US Transition 2020: Everything You Hear Is True
By: Adam Barish
Tags: Politics, Coalition Building, Democratic Party, Election 2020

Everything You Hear Is True

Photo by Erik Eastman

The Democratic margin of victory in the 2020 presidential election was substantial — not a bloodbath, but big. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris received the most votes in the history of the republic for the roles they will assume in January. They will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College comfortably. This is a profound, existential victory for democratic values and social norms.

When all the votes are counted, Donald Trump will have improved on his vote total from 2016 — by a significant margin. On the list of popular vote totals for presidential candidates, his name will appear second in US history, after Joe Biden’s. How one internalizes this unambiguous statistic is a matter of perspective: for those whose experience with Trumpism represented something unprecedented, shock and sadness; for the well-versed among us, those who navigate prejudice as a matter of routine, nihilism; and everything in between.

Any unscientific perusals of Biden voters on the internet, specifically on social media platforms, will highlight the many who are thrilled that Donald Trump will be a one-term president, and many who judge Biden’s victory an empty one without control of the Senate; groups eager for a Biden agenda, and groups eager to break up the winning coalition in search of something more progressive; plenty who can breathe sighs of relief at seeing a white supremacist voted out of office, and plenty who can’t breathe seeing the ratio of white voters who said yes to four more years.

Saying we live in bubbles is like saying we live in communities while frowning. Of course we live in bubbles, each one characterized by some blurry combination of our identities, geographies, economics, interests, and so on. The limits of any bubble are two-fold: context (fans of two professional baseball teams may abhor one another but come together to root against the scandal-plagued Houston Astros) and scale (New Yorkers are New Yorkers, but some New Yorkers are from Brooklyn, and some of the ones from Brooklyn live in the neighborhoods where it’s easy to commute to Manhattan — a matter of widening or narrowing the lens).

The context and scale of our internet bubbles shift with incalculable fluidity. My ally on one front is my enemy on another. Thoughtful discourse is overrun to grease the wheels for social media’s addictive design properties, which thrive on broad dysfunction. (More to come on this subject.) Straddling these echo chambers, trampled under a mob of virtue-signaling and condemnation, is a complication that’s easy for all of us to overlook: Multiple things can be true at the same time.

It is as true as the day is long that the most reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party, black women, came through once again. (Do not discount the impact of Indigenous voters, who can reasonably claim to have made the difference for the Biden-Harris campaign in Arizona and Wisconsin.) It is also true that the suburbs which shunned Trump’s Republican Party in the 2018 midterms aligned more with Joe Biden in 2020 than with Hillary Clinton in 2016.

It is true that community-based organizations and large-scale operations like Fair Fight gave life to the Democratic Party, producing victories in states like Georgia and Arizona and unleashing people power in neglected, competitive corners of the country. It is also true that the Lincoln Project, no matter your views on its efficacy, was founded by former Republican operatives who looked at the party that they had helped to engineer and chose to fight back against the dangerous, unethical, unprincipled, anti-fact, anti-democratic monster.

This moment is not a little crack in the pavement on the streets of American life. World history tells us that democracy is a fragile bridge, and we need all the help we can get to keep this one from crumbling.

The cousin of remembering that multiple things can be true is resisting the temptation to accept the counterfactual. Without overwhelming evidence — and even then, skepticism seems wise — we can’t know what would have happened in an alternative timeline of history.

I’m from Boston. The 2007 New England Patriots were supposed to win the Super Bowl and become the first team ever to go 19–0; they lost. The Red Sox were down 3–0 to the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series; against their archrival, they became the first team ever to erase a 3–0 lead to win the series (and in the next round, they erased an 86-year World Series drought).

We can’t know for sure what for sure didn’t happen.

That hasn’t stopped us from expressing certainty about what went right or wrong in this election cycle…

…even when evidence might suggest something else:

This outcome, by modern standards, was not especially close. It was also closer than many of us who sought a resounding repudiation of Trumpism would have liked it to be. Despite, at the presidential level, restoring the Blue Wall, winning Georgia for the first time since 1992, winning Arizona for the first time since 1996, making significant gains in rural states, and beating an incumbent for only the third time since World War II (Carter, Bush I), Democrats lost a number of seats in the House of Representatives, likely will not control the Senate, and 70 million-plus people voted for four more years of Donald Trump.

Although it was by no means a Pyrrhic victory, these simultaneous truths imbue the Biden-Harris win with at least a tinge of hollowness. That hollowness has led to questions, soul-searching, and signs of fracturing within the winning coalition — at a moment when that coalition’s unity is more vital than ever.

The American political system has two major parties. In terms of people and ideas, one of those parties is diverse and the other isn’t. For a diverse party to thrive, coalition-building is the only road to progress. The alternative to coalition-led progress is currently running the country.

Trumpism did not begin when its namesake announced his run for the presidency. He became president because he voiced what was quietly mainstream. These four years injected new imagination into gross incompetence, brazen corruption, and hateful radicalization — and still, it was only four years.

What ails us collectively will not be cured in the next four years, let alone by one election day (or week). Republican financial policy has been in a 40-year bear hug with the mythology of supply-side economics, which has yet to demonstrate a result other than making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Republican social policy has long endorsed racism, misogyny, and homophobia as features, not bugs.

The characteristics of Trumpism that unify the Republican Party, along with the structural advantages afforded to Republican-leaning states, mean that Democrats have no choice but to embrace their base and court new voters, to listen to new ideas and age-old wisdom, to penetrate bubbles of ignorance and bubbles of inaction.

In the words of former president Obama and literalists everywhere, “Better is better.” To secure “better,” Democrats must accept that theirs is the party of nuance and compromise. Latching onto a single narrative is as natural as it is counterproductive. It is a bias, and like other biases it demands active, sustained effort to deconstruct.

If and when Democrats come together under the Big Tent, all they will have left to do is govern a large, divided country and run for reelection on a singularly compelling and easily digestible vision.

“Nuance and compromise” is not an ideal platform, and it may be the right platform. Two things can be true at the same time.