On the other hand...

 

Those who have read my blog entries on Election Night will recall that I was pretty discouraged. My mood has taken a turn for the better with the defeat of our Child President and the prospect of an adult occupying the Oval Office come January 20. America and the world have dodged a bullet, and I'm gratified that my intuition ever since Mr. Trump's freak elevation to the position for which he is so poorly suited- that there was simply no way that the American people, in their wisdom, would repeat the mistake this time around- has proven accurate.

But my concern remains. The damage Donald Trump has done in the past four years is profound, and much of it, I'm afraid, is permanent. Just how serious that damage is can be seen in the very fact that an election which should have been a historic landslide, a blowout for the ages, was a solid but modest victory for the Democrats which seems not have been able even to carry a Senate most of whose members very much deserved to be replaced. My own junior senator, Joni Ernst- a woman for whom I once had such high hopes- richly deserved defeat, if only for voting to acquit an impeached president obviously and plainly guilty of abusing his office. Her gutless acquiescence, and that of her fellow members of the Republican caucus, in the insanity of the past four years, demanded retribution that didn't come. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm delighted that Joe Biden won. But the result should have been the landslide everyone expected, the purifying "blue wave" that might even convince a Republican Party drunk on the wine of authoritarian right-wing populism to go on the wagon. But instead, the GOP seems to remain thoroughly Trumpified, and the question at this point seems only to be whether the attempt at a Trumpista restoration in 2024 will be led by the man himself or an imitator.

In the midst of a pandemic that has killed over a quarter of a million Americans, half the nation still refuses to take the advice of the epidemiologists and other experts who actually have some idea what the hell they're talking about, and many apparently believe that they have a constitutional right to infect others. And there is no getting around it: Donald Trump mainstreamed paranoia and far-fetched conspiracy theories while making it respectable to ignore plain and undeniable facts. For half the nation, anything that doesn't support some personal bias or fever dream can now be dismissed as "fake news" no matter what the evidence and no evidence at all is required to turn hallucinations and fantasies like the alleged "rigging" of the election just concluded into articles of faith.

The fact that Donald Trump was defeated is something for which every well-informed American should be grateful. That he was not buried in a historic landslide, though, means that the virus of nativism, authoritarianism, and stubborn ignorance will continue to run amok in the body politic. At some point, we'll have a vaccine for COVID-19. But despite the defeat of Donald Trump, our values will continue for the foreseeable future to be eroded by the disease of Trumpism.

It's a sickness that still has the potential to cost us our freedom. As Lincoln once observed, if we ever lose that freedom, it will not be at the hands of a foreign conqueror. It will be because we ourselves chose to throw it away.