Donald Trump has lost, but he is
not going anywhere and so soon, something that large sections of the mainstream
media and half of American voters would want so desperately. He has got massive
electoral support, almost 70 million plus votes, half of the American vote
bank. He might be openly a racist, an overt and tacit patron of Rightwing
fringe groups of white supremacism, a misogynist, sexist and an anti-immigrant,
apart from being rather crass in his public conduct.
He might have decisively
botched up the Covid emergency in his total denial in public and acceptance in
private, as disclosed by a top journalist with whom he shared his views; and by
denying masks and the universal danger of this pandemic, he might be singularly
responsible for the spread of the epidemic. Almost 250,000 Americans have
fallen to the pandemic.
And, yet, Trump is refusing to
give way to the new president-elect, Joe Biden and his team, even in carving
out an emergency response to the pandemic. On the contrary, he continues to
call the poll results a fraud, something even some of his aides in the White
House and many Republican leaders are not ready to accept.
Biden, in his
victory speech, has emphasised that he stands for not a red or blue America but
a United America, which is quite in contrast to the sectarian ‘ultra
nationalist’ Trump slogan of ‘Make America Great Again’, which unconsciously reminds
of the colonial era of White supremacy, the bloody and genocidal subjugation of
the indigenous inhabitants and natives of this vast land by colonisers and
missionaries, and the slave trade of Blacks and later their continued brutalisation
even in the post-War scenario by the rabid Ku Klux Klan virus of white
supremacy.
Biden
especially said that he stands for all of America, including those who did not
vote for him, acknowledging the tragic and bitter realism of a socially divided
and psychology wounded country, which might take years to overcome the fissures
and hostilities entrenched after the short Trump era of four years.
Indeed, as
the The New Yorker reported, Biden
asked for an end to “this grim era of demonization…” “He stressed that, in
choosing him, a majority of Americans opted to “marshal the forces of decency
and the forces of fairness. To marshal the forces of science and the forces of
hope”— the forces of everything good, reliable, and familiar that can help us
shake the feeling of living in an unstable and unrelentingly dark reality.
Biden promised to “restore the soul of America”.
Surely,
America is in a crisis. Despite the upset victory of the Democrats in certain
red states like Arizona and Georgia, and the close margin of the final vote
count, the vast white countryside, especially the uneducated white working
class, both men and women, seemed to have gone along with Trump. So has,
surprisingly, a sizeable number of Hispanics, especially Cubans who hate
communists and who got sold yet again on the Trump slogan that socialists and
the Left are out to take over America. Trump has repeatedly drummed it in the
social media that the Left has taken over the Democrats and America is going Left.
So much so, some Democrats too have done a kind of campaign that it is because
of the progressives led by Bernie Sanders, and others like Rep Alexandria Ocasi0-Cortez
and ‘the squad’ of four radical, progressive and emerging women leaders, among
others, that the Biden campaign suffered in some states.
Reports from
the ground affirm that nothing can be further from the truth, and that it was
basically the Sanders, and progressives’ campaign, relentless and dogged, and
which went on from the day Trump won the elections in the first instance defeating
Hillary Clinton (though she got more votes), and the Black Lives Matter
movement, massive and widespread across class, colour and race, apart from the
larger rainbow coalition which swung it for Biden and Kamala Harris.
This
coalition belongs to educated people, youngsters and students, the millennials,
the LGBT collectives, the liberal White, enlightened and feminist women, immigrants
and Asians, and almost the entire Black population, who consolidated the huge
and unprecedented mass of vote which overwhelmed the support base of Trump, who
just did not anticipate the huge ground level work, the door to door outreach,
the voters’ enrolment and postal ballot campaign, and the idea of a new,
egalitarian and secular America without the racial and sectarian divide. Native Indians campaigned and voted
overwhelmingly against Trump. This was against the crass language and conduct displayed in the Trump
era, where unbridled capitalism of monopolists, despite the pandemic, mass
unemployment, collective uncertainty, depression and anxiety, stalked the
American landscape.
The
progressives’ agenda will mark the new America in more ways than one. People
are desperate for a health sector which is not so shamelessly loaded in favour
of the rich, which reaches out to the most ordinary Americans; they want higher
education for the vast majority of the working class, across colour, they want
social security and financial relief, jobs and homes for the homeless, and a
society where the police and law enforcement agencies are not so brazenly
biased and partisan. They also want accountability for the rich and super rich,
a level-playing field, a new economic order, and an end to the rise and rise of
the capitalists who seem to have flourished in an unprecedented manner amidst
the despair and distress of the deadly pandemic.
Surely,
amidst the millennials, this is a trend which has been trending since Socialist
Bernie Sanders first entered the fray, while being blocked again and again by
the big money lobbies, including Barack Obama himself. The Barack-Biden twosome
has a bad record on several counts: mass deportations of immigrants, the total
insensitivity towards the working class, health and education, and of course,
the unbridled killings by the drones in conflict zones across the middle-east
and the borders of Afghanistan, and the death and destruction in Syria and
Yemen, which continues. At least, in the Trump era, no new wars waged by
America in the rest of the world, though his record on Palestine and Iran has
been grossly unimaginative and crude.
Stacey
Abrams, for instance, a prominent black leader of Georgia, who had earlier run
for the post of Governor, has been credited for leading a whole-hearted and
successful grassroots campaign for Biden, overcoming the formidable Trump
support base in Georgia. Writes The Daily
Beast: “The Biden campaign placed
Georgia as one of just three reach states that they sought to turn blue, hoping
to expand the party’s old electoral map to defeat President Donald Trump. The
fact that Georgia is narrowly trending in that direction at the top of the
ticket is, in part, thanks to the work Abrams put in place during her first
governor run in 2018, where voter suppression contributed to her close loss to
unseat (Republican) Kemp. She has since escalated her organizing and mobilizing
efforts with Fair Fight, the group she founded in the aftermath of that election,
and offered a strong closing pitch to voters to “make a plan to vote early”
leading up to November 3.”
So will
America heal itself and become united in these edgy days to come… The answer,
as the Bob Dylan song says, is once again blowin’ in the wind.
