Well, it looks like we fucking did it. And when I say "we" of course I mean me and like 75 million of my new best friends, plus apparently some dead people and some computer-generated ghosts and I think probably Matthew Broderick's character from the 1983 techno-thriller classic WarGames. All with what would have had to have been the active complicity of all the vote counters and state election officials, fully half (or more) would have to be Republicans. Sure, it seems like an unlikely scenario by which an entire American federal election would/could be stolen, and by Democrats no less, the same party who have been stumped at the state level by the same gerrymandering trick for like forty years.
I'm not going to pretend I'm not super excited about the outcome. Yes, it wasn't the easiest thing to try to get behind a Joe Biden candidacy, a guy who looked like he'd lost a few MPH off his fastball and was mostly a crafty junkballer in his prime to start with. But politics is a results business--maybe the results business--where the only way to be completely sure you're right is if you don't fucking lose. And Joe Biden didn't lose. Ergo he was the best choice for the run, cometh the hour, cometh the man. And a 78 year old corny-ass grandpa just becometh the president.
You can have policy quibbles (and I do) and irritation at the cornpone old-timey American Irish style shot through with back-claps and minced oaths (and I do), but history is jumble of sine waves oscillating between chaos and convergence, arriving sometimes at these points of resonance that have exactly as much to do with agency as accident. At those points the universe shouts its song of knowledge at us, daring us to be tuned and receptive enough to listen to the sung lesson. Right now, what we've all simultaneously learned: Joe Biden can take a fucking punch.
If we were covering the events more negatively of course, we would conclude: Donald Trump fucking sucks and an historic number of people can't stand him. Over two elections, as of press time here, he has amassed 138,353,846 votes against him for president. This is, by a country fucking mile, a record. Which has to sting even more because it's the country motherfuckers who all voted for him.
Of course in the back of my mind, I'm not on board with unrestricted celebrating until official, certified results are submitted and accepted to the Congress. Trump is Trump which means a gracious, patriotic concession speech was never in the offing. Even though it's pretty obvious that the lawsuits challenging the election are based on nothing and simply a cover for yet another fleecing operation against his own supporters, the challenges trickle on. But you have to keep the third eye open to the possibility that maybe the prepared ground of many, many conservative court appointments might shake something genuinely nefarious loose. The great joy of the right during the Trump era was the fantasy of the emotionally perturbed left. I'm here to tell you that even now, that's not entirely fantastical.
On the Saturday when the results started to become clear, the GOP already started up their calls for "bipartisanship," which in their mind means Democratic leadership advocating for Republican-only policies. And media calls to remind us that 70 million people still voted for Donald Trump so we should definitely keep their priorities in mind, to which I feel like someone should point out that is definitely fewer votes than the other guy, so maybe try shutting up for like five fucking minutes. Joe Biden is going to play along to a degree because he's going to make the mistake all Democrats make, by trying actual bipartisanship, which no Republican actually wants and would never in a million fucking years ever countenance during their own periods of ascendancy.
So yeah. There are parts of this that are going to make me tired already. Nobody is less capable than acting like they won than the left. But being shit at consolidating power doesn't mean you didn't actually Do The Thing and win in the first place. And there's something to the fact that, in all of my adult political life, Democrats tend to win presidential elections right when everything kind of goes to shit. Then we get to shore everything up, turn deficits into balances (or even surpluses), add jobs, provide healthcare, clean up the environment... and then get turned out a cycle or two later because we are not a fickle or even interesting country politically. We're a kind of shitty watch you have to shake sometimes or hold to your ear to make sure it's running. But now, for four years at least, we'll be able to reliably get the right fucking time.
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