The United States of Waiting and Worry: Election Week 2020

Deep down, we knew it was going to be like this.

We’d been told over and over before the election that with mail-in balloting and the surge in voter turnout this year that definitive results in the most consequential presidential election in generations would most likely not come in on election night. I believe most of us even accepted this warning, on an intellectual level at least if not an emotional one. Because that was the problem, wasn’t it? We just didn’t get how four years of the most destabilizing and destructive President in at least a century; a President who was impeached already for attempted election interference, the most blatantly racist President since we as a country decided Presidents should not be blatantly racist, a President who presided over our utter failure to contain the Coronavirus that led to over 230,000 American deaths as of this writing with over a 100,000 of those considered to be directly attributable to the President’s mismanagement of the response; we didn’t get how none of that seemed to affect his hold on his base.

We thought, and I still think, that all that should have made some kind of impact on his supporters. We dreamed of a blue wave in 2020. We dreamed of Biden winning so overwhelmingly in early states like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio (Pennsylvania literally promised no official results on election night) that we’d know who won before bed. We dreamed of taking back the Senate in one giant country-wide repudiation of Trumpism. We dreamed of getting our country back on track in a clear and undeniable fashion, telling ourselves that there was still decades of work to do but allowing ourselves one night to breathe and celebrate and plan and regain some faith in our fellow countrymen.

Instead, most of us went to bed last night awash in uncertainty and then awoke this morning (after a restless night of sleep if you’re anything like me) still mired in it. Though, I do want to note here that it is a less doom-filled uncertainty than it was in 2016, and than it could have been this year. For one, Biden is in a better position the day after the election than Hilary was in 2016. For two, we’ve lost some of our softness from four years ago. We’re less likely to be overwhelmed at polls being wrong, at the depths to which the current administration and it’s cronies are willing to sink. We’re more prepared.

But that doesn’t mean we should lie to ourselves that we aren’t disappointed. Instead, we need to keep paying attention, stay ready to act if the current administration tries to fuck with the results, and wait. Thinking about it, there’s probably no more representative thing we could do for the previous four years than wait.

Because, in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to the political arena or any sort of large-scale cultural or environmental goals, we have essentially been waiting these last four years. Yes, there have been innumerable protests. The top four largest single-day protests in American history took place in the last four years, in fact. I myself had never attended a protest before the current administration. Now, four years later, I’ve been to five. It’s not much but it shows a growth in political awareness, in understanding the need to act. I believe this growth is probably reflected across a wide swath of Zoomers and Millennials as we emerged into adulthood in a time of historic instability. So the current administration taught us (through pain and attempted authoritarianism) to pay attention and to act more than any sort of competent government could have.

It also taught us (again, through pain, lunges toward fascism, and the stupid pointless cruelty of a government incompetently trying to hurt its perceived enemies) the limits of traditional action and traditional governance. We protested the hell out of this administration, and at least partially thanks to that public outcry, some of the worst of what they tried to do was stopped or at least delayed. But not close to enough. I was part of the Never Again Action against ICE’s child-detainment policy. There were dozens of protests, both regular and social media lit up with outrage at the purposefully inhumane policy. Yet the effects of the child separation policy remain today, with literal hundreds of lost children even now. While there are people and organizations working to make that right, for the large majority of concerned citizens there is nothing to do now but wait until we as a country fix as much of this mistake as we can, despite that there’s really no making up for it.

We waited for Mueller too, didn’t we? We waited for almost two years for Mueller to complete his investigation, prove the administration as corrupt and traitorous as it so obviously was (and still is), and save us all while we got to watch the fireworks from our sofas. Instead, while Mueller got almost two hundred charges and dozens of convictions, his final report arrived pre-defanged the current Attorney General, Bill Barr. Bill Barr, it should be noted, lied through his teeth in defanging the report; and is perhaps the most morally disgusting political animal alive in America and is so evil he had to trade his human body for that of a decaying toad. But either way, we waited for the Mueller report to save this country from an obvious and incompetent traitor, and then realized after Bill Barr lied to the nation, that we’d have to wait some more.

And we did wait more. We waited through failed trade wars with China, through border walls that were clearly nothing more than a vanity project that never got built anyway, through multiple horrendous wildfire and hurricane seasons in which the federal government’s response was handicapped by incompetence and a disturbing fixation on the political loyalties of the victims of these natural disasters. Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama ever made a point of which color the affected states went in the previous election when dealing with their own natural disasters.

We waited through UkraineGate and the impeachment trial that followed. We watched as firm, indisputable proof that the administration was trying to force a foreign power to help it win the upcoming election was provided to the public. Again, there was little the average citizen could do but protest, watch, and wait. And we watched as the House of Representatives collected the evidence and decided it was worth pursuing impeachment. We waited for it to mean something. Then we watched the Republican-led Senate collectively decide that even though they had to admit attempted solicitation of foreign interference in an American election had indeed happened, and that it did constitute a crime, it apparently wasn’t enough of a crime for the President to receive an ounce of punishment for it. We were forced, once more, to wait for our system of government to respond to a vicious attack on itself.

In many ways, we are still waiting for this, even if today and the coming week have a chance of turning out blue. We have had to wait four years for any federal progress on climate change to even have a chance of passing. We have had to wait four years for any federal policing reform or possible steps toward dealing with systematic racism to be even a plausible thought. Same with compassionate yet reasonable immigration reform. Same with electoral reform that might actually remove some money from politics. Same with education reform and actually properly funding our public schools. Same with closing corporate tax loopholes. Same with reversing the trend of ever-widening economic inequality. Same with etc., etc…. We have had to wait for four years to take any important steps in making our country a better place, with a more solidified future, at all.

Going forward, we will still have to wait. Even if today and the coming week work out well on the Presidential side of the election, it is unlikely that the democrats will take back the Senate in this cycle. This means that while some reforms would be possible, they will be slow and they will almost never be what the problem actually requires. We will be required to watch, protest, and wait even more; in order to move our country forward. And we will have to wait two and a half months between now and the official inauguration. That is a lot of time in which the current administration will try to delegitimize the electoral process and damage this country. As citizens, once again, the only things we can do are watch, protest at the appropriate times, and wait.

So it is, unfortunately, quite fitting that we will have to wait to see the results of the election last night, even if things are beginning to come clearer now. The 2016 election, and then the four years that followed, have been a disillusioning and educational experience for me and, I believe, for the country at large. We have discovered a lot of disconcerting facts about the fragility of our government and the apparent political priorities of a bit less than half our country. But we have also learned patience. We can wait out this delay in results just fine, even if we wish we didn’t have to. We can wait out the confusion and misinformation and possible violence in the next few months no matter what the final results say. We can even wait out the stubborn intransigence and even purposeful uselessness of a Republican-led Senate in a situation of split government. Though for the planet and our country’s sake, we can’t afford to just wait for long.

I have been checking the election results obsessively as I write this, by the way. I apologize for writing for directly about politics in this post, but on the day after this election, there was literally nothing else I could think of to write about.

We will watch, we will protest when we have to, or even commit to a general strike if we must, we will of course VOTE in every election, and we will wait. If we’re smart about it, if we use the tools available to us as citizens productively, maybe in four years we will have more options available. Maybe four years from now we will see the true Blue Wave this election only planted the seeds for.

But no matter what, we will have to wait.

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