Those of us who have been virtuosos in anger and despair these last four years can now revel in the win.
Gorgeous work, friends!
Presented with a choice between the candidate who appealed to our better angels, and the one who leveraged our basest instincts, a large majority of voters chose the light. We put our faith in the guy who has spent the days since the election offering us humility and reassurance, urging us to have patience, and faith in our democracy. We rejected the one who has been railing and flailing, spreading lies and encouraging mobs to try to kick the legs out from under our electoral system.
What is this unfamiliar emotion? It’s warm, light, and not unpleasant. Paralyzing dread seems to be yielding to positive feelings about the future. Is this ... hope?
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Joe Biden will be our next president. Say that again, and say it loud. Man, it feels good.
Of course, there is plenty this does not solve: So much has been broken over the last four years, some of it perhaps beyond repair. We’re in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis, both very likely to get unimaginably worse. Racism doesn’t magically disappear on Jan. 20. There are 72 days between now and Inauguration Day, in which a vindictive Trump can wreak havoc. And if Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell remains in power, he will try to obstruct the new administration at every turn.
So yes, there is plenty to concern us, and more than ample reason to remain vigilant. But perhaps, just for today, those of us who have been virtuosos in anger and despair these last four years, could revel in this triumph. The Trump years broke some of us, shattering our faith in this country. Here are a few of this election’s joys, beyond the mere fact of Biden’s victory, that might help restore it:
First, no Donald Trump. He will still be around, of course, but we can now allow ourselves to imagine what it might be like to live without the unhinged daily tirades from the Oval Office, the hourly desecrations of the presidency, the jarring revelations and abuses. To have an attorney general who believes in the rule of law, departments run by experts and leaders who don’t want to dismantle them, policies that do not reek of incompetence, or malice, or both. To have sane economic policy, compassionate immigration rules, efforts to protect our water and our air, actual plans that might slow deaths from the pandemic. Earlier this year, the man who will try to lead us that way seemed like a longshot. But Biden (and the many grass-roots organizers who carried him to victory) ran a superb, disciplined campaign, mobilizing crucial voters of color, and managing to win back some of the white voters who had gone to Trump while also arguing that we need to properly reckon with the racism that has riven this country since its founding. In a rational world, it wouldn’t be such a hard needle to thread, but here we are, and he did it.
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A woman will be vice president! So many firsts: The nation’s second-highest office will be occupied by not just the first woman, but the first Black and South Asian woman, too, and the daughter of immigrants. It’s not quite as far as we’d hoped to get by now, but it feels pretty fantastic nonetheless. Millions of girls across the country will now be able to see in Kamala Harris proof that their possibilities are limitless, that it’s fine to be unapologetically ambitious, that the world belongs to them, too. A lot of grown women who need to will learn those lessons, too. Biden has promised that his vice president will have the same kind of influence he had with President Barack Obama. We are closer than ever to the joyous day when a woman president becomes as unremarkable here as it is in much of the world.
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All those beautiful, beautiful voters. So, it turns out, if you make it easier to vote, more people vote. Neither a pandemic nor countless cynical Republican voter suppression efforts could keep us away. We voted big, turning out at rates not seen in this country since 1900, thanks to early, absentee, and mail-in voting. Almost 160 million Americans cast ballots, with each party drawing millions of new voters into the process. Both Trump and Biden got more votes than anyone who has ever run for president, with Biden garnering a massive 75 million votes so far. Imagine what we could do if we kept up that level of engagement, or even grew it, making it clear that those who lead us must answer to more of us than ever?
Our heroic municipal officials. Bless the poll workers, the counters and the election officials who make democracy run. Underpaid, if they’re paid at all, they toil in obscurity most of the time, making sure votes are cast and results tabulated. But this year, they’ve worked under impossible conditions, dealing with massive turnout, avalanches of absentee and mail-in ballots, and complex rules in the midst of a pandemic that puts their own health at risk. They’ve been swept up into the ugly battle for the soul of this nation, and they have stood courageously against attempts to intimidate them. In the states with the highest stakes, they’ve been contending with whiplash-inducing legal filings, election observers yelling at them and interfering with their work, with angry mobs and the very real threat of violence. “I can tell you that my wife and my mother are very concerned for me,” said Joe Gloria, registrar of voters in Nevada’s Clark County. Give this man, and the other essential workers, a raise and our praise. They’re heroes.
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Georgia shows us the way. Given the unconscionably small margin of Biden’s victory over this benighted president, some Democrats have been lamenting the party’s inability to win back the white voters who stayed with Trump. Biden’s amazing showing in Georgia is built on a more realistic view: Those white voters aren’t coming back. The way forward is for the Democratic Party to expand its support among people of color and progressives, and to fight decades of voter suppression efforts so that they can actually vote. And so the brilliant Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost a gubernatorial race in 2018, set about doing just that in Georgia, certain the state could flip blue. Her Fair Fight registered 800,000 new voters in Georgia (and helped register and mobilize voters of color in other states, too). Abrams, and the people she has mobilized, are the Democratic Party’s future, and they’ll only hang around if Democrats make policies that honor that. And as former presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke will tell you, what happened in Georgia is also possible in Texas. Now there’s a thought to warm even the most disillusioned Democrat’s heart, and make the next 74 days almost bearable.
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Almost.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.
"light" - Google News
November 08, 2020 at 01:50AM
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In electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, we chose the light - The Boston Globe
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