Ain't that good news?

In a year that’s been filled and continues to be filled with much death and destruction, we are starting to get the best news the world could hope for. In the past couple of weeks, results have been announced from the phase 3 trials of two novel coronavirus vaccines, and from the phase 2 trial of a third vaccine. 

And what are too many people tweeting and fussing about? Who paid for the vaccines, who does or does not deserve credit for them. WHO CARES? This is the best news the world has had all year—yes, more important than the U.S. election. 

But of course, the whole world cares about both. And I’ve been trying to talk friends, from more than one country, off the ledge about all the terrible things that have been going on since the election, and what it means for democracy. So I’m here to tell you why, despite the pandemic getting worse and not better, this really is the beginning of the end, for a whole host of good reasons. 

First: vaccines. The efficacy rates reported, >90%, are far higher than needed to gain herd immunity in a population, if we are able to vaccinate at scale. Importantly, these vaccines have also been shown to be safe in older people, who of course are among those who need protection from COVID-19 the most. We should all be thankful to the thousands of volunteers, many of them in their sixties and seventies, without whom we could never have these findings on safety and efficacy. As I write, the first of these vaccines is being considered for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the UK's MHRA. 

Second: The election. You know who won? The process. This was impressive. In the midst of a pandemic, where it was a challenge to enable people to vote and where many thought turnout would be driven way down, a far larger percentage of people voted than in the previous 120 years--that is, since before American women gained the right to vote. Some states, like Pennsylvania, had no previous culture of large-scale mail-in voting, yet with the eyes of the world on them, election officials and poll workers just calmly did their job. Wearing masks, night and day. There weren’t even many glitches or problems of the type that routinely happen in U.S. elections, much less the fraud and violence that some alleged and/or feared. 

Who else won? A much larger group than Democrats. I call us “people who wanted Biden to win.” That’s a crucial distinction, because there is evidence that a significant proportion of people who aren’t Democrats, who in fact might have voted for Republicans further down the ballot, couldn’t stomach another four years and cast their vote in the presidential election for Biden. (Not to mention, there are people around the world who wanted Biden to win, although they can’t vote.) 

Now I don’t Tweet or watch U.S. television, but I see posts about Twitter and what people are seeing on MSNBC and other networks. You wouldn’t know Democrats had won the presidency, still less the House of Representatives, from some of this fussing about why Democrats didn’t win even more House seats. Do these guys not know how to win? In fact, had the votes in different states not been counted in various peculiar orders (and had there not been all those mail-in ballots, for which we have the post office to thank for WORKING in spite of all obstacles), it would never even have looked close. 

Joseph Biden, Jr. ended up winning the popular vote by 6 million votes. That’s a big margin. Yes, tens of millions of people still voted for the loser (or, as I will hereafter refer to him if I have to at all, Loser with a capital L). Some people, and not just Americans, are hung up on that. But this was a turnout election. If we insist, as we did, for months that this was the most important election of our lifetimes, and as a result achieve record turnout, then people are going to turn out on both sides who don’t normally vote. 

Let’s break this down a little bit. In case you want to skip around, (1) are the good things that happened, (2) is why we should stop worrying about bad things that aren’t going to happen, and (3) is what we—again, worldwide—need to do next. 

(1) Most incumbent presidents are reelected. Furthermore, no challenger has upset an incumbent by this large a margin since Ronald Reagan defeated President Carter in 1980. In an era of great polarization, such as the U.S. is enduring today, this was a big win for Biden. No, it was not a landslide but it’s probably as big a margin as can be won in a national election these days. This did not come down to Biden winning by a few votes in one state. 

While not a wholesale repudiation of the Republican party, it certainly is a repudiation of the Loser. We know this because of the gap in Congressional races that some Democrats are complaining about. The only explanation for Republicans doing better down ballot than at the presidential level is ticket splitting—something that doesn’t happen as much in U.S. politics as it used to. In other words, a crucial slice of the electorate that normally votes Republican, that was happy to elect Republican senators and representatives, just could not stand the Loser. Why is this not a good thing? 

