Stop being gaslit. Assuming he survives into November, Joe Biden will be re-elected. Kamala Harris will be our 47th President.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is going to keep the economy humming. Trump is going to continue to disintegrate like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. The Republican Party is going into the kind of hole Democrats faced with George McGovern.
That was a generational hole. Without Watergate, a shoe that’s now on the other foot, Democrats could not have won Congress in 1974, and Jimmy Carter would never have been elected. The party that came back under Bill Clinton was conservative, a “yeah but” party like Eisenhower’s Republicans, one that cozied up to right-wing positions on a host of issues.
Barack Obama flipped that script, which is why he’s now ranked 7th among U.S. Presidents by historians, behind only Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Jefferson, Washington, and Harry Truman. It’s not that historians are all liberal elitists. They’ve just studied the present in the light of the past and they know where progress has come from.
The Republican Party is America’s Enemy
There are two forces behind Trump, closely related. They’re what I have called the Taliban wing and the Oligarch wing. The second finances the first, which is doing the lifting. Where these forces have taken control, medievalism is being imposed from the top down. People don’t like it. They didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition, and there is growing anger on the social policy left right now.
This is shared by the economic left, which is more like the European center. Were Biden a European he’d be a Tory or a Christian Democrat. The reforms he has supported are modest. They don’t really threaten the oligarchs.
But the Web 2.0 boom brought a new kind of oligarch to the party. These aren’t men who have gotten their hands dirty, who have built businesses, who have gone into a factory or onto a sales floor. People like Peter Thiel and David Sacks did their work from offices, moving people around like chess pieces, tossing billions of dollars around like poker chips. They’re an easy money crowd, and they’re too blinded by their own wealth to see how folks are disgusted by them.
Americans reject the KKK. We reject the Taliban. We reject Nazis. It’s insane that I feel a need to write that. What’s left of the media is saying this is a close race, that we “better be ready” for the full fascist experience, that Russia and Iran are going to take us over and remake us in their twisted images.
It’s crazy talk.
America is United
Democrats today are more united than they have been since FDR. They have more money than the Republicans, they have more volunteers, they have momentum, and they have Dobbs. Events since the decision letting states make abortion illegal have rattled women, of all political persuasions. And the Taliban wing keeps on doubling down, killing trans kids, going after birth control and gay marriage, stating explicitly, even loudly, that their desire to make America a 19th century country again.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
This is America, goddammit. This is the wealthiest, best educated nation in the history of the world. We live longer, in more comfort, than anyone ever has. You seriously think we’re going to throw that away because Joe Biden is old, or to follow a shrinking religious minority?
Not happening.
