WHAT'S NEXT PART II

The election is behind us. The 46^th President has moved into the White House and the next election is less than two years away (which means that The House of Representatives is already again in election campaign mode). There is an awful lot of sorting out to do between now and November 8, 2022.

Joe Biden will have to sort out what he will have to do to be able to make good on his ambitious campaign promises, with only the slimmest margin of control over the legislative branch and a significant left-wing representation in his party nipping at his heels.

The Democrats will have to sort out if ideological purity and revolutionary activism is more important to them than pragmatism.

Mitch McConnell will have to sort out if he is better off working with-and putting restraints on- Biden policy making or obstructing Biden in every move, trying to set the stage for yet another one term presidency.

The Republicans have the most and hardest sorting out to do. They will have to decide if they want to go back to traditional republican conservatism or become the national populist party, much in the way Donald Trump has pushed it for the six years since the start of his campaign and presidency. Their decision may, or may not, cause the fissure within the GOP, which so far has been taped over, to lead to a break-up of the party.

In all of this, the most important sorting out to do is for each of these policy makers to decide if they will put the interest of the American people over their narrow personal and partisan interests. The question is, if the momentous events since November 3, 2020 have shocked the policy makers enough to force them into acceptance of the fact that the American people need to see action now, or that any policy making will be further deferred until after the 2022 election (and then possibly again until after the 2024 election). The answer to this question will have to come clear during the first 100 days of the Biden administration, with a likelihood that the named policy makers will not all come up with the same answer in this binary choice. The betting will be on whether they think that they can improve on their political fortunes in the next Congressional election, in 2022. The outcome will nevertheless be hugely consequential for the health of the nation and our democracy. The choice is between a positive role for an effective-be it limited- federal government in the shaping of the destiny of the nation and its people, or continuing governance paralysis.

Today, it is too early to tell which way it will go. The upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate, now set to begin the week of February 8, will give us a hint. In the meantime, we can make up the balance on what positives and negatives have come out of the 2020 election and its aftermath.

Let’s start with the positives:

·       A horribly and dangerously unqualified President has been voted out of the White House.

·       Against all odds, Mitch McConnell has been deprived of his Senate leadership.

·       The Republican Party will have to re-articulate what it stands for and may be splitting.

·       The January 6 storming of the Capitol and Trump’s actions leading up to that may instill in some Republicans political courage that otherwise would have been absent.

·       Large political donors, business and otherwise, are shunning the lawmakers who propagated the fallacy of a stolen election and voted against the certification of the Biden election victory.

·       Our democratic institutions held under the onslaught of conspiracy, blackmail, and misinformation originating with Trump, his sycophants, and media pundits.

·       New leadership at the Department of Justice, in tandem with the investigative powers of Congress, is likely to discover who, inside and outside the halls of power, were the instigators and ringleaders of the January 6 insurrection.

But it is not all good news. The negatives that we will have to wrestle with include:

·       We have allowed trust in our political leadership, process, and institutions to erode to the point of leading to an insurrection.

·       We have condoned for too long an assault, by our President, on the truth, the facts, and the empirical reality.

·       The COVID-19 pandemic has been allowed to go rampant in the absence of government attention and leadership causing hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.

·       Fifty Democratic Senators represent 41.4 million more Americans than the 50 Republican Senators but have to rely on the Vice President to give these people a voice.

·       The election has failed to deliver a governable majority in Congress.

·       Too much energy will have to be devoted to ‘decontamination’.

·       The combination of seniority rules and absence of term limits has left us with Congressional leadership largely in the hands of septuagenarians and octogenarians.

·       The election has further dismantled the political center and boosted the presence and power of the extreme right and extreme left.

·       In summary: So much to do, so little time to do it, and not enough consensus to get it done.

At this point, it is entirely unclear if our politicians are capable of putting the People’s interest above their desire to get re-elected and hang on to power. Only time will tell.

There certainly is no shortage of challenges to address. Starting with the need to avoid further damage from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic downturn that has, once again, hit the most vulnerable segments of society the hardest. Even before and without this crisis, our society has shown to be in urgent need of addressing the untenable inequality that puts too many Americans at an insurmountable disadvantage, in income, in wealth, in education, in healthcare, and in general welfare and wellbeing.

In a next segment of ‘WHAT’S NEXT’ I will explore the governance system changes that can be considered if America wants to clean up its act and become yet again a vibrant, functional, democracy. Much of that I wrote in my 2014 book ‘NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, a First-Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism’, but the recent events have surfaced many more inadequacies in the system that need to be addressed.

For that, we don’t have to start from scratch. A good starting point would be a reading of the 2019 report ‘Our Common Purpose, Reinventing American Democracy for the 21^st Century’ from the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2020-Democratic-Citizenship_Our-Common-Purpose_0.pdf .

The blueprint is there. Will the political courage be mustered to put this, or a similar, playbook in action?