But while Republicans in the Lincoln Project are on the right side of history, they didn’t save us. Americans of color did much of the work, and the Loser’s inept handling of the pandemic in “blue wall” states finished him off. The sun had not even risen on the day after Election Day and I was already seeing down-in-the-mouth moaning about “how could you?” (a large percentage of white voters) vote the wrong way again. But there’s another way to think about this: We needed all those votes. Black voters in Georgia went for the Biden-Harris ticket 90%; in the Navajo Nation, it was 97%. Those votes mattered. Some of the communities that have had the most to put up with in American history, and this year in particular, did not give up on democracy, but showed up and made their voices heard. Our democracy was saved by people who weren’t recognized at all at the founding of the country, and who, for practical purposes, didn’t achieve voting rights until relatively late in the twentieth century. 

They could have given up on a democratic republic as the imperfect invention of men who failed to recognize their very humanity (Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, etc.) Instead, they heeded the call of Stacey Abrams, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and many others to take power into their own hands and exercise the right to vote that has long been fought for. We—and I don’t just mean those who live in the U.S.—owe it to those people to take seriously what we have learned from them. To take seriously the responsibility to make that imperfect invention more perfect, to fully include all the people mentioned in Joe Biden’s victory speech and so many others. 

(I almost wrote Keisha Knight Pulliam there, but she was the little girl who played Rudy on The Cosby Show. Oops!) 

Instead of wringing our hands wondering why we can’t convince more of our white fellow citizens to vote the way we do, we need to thank our neighbors of color—above all black women and Native voters—for saving our butts. And we need to start actively helping life be fairer for them. That starts at the community level, wherever we live. It doesn’t just happen every two or four years. 

But, and I’ve seen a lot of fretting about this too: What about the Senate, what about President Biden not having enough clout to do all the things we want him to do? As Perry Bacon, Jr., an African-American journalist with FiveThirtyEight, said soon after the election, there are two big crises happening in America and worldwide, neither of which has much to do with whether Congress and the president can work together. First, the pandemic—just taking a different tone will help, and President-elect Biden is already taking a different approach, meeting with both Republican and Democratic governors, for example. Second, doing something about improving the race situation. Again, the president can instantly send a different message and set a different tone, but those issues have to be resolved at the community level. Your town, where you live. 

I know people who look from outside at a map of the States and rage about all this "red." They vow never again to visit a place full of voters for such a terrible person. Well, if they ever get another chance to visit the U.S. I hope they’re prepared to hold it between Chicago and Omaha! Seriously, we need to look at the big picture. Not only Philadelphia but its suburbs went for Biden, and in a big way—a 50% increase over Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016. Biden did better in South Dakota, which is suffering terribly from the pandemic, than Clinton did, and much better in Minnesota. Middle Tennessee is more “blue” than it has been in many years. Even absentee ballots from the military, which typically skew Republican, increased Biden’s winning margin in the crucial state of Georgia, rather than eating into it. I guess it really does matter which candidate respects the troops. 

If after all this, you still wish the Democrats had done better or you have energy left—good! Use it to help win the two Senate runoff elections in Georgia on the 5th of January. I guarantee you that Stacey Abrams and everyone who worked so hard to organize and turn out the vote in Georgia are not whining and complaining. They’re fired up! 

Jimmy Carter was just waiting for this day.

(2) But, say my worried friends, the Loser is about to stage a coup d’état. Or millions of armed Americans are going to come out of the hills. Or Vladimir Putin will somehow prop up the Loser, even though he’s not Putin’s useful idiot anymore. These things don’t even make any sense. Granted—it’s disturbing that even a fraction of Americans believe the bullsh*t that the election was crooked or stolen in some way (a fraction that’s already declined since the election). All these lies are bad for democracy—very bad, which is why it was so important to defeat this guy. But we did defeat him. 

And all the efforts by media, I don’t care if it’s social or The New York Times, to keep us glued and worried about how somehow we’re still all doomed is not going to take away my relief about this fact. Come the 20th of January, Biden is going to be president. 

I don’t know about you, but the main reason I voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is so I would not have to worry about the U.S. every day anymore. I haven't lived there for 20 years. I’ve had to deal with anger and anxiety over what the Loser was doing to America and the world for four years now, and d*mned if I’m going to do it for two more months, or even one more day. He LOST. He never had the votes, he never has had magic power to destroy democracy in spite of all our efforts, and we have got to stop giving him attention as if he had. 

