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Beyond Damage Control: Institutional Reform
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Well, it ain’t over. And even when it is over, it won’t be over.
As I write, it seems as if Biden will win the Electoral College by a hair. But at the moment Biden not only has close to 4 million more popular votes than Trump: he has beaten Obama’s popular vote count in 2008 and thus has set a record for the total number of votes cast for any presidential candidate in US history. And still, Biden hasn’t yet won the office.
This is, frankly, madness. Even more insane than the fact that the Trump regime is preparing to throw any legal challenge it can against the electoral results to see if any of them stick. The “damage control” election that I understood this one to be has come to pass and, hopefully, we will have dodged one bullet aimed at the heart of American Liberal Republican Democracy.
But any more of these skin-of-the-teeth victories will be the death of us, and I am not talking death brought on by angst on an individual level. That can be palliated by meditation, social media and cable news fasting, listening to Vivaldi, and Sauvignon Blanc, all of which have a much-appreciated calming effect. I am talking about the death of us as members of a political society. And much of what is going on in this interim period where votes are counted and strategies formulated is not encouraging…
