In A Clearing
So, here we are. At last. At long last.
For too long, we’ve felt as if we’ve been lost in the woods, blindly tripping over roots, stumbling through muck, fearful, frustrated, angry, not knowing which step would put us in the right direction and not knowing how long it would take us to reach open space, sunlight, and safety.
But we’re here. We’ve arrived. We see light ahead of us and darkness behind, and, if we aren’t careful, we’ll convince ourselves that we’ve made it out of the woods, that it really is all behind us.
That’s the trap. That’s the lie that we long to hear. But we know better. Or should.
Yesterday, the Electoral College voted to confirm the victory of President-Elect Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and Vice President-Elect Kamala Devi Harris. After four years of naked corruption culminating in a campaign of naked racism, hatred, and fear, the arrival of a president seemingly in it to serve rather than only in it to help himself should have us elated. But we aren’t. We can’t be, and we know why.
The Electoral College itself is emblematic of where we are and of how far we still have to go. As a system, the use of electors is obsolete, like relying on a video store when you’re already paying to stream high-definition videos. The electors, representing only the major political parties, are gatekeepers, a class unto themselves who are chosen from among a select, well-connected few.
It’s one more remnant of a world in which being a wealthy, white, male land (and people) owner meant you had the moral character to decide whether or not those allowed to vote had chosen well. However much Alexander Hamilton and others talked up checks and balances, this was one thing seemingly designed to maintain imbalances of power, for that is what it has come to do.
It badly needs to go. Even some of the electors say so. Unfortunately, that will require a constitutional amendment, which will require states to ratify. And wouldn’t you know it, the states needed to reach the 75% threshold for ratification are the ones benefitting from it still: sparsely populated, rural states.
To be fair, a country dominated by the economic interests of heavily populated cities isn’t a country any of us should want to live in. We need balance (and checks), and rural regions have good reason to fear that without something to force attention onto them, they wouldn’t be heard, let alone listened to.
And yet, the electoral college isn’t the means we need to that end. It forces attention, yes, but it also enables abuse of power by the few over the many and, as the past two presidential elections have shown all too well, it encourages bigotry as a means of maintaining regional identity and securing (or suppressing) votes.
The road to eliminate it is so far out in front of us that we can’t even see it. It would require convincing small states to vote for it or creating newer small states - D.C., Puerto Rico, splitting California - to push the margin. There’s so much we have to do just to get to it, and knowing that is what should tell us where we are, not at the edge of the woods but in a clearing, still deep within.
The seemingly easy solution is simply to go forward in the direction we took to reach the clearing. Just keep going. However, without knowing what we face in the woods beyond the other side of the clearing, how will we know where it leads?
What we should do, as always, is stop to get out bearings, to know where it is we actually are, and then to ask the questions we should know to ask.
The first question upon entering the clearing is: What were we escaping from? That, of course, only leads to more questions. For example, 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden, but how many of them were just voting to get rid of Donald Trump? If just getting rid of Trump was all they wanted, how many of them are committed to getting rid of the culture that gave rise to Trump? How many would just be satisfied to return to the world as it existed January 19, 2017? Or November 7, 2016?
The uncomfortable truth of this moment is that the answers to those questions are probably: Trump in the White House; The majority; Few even think about it; and, Way, way more than is good for us long term. If facts matter - and do they ever matter - the most simple fact of all is this: There’s a pandemic going on and people want certainty, first and foremost that the pandemic will be ended soon by competent, compassionate human beings.
That, voters of America, might as well have been Joe Biden’s campaign slogan. If you’re looking at him nominating one Washington and Wall Street insider after another and pulling your hair out, keep in mind that metaphorically turning the clock back four years was his entire campaign promise and is exactly his goal. To him and those working with him, this is what the world needs to see. He wants to reassure banks and to reassure the militaries of both allies and foes.
“We were sick,” he’s saying. “But we’re healthy again.”
That Biden is sending this message just as the first COVID-19 vaccines are arriving around the world is a little ironic, but only because the drive to release them was as much a political one as anything, pushed by a man who cared less that the vaccines worked than that they came out in time for him to claim credit. And credit will only really be due if they actually work, which we won’t know for months, possibly even an entire year.
What, then, of this coming year? Well, if you thought getting Trump out of the White House would be enough to get rid of him and his influence, you were deluded.
As much as 81 million Americans just wanted Trump gone, 74 million took a good, long, four years to look at who and what Donald Trump was and what he did and what he said and what he was doing to this country and thought, “That’s the one for me!” They’ve tied so much of their identities up in seeing him succeed, that, like die hard fans of a losing sports team, they just keep coming back for more.
If you’ve been wondering how and why 126 Republican men and women and 19 Republican Attorneys General would sign on to a lawsuit filed by the Republican Attorney General of Texas to invalidate votes in States that were not Texas, well, you have 74 million reasons, all of them potential campaign donors and voters in just two years. Of course, they all knew the lawsuit was a joke, that it would fail.
Most of them probably also knew that seeking to invalidate votes and install the loser of a presidential election could be seen as sedition or treason, but how many of them sincerely believed the lawsuit would go anywhere? To them, it was just another empty campaign promise made to suckers and losers. And to Ken Paxton, that Texas Attorney General, it was little more than a valentine to the man who, for the next four and a half weeks, has the power to pardon him for multiple federal crimes.