It is important to remember that while everything he's up to now may be venal, if not seditious, it is also ridiculous. Some of the things he and the rest of the treasonous gasbags have done, not just since the election but throughout his administration, are illegal. The State of New York is certainly preparing charges, and state charges are unaffected by pardons, the future Department of Justice, or anything else federal. But all his graceless and corrosive antics now, from failing to concede to baseless lawsuits that keep getting thrown out, are just fundraisers. He's bilking a few more bucks from those still gullible enough to believe in him, before his creditors come (and they are coming).

The narrative that we still have to worry about the Loser, that the Republican party will remain in thrall to him or he’ll be in a position to run again, is as much a fantasy as his tweets about winning.  A lot of media want to keep pushing the story that he has a future after this—in TV or as a Republican “kingmaker.” That’s because he’s been perversely good for ratings for them. But none of that is going to happen. He is facing bankruptcy and will be lucky to stay out of prison. 

Again, if you still have energy, don't look at headlines about the outrageous actions of fools and worry that these things might actually happen. Focus on the Georgia runoffs, which will determine control of the Senate, and getting through the pandemic until the cavalry arrives.

(3) Finally, where do we go from here? As we’ve heard ad nauseam, America is still deeply divided, and the ink hadn’t dried on the last ballot signature before I started seeing posts despairing of the “half of us” who are these terrible supporters of the Loser. Wrong. Seventy-three million is a lot of people (all of whom did not have the same reasons for their votes, any more than the rest of us did). But it’s 22% of the population, somewhere in the 30s if you consider only the voting-eligible population. His support isn’t and never was “half” of Americans.  

When people fret about this “half,” what they really mean is they despair of their neighbors who voted the other way, and don’t know how they’re supposed to live with them anymore. The divide between urban and rural Americans is deep and deepening, but it’s only part of the story. Gender is a big part of it, as is race, always. And education. By that I don’t just mean the growing tendency of college-educated Americans to vote Democratic; that’s not a solution, as the college-educated percentage of the population is only in the 30s too. I mean critical thinking skills, so people can evaluate sources and know what to believe, whether from cable news or Facebook. The ability to tell fact from fiction is a long-term project; it’s not going to be fixed, in America or elsewhere, even in a generation. But we can do it. 

There’s a difference between saying it was good that a trauma has happened, and that there’s something we can learn from it happening. Like COVID-19. It’s here; what, if anything, can we learn from our reactions to it? 

The past four years have brought to the surface some aspects of American life that were not new or created by one person. A young political writer originally from Ohio, Clare Malone, has written a piece that includes many good observations, and in an interview about it she mentioned “the talk” that black families have, something with which many white people were previously unfamiliar. In the midst of terrible events, there’s a chance for more of us to become aware of things of which we were previously ignorant. But awareness is one thing—doing something positive with that awareness is another. 

We should not be too disappointed that we still have to fight. Gay people like me should certainly be used to this. If America has never yet lived up fully to its promise to all people, one election is not going to change that, no matter how consequential. But things do change. It’s well known that Biden went out on a limb for same-sex marriage before most other leaders of his party, including Barack Obama. We could see Biden’s evolution, on this or another issue, as just one more example of flip-flopping; but haven’t we evolved ourselves? I know I have, thank God. 

The prayer of St. Francis has really been in the zeitgeist lately. Our cousin Kim prayed it in her communion meditation the week after the U.S. election. And Malone mentions the prayer “that I may not so much seek… to be understood as to understand” as “the journalist’s prayer and the prayer of our time.” She is skeptical that the tensions and divisions will be healed, but also notes that cynicism is a choice, and a boring one at that. And she provides these astonishing insights: 

It can be painful to realize your brother is a chauvinist, your cousin is bigoted toward religious people, or your mother is a racist. And that pain can drive us into the harbors of the like-minded. 
It’s harder to grapple with how to convince people to change the way they think about things, or to just go on letting them think what they think, not allowing their humanity to be defined by their worst beliefs. That’s a radical act of acceptance, and some might say a radical act of love. It’s not an easy thing. It might actually be the hardest thing.  

Happy Holidays, and may we all look forward to a much happier New Year.