I
Around 11:30 a.m. on Saturday repeated cheers and car horns broke the near-silence of a pandemic morning on Riverside Drive. It was over; Biden was the President-elect. Cheers and car horns, lots of them, were still sounding half an hour later, with the addition of cowbells—an improbable number of people in Morningside Heights turn out to own cowbells. There were church bells, too, probably from St. John the Divine. There are always church bells at noon, and I heard them daily decades ago, when living just off Amsterdam, but I’ve never before heard them from the eleventh floor four blocks to the south and more than a long crosstown block to the west. If bell-ringers still do that work at St. John’s they were clearly putting more oomph into it. At a quarter to three people were dancing in the streets.
On election day, a bit before midnight, the specter of an un-slayable Trump-monster, an invincible and vicious clown, for a few minutes loomed so large that it drove from our minds what we had good reason to remember, because it had been the talk of all the saner commentary we’d read for the preceding weeks: wait for it, first comes the red mirage, then the blue wave. And by Wednesday morning first some and then more of the red did prove a mirage. After the very bad news about the Senate and House races the blue wave did roll in, slower than any tide, if anything increasingly undramatic, and nothing as brisk as the country simply scraping Trump off its shoe on a curbstone. It was instead slow, calm and inexorable, until the news about Pennsylvania broke. That’s when the joy in the streets erupted. I’d bet that it did not, despite the church bells, remind anyone of our folk memories of VE Day. If anything, it was more like crowds of exuberant Berliners celebrating a World Cup victory. But it was not very much like that, because the people on Riverside sounded joyous without any of the sweet silliness of vast emotion over one or another kind of ballgame. A lot of our politics have been despairingly described as tribal, but for whatever reason the joy in the streets and courtyards did not sound meanly or trivially tribal.
A friend, now dead, a Central European émigré scholar whose family—some of them, anyway–had survived many kinds of deadly politics, once described a moment in our own lives as evidencing the worst kind of politics, which he described as the kind when tribe A exults only because tribe B is newly miserable. The cheering, joyous, dancing crowds, at least as heard from the eleventh floor or seen at street level, were pretty obviously not in the grip of the worst kind of politics. They might have been capable of singing “Ding, Dong, the witch is dead!”, but they weren’t shouting for a pogrom directed at flying monkeys.
II
Strikingly, the disillusion preceded the exhilaration. For a couple of days the commentariat, friends and some family were focused on what had gone wrong, what it portended, and why there was no reason for joy. This joylessness had two causes, and one was that Trump had ever won, let alone for part of an evening looked as if he’d do it again, and this was taken to reveal something horrific about the country, and the insufficient scale of his party’s defeat seemed not merely dangerous but catastrophic. The failure to convincingly repudiate was taken to mean that Trump and Trumpism would inevitably return. He’d constantly envenom his eighty-nine million Twitter followers, so he already possessed something like an SA in waiting, whereas in just squeaking through Biden lacked the legitimacy to deliver almost any of what he’d promised. People were profoundly disheartened that the margin was so small: he’d been vile, and how could almost half the country not see this? Who are we? This is a serious and distressing question. One possible if admittedly partial answer is that we’re not the ones who voted for Trump, and that the people who did vote for him cast their votes for many different reasons. While all of these reasons were rooted in grievous errors, some of the errors were much less ugly than others.
In sharp and self-admiring contrast we are merely the people who despite occasionally and preposterously mistaking Trump for Hitler otherwise got him right. But if there is a case that Biden’s proposed politics of magnanimity should prevail, we can help it along by recalling that some of us had in the past vicariously salivated over various omelets, the kind you can’t make without breaking eggs, or insisted that liberal interventionism invariably produces much worse horrors than any number of dead Tutsi, Bosnians, Afghans, Kosovars, Syrians, Koreans, Uighurs or Rohingya, or now choose to believe that the vast number of working class Harlemites who cheered for a three strikes law during an awful crime wave never existed, or nod wisely when we hear that Jim Crow was only American slavery under a different name, that Jim Crow is still with us, and that the counterinsurgency campaign against Mau Maus was Britain’s Gulag, which suggests the reverse of what we may think it does: it suggests that non-metaphorical slavery, Jim Crow and gulags may not be wholly real to us.
