One of the great victims of the four-year experiment of American Fascism has been science, along with scientific thinking. Readers of my past essays in this blog are well aware that, already in the past, this nation had a real struggle with critical thinking. I’ve worried in the past about efforts like “The Wedge Strategy,” a document that outlined a means by which America could be separated from reason using an extremist version of Christianity, first by undermining biological science and then by separating all other forms of reason from American life. The last four years have been an experiment in precisely that kind of effort.
The wedge began with an effort to separate America from the rest of Earth. The borders of America were shut down in wave after wave of inhuman action, inhumane policy, and bitter cruelty. Americans were first turned against all others. Foreign policy was gutted. Civil servants in foreign service were excoriated, driven out of their jobs, and their positions left vacant. With gross caricatures of Mexico, Central and South America, Asia, and Europe at work, it was easy to dismiss our greatest allies and trade partners and create new enemies. Science, an international enterprise, was suddenly choking for air.
The work then commenced to tear Americans apart from the inside. Historical divides – race, religion, income – were places where the wedge found its work. Each breaking point was struck by the great force of the hammer of cruelty. Racial divides particularly were cracked wide open. White supremacists and right-wing extremists marched openly, brought violence upon the peaceful, and found succor and aid from the President.
I watched family members and old acquaintances openly express racism for the first time since I had known them. They did it loudly in the pseudo-public squares of social media. I watched people in the military set up shrines to Trump and his American Fascism, decked out with cheap overpriced merchandise. Quality journalism was branded as fake news; instead, people peddled bullshit from right-wing propaganda outfits as if it were verified truth. As credulity spread like a disease – a mind virus – conspiracy theories became the currency of casual conversation. The dumbing of America was accelerated, and it was impossible to do anything about it. I found myself grateful for the journalistic media agencies that have worked themselves to death for four years just to keep up with the shit storm.
At first, the American Fascists came for the science that was easy to demonize as “anti-capitalist” or “anti-business.” They shattered environmental policy and federal land management. Cronies and cretins with little or no scientific credentials were put in charge of the agencies tasked with oversight. The EPA was gutted and humiliated by an orgy of business-friendly policy that cow-towed to special interests in dying industries, like coal, who now found an ally in the Oval Office. Unable to compete with other energy options, such as natural gas and even wind and solar, coal was nevertheless pulled from the grave and pumped full of adrenaline. Promises that could not be kept were made to mining towns that, long suffering, were unable to mount sufficient incredulity in the face of a talented liar. Coal had a friend … but it nonetheless wilted away, its heart pumping on a cocktail of lies but its other organs failing, its flesh withering away. Rather than transform these towns with new industry and opportunity, they were made to feast at the table that had poisoned them all along.
Then the American Fascists came for agencies like NOAA who have a clear sense of the terrible effects of climate change on America. Decapitated, these once proud agencies were twisted to echo the lies of the President. If the President said a hurricane was going inland, and even went so far as to draw that fact in sharpie on a chart, weather and climate agencies were expected to agree with him … even in the face of a storm obviously turning up the Atlantic coast. If they would not parrot the lies of the President, they would never speak again. As much as possible, “climate change” was scrubbed from federal agencies and websites.
Even the Department of Energy was made to suffer, at first placed in the hands of an embarrassing man who, when asked once, could not even remember the name of the agency he would later be tasked to run. Every Presidential budget proposal gutted science, proposing precipitous decline each and every year. If not for the grace of the Congress, which simply ignored this guidance (and, since the administration cared little for science anyway, this fact seems to have gone unnoticed), science agencies would be hundreds of millions or billions of dollars poor. Science stocks the cupboard of the nation with new ideas. The trade of tomorrow is fueled by the discovery of today. We have been saved from empty shelves only by the inertia and wisdom of the U.S. Congress.
Then they came for human health. Faced with a pandemic, armed with 100 years of experience and knowledge that could throttle the transmission of the virus, they simply ignored all of it. They left us all to suffer and many of us to die. Almost a quarter-of-a-million Americans are dead of COVID-19 as of the writing of this essay. We never really recovered from the first wave in the spring, instead experiencing a series of body blows that have kicked the life out of healthcare workers. American Fascists denied the existence of the disease, then the severity of the disease. They twisted mask wearing into a political litmus test, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the process. We’re on track now for 300,000 dead this year, and if the rate of spread continues unchecked, we’ll tick over the 400,000 mark not long into 2021. Brilliant epidemiologists were sidelined for the lunatic ravings of a neuroradiologist with no experience in infectious disease but a strange penchant for pseudoscience.
