The challenges that climate change presents are numerous and at times overwhelming: more extreme and volatile weather patterns, increased average temperatures, and destabilizing ecosystems. Climate change is the most important long-term threat facing our society. In the Midwest there is good news: many options for climate mitigation and renewable energy production available, and they run through the traditional backbone of the Midwest economy: farmers. In order to address climate change, we must immediately act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, produce more renewable energy, and begin implementing carbon sequestration strategies. Each of these strategies can be implemented by and support the operations of farmers.
Implementing conservation and renewable energy strategies is not solely beneficial for addressing climate change – it is also a financial investment for farmers. More than half of all farmers have lost money every year since 2013. Farm loan delinquencies and bankruptcies are rising. Investments in land conservation and rural renewable energy will help farmers will help address their growing financial struggles that have left the national farm debt at $416 billion. Additionally, solar and wind energy are fantastic investments. Both systems return their financial investments in approximately 10 years with a lifespan of 20-30 years. Farmers can lease their land to utilities or own the solar and wind power to offset high energy inputs such as livestock buildings.
In addition to renewable energy, soil conservation practices can prevent soil erosion, protect waterways, and sequester carbon in the soil. Cover crops and implementing no-till practices protect topsoil from erosion and reduce the time needed for heavy machinery to be in fields applying oil-based herbicides and fertilizers. By reducing these inputs, cover crops and no-till reduce diesel fuel and oil products consumption.
Wetlands, which can be restored where they previously existed before being drained for row crops and pastures, are a natural, effective carbon sequestration method available to address climate change. Wetland restoration also provided the added benefits or restoring native habitat, preventing and reducing flood and erosion risks, and providing drought resiliency.
For most farmers to make these investments, financial support is necessary. Whether it through grants, low interest loans, or lease agreements, most Americans, farmers or not, do not have the capital immediately available to invest in wind or solar power installation on their own. It is critical for the federal government to continue providing financial support for land and water conservation projects. Additionally, Congress should continue the tax incentives offered to businesses for investing in solar, wind, and other renewable energy. These incentives must be in place if farmers are expected to lead the way in protecting the environment and mitigating climate change with a Midwest first approach.
Climate change is the greatest threat to our society, our economy, and our environmental for this and future generations. Climate change is also one of the greatest opportunities for the Midwest, the rural economy, and farmers to be the answer. The programs, incentives, and technology are available, but must be revitalized. Now is the time to address climate change, support farmers and the rural economy, and have the Midwest lead the economy and natural resource management model of the future.
As of writing, ~229,000 people in the US have died due to COVID-19. The US Civil War had ~215,000 combat deaths and World War II lost ~291,000 Americans in combat, putting COVID-19 up there with the bloodiest wars in American history in terms of death count.
Notice that this Business Insider analysis put 240k as the high end of the estimate back in March 2020, and we’re already at 229k seven months later.
But COVID-19 did not have to be this morbid. Globally, there have been 1.18 million deaths due to COVID-19, meaning the US holds 19.4% of the world’s deaths due to COVID-19, but we are only 4.25% of the world’s population. We must hold our elected officials accountable for that overrepresentation in the global COVID-19 death count.
COVID-19 in America
The Democratic party in America committed early to trusting scientists and taking the precautions necessary to flatten the curve, while the Republican Party stoked anti-science sentiment and mocked mask-wearing and social distancing, claiming that Democrats were overreacting to the virus. Here in Wisconsin, Governor Evers tried to institute a statewide stay-at-home order only to be struck down by the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court. A conservative militia in Michigan wanted to kidnap Governor Whitmer (and Governor Northam in Virginia!) due to restrictive policies that slowed the spread of coronavirus.
The rest of the world prevented cases much more easily than we have in America, and I truly believe the difference is the prominence and presence of the Republican party in America. Through decades of climate skepticism and sowing distrust in scientific authorities, the Republican party’s logical endgame when COVID-19 arrived was to belittle the gravity of the virus and to kick and scream as our nation’s scientists explained the steps we all needed to take to save lives. Out of a desire to have things go back to ‘normal’, Republican politicians across the country have challenged mask mandates and have reopened businesses only to then preside over outbreaks in their backyards. The virus doesn’t care what your politics are, and as the virus spread from the mostly Democratic cities in March to now the Upper Midwest in October, setting new records as we head into flu season, it is clear that we as a country have failed to meet this challenge. The next nine months or so until we get a vaccine will be dark, and I’m not naïvely thinking that Biden winning will immediately end the virus. But when Fauci suggests this week that we should consider a national mask mandate, I know Biden would take that advice seriously.
At this point, we all know the story of how we got here. Trump knew COVID-19 would be bad in February and he downplayed it. He suggested it would be gone by Easter. Then he said warmer weather would make it go away. Seriously, the list of his lies about COVID-19 are incredibly sad. He desperately wants this to go away, and I do too! I wanted to believe him when he said we’d have a vaccine before the election. But his constant, unapologetic lying only leads to more deaths. As President, the buck stops with him, but he’s desperate to avoid blame. At the last debate when asked about the deaths from COVID-19, he, absurdly, responded, “I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault.”
Republicans claimed throughout this year that the economy needed to remain ‘open’ and that the ‘cure can’t be worse than the disease’, but those strategies to keep states ‘open’ even in the spring ruined our chance at containing COVID-19 and then opening up businesses after the virus got under control. A number of countries around the world took the appropriate steps to test, contract trace, and issue public health guidelines that people took seriously, and those countries are now closer to normal than anyone. Look at how New Zealand handled it. Or South Korea. A quick, intense public health response in the spring could have made a world of difference and could have allowed more businesses to reopen sooner, saving workers’ jobs and promoting well-being.
