At Long Last, Our National Nightmare is Over… But Not Really

The election of Joe Biden as the USA's 46th President is… not great, to put it simply. Biden could be described as a liberal, but he's certainly no leftist. It's well known that he's one of the architects of mass incarceration and the USA's misguided war on crime. In any other country, he'd be a conservative.

Biden's election does nothing to diminish the outsized power that conservatives hold in my country, or the undemocratic tyranny of the rural minority over the urban majority. It does nothing to address the alliance between quisling conservatives and open fascists. It does nothing to address systemic problems with government gridlock, disproportionate representation, gerrymandering, campaign finance, regulatory capture, income inequality, systemic racism, the existential threat of global warming, or any of a hundred other intractable problems facing my country that I have little hope of ever seeing resolved in my lifetime.

I don't foresee any meaningful change, because Biden, despite the fact that he belongs to that club of Washington insider good-ol'-boys, is nevertheless a Democrat, and Democrats have a problem. They still haven't quite caught on to the fact that Republicans since the Gingrich speakership haven't been playing by the same rules—or, really, any rules. The Democrats are still playing the appeasement game, while the Republicans engage in total war.

So… yeah, those nightmares all continue.

But today, at least, now that major press outlets have finally cowboyed up and called the election for Biden, we can say one thing. The annoying orange TV man, with his annoying face and his annoying voice, finally won't be on the TV screen anymore. The country will continue to go to pot, of course, but our lives will all be a little bit pleasanter as the inevitable happens, because the annoying TV man will no longer be there to inflict his criminal stupidity and incuriosity and mendacity upon the rest of us.

And as for the people who want Donald Trump on the TV screen (a man who, as self-described "news dude" Cody Johntson once pointed out with elegant simplicity, is "a crime man—who does crimes"), there's only so much one can say. If you wanted Trump on TV because you liked The Apprentice, it's a fair bet that your brain has been reduced to mush by social media and reality TV. If you wanted Trump on TV because you believe he is less annoying than Hillary Clinton would have been, it's a fair bet that your brain has been rotted away to offal by 24-hour news and talk radio. And if you wanted Trump on the TV because you thought that only he could save you, or because he tells it like it is, owns the libs, and just might lock her up or burn it all down, I'm afraid that the only diagnosis is fascism—and it remains to be seen whether individual cases are chronic or acute.

The remedy for the former two problems is clear: unplug. Read a book, take a walk, just peel your eyes away from the thrice-damned glowing screens, and close your ears to the cynical bellowings of the Limbaughs and the Hannities and the other conservative liars who are known not to buy a word of the nonsense that they preach and have only contempt for the stupidity of their followers. The remedy for the third problem, unfortunately, is denazification—to complete the failed project of Reconstruction that this country couldn't even stomach after the Civil War. Which is why it won't happen.

The fascists—in this country, they're not Nazis, they're neo-Confederates, and their stronghold is no longer the regional south but small towns and rural parts in every state—are still here. And thanks to the Senate, the Electoral College, and the House Apportionment Act of 1929, they don't need to outnumber decent folk to wield power, or to be wielded by the forces of capital and privilege in this country who gladly, gleefully play racists for rubes to protect their moneyed status quo.