It is ironic, therefore, that after gutting environmental science, then climate and weather science, energy science, attempting to murder basic research, and then suppressing 100 years of infectious disease science, it would be math and statistics that would close this experiment in American Fascism. Trump himself planted the seeds of this embarrassing end. As mail-in voting rose in prominence in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump poisoned Republicans against this form of voting by claiming it was rife with abuse. Like most things he says, this was a lie. But, the lie dissuaded Republicans from using it, with much less effect on Democrats and Independents. So while the latter groups were voting overwhelmingly in mail ballots, while taking advantage also of early voting, Republicans stayed home and largely came out to vote on election day.
The nation was warned for weeks by people that understand numbers that this would lead to a predictable effect: since votes generally cannot be counted until election day, and since live voting will lead to the fastest tallies, Republicans and Trump would appear at first to have a big advantage. But the size of any lead would be a mirage. In truth (as we learned), the total vote was always skewed slightly in favor of Biden. It just had to be tallied, which takes days. We couldn’t know the truth of the count on election day (we never do); but the truth would pile up over days.
That time has essentially now passed. With the exception of some remaining ballots that need to be counted, as well as some late deadlines (like in North Carolina) for receiving overseas and military ballots, the vote count is complete. Biden has won. American Fascism, which failed to grasp basic math and statistics, was in the end beaten not by terrific punch to the jaw but instead by a steady, long, draining series of body blows. A state went for Biden here. A state went for Biden there. It was slow and agonizing and painful. American Fascism lost, not by a crushing defeat, but thanks to a slow and painful technical knockout.
It was delicious.
It’s also important to remember, therefore, that Biden doesn’t have a strong mandate. But, that’s okay, because he was always going to try to be a uniter and lead from somewhere close to a center-left position. No matter what his detractors might say, this is going to be the case. Trump only ever led from a position of what was personally best for him; he played his base for fools, the ultimate spray-tan con-man. Tempting his base’s darkest fears, Trump led from deep in the extreme right of the political spectrum, and did so with spectacular incompetence.
But this slim margin of victory in the final battleground states means Biden has to form a difficult coalition. This he must do while rebuilding trust in America and in Federal Agencies. He also has to rebuild the federal government, which was stripped and starved during the American Fascist experiment. Propagandists will have to be removed from agencies, and political appointees removed from the offices they were never qualified to run in the first place. The foreign service needs to be completely rebuilt.
This will take years. And Trump’s ransacking is not yet done. He will likely do a lot of damage on the way out in the next two months, and that will require cleanup as well. American Fascism is not over yet, and even in defeat it won’t disappear. It will simmer in the country after Trump leaves. But, for now, at least the long night of this murderous experiment is coming to an end.
It’s morning in America again.
UPDATE: November 15, 2020
The counting of all votes took a long time, as expected. When the counting was done, the math was pretty irrefutable. Biden not only flipped three states that went to Trump by narrow margins in 2016 (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), he flipped two previously “safe” Republican states: Arizona and Georgia. In the end, he accumulated 306 electoral college votes, compared to Trump’s 232; this is almost the precise scenario, albeit flipped, that Trump ended his campaign in with a victory of 304-227 over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Above, I wrote that “… Biden doesn’t have a strong mandate.” While you can certainly argue, as people did in 2016, that this is technically true, Biden basically has the same electoral college mandate that Trump had in 2016. In fact, his mandate is a little stronger than Trump’s by 2 electors. To put that in context, since every state gets 1 elector for each Senator and 1 elector for each member of the House of Representatives, this gain is almost the equivalent of Biden having won North or South Dakota to his side in this election (they each have 3 electors, the smallest number possible in the system).
By the popular vote, the comparison to 2016 is even more stark. Turnout in this election was historic for the modern era. Over 150 million Americans voted in this election (more than 20 million than voted for President in 2016). Biden won 78.7 million of those voters, while Trump won 73.1 million voters. Biden thus won also the popular vote by a margin of over 5 million voters; Clinton’s lead in the popular vote in 2016 was about 3 million votes.
By any comparison to 2016, Biden’s win was substantial. “Tremendous,” as one person might have framed it. It’s even more substantial when you factor in that he beat an incumbent president; being incumbent is usually believed to give a strong advantage to a candidate.
Biden won’t be able to enact the grand promises he aimed for during his campaign that clearly needed a majority of one party in both houses of Congress. But he’ll be a real leader for the nation, and he’s already been demonstrating that since the election was called for him. He can’t really do anything until January 20, 2021, but in a meaningful way he’s already the president we’ve been missing since 2016.
