I'm Going to Enjoy This As Long as I Possibly Can

I didn’t support Biden or Harris in the primaries, mostly trying to decide between two candidates I really did like- Sanders and Warren. Neither Biden nor Harris had policies strong enough to address the scale of the problems that we have. Nor, I thought, did they have the ideas that could mobilize the base. My friend 

Ricki told me I was wrong about the latter, that Harris’s status as first woman and first woman of color in either position would rally people—which did rally me along with tens of millions of other Dems—and also that people would respond overwhelmingly to Biden’s decency and non-reactionary policies. She was right! We all can continue to debate whether more progressive policies would have helped make the Dem margin bigger, including in House and Senate races. But there’s a massive, immediate victory for four issues:

1. racial justice, where overt racism won’t be sanctioned at the top. It’s only a start, but the Democratic win will end the demonization in Biden’s corrupt terminology of mainstream civil rights campaigns, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, queer people at that level of the federal government. The king of the Neo-confederacy has been beaten.

 

2. judicial corruption. The Republicans did pack the Supreme Court and the federal bench, but the removal of Barr from the Attorney General position will allow the Dept of Justice to function more professionally. This will help with civil rights enforcement, investigation of racist police departments, reduction of violence against indigenous peoples protecting water and land, and other basics. We can also again start to imagine enforcement of anti-trust and other regulations in relation to a Wall Street that has had a free hand to reinflate asset bubbles, invest against their own customers, etc. The same goes for the Department of Education on student debt and for-profit abusers, among many others. Rampant sexism no longer has a safe space in the White House, so gender equality can return to its status as a normal goal in the 21st century.

 

3. environmental regulation. Neither Harris nor Biden support the Green New Deal, but they can undo a ton of Trump’s gratuitous damage. They can be pressured into stronger, more adequate positions. and they’ll rejoin the Paris Accords.

 

4. Covid-19. Biden and Harris understand the concept of public health and the essential role of the public sector in operating a pandemic response. The country will get well much faster next year because the Democrats are back in the White House.

 

Other issues are up for grabs—education and higher education policy, labor rights, reproductive  rights, fiscal policy, transportation, infrastructure, the Middle East, China and foreign policy more generally. But i’m going to take a few days off from worrying about that.

 

And I’m very happy to have a community college professor as First Lady. It’s about time!