If you squint hard enough you can find a silver lining about the blood-soaked legacies of even the worst tyrants and dictators. Fidel Castro gave poor Cubans access to health care. Pinochet left Chile in a pretty good economic position. Joseph Stalin beat Hitler. Adolf Hitler killed Hitler.
Donald Trump was not a dictator - being a real dictator would have taken too much of his precious golf and Fox and Friends time - and amidst the wreckage of his failed, divisive Presidency, he occasionally did something right. He made a few tentative steps toward criminal justice reform, brokered some peace deals between Israel and Muslim states, and actually avoided getting his country involved in any new wars.
Most importantly, I feel like the United States of America needed a populist demagogue like Trump to get elected to illustrate, once and for all, just how populist demagoguery works in practice. Stop taking politics seriously, take for granted the political norms that have served the country well, pretend tyranny and authoritarianism “can’t happen here,” and you get someone like President Trump.
President Trump did substantial damage to his country and its international standing - as someone said on Twitter, when the world celebrates your election defeat like the Death Star blowing up, it’s time to re-examine your life choices - and his policies hurt many Americans on a personal level. Child separation at the border, in particular, will go down as the Japanese internment of our age. Here in Canada we’re celebrating, but in the back of our minds we’re still wondering if our neighbour, trading partner and ally will go down this road once again.
That said, assuming Trump leaves office on his own volition (there are some signs his family and hangers-on are trying to talk him down) the United States of America will get another chance. It often takes a lost war or a violent revolution to bring down someone like that, but - knock on wood - America got rid of this guy legally and peacefully. Now the country will have a chance to correct the structural issues and social trends that left them in a place where someone like Trump could get elected and bend the institutions of government, and a major political party, to his will. A chance to finally turn down the heat.
And if you saw Joe Biden’s victory speech on Saturday night, you know he may be just the person who can do it. He is an old-school liberal, not a fire-breathing progressive, and - unlike his predecessor - he appreciates even the parts of his country that voted against him. Obviously he will try to carry out Democratic Party policies, but even after Trump he is still honorable enough to extend a hand to the other side. I hope and pray they take it.
The other big speech on Saturday night was from Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, and while watching her I thought about…NASCAR driver Danica Patrick.
Seriously.
In 2017 my parents and I went to the fall NASCAR race at New Hampshire International Speedway. Only when I saw so many girls and young women wearing Danica Patrick merchandise did I appreciate what her competing at this level meant for so many. She was racing not just for her team and her sponsors, but for millions of female NASCAR fans.
Kamala Harris standing on that stage was the same kind of thing, multiplied by several thousand. A partly African-American, part Asian-American woman - a daughter of immigrants, no less - will soon occupy the second-highest office in the United States. It is unprecedented. It is something so many little girls, like the one in the above photo I found on Reddit, are seeing for the first time. And it is showing them just what is possible.
I’m not going to say I’m a huge fan of Kamala Harris - Val Demings is the Biden running mate I really wanted - but I cannot deny the significance of her incredible accomplishment. And think about this: assuming Biden stays in office for only one term, Harris is in a good position to win her party’s 2024 nomination and become President of the United States. And in 2026, when the USA celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, a minority woman could be leading the country and presiding over the celebrations.
Gotta admit I didn’t see this coming.
A more pessimistic view from the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/trump-proved-authoritarians-can-get-elected-america/617023/
I think American democracy is as shaky as ever, Trump's supporters aren't going to just realize they were wrong and fade away, and after the cooling off period there needs to be a serious effort to introduce more checks and balances to prevent this from happening again .
America is lucky this particular demagogue was not the real deal. If he had been more intelligent and less absolutely focused on himself, he might have been, as the States seemed completely unprepared. People always think "it can't happen, not here (or not now)", but people have always thought that and it has happened anyway, and continues to do so. So when one catches oneself thinking that, maybe it's time to consider the possibility seriously before it catches an entire country unawares.
In that sense, the close shave in this election was a useful wake-up call. If the Dems had gotten their blue wave, the lesson might not have been learned as thoroughly.
Harris being elected is especially meaningful even to me, being Caucasian and having had it relatively easy compared to what many other girls and women go through. Battling systemic discrimination against a disability and past abuse is undoubtedly not nearly as hard as being faced by a wall of racial *and* gender discrimination on all sides, while also being stonewalled by permanent poverty. And being raised in a secure middle-class family until the age of about 10 gave me a sense of who I was...a self that one inevitably returns to, no matter how low life's circumstances take you from time to time. Again, that's something many little girls just don't have. It's much harder to break out of the constraints imposed by your racial, gender and socioeconomic situation when you've never known anything else.
Harris as VP is undoubtedly a new ray of hope in the lives of many girls and women who have never considered their full possibilities before. A lot of females will reach farther than they previously dared because if she can, maybe they can too.
Lol on Q. Who knew? ;)