Isolation Report, Week #35

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Well, election day here in the US is finally behind us.  It was quite a stressful time, even though things played out almost exactly as was predicted.  Oh, sure, people are belly-aching about the polls being wrong, but all the polls said was that there was a 90% chance that Biden would win, and he did.  The polls never claimed it wouldn’t be a close race.  We read that into the polls.  We humans are shitty at understanding probabilities, and somehow we imagine that 90% means it’ll be a walk in the park, when all it really means is that, if you do it 10 times, you’ll only lose once.  And everything else was spot on: that the count would take several days to complete, that we wouldn’t know the winner right away or for days, that Trump would be ahead on the night of, and that Biden would close the gap as more and more mail-in ballots were counted.  All of that happened exactly like pretty much everyone said it would ... but, I gotta tell ya: there’s a big difference between intellectually accepting those things to be true and living through them.  Even though every single event happened exactly as predicted, we still sat around biting our nails, unsure of how it would all come out.  Blame 2016 for that: our capacity to dare to hope has been severely curtailed.  But now that phase is over: Biden won the popular vote, as almost everyone knew he would, and he even won the electoral college, as most said he would, but it was a nail-biter all the same.  Next up: can he win all the court cases?  And, assuming he does so, can he successfully evict Trump from the White House?  Neither of those is assured, although I think he has a pretty good shot at the second one if he can manage the first.

Trump (and/or his people) have done an amazing job of setting up the Supreme Court to support him in whatever cockamamie case he brings to have the election overturned.  Right now there are 6 conservative justices and only 3 liberal ones (and all the moderates have been skillfully excised).  If such a case comes before the current court, I think we can absolutely count on the 3 liberals (Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) to vote against such a thing, and I think we can count on the two most recent Trump disasters—being, as they are, utterly unqualified to do much of anything else—to vote for him, and we can probably also throw in Thomas, who never met an argument he couldn’t settle in favor of the most right-leaning option he could find.  That leaves Chief Justice Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch (the first Trump nomination).  Two of those three would have to vote to do the right thing, and, while all 3 are conservative, all 3 are also known for breaking ranks on some important issues: none of them are puppets, in other words.  So there’s a decent shot.

Then the trick will be to attempt to undo all the damage that Trump has caused, and I’m of mixed emotions about the ability of Biden and his team to accompllish that.  In case I’ve not been clear, I’m mostly liberal, and almost entirely progressive, but I am not a Democrat.  The Democrats are exactly half of what’s wrong with the American political system, and I have very little faith in their desire to effect real change, much less their ability to do so.  It’s looking more and more like they will not have the Senate on their side to do that either, and that makes it all the more up in the air.  Best case scenario we end up with a perfectly split Senate, which means Kamala gets to cast any tie-breaking votes, but that’s only if everyone votes along strict party lines, which, you know, they don’t, always.  There are several Democrats who are way more conservative than the majority, and a few Republicans who are more liberal than the majority.  One senator could conceivably hold up legislation for everyone if they demand something extra for their state, or just need to get their ego stroked.

So it’s by no means a sure thing that anythihng useful (much less exciting) will get done.  But at least it (probably) won’t get worse, which is the main thing I feared from a Trump re-election.  I said in a Facebook post, and I will repeat it here: people crying doom and destruction over Biden becoming president are only guessing at what he’ll do, or in some cases (but not that many) assuming that he will do what he says he will.  In neither case are they likely correct.  On the other hand, we already seen what Trump will do.  The damage is pretty bad: the environment has suffered setbacks that my children will have to deal with for years, the education system, park system, and post office will likely take years if not decades to recover, and, mostly significantly, the Supreme Court is now poised to take away my children’s rights to reproductive freedom, marriage equality, and employment protections.  These are not things I think Trump may do ... this is what he’s done thus far.  And, with Bill Barr behind him, telling him that Article II of the Constitution says he can do whatever he likes, it’s not like it would have gotten any better.  So I’m happy Trump lost and probably—hopefully—won’t be President again, but I can’t say I’m all that thrilled that Biden won.

My birthday was two days after election day, and my father called me supposedly to wish me a happy birthday.  But mostly just to yell at me for supporting the socialist takeover of our country.  The most amusing part of the call was when he called me out for not knowing what the Democratic platform was.  I responded by asking him if he knew what the Republican platform was.  “We’re not talking about the Republicans!” he hedged.

Of course, it’s not particularly surprising that my father knew the Democratic platform but not the Republican one, nor that I knew the Republican one but not the Democratic one.  Because my father didn’t really vote for Trump (who he describes as “an idiot”): he was just voting against Biden.  Likewise, I was voting against Trump (naturally), but I didn’t even have to vote for Biden: since I live in California, I had the luxury of voting for whoever I thought would actually do the best job.  I voted for the Green Party candidate, whose name I didn’t even know before I received my ballot (and didn’t bother to retain after filling it in).  I considered the Libertarian fellow as well, but I actually did read the platforms of all the third party candidates, and the Green Party sounded the most like my own views, so that’s who I voted for.  Of course, the majority of Americans think that a vote for anything other than a Democrat or a Republican is a “wasted vote” ... the Democrats and Republicans have worked together quite effectively to make us all believe that.  And, since we all believe it, it’s true.  So, if I lived in Ohio or Florida or Pennsylvania or Michigan, I would likely have a much tougher choice, but there are some advantages to living in a state where the color on the news maps is known well before the election even starts.  So my father and I voted against rather than voting for, and that’s fine.

My dad tried to explain to me why electing Biden was so bad.  But, other than the obvious assertion that he might die and then “that woman” would be President (oh, the horror!), the best he could come up with was that Biden was going to get rid of the oil companies.  This, of course, is hilarious for a number of reasons:

• It presumes that I believe Biden has enough balls to actually try to take on the oil industry, which I absolutely do not.
• It presumes that, even if he wanted to, he would somehow, as President, have the power to abolish the oil industry, which of course he would not.
• Most ridiculously of all, it presumes that I would have some sort of problem with getting rid of the oil industry.  Being as they are responsible for raking in billions of dollars in profts while paying no taxes (often actually receiving money from the government instead), that they are the primary polluters of the planet, and that they have worked tirelessly to retard our growth into more energy efficient industries (such as by killing the electric car), I would be more likely to dance on the oil industry’s grave than mourn its passing.  But somehow my father missed this memo.

But of course mostly that’s just a smokescreen for my father’s fear that a strong, liberal black woman from California (which is at least four strikes against her in his book) might be President someday.  I sincerely doubt he’s alone in this viewpoint either.  The racists (and sexists, and homophobes, and xenophobes—my father is all of those and more) have been much more comfortable showing themselves over the last 4 years, and I’m sure they’re not looking forward to having to crawl back into their holes again.  Many of them won’t.  And, I know that eventually most of these idiots will die and their minority will actually be small enough to ignore, finally, but it seems to be taking a really long time, and I’m sort of losing my patience.

If Biden does step down for health reasons at some point, Kamala becoming President could be quite a good thing.  I certainly have more faith in her than him for at least trying to get some big changes accomplished.  But I’m not holding my breath.  For the most part, things will go on as they always have ... well, as they used to back in the days before Trump anyway.  Sadly, right now that seems pretty nice.  I hope that doesn’t continue to be the case, because “business as usual” was already pretty shitty, as the continuing instances of police brutality continue to demonstrate, in shocking and tragic ways.  But I guess I can be happy that, while I’m not holding my breath for any real change, I’m no longer holding my breath that we might descend into further chaos either.  It was not particularly pleasant having to hold one’s breath from Tuesday until Saturday, but at least now it’s over.

Probably.