Columnists are delighted that politics will be boring again? Trump was just a game to them.
For people who can be hurt by the policies of a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump politics are never a joke, they're deadly serious.
I’m glad Joe Biden won. I’ll be happy when Donald Trump is finally dragged from the White House — I really think he’ll need to be dragged — but I’m not doing a jig. Joe Biden is 78 years old and has a long career of compromises and u-turns to look back over. And while the Obama administration in which Biden was Vice-President was more polite, civil, and inclined to taking part in cosy memes, it continued the drone strikes of the Bush-era and sowed the seeds of discontent that led to Trump.
To read journalists writing things like “This is what it's like to have a president again” and ‘America Votes to Make Politics Boring Again’ is maddening. Trump is still President and has been President for four years. It’s apparent in the headlines and the chummy little columns that the media are glad that game is over but also that they played it for eyeballs throughout. They couldn’t get enough of Trump’s schtick and the chance to be cartoonishly horrified by it.
The notion that the wound in America can be sutured back together by sweet words from Biden and the powerful symbolism of Kamala Harris as Vice-President is childish in the extreme, just as all the memes of the Presidential pair flanked by plastic politicians like Pete Buttigieg dressed as The Avengers are liberal horseshit. I am glad that people feel relieved that Trump is gone, but Trumpism is not and under previous presidents that we are now told were terribly civilised some awful things happened.
The American Dream is a lie. It’s always been a lie. The key has always been to let just enough poor people ascend the ladder that the majority of poor people are persuaded that escape is possible for them too. Columnists on both sides of the Atlantic are fully bought into the notion that they have achieved their position through merit. It is a mortal offence to them to be told that the system is not, in fact, fair but rigged in their favour. So week after week, month after month, year after year they pump out columns that support the status quo so much they should be bedecked head to toe in denim.
The Trump era was a horrible TV show that the commentariat watched through their fingers, hiding behind the sofa as if the orange guy was some new kind of Dalek. But they profited from the Trump effect at every turn. Shit comedians were given careers simply by parroting the obvious lines about Trump, and even shitter commentators made careers from studying and mimicking his grift. For people who were actually affected by the Trump corruption — in America’s schools, hospitals and its particularly cruel immigration system, Trump wasn’t a joke or an impolite thing; he was a threat to their very existence.
It was majority-black cities that gave Biden the Presidency but Donald Trump increased his percentage of the black vote — an estimated 1 in 5 black men voted for him — despite the bulk of his support coming from white voters. The media’s cheap desire to move on and dismiss what has happened in the past four years and what happened in the years prior to Trump’s rise is understandable — they’re easily bored and the events of those years didn’t really touch them. But the militias on the street and, to mangle a Springsteen lyric, the six-inch valley through the middle of America’s soul is not getting healed any time soon.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have the same corporate donors as every political pair that have taken the White House in the modern age. In the American political system, corporations have speech rights and they shout louder than every individual — money buys you a bigger voice in the United States. It is for that reason chiefly, among many, many others, that I’m not dancing a jig at the election results.
All it looks like to me is a vote for more civilised barbarism, American dominance delivered with a cheeky smile and a polished meme-friendly face. Meanwhile, across America, 70 million people who voted for Trump will be ready for the next authoritarian who comes around with promises of a revolution and a way to ‘drain the swamp’. Joe Biden has been swimming in Washington’s swampy waters for decades.