So This is Victory

So, this is victory in 2020. Or, it will be, when the count is done this weekend or next week.

For most of us, it does not feel like we’d hoped. We’d hoped for a repudiation of evil, a big blue blow-out, a new power base for compassion and decency and science. In the last few months, as Trump’s campaign became increasingly unhinged and COVID-19 deaths continued to mount, I think a lot of us began to believe what we dared not believe at the beginning of this year: that a blue wave might wash the nation clean.

What actually occurred appears to be more what we all expected at the beginning of this year: a hard-fought, narrow victory for the Presidency, a slim chance at a Senate majority, major gains in places like Texas (but not enough to flip), more Americans voting than at any point in history, and GOP lawsuits as the final wave of voter suppression.

It’s hard to feel victorious when the man responsible for a quarter of a million of our fellow Americans dying, a man who presided over an unprecedented economic crash, a man who was impeached once and whose crimes and racism and misogyny have been revealed again and again for four years almost wins. It’s hard to feel victorious when senators who have gleefully let the American people starve and lose their homes while appointing judges who will attempt to guard white supremacy for a generation to come keep their Senate seats (and maybe their majority). It’s hard to feel victorious when the very lives and livelihoods of so many of us — ourselves, our friends and family, remain under attack by nearly half of our population.

This is victory in 2020.

—

I grew up in North Dakota, tornado country. I remember the sirens going off as a kid, huddling in the basement until we got the all-clear, emerging to find that all our little problems remained, but at least our house still had a roof. Not everyone was so lucky.

In 2011, massive floods in North Dakota put my parents’ home underwater for almost 3 weeks. When the waters receded, we found the house itself salvageable, though everything inside was destroyed. There was relief; much had been lost, but we’d be able to rebuild, and with hard work things would eventually be okay. A FEMA trailer rolled into the backyard for my parents to live in, and we rolled-up our sleeves.

That’s what this feels like, to me; others will draw from their personal experiences. This week we’re watching the flood waters slowly recede. We can take stock of what was destroyed, what survived, what can be rebuilt. Much has been lost, especially in the past 8 months — jobs, homes, freedom at the border, a quarter of a million lives. More will be lost in the aftermath, thanks to McConnell’s packing the court and the pandemic that still rages. But we’re emerging from the worst of it. What’s ahead of us is not celebration. It’s opportunity to rebuild. What’s ahead of us is a long road of very hard work. But, at least the road is there. The waters are receding. It’s opening up. It may still be covered in muck, but we can see the path.

—

The most difficult thing for a lot of us, as we watch the the numbers slowly roll in, is coming to terms with the almost 70-ish million people who voted for Trump to stay, who voted for McConnell to remain in charge of public policy, who voted for the destruction of progressive ideals in favor of preservation of a corrupt and broken status quo. They might be our neighbors, our family; at the very least, they are our fellow Americans. What do we do with that?

My instinct is to try to understand. Not to forgive, not yet at least — these folks pulled a lever that literally puts the lives of tens of millions of people, many of whom I love, all of whom are human beings, in jeopardy, so they could get a tax break, or make abortion illegal, or whatever it is they’re seeking. But understanding a problem is the first step toward repairing it, and I long to understand.

It’s easy to understand why some people voted for Trump. Many are overt racists and sexists and homophobes and white supremacists, emboldened by Trump’s sometimes tacit, sometimes blatant support. The answer to those folks is easy: always punch Nazis. Shut them down. Do not tolerate their discourse, and make their support poison to those who seek it. Trump and guns make it harder to do, but at least we know the answer. A larger group are economic opportunists — they may insist they are not racists, maybe even claim to be social liberals. But they are capitalists first, dammit, and are willing to look the other way so long as their tax cuts are delivered and the stock market rises and the commodities subsidies flow. Another group are evangelicals who have abandoned the actual teachings of Christ in favor of the gospel of prosperity or the single issue: abortion. These three groups are difficult to square with the America I hope for. But there are not enough of them to keep someone like Trump so close to power. They are not numerous enough to do it alone.

There is another group I think about a lot. I believe these are the folks that continually confound our expectations of an enlightened America. These are the group that put a person like Trump in the Presidency. In past decades, I thought about them as low-information Voters. Now I think of them as misinformation voters. These are folks whose information comes to them in the old ways: a quick glimpse at the nightly news, a quick hit from radio news on the way home from work, or in one very new way: Facebook.

Just a few decades ago, this was less dangerous. The nightly news, wherever you sought it, was grounded in a shared reality. Right-wing conspiracy theories on the radio were hard to find. An obligation to objective facts, to a shared reality, kept us all on the same playing field as a society, even if some of us were playing dirty.

Now, there is no shared reality. Algorithms designed to favor engagement without any regulators for reality drive radical conspiracy theories like QAnon from the dark corners of the web to your Mom’s iPad. FOX news, and even more radical outlets like OANN, paint a picture of an alternate world, lies as facts, facts as lies. And the consolidation of small town local TV, radio, and newspapers under companies like Sinclair creates a propaganda echo chamber throughout the exurbs and rural areas of our country. On top of all of this, many of our politicians on the right, Trump most of all, but hardly alone, no longer fear telling blatant lies to a national audience, because they know any advantageous lie, recycled through Facebook and Fox and Sinclair, becomes an alternate reality truth. Getting caught in a lie, on the right at least, is not only no longer to be feared, it is increasingly impossible.

This is all by design, of course. When Nixon was forced out of office for his crimes, Rupert Murdoch posited that if only one major news network had been on his side, he could have been saved. That’s how FOX news was born. It, and all that followed, was designed for this very moment.

So, we’re faced with a sea of misinformation voters, puppets of a dwindling right wing minority, who earnestly believe in, and vote based upon, a reality that only exists suspended among the rancid webbing of FOX, Facebook, and Sinclair. These voters cannot be engaged in constructive debate, because their beliefs are not grounded in objective reality. Their misinformation streams cannot easily be dammed-up, because they are among the most rich and powerful companies in the world, and in America we’ve lost the stomach to confront such corporations. These voters, infected with the misinformation virus, can be harnessed to keep McConnell and Graham in office, to allow Uber to re-write California’s labor laws, and even, after 250,000 deaths, millions of jobs lost, disastrous international policies, and economic plans that only make the rich richer and the poor poorer, almost re-elect the worst President in the history of America.

What do we do about these voters? More to the point, what do we do about the web of misinformation that so jeopardizes our democracy? This is among our deepest American problems, and we’ve only just begun to recognize it, much less solve it. This is gonna take a while.

—

Today is Friday, November 6, 2020. Today or tomorrow or Monday we’ll see the presidential race called for Biden, and possibly recounts starting in a couple of states. Lawsuits will continue to blossom and then fall. In a week or two or three, hopefully not too much more, the reality of the Biden/Harris win will settle in across the country, hopefully without the violence many of us have been bracing for. We’ll guard ourselves as best we can against whatever this unhinged President might do over the winter. Today, or Monday if we’re very lucky, the campaigns for Senate special election in Georgia, a special election that decides the disposition of the Senate for the next two years, will begin.

We’re standing at the top of the basement stairs right now. The waters have receded. We’re inside our house for the first time in nearly four years, after being forced out by the flood. The walls are covered in mold. The floorboards are warped beyond saving. The electricity is still out, so the basement is pitch black, but we know what’s down there: a morass of fetid mud, sticky and stinking. It must be shoveled out so we can power wash the whole place and begin to rebuild.

We roll up our sleeves, adjust our masks, heft our shovels. We know what needs to be done, though we don’t yet know exactly how to do it all. But, the water is gone and it’s time to begin the clean-up. This is what we’ve been fighting for. It doesn’t feel like victory right now. It certainly doesn’t smell like it. But it is the opportunity for a better tomorrow, and it feels like we haven’t had that in a very long time.

Take a deep breath. Recover your strength. We’ve won ourselves opportunity. This is victory in 2020. Now a new kind of work begins.