The future is uncertain. It always is, right? I am reminded of this truism by a dairy discussing how Trump has united the country against the GOP, which is staring at a huge electoral wipeout, if the polls are predictive. I posted a long response there, but it’s worth making my own diary, because there are still so many warning signs of multiple disasters ahead.
First, allow me to say that I’ve been predicting a 2020 electoral disaster for the GOP, for 4 years now. I was inspired by what Lindsey Graham tweeted in May ‘16.
I have written about this before, but I lacked the confidence so many had that Hillary Clinton would defeat him. Even on Election Day, in the No. Virginia campaign ‘boiler room...’ Other lawyers on the voter protection phones were musing about Clinton’s prospects in the Southwest, I said I thought that shift was coming but not here yet, and I feared that a terrible switch in the Midwest was already at hand.
I dreaded a Trump Presidency, but after Bernie lost the 2016 nomination, I was already setting my sights on 2020 as a far more consequential election — the one which would define the country’s future, with the prospect of a potential permanent gerrymandering of many state legislatures and even the US House, the looming retirements of multiple justices o the Supreme Court. The moment would be even more fraught, because the 2020s would be the last chance to radically transform our energy policy and rescue the future from a cataclysmic change in the climate — not just a political crisis, but potentially a species extinction level event.
My hope was always that the Trump Presidency would be full of such overreach and so disastrous that it would destroy the current GOP, as Lindsey Graham forecasted in respect to the nomination. I suspect Graham was talking about a 2016 election wipeout, but I was looking at 2020. In fact, I was telling people that maybe we need the shock of a Trump Presidency to mobilize the kind of effort and broad support for Democrats that would be required in 2020 to overcome the level of gerrymandering already baked into the Electoral College (and the red state GOP support which had produced the skewing of the Senate). As I wrote above, I thought the 2020 election would be for all the marbles. The truth of that should be undeniable.
Not that I want to claim infallible power of prognostication. I had no idea it could be this bad — no idea that our democracy would be so under threat in every way, and no idea that our country’s politics could be this racialized and racism so publicly displayed and embraced. Of course, no one could’ve predicted the devastation of the pandemic.
I radically underestimated how the power of the Presidency could be abused, to inflame latent racism, to undermine the rule of law, and to threaten the mechanisms of democracy which I was counting on to rescue us in 2020. There are still so many ways we could lose this, including voter suppression at the polls and the rejection of millions of absentee ballots. I don’t discount the possibility of rigging the vote totals. Even today, I’m learning that the systems Democrats were instituting to check the accuracy of reported votes — taking photos of the machine poll tapes — may not be useful in some states as election officials are saying they may not post poll tapes because of the time and labor involved in printing them at a few vote centers which will substitute for dozens or hundreds of precincts.
I’m also not sanguine about the rejection of the right-wing racism which has been laid bare. As it's been more publicly embraced, it will be harder to overcome, not easier. Same with the rejection of expertise in favor of nonsense conspiracies. We may laugh at it, but it’s incredibly dangerous and the more widespread and public it becomes, the harder it will be to dispel, even when Democrats regain levers of power. Even if we rout the GOP, there will be very difficult years ahead.
If we want to hold on to the reins of power in 2022 and 2024, we will have to overcome the twin evils of racism and deep skepticism of authority and expertise. Some of that skepticism is well-earned, as the ‘expertise’ of elites has done nothing to head off the deep polarization of our politics, the ever growing economic inequality which elites have helped create, and the great peril of climate change. We will need to craft better policies. We must transform centuries of deference to capitalists and liberals who’ve touted the genius of our democracy without confronting the huge failings of our Constitution.
We’ve allowed guns and gun violence to become a national epidemic. We have allowed the Kochs and their allies to exploit our electoral systems to virtually conquer this country, to rig our elections and legislative outcomes. There are so many changes we need to make. Some are probably impossible — like eliminating the Senate, or removing hundreds of millions of guns from private hands, or wishing away racism. Still, we can do much.
We can get rid of the Electoral College. We can reenact Voting Rights Act protections, and pass a Constitutional amendment enshrining a right to vote. We can overturn SCOTUS decisions restricting regulation of campaign finance, even providing a robust public financing scheme, and, perhaps above all, we must eliminate political partisan gerrymandering at all levels of government. Elected Democrats will really resist that last one, but it’s the single most important change we can make to prevent a right-wing takeover in the future. We must have meaningful elections, if we want to resist authoritarian leaders.
We must also be bold on policy. There are great crises we face, and we must show bold leadership to face them. It’s the only way to address them — and the only way to ensure support of hte voters. This is the lesson of 2010. It wasn’t the debate over Obamacare that led to the electoral wipeout in 2010. It was the fact that the Obama Administration had been far too timid on a range of policies and not enough Americans saw deliverables to improve their lives. That included Obamacare. Had we been bolder and adopted a single-payer system, I think Americans would have been far more able to see the benefits they would receive. It’s not radical change they fear. They fear changes which don’t clearly improve their lot, while possibly upsetting what they do have. Be bold, and voters will reward it.
Winning big and wide in 2020 is essential, but it will be a pyrrhic victory if we don’t seize the moment to discuss and advance proposals to reform our defective Constitutional governing framework, and to transform our economic system, including the most important of all economic mechanisms — our broken national healthcare system. We cannot think small, or we will be back in this position again in a few years and facing the same existential threats to democracy and civilization in 2028 and 2030.
I fear we have the wrong standard-bearer for this moment. Biden may win the election, but he has no taste for radical reform. He will not seize the moment. We must force him to accept the cold logic of history. We cannot waste this moment, as there may be no second chance.