A DEEP, FESTERING FRACTURE
Rifts in U.S. won't heal easily
Democrat Joe Biden edged closer to winning the White House on Friday, expanding his narrow leads over President Donald Trump in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Georgia even as Republicans sought to raise $60 million to fund lawsuits challenging the results.
Trump remained defiant, vowing to press unfounded claims of fraud as a weary nation waited for clarity in an election that only intensified the country's deep polarization.
On the fourth day of vote-counting, former vice-president Biden had a 253to-214 lead in the state-by-state Electoral College vote that determines the winner, according to Edison Research.
Securing Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes would put Biden over the 270 he needs to win the presidency after a political career stretching back nearly five decades.
Biden would also win if he prevails in two of the three other key states where he was narrowly ahead on Friday: Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Like
Pennsylvania, all three were still processing ballots on Friday.
Nationwide, Biden led Trump by 4.1 million votes out of a record 147 million cast. However, his lead was much smaller in those four contested states: just 79,910 votes out of more than 16 million cast. In Georgia, he led by a mere 4,278 votes.
As Biden's lead grew in Pennsylvania, hundreds of Democrats gathered outside Philadelphia's downtown vote-counting site, wearing yellow shirts reading “Count Every Vote.”
In Detroit, a crowd of Trump supporters, some armed, protested outside a counting location, waving flags and chanting, “Fight!”
Trump showed no sign he was ready to concede, as his campaign pursued a series of lawsuits that legal experts said were unlikely to alter the outcome.
As former Democratic Party presidential nominee Andrew Yang tweeted on Thursday: “If 68 million people do something, it's vital we understand it.”
That is now the job of soon-to-be president-elect, Joe Biden.
In the speech he gave on Wednesday, he said he recognizes the need to bridge the left/right divide.
Americans should put the harsh rhetoric behind them, lower the temperature and “see each other again,” he said.
He acknowledged it will not be easy. “I'm not naïve,” he said. “I know how deep and hard the opposing views are on so many things. But I do know that to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies.”
What are the chances that the avuncular Biden can persuade partisans to listen to one another again?
His election is not a panacea.
The differences between the tribes are profound and reinforced by media outlets whose business model relies on polarizing opinion. Just as sports is more interesting when you are invested in a team, so political coverage in the U.S. is designed to encourage voters to pick a side. Coverage then addresses why your side should win and the other side should lose.
Ezra Klein's book Why We Are Polarized suggests the more political media voters absorb, the more warped their perspective of the other side becomes, citing a 2018 study in which Republicans were asked the percentage of Democrats who are black or atheists, gay or union members. In each case, the responses were wildly out of whack with reality.
Likewise, Democrats were asked about the percentage of Republicans who earn more than US$250,000 or who are evangelical, over 65 or southern. Again, the results bore no resemblance to reality.
People are not likely to change their media cons umption habits under Biden. Even if they did, research suggests that exposure to contrary views often makes partisans more certain that they are right and their opponents wrong.
Shira Lurie, an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto, is pessimistic about the prospects for reducing polarization. She said the Republican Party strategy relies on hyper partisanship to win enough electoral college votes with a minority of the popular vote.
“In the last 30 years, with one exception (George W. Bush in 2004), Republicans have relied heavily on minoritarian levers.”
She said she doesn't see any prospect of much movement by either side. “Historically, we have seen nationalism win over partisanship in times of war. You would think a global pandemic was a recipe to bring the nation together. But that's not what's happening,” she said.
Yet Biden's efforts at reconciliation are not necessarily doomed.
One day soon, Trump will have to give up his bully pulpit in the White House, an act that will, by itself, lower the volume.
Then there is Biden's natural inclination towards consensus-building.
In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, s ocial psychologist Jonathan Haidt looked at why “good people” are divided by politics. He said people's beliefs come from intuition, rather than rational thought.
Haidt argued that morality is built on a number of foundations — concerns over care (the suffering of others), fairness (unfair treatment), loyalty (the obligations of group membership), authority (social order) and purity (control of desires). Liberals are most sensitive to care and fairness foundations; conservatives to all five foundations, he said.
Members of the two political camps are often blind to one another, allowing them to demonize the other side.
But Haidt suggested that compromise can be found, if, for example, liberals go beyond their care and fairness fixations to incorporate loyalty, authority, and purity in their world view.
This is what Biden is trying to do. If he can successfully counter Republican
fears about big government, he may find a doorway to the conservative side of the wall.
That is a tall order when millions of Americans view wearing a mask as pernicious government control.
But the man who may soon become president-elect is a centrist who does not see Republicans as his enemies.
The failure of Democrats to capture the Senate may help create a path to reconciliation. While four years of gridlock is not good news for Biden's climate change agenda or health care reform, it will reduce fears on the right that the hard left is pulling the strings.
Biden can only rely on executive action to take him so far. The other way to advance his agenda is to strike deals with Mitch McConnell. The wily Republican Senate majority leader is unlikely to play ball on the more progressive parts of the Democrats platform, but there could be scope for bipartisan support on things like COVID relief and trade deals.
At the very least we will see the back of the worst of the dysfunction and delusions that have surrounded the 45th president, such as his “spiritual adviser,” Paula White, last seen blasting the “demonic confederacies” attempting to steal the election from Trump.
All Republicans should mull how their party has come off the rails so badly since the late John McCain made his concession speech in 2008.
He urged his supporters to find ways to come together with Democrats to “find the necessary compromises and bridge our differences, to help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.”
In contrast to the president's attempt to delegitimize the democratic process, Biden has said under his presidency there will be no blue states or red states, “just a United States of America,” offering this beleaguered nation hope for a less poisonous future.
“I will govern as an American president,” he said. “The presidency itself is not a partisan institution — it's the one office in the nation that respects everyone, and it demands a duty of care from all Americans.”
The healing has begun.