Instead, we have a record 40 million people filing unemployment due to COVID-19, obscene numbers of evictions and homelessness, and billionaires earning half a trillion dollars during the pandemic while workers suffer. The Trump administration did do one thing right, and that was the $1200 stimulus check sent to each American earning under $75,000. While only a single payment, we need to consider direct payments to citizens as a form of social security more often; it’s why I’m a huge proponent of a universal basic income. I wish the Trump administration had made the stimulus check a monthly tool to keep people afloat in the midst of economic turmoil and job loss.
Biden understands how many jobs can be created in sectors like clean energy, education, and caregiving while also committing to policies that will help working people like a $15 minimum wage, universal sick leave. And his anti-poverty plan actually gets me pretty excited. According to analysis, it could life 20 million Americans out of poverty, cutting the poverty rate in half through interventions like universal section 8 housing vouchers, a $3,000 per year child allowance, and Senator Harris’s LIFT act that will provide new tax credits for low-income households. This is genuinely big deal — for the wealthiest country in the world to still have 41 million Americans in poverty is a testament to our inability to empathize with those struggling to put food on the table and an overreliance on rugged individualism as the explanation for who’s successful and who isn’t.
Healthcare
But perhaps the issue most brought into focus by the COVID-19 pandemic is healthcare. We saw this year how poorly our healthcare system is set up to handle a massive pandemic. When someone has to rely on their job for their health coverage, losing your job often means losing your health coverage. And this year, a lot of people lost their jobs, and thus their healthcare. In the middle of a pandemic. And beyond the immediate health crisis of potentially contracting COVID-19, we are also facing a second surge of healthcare needs as financial insecurity, social isolation, and other social determinants of health have seen dramatic increases in prevalence due to the pandemic, leading to a tidal wave of mental health issues. We need to separate employment from benefits generally, but thankfully due to Obamacare we have more folks covered by Medicaid and an ability to purchase healthcare coverage on the insurance exchange. Now that’s under threat too. Trump repeatedly has said he wants to get rid of Obamacare, and he might get his chance shortly after the election, when the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court decides on a case that may wipe away Obamacare, throwing even more people off of their insurance in the middle of a pandemic.
So on one hand we have Trump, looking to throw millions of people off of their insurance, but on the other we have Biden aiming to build upon Obamacare and add a public option that will drive prices down and force private insurance companies to stay competitive with a government-run plan. Is it a perfect plan? No. Do I wish it was a single payer plan? Of course. But in the middle of pandemic, we’ve seen how our healthcare system isn’t equipped to meet our country’s needs right now.
So the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic led to more deaths than expected and his economic plan is decidedly worse for average working people. Trump wants to throw people off of health insurance while Biden wants to drive costs down and make insurance more widely available.
It’s pretty clear who would save and improve lives if elected.
At America’s core is a central struggle: are we a country that embraces multiculturalism and immigrants from around the world (as evidenced by the Statue of Liberty and our ‘melting pot’ analogies), or are we a country for, by, and of white people?
The Origins of the American White Caste
I recently read Witnessing Whiteness by Shelly Tochluk, which empowers white people to do ally work by reconciling their whiteness with the privileges it bestows upon us (whether we know it or not). It’s not to say that white people cannot have it tough — of course life can be hard for white people — but we will always benefit from structural racism that treats whiteness as the default and as ‘normal’. But perhaps the most interesting part of the book was a chapter on America’s history of whiteness.
Tochluk’s research found that America (and really the world) didn’t think of itself in racial terms before the late 17th century. But then came Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, where poor Black slaves and poor white indentured servants rose up against the plutocratic elite to demand better working conditions, wages, and an overall fairer economic system. In the wake of that successful rebellion, those in power sought to divide the poor against each other by passing and enacting laws that granted more rights and freedoms to white people and fewer rights and freedoms to Black people. This intentional division sparked the social construction of race and ‘othered’ Black people in particular to a category frequently treated as subhuman. The white bourgeoisie weaponized race to stew hatred within the multiracial proletariat in order to protect their economic interests.
This founded the identity of ‘whiteness’ as an American ideal, which we can see in America’s perception of Manifest Destiny and in how settlers treated Native Americans. We also see this in the 1800s and 1900s as immigrants from around the world moved to America but only the immigrants of European descent eventually assimilated into the dominant caste of American society. And if you look at how America determined its naturalization laws for who can become an American citizen, as early as 1790 our laws explicitly stated that someone had to be white to become a U.S. citizen. But even more shockingly — that prerequisite of being white to become a citizen remained in place until 1952! That’s 162 years of requiring whiteness to become a citizen. (There were a few exceptions over the years; namely, in 1870 America allowed newly freed Black slaves to become citizens, and Native Americans were granted citizenship on a tribe by tribe basis up until 1924. And the law concerning birthright citizenship only explicitly included all racial minorities in 1940.) That means that immigrants from around the world had to petition to (and aspire to) be considered ‘white’ in order to naturalize, and there were examples of people from Mexico, Syria, India, and Arabia occasionally getting approved as ‘white’ while other compatriots were denied.
I also recently listened to the audiobook of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, which convincingly argues that the world has seen three major caste systems in its history: the Indian caste system, Nazi Germany’s intentional persecution of Jewish people, and