This election has not healed America’s wounds
Three days have passed since the American election, yet it’s still too early to say with certainty who won it. The loser, however, is abundantly clear and it’s the United States itself.
Americans went into this vote on opposite sides of a widening chasm, peering at each other through the void with anger, fear and growing incomprehension. And that’s exactly how they left it, a tragedy that will prevail even if, as increasingly seems likely, the Democrats’ Joe Biden replaces Republican Donald Trump as president.
This election should have begun the necessary and arduous process of bringing Americans together once again as a people united by mutual respect, common purpose and shared dreams for the future. It did nothing of the sort. Defying the predictions of pollsters and pundits, Biden and the Democrats did not stroll to an easy victory, far less engineer the Trump-dumping landslide many thought possible.
It was a tight race that is still not over and, because of Trump’s selfish, defiant court challenges, might not be for days. And whatever the final outcome Trump, a man widely considered to be the worstever U.S. president and a demagogue whose dishonest, boorish and erratic personality is acknowledged even by many of his most loyal supporters, has come within a hairsbreadth of winning.
Some might say Trump’s victory in 2016 was an aberration. Nobody can accurately use the word to describe what happened this week. The 68.7-millionplus Americans who voted for Trump this time — millions more than did so than in 2016 — knew exactly what they were voting for and what their ballots would purchase.
Even if Biden becomes president, unless the Democrats capture a Senate majority — an outcome that may well prove unattainable — the party’s ambitious platform will be held in check by the Republicans. Hopes of renewing the national fight against climate change, for instance, will be stymied.
How could all this have happened? Are some white voters who backed Trump taking a last stand against the nation’s shifting demographics and their own impending minority status? If so, they must be convinced that they, too, will gain if the country honours the legitimate demands for racial and ethnic equality that have been heard so often this year.
Did Trump succeed in damning mainstream media and erasing the line between truth and fiction so effectively that his lies and absurd conspiracies were not only believed, but embraced? If so, how in the tangled, fragmented media universe of Twitter and Facebook can people be taught to discern the truth?
Fortunately as the final votes are tallied, Biden still commands the best path to the White House. Assuming he gets there, his biggest job, after fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, will be trying to reconcile the hostile factions dividing his country today, factions that clashed violently on the streets of the nation throughout 2020.
Biden has already displayed admirable caution, insisting he will declare victory only if and when the ballot count says he’s won. Even better, he has declared he would be a centrist president for all Americans, not just those who voted for him or inhabit one part of the political spectrum. That assurance, while seemingly obvious, is one Trump always scorned. Unite and govern — not divide and conquer — must be the new order. Not only Americans but the world should hope for a Biden presidency that can begin the healing of a nation and restore to it stability and civil harmony. In the shifting, changing 21st century, the values of human rights, democracy and individual freedom need a reliable defender. For all its real flaws, the U.S. can still fill this role today.