Another turning point

 

I remember the exhilaration I felt when Jimmy Carter won and we turned the page on the corrupt Nixon era. I recall the excitement when Clinton won and we closed the disastrous Reagan chapter. I remember the optimism I felt when I learned that Obama won and bookended the calamity that was the GW Bush presidency. And we celebrated Biden’s victory chez Eissenberg last night, as it rung down the curtain on the pernicious and corrupt Trump term.

All of these elections seemed at the time to me to represent turning points. But then the country turned back to the sunny fictions that hid the divisive agenda of the GOP. Now, Biden wants to be a healer (something Trump never claimed) and a president for all Americans (something the GOP never wanted). But he faces an opposition party that will continue to interfere with representative democracy at the ballot box and that wants to return to a time when government controls reproductive choice and allows people to die because they cannot pay for health care.

I allowed myself some pleasure at the belated news of a Biden/Harris victory, but I now understand that its significance lies primarily in a repudiation of Trump. Progress will be incremental for the next couple of years, and then we will face the iron reality that the party in the WH nearly always loses in the mid-terms. It ain’t over, folks. It never is.