If enough of the Trump voters who made a very bad and dangerous mistake voted not out of xenophobia, racism, sadism or blind greed, rather out of a not-entirely-crazy sense that less boorish American elites hadn’t cared a whit about them ever since the end of the Cold War, and in many cases not before, we should struggle to make them more real to us than Trump was to them. If they remain unreal to us and we persist in conceiving them en masse as comic book villains, we heighten the risk of losing another election to a probably more dangerous because less obviously grotesque version of Trump. To imagine that just under half of our fellow citizens are either cretins or criminals risks the sin of despair, most decent politics contain at least a measure of hope, and when Marlowe’s Machiavel held that there is no sin save ignorance he may have been on to something. We have ourselves sometimes chosen to be selectively ignorant of what we’ve occasionally cheered for, and also chosen to be ignorant of who some of them are, and of what they’ve endured. We should stop. Trump’s political achievement rested on cynically and recklessly arousing hatred, Biden’s on the reverse approach, which he urged again last night in Wilmington. He clearly thinks that this approach has been a significant cause of his victory, and this morning Biden’s political instincts, at least about the electorate, are looking pretty good.
The other reason for immediate disillusion with Biden’s not-yet-achieved victory rested on the strong suspicion that without a voting majority in the Senate, the will to use it and ruthless discipline, none of which we seem to have, the Republicans in Congress will cynically insure Biden’s absolute failure on their traditional Leninist grounds of the worse, the better. This is not a foolish fear: ever since Newt Gingrich became Speaker the Republicans have done this much more frequently than they’ve done anything else. So this argument for disillusion catches what the mourning for repudiation on a sufficiently vast scale misses. Biden’s victory in 2020 will be in every respect larger than Trump’s in 2016, with more votes in what proved the crucial swing states, in all likelihood with at least as many electoral votes, and while in 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by just under three million votes, in 2020 Biden will have won the popular vote by at the least more than four million, and maybe many more than four million. But the minute scale of the electorate’s repudiation of Hillary Clinton in no way stopped Trump from achieving vast changes in our laws and norms. He did this only because he had the one thing Biden will probably lack, command of both halves of a bicameral legislature, without which almost nothing would have been possible. And if nothing is possible in the face of the pandemic, the looming spike in unemployment, bankruptcy, loss of medical insurance and evictions—Trump is already the first president since Hoover to leave office with fewer employed than when he took office—portends that the Republicans will take back the House and expand their Senate majority in 2022, then retrieve the Presidency in 2024. Or so the argument for disillusion goes.
In the face of this strong argument for pessimism we should first remember that what will happen on Jan. 5th is unknowable. The Georgia runoffs may not be hopelessly uphill fights, in part because on Jan. 5th Donald Trump, still President, will have presided over perhaps another hundred thousand Covid deaths and probably many millions of newly-lost jobs and personal bankruptcies. Biden, a Democrat, will have either won a state-wide contest in Georgia or come within a hair of that, and what has happened once and very recently can logically happen again. Turnout by demoralized Trump-idolators may be down compared to that of inspirited Democrats with everything at stake, Biden will probably look better to many people than he did on November 3rd, and Trump much worse. In addition to the probably rebarbative character of his misrule in November and December, Trump will have spent two months sulking and blustering with fabulous want of dignity, a few Republicans may be publicly saying as much, so who knows how Georgians will vote, or how many will vote, or which ones will vote?
Last night Trump shrank with such startling speed that one was tempted to look for an empty bottle labelled “Drink Me”. Right after Biden’s Wilmington speech, switching to Fox to see how they covered it, we saw anchors and commentators speaking with perfect gravity of the man they very properly called the President Elect, while the chryon—the text-based graphics scrolling at the bottom of the screen while the talking heads bloviated—relayed an unending series of Trump’s increasingly ludicrous tweets vowing victory. Maybe scores of millions of Trump’s idolators will pay no attention to the man behind the curtains, and forever see only the great and powerful Oz. But probably not. Somewhere among them is the first one who’ll discover and shout that Trump, Barr, Stephen Miller, Pompeo and the rest are now no more than a pack of cards. And whoever she may be, she surely won’t be the last to make the discovery and spill the beans. And precisely because Trump will remain able to enthrall and mobilize his remaining loyalists he’ll almost certainly be a much worse problem for Mitch McConnell than for Joe Biden. What McConnell really needs for 2022 and 2024 is a “conservatism” without Trump, and Trump is unlikely to oblige.
