Sorry, that came across as unnecessary cynical. I know when I voted (and like lots of us, I definitely got it done early), I did it with a sense of purpose and anger and force and determination and spite. All of those together can definitely be melted down and recombined into a reasonable simulacrum of enthusiasm, which I will take. It's popular among leftists, centrists and those unenthused by the death cult of personality that has so thoroughly infested the corpse of what used to be the party of the Christine Todd Whitmans of the world to gin up some rue as they look at their feet and say "Well, Biden definitely wasn't my first choice," right before the irreducibly world-critical "...but..."
I've learned a lot in 46 years, and what is now my eighth presidential election. This year what I'm learning is the planetary-axis-tilting power of ambivalence. A lot has been made, for obvious reasons, about the sociopolitical binary of the present, the division, the gaping opening between right and left that seems un-zipper-able. And yes, there are some who are insisting on the evil of the opposition, and who will inevitably ratchet up the level of agitation among the people who were never under any circumstance, up to and including watching Donald Trump murder their grandparents, going to vote for Joe Biden anyway. And not move one single other person whatever.
Once Biden became the nominee, it seemed very unlikely that he would be the one to draw us back together as a people. The competitive atmosphere really made it feel like the only way to unite would be to win and the only way to win would be the annihilation of the enemy. Persuasion would be great, but honestly the entrenchment of the sides suggested pretty readily that the only way forward would require capitulation, of one or the other. And hey, if the Democrat won, maybe we'd get capitulation and universal healthcare. Bonus!
What happened instead is what inevitably happens throughout history, something we never see coming but is as obvious as a herpes outbreak in retrospect. Now, there's a lot of confirmation bias in hindsight, but the great advantage of history is that, since it already happened, it can never actually be wrong. Maybe we didn't need a Bernie Sanders to un-Trump everything, like some kind of antimatter particle destroying everything else on contact.
As I type this I can't believe this is going to accidentally come out sounding like optimism, but maybe an all-the-way-to-socialism antithesis wasn't what was going to get us where we needed to be. Maybe what we need to putty in the cracks in our social drywall is a) someone everyone hates in record numbers opposed by b) a genial squish well past his piss-and-vinegar partisan prime, to the extent he ever had one.
Joe Biden gets to be called "vice president" due to the emeritus perks of his position, but at the core of his being, he's a senator. And a senator in the old sense: a consensus-first get-along hand-shaker and head-nodder, a negotiator and a friend-maker. The kind of guy who fancies himself as the type who can sit down and have a beer with anyone, probably because he's been around so long, by now he has literally gotten around to having a beer with everyone. He's the kind of guy who will tell you a mole-rat like Lindsey Graham is just misunderstood, but can be talked around.
The election is chaotic and stupid and divisive because, as the incumbent, this election is about Donald Trump, who is chaotic and stupid and divisive. If he loses (and I hope to shit he loses) very quickly everything will stop being about a person who no longer matters to anyone else's lives except for the reptilian dipshits related to him by blood or marriage.
And the rest of us will be stuck with a boring-ass, old-time conventional, probably profoundly underwhelming Biden presidency. And holy shit, doesn't that maybe sound like the best thing ever?
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