like the Voting Rights Act to be fully reinstated, as pretty much everything that's happened since the Supreme Court killed it shows how necessary it is. I'd like to see an end to gerrymandering. Whether it is done by computers or non-partisan or bi-partisan commissions or some other way I don't really care, so long as legislators aren't drawing their own districts any more. I'd like to see an end to the filibuster, because the government created in the Constitution was designed to be hard to act without broad consensus before the rules were changed so you need 3/5 of the Senate to agree on things. We're a republic, but we're a democratic republic. Let's go back to small states having only a moderately disproportionate representation instead of an absurdly disproportionate representation, please. I'd like an end to the Electoral College, so A) the winner is the person who gets the most votes (again, me being a radical antifa Communist here), and B) national politics aren't nearly 100% driven by what makes voters in Iowa and Florida and Pennsylvania happy. Nothing against the people of the swing states (even Florida), but if there's no electoral college, they aren't deciding our presidential races any more.
We need to address the issues that BLM managed to bring to the forefront of the national conversation for a few weeks. I can't get as specific here as I did in the previous paragraph, simply because I'm not as well informed on these issues, but here's what I know. We need serious police reform. We need to demilitarize the police and clean out the White supremacists. We need to expand other social services so that the police aren't the once-size-fits-all solution to every problem. We need to step up accountability, which means (among other things) body/dash cams at all times with no transparent nonsense of "oh, his camera happened to be off." Police officers are entrusted with great power and great responsibility, and if the daylight of public view means they can't do their jobs the way they're used to doing it they need to change how they do their jobs. We need police unions to stop protecting their worst members. We need to shatter the blue wall of silence - if you want us to stop saying ACAB, then the people who would like to be good cops need to stand firm against the bad cops.
We need to join the modern world, dragging the reactionary parts of the country along kicking and screaming. Single-payer healthcare, sensible gun control legislation, cancelling student debt, scaling back the defense budget, improved infrastructure spending, the Green New Deal, stronger social safety net - all that stuff that somehow every other advanced nation in the world makes work but for some reason can't be done here.
Which ties into the hardest part of what I think we need to do - dealing with rage that led to Dear Leader's election, the insurrection at the Capital earlier this month, and all that. A large part of me wants to say "fuck them" and leave it at that. But their anger, justified or not, is real, and we can't just ignore it and hope it goes away.
So what do we do about it? Bluntly, take many of the steps I laid out above. This is what's so frustrating about things from a leftist perspective - much of what we want that the right decries as "socialism" is exactly the same stuff the average right-wing voter wants. We've all seen and laughed at the people with "keep your government hands off my Medicare" signs, but there's a real issue here. All the policies for a stronger safety net would disproportionately help the poor, which includes both urban poor (black) and rural poor (white). And if you ask poor and working class Republicans what kind of policies they would like to see, much of what they want is the same stuff the left wants.
But the Republican Party and the Southern Strategy has been poison. Nixon and every Republican leader since him has used coded (and not so coded) racist language to get poor and working-class Whites on their side. They've elevated the abortion issue, convinced gun owners that Democrats want to disarm them, and all sorts of other things to rally them to vote Republican. And they've promised them economic benefits that never come. So the result is millions of people who keep voting for the people who are (supposedly) going to help them out, and when their lives don't improve, they look for someone to blame. Throw in Fox News propaganda, and the result is rage at the left. Improve the lives of everyone, and there's a lot less to be angry about.
How hopeful am I about all this? Honestly not very. The last few years haven't exactly left me an optimist. But here's hoping.
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