Land of Hope... and Dreams

Election Day 2020, outside the precinct: Quiet and peaceful

On Election Day in 2016, I walked to my polling place, over a couple streets and down a bike path from my home. I took a snapshot of the empty bikepath. Just a thing of tranquility, with leaves on the ground, a reminder of, as I said at the time, "what my America looks like today." The before times photo, as it were.

I've spent some time this evening re-reading what I wrote then: 

"Ever since Brexit I felt that Donald Trump was likely to win the election. There were too many single-issue (or nearly single-issue) voters: The voters who would vote Pro-Life. The voters who would vote Gun Rights. The voters who would vote Supreme Court (often in support of Pro-Life or Gun Rights or "Religious Rights"). Too many disaffected, who wanted to hear that magic word: "change." They were going to vote for him so long as he seemed to speak for them, even if he was personally a scoundrel or worse, even if he lost every debate. Then there were the scary ones, the ones who spoke in dog whistles, of dark things to come for immigrants and minorities and people like me."

I went on: 

"Trump will likely be a disaster for the environment, for international relations, for civil rights, for the economy, and more. There is talk that he might put Sarah Palin in his cabinet, and there is just no suitable joke to respond to that. I always felt that a Clinton election might only have delayed the sort of hostile takeover that began last night, but I wanted that delay."

Except for Palin, who remained happily removed from public service, all of that came true and worse.

Trump came in with a burst of Islamophobia and will leave after a failed insurrection attempt against his own government.

I took more snapshots on Election Day in 2020. This time, I didn't walk to vote; rather I was co-chair of a precinct in my town. During one break, I walked outside to admire the glorious late afternoon sun illuminating the reds and yellows among the trees on the other side of a middle school soccer field. I felt good that Joe Biden would defeat Donald Trump. But it wasn't until the next morning, when it became clear to me that Biden's strength in Michigan's absentee votes would enable him to win this state, that I exhaled: that certainly meant that Biden would ultimately win the election.

And yet...

After everything that Donald Trump inflicted upon the United States of America, he came closer to winning the 2020 election than did Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

In 2016, Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined total of fewer than 80,000 votes; had Clinton won those 3 states she would have won the election.

In 2020, Biden won Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin by a combined total of fewer than 45,000 votes; had Trump won those states the election would have gone to the House of Representatives, where the rules would have resulted in him winning a 2nd term. Biden also won Nevada by fewer than 35,000 votes.

What made the difference this time? I fear it wasn't Trump's direct racism nor his winking support for it, nor the tax cuts for the rich, the incoherent foreign policy, the fealty to Vladimir Putin, the unqualified judicial appointments nor even the open corruption nor using the office of the Presidency for personal gain. It certainly wasn't any of the literally hundreds of books detailing his gross incompetency and awful behavior (and, thanks to audible.com, I listened to more than my fair share of them).

Ultimately, at least in my view, what did him in was his complete failure to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. Had Trump even pretended to care, or to have empathy, or to allow the scientists to lead the response, I believe tomorrow's inauguration would be for him. Other would-be autocrats surely noticed.

Is Biden's win, then, only a delaying tactic until the next hostile takeover?

Maybe. The world is more dangerous than it was 4 years ago; the environment is much worse, too. The questions I asked in that old post remain: "Where do we go from here? Where is there to be?"

In his farewell address today, President Trump said, "We are, and must always be, a land of hope, of light, and of glory to all the world." If he'd just lose the invocation of "glory" and its Romanesque imagery, as if Trump were Caligula his awful self, the imagery might even work for me. But even that sentiment is undercut by the exceptionalist sentence immediately preceding it: "This is a republic of proud citizens who are united by our common conviction that America is the greatest nation in all of history."

If I'm thinking of a Land of Hope, though, I'll add Dreams. I'll add inclusiveness.