So if Biden has no Senate majority in 2021 the Republicans may pave the way for one in the midterms, which only a month ago were widely understood to likely be a worse year for incumbent Republican senators than 2020 was going to be. Doing nothing or almost nothing while many more die or go broke is not inevitably brilliant politics. Repeated polling indicates that most Americans want a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage, something very close to the rights created by Roe v. Wade, some of the protections created by the Affordable Care Act, higher taxes on the rich and at least a bit less income inequality. Majorities also think that Black Lives Matter seems on to something, and are in favor of various other Biden pledges McConnell’s Republicans disdain. Majorities are in favor of immigration, even more than they were before Trump started so odiously persecuting immigrants. Majorities support DACA. Majorities are genuinely uneasy about global warning. If the Democrats never stop sending the Senate bills responding to these desires and McConnell keeps bottling them up, the Republican’s may well look more malevolent than Biden will look impotent. A tab will come due in ’22, it’s not clear who’ll have to pay it, and it would be genuinely perverse to be certain that it’ll be Biden’s Democrats. Biden may go into 2024 after two years of legislating with a new senate majority, rather than suffering the reverse timing, which is what hit Obama in 2010.
Things can obviously go very wrong, and if they do it may not be due to the Republicans’ unassisted efforts. Using the phrase “defund the police” in its Pickwickian sense was an unforced error, similarly ignoring the fact that a majority of Black Americans want more police, albeit ones who won’t indiscriminately murder them. Wooing Hispanic voters, seventy per cent of whom apparently consider themselves White, by showing no obvious distaste for people who use the word White as a pejorative adjective, was another unforced error. We now know that calling for socialism is unlikely to charm strategically located and ever more numerous voters who’ve in living memory fled something its practitioners called socialism. Forgetting what the first and admittedly unreliable exit polls (they were conducted during a pandemic) suggest, that Trump significantly improved his numbers with all Hispanic Americans, with black men, and with LGBTQ voters, while Biden improved his with whites and especially white seniors, implies that seriously rethinking the way we strategize about race and politics may mean something more complicated than what we are too often told it does. Factions who scorned Biden and claim to be focused on racial justice seem to miss the fact that Black voters made Biden first the nominee and then the President Elect. Maybe they knew something.
III
One reason Trump won in 2016 was because too many people thought the game was rigged but missed the fact that Trump was a vivid example of the sort of person for whom it had been rigged, and one who had no intention of changing many if any of the rules. Biden himself spent some time rigging the game—Senators from Delaware have obvious incentives to do that—but one reason he won the election is because he seems to sincerely believe that the people against whom the game has been rigged deserve a better shot. The Jacobin, with impeccable timing, just published a piece with this stirring sentence: “The incoming Joe Biden administration doesn’t deserve an ounce of credit for having the right intentions or a day of progressives patiently waiting to see how it acts before pivoting to a posture of opposition.” Jacobin writers, while less obscure than I am, probably have about the same chance of organizing what we used to call the broad masses, and my guess is that Biden knows this. What happens in Congress and the media matters more, but let’s hope Biden remains unruffled by the disdain and animus of the people who dismissed, vilified or mocked him until almost the very end of a long campaign. It turns out that he didn’t need them, and it turns out that we probably did need him. People who insist that Bernie (or someone like) would have taken the Senate, or won in 2016, while mirthless examples of the inelasticity theory of comedy, are still funnier than Biden. Biden, Donald Trump very belatedly discovered, is no joke.
What is he? A glimpse I found strangely appealing came after the Wilmington speech when the party began, first the dancing and then a protracted display of fireworks. When the camera caught Biden beaming at those fireworks he looked happy as a child, and happy in the most ordinary way in the world. Delight when watching fireworks is one of the few joys that seems common to us all. Biden is not Everyman—in my experience Everyman, insofar as there is such a one, only rarely quotes Seamus Heaney or Yeats—but the ordinariness invariably and patronizingly ascribed to Biden, and his own indirect invocation of that quality, may be worth considering in a less patronizing way. He clearly hopes to call forth what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature—the surrounding words in the original speech are very much worth recalling—and the point of the word ‘our’ in that passage is the conviction that almost all of us have better angels as part of our nature. The very unordinary man who called forth those better angels would never himself find them on the broadest possible scale (although the ones that animated the Armies of the Potomac and the Tennessee must have been some consolation), but the insistence that we have them remains the predicate of democratic politics. Trump very explicitly and for a time successfully sought to arouse our worse angels, and shared with some of his adversaries an apocalyptic sense of our historical moment. Biden’s optimism about what most Americans can sometimes be, and about what most of us can share, is not the most trivial portion of our political tradition.