Which raises another question: How many of those 126 believed that they would ever be brought up on charges in this political culture? Is anyone charged with anything anymore? Certainly, no one ever goes to jail. And if they do…well, maybe there’s a pardon, from this president or whichever Republican wins in 2024. Just because they’re cynically using Republican voters for profit doesn’t mean Republican politicians can’t be just as deluded as their marks.
We live in a cheating culture. Electing Joe Biden does nothing to end it. Mitch McConnell and his House counterparts are counting on that. So, too, are current White House staffers, from outgoing Attorney General William Barr down to the lowliest interns manning the paper shredders this Christmas. They all see this moment and think, “This won’t last. We’ll be back.”
They may be right. Hell, even the Houston Astros coaches and executives who cheated their way to a championship a few years ago have jobs in baseball again. The sport entered that particular clearing, one in which cheating and cheaters were publicly shamed, turned around and walked right back where they came from. Of course, they have some experience with this kind of collective amnesia, and there’s so much money to be made.
That’s why the Republicans are acting like this moment is just that, a moment, a pause, a break. They fully expect us to turn around and go right back into the woods we just escaped. That’s how they make their money. They expect us to see Joe Biden in the White House and lose our way, either to confusion, frustration, or complacency. We’ll look around ourselves and see woods in every direction, with no sense of which path to take or how far the woods go in any one direction.
And there they’ll be, at the edge we just left, beckoning us back, telling us how foolish we were to allow ourselves to be dragged out into the open where we are vulnerable. The longer it takes for us to get vaccines, the longer we go without jobs and stuck at home with our kids, the more they will play this game. To them, that’s exactly what it is, a game with only winners and losers, and the more they play, the more uncertain the results will be.
That’s how they win, and it’s the specialty of Mitch McConnell. It’s what he did to obstruct Barack Obama and, given that Joe Biden will undoubtedly negotiate exactly the same way he did as Vice President, it is undoubtedly what McConnell will do again. Anything he can do to delay relief to those who have been made most vulnerable by the pandemic, he will do in order to extract more profit for himself and his benefactors.
That anything includes enabling and encouraging right wing violence, which has increased in lockstep with the Republican Party’s dismantling of functional governance and which will very likely increase even more now that Trump’s roadshow circus of lawsuits have resulted in comical defeat.
Trump is doing it for the obvious reasons: adulation, power, and, most important, to leech every last penny he can from his devoted followers. McConnell and the rest of the “we don’t know who won” Republicans in Congress are doing it for those reasons, too, but they have one other reason: the two Georgia runoffs on January 5th. They have two candidates battling accusations of insider trading (and cozying up to white supremacists), and desperately want Trump voters (including those white supremacists) to vote Republican.
Which takes us back to the newly-re-re-re-christened president-elect, who has until today resisted visiting Georgia to help the Democratic campaigns. He’s still been a presence there - How could a president-elect not be? - but only as a distantly reassuring face for Democrats and a menacing bogeyman for Republicans. Think the attack on Dr. Jill Biden has nothing to do with Georgia? If Republicans can’t run against “socialists”, they’ll run against “uppity, liberal elites trying to tell everyone how to live their lives”, which amounts to the same thing: “Freedom!”
All of this is to say, we can’t expect the right wing to learn the lessons we want them to learn from defeat. They never have, and they never will. If they could learn those kinds of lessons, they wouldn’t be right wing. Their instinct isn’t to accept defeat and be humbled by it, it’s to figure out ways to get around it without having to admit they lost at all.
When Nixon was forced from office, his closest supporters didn’t take the lesson that corruption and an illegal war were wrong, only that he failed to get away with it. Thirty years later, two of them, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, led the United States into a still ongoing war in Iraq from which they and they friends made billions. Their push for deregulation led in no small part to an economic crisis, for which they and their friends were bailed out. What lesson do you think they learned from that?
And almost fifty years after Nixon initiated the “Southern Strategy”, one of his most faithful acolytes courted white supremacy to gain and then attempt to hold onto the presidency. The Southern Strategy was something of a revival of Jim Crow - a mutated strain, if you will - which was a revival of the Confederacy, which was an attempt to hold onto slaves, which at its root is an economic system built on an imbalance of both power and accountability.
There is no permanent cure for things like racism and sexism and bullying, because it is the motivations, such as the craven desire not to have to be accountable to others, that drive such behavior. If I am not accountable to you, I can take from you, I can hurt you, I can humiliate you, and I can enjoy it. The abuse not only is the behavior, it is its own justification for the behavior. That is what hides waiting for us in the woods. That is what we have escaped from - or tried to - as we entered this clearing.
If only we could stay here. We have this brief moment, out in the center of the clearing, out in the sun, safe and warm, but in a few short weeks it will be time for us to choose a direction. The risk we face by stopping is that we may get turned around. From the center of a clearing, the woods look the same in every direction, just trees and shadows and whatever dangers they may hide. Lose our way and we may end up right back where we started. We can’t allow that. We can’t settle for it.
This is an inflection point. Things can go in any direction. We are the ones who have the power to decide, not the gatekeepers and not anyone preying on the worst of our nature.
Choose accountability. It may not be the fastest way through the woods, but it will be the only way out.
- Daniel Ward