My Take on the U.S. Presidential Election

In a nutshell, my take on the recent U.S. presidential election is that we came very close to losing American democracy. It was saved, for the time being, by election officials and workers in the individual states who did an amazing job in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The court system gets credit, too, but largely because the states presented the judiciary with such clean results. And the much-maligned Post Office deserves credit for getting huge numbers of pandemic-induced mail-in ballots delivered on time.

As Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr said, his department found no evidence of irregularities significant enough to change the outcome.

One can also view it as a vindication of Federalism and the division of power.  Imagine if a single federal agency had been in charge of carrying out the election and certifying the results.

Trump was clearly counting on chaos and, indeed, had said as much in the lead-up to the election. If the vote failed to show him the clear winner, he appeared to believe the outcome would be messy enough to render the results invalid.  Who knows exactly what would have come next, but I doubt it would have been a peaceful transfer of power in line with the provisions of the Constitution as we have traditionally understood them.  The storming of the Capitol could easily have been far worse.

To me, the most astonishing aspect of the election was that Trump got about 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. One might argue that was because overall turnout was significantly larger, but despite his appalling behavior, he got half of the additional votes. And there was no rush by the people who voted for him the first time – most significantly white Americans, -- to acknowledge a mistake and sweep him back out.  Not at all! And there was even evidence that Trump had found new pockets of support in unexpected places.

Having read a great deal of commentary and analysis on what produced Trump’s 2016 victory, I would say that in broad-brush terms there were two significant trends: changing demographics signaling the coming end of a dominant white majority combined with persistent economic stagnation and even decline of much of the white middle class, and particularly those with less education. Many white Americans seem to fear they are in danger of sinking below layers of both new, non-white arrivals and the traditional Black “underclass.” To them, the presidency of Barak Obama seemed a harbinger of their decline.

Recent books that help shed light on what is going on include: “Strangers In Their Own Land,” by Arlie Russell Hochschild; “Brown Is The New White,” by Steve Phillips, and “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson.

Toward the end of her book, Wilkerson relates a conversation she had with the historian Taylor Branch, the author of a trilogy on the life of Martin Luther King. She quotes Branch, who she identifies as a friend, as saying: “People were angry when the projections (that whites would fall into minority status by 2042) came out. People said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country [my emphasis]. … So the real question would be, if people are given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

That’s clearly a concern Wilkerson herself strongly feels. But quoting Branch, who is white (she is Black), serves to give the notion, which Trumpism clearly embodies, more force and credibility.

Biden’s victory was a relief, but the down-ballot outcome was sobering, suggesting significant problems lie ahead. Democracy, as we have known it, may indeed not be the top priority of a significant number of Americans in years to come,