What Does 2020 Hold?

Think this is going to be another dark one - both this post and this year.

Not at a personal level, necessarily: unless political realities impinge on my personal life, I'm planning on having more fun times with my honey, and on writing more stories (although I hope I'll do better than last year's output), and on generally enjoying myself.

But I've got a sick feeling that in 2020, America (and by extension the rest of the Western world) is going to pause at the brink... and then plunge straight on down.

I'm basing this in part on the UK election result from last month, which I expect to be a canary in the coal mine the way the Brexit referendum was in 2016. There are numerous differences between the Labour Party and the Democrats, not least the fact that the Democrats haven't opted for the "left-wing" candidate over the "establishment" one (I'm slightly troubled by both epithets) the way Labour did.

The other difference is that Labour still hasn't recovered from the Blair years, and so any internal fights are still between groups representing Blair's wing of the party against those repudiating his policies. The Democrats, on the other hand, got over their Clinton hangover in a short eight years, by electing Obama; moreover, his election didn't bring electoral success at the cost of the party's long-held ideals, so his shadow doesn't loom quite so large over the party as Blair's does over Labour.

But on the other hand, there is an area where Obama maybe does wield an undue influence, which is likely to hurt the party in November. He represented a new, "hopey-changey" type of candidate, in the words of that dum-dum Sarah Palin, and it's hard to point to any of the remaining Democrats in this race who fill that same role. He was a break from the Clinton family's influence, but in failing to establish his own wing of the party, there's no obvious success to him, just as there wasn't in 2016.

To be clear, I think any of these candidates would do a better job than the incumbent (even the ones who've already dropped out, up to and including Marianne Williamson, worrying comments on mental health aside). But I don't feel that any of them represents the kind of groundswell that could help overcome Donald Trump's inbuilt advantages.

Those advantages are various, and were there in the last election. I've spent these past 3+ years noting that there wasn't one thing that put him in the White House - rather, a perfect shit storm came together all at the same time, in the form of Russian interference, social media manipulation, voter suppression, voter apathy and white rage. Plus a number of other factors which are probably too arcane for us non-wonks to get a handle on.

My point is that a lot of these factors are still present - in 2018 we saw voter suppression efforts in the state of Georgia, and there are others going on with the express aim of denying the vote to college students (such as in New Hampshire) as well as people of color. Facebook has disclaimed any responsibility for its role in 2016, and so is proudly trumpeting the fact that it's still allowing lies in political ads. Voter apathy continues apace, and white rage has gotten, if anything, worse since 2016 - we've even started having hate crimes against black churches here in Palo Alto (not that I'm claiming my hometown has always been a perfect model of diversity, but that racists are so emboldened to attack black churches here speaks volumes).

And then there's the inbuilt advantage for the GOP in the Electoral College, where there are more small states with undue influence than large, populous and urban states.

The other question is what will a second Trump administration mean for America? I've heard legal scholars and experts suggest that all the institutions that have been holding him back so far will be further gutted, meaning even less consumer protection and rule of law. Institutional corruption will be allowed to gather even more pace, and the transfer of wealth from the middle and working classes to the ultra-rich will also likely accelerate.

Recourse to the courts to block his agenda will be further limited as age takes its toll on the remaining Supreme Court justices (Breyer and Ginsburg) who were put forward by Bill Clinton in the 1990s - and if any of the Republican justices predating Trump's term have to leave the court, he'll have even more opportunities to nominate justices, and the Democrats won't have any recourse unless they retake the Senate.

The future isn't set in stone, of course, so we'll all need to be working toward electing the candidates who are best-placed to counter his agenda - and not just candidates to replace him in the White House. Especially in battleground states, it'll be important for voters to pay attention to the state and local races, especially judgeships, as that's the group that'll form the pool for Trump and future presidents (if there will be any) to select federal judges from.

I'll be looking for ways to do my bit, and I hope you will too, starting with one of the more venerable get-out-the-vote groups, Rock the Vote. One of the GOP's in-built advantages is that its base tends to vote more often, so Democrat-aligned groups have to do more to get people registered and voting. As I find more groups I'll try and post them here, either in the blog or elsewhere on the site.