Don't Be Fooled as 2020 Threatens to Come Good at the End

It felt like it'd never happen, but the 2020 election has come and gone, and it went to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There were a few nail-biting moments there, when certain states showed up with early Republican leads, and despite the calls from the likes of Nate Silver's 538, it was hard to feel confident about a blue shift from the postal ballots being counted after the same-day ballots.

The Election Day violence and intimidation seems not to have materialized, though that could be because no one reported on it (the intimidation, at least) or because the majority of Democrats voted by mail, meaning there were fewer people for white supremacists to intimidate at the polling stations. The attempts to steal the election do seem to have materialized, but luckily the Republicans (or more specifically the Trump administration) have been so ham-handed about it that even Fox News hasn't propagated their false claims.

My worry is that the relatively orderly election leads to a feeling of returning to normalcy for the incoming administration. The fact that the Electoral College didn't contradict the popular vote this time around, and the fact that the vote-counting infrastructure at state level were actually honest and not bought off by Trump supporters seem reassuring, but could just end up masking our system's in-built flaws until someone comes along who really knows how to take advantage of them.

This isn't an idle worry, since the "blue wave" we were promised didn't really materialize down the ballot. It looks like the Republicans cut in the Democrats' lead in the House (though without taking back control), and it looks like they're maintaining their lead in the Senate. With Mitch McConnell still leading the Senate GOP, we can expect four more years of obstructionism and zero-sum-game politics, where the Republicans will be playing to stop the Democrats from winning, rather than proposing their own agenda (and to be fair, this isn't surprising, since the GOP didn't even offer a platform for the election this year).

The other problem to think about is what all those Trump voters are going to do for the next four years. There are 71 million of them out there, and while they surely aren't all Proud Boys or whatever unpresentable group you want to name, the madness that the Trump presidency unleashed is going to poison our politics for a long time to come. If nothing else, that madness will come back in four years, when Trump presumably attempts to run again (or his daughter does, or Tom Cotton, or some other monstrosity), but the real worry is that they'll come back in just two years to grab the House in the midterms.

After all, the effect may be less pronounced than in the Senate, but the House is also prey to the demographic advantage the Republicans have by controlling the non-urban districts. And the fact that Representatives serve two-year terms means that the fundraising for 2022 starts now, with all the dark money presumably going to races that could prove decisive in two years.

In the meantime, the Republican stranglehold on the judiciary continues. It's not just the Supreme Court, which is bad enough, but they've filled more lower-level judgeships in the past four years than Obama did, so the pool for Biden and presumably Harris to appoint from will be very heavily Republican to start with. The big challenges to a progressive agenda are going to come from that quarter, so I hope the Democrats are taking it seriously.

On the plus side, Biden's win seems to have the Brits scared now that they won't have the US backing them up on Brexit. Jokes about him being Irish aside, I'd like to see Biden be constructive and steer the UK back from the brink of a hard Brexit, especially one that endangers the Good Friday Agreement - and hopefully it will also provide an opportunity for the political climate in the UK to calm down again after the last four years post-Brexit referendum.

My other foreign policy wish, though this is much more remote, is that Biden reverses the policy of the past two decades in the South China Sea, of pulling back its forces and allowing China into the vacuum. This policy has allowed China to bully the smaller countries and influence them unduly - an reinvigorated American show of soft power (backed by good-faith attempts to create trading and cultural links) will help show the benefits of good governance and provide an alternative to the Chinese Communist Party's way of doing things abroad.

And of course, the big thing on my mind is the coronavirus. Biden has already named a task force to tackle the pandemic, but it's clear that it'll be with us for a while even in the best-case scenario. As my girlfriend pointed out today, quoting from a tweet she saw, it wouldn't do to get the virus now, before we start to make actual progress against it. We'll have to maintain vigilance and avoid ending the shutdowns and mask mandates until any successful vaccines have been rolled out to enough people.

But with all those caveats out of the way, it's nice to see that things have a chance of righting themselves. I don't want to say "go back to normal", because the "normal" of the past two decades wasn't that great. But good governance will make for a nice start.