Well, that was close.
Democrats and progressives have reason to be relieved, maybe even jubilant. But that’s tempered by the realization that had President Trump hired just one person to curb his most maniacal statements and behavior, he’d have been reelected.
Had he just not hosted a super-spreader event in the Rose Garden, had he just not cleared peaceful protesters with tear gas near the White House to pose comically with a Bible, had he just not himself contracted COVID, Trump might have won another four years.
The windbag, buffoon, and imbecile-in-chief who flouted the law, tradition, the Congress, the courts, science, logic and anything else blocking his way to total power rallied deep support, winning more votes than he did in 2016, before he started exposing himself to the electorate.
This election was not a tough call. It was not a choice between Eisenhower and Stevenson, between Ford and Carter or between McCain and Obama. This was not an agonizing decision between two knowledgeable, honorable, and reasonable men with differing political philosophies.
This was a choice between decency and dishonor, between sense and senselessness, between reason and reaction, between a handshake and the middle finger. America the middle finger lost by a narrow margin.
This was not a victory for Democrats and progressives, it was bare survival against a malevolent opponent who did everything to lose, yet nearly won, a man who cultivated and celebrated the nation’s ugly underbelly, a place that celebrates greed, bigotry, thuggery, ignorance and violence and values victory above all else.
This is America, a place where half the people believe that the ends justify the means, that the rules don’t matter, that self-interest trumps social justice, that the economy is the only measure of the nation’s health, and that deceit and intimidation in the name of victory are not sins.
This is America, where a tyrant and a bully can dishonor his wife, his friends, his associates and his peers and still maintain the esteem of half the nation’s citizens, and where some of those citizens are showing up in public with semi-automatic weapons and plotting to kidnap elected leaders.
Joe Biden said the election was for the soul of America. Michelle Obama told blacks to vote as their lives depended on it. Those statements were election-year rhetoric but even to old news reporters jaded to such puffery, they rang with eerie truth.
After four years of presidential bluff and bluster, proud and willful ignorance, insults and hate-mongering, this election asked the question, “Can our nation be redeemed?” Unfortunately, because of the closeness of the vote, the question still stands.
As a writer at The Atlantic put it in so many words, the next Republican dictator need only be one shade more savvy than Trump to take over this nation.
This is America, riding the razor’s edge between slow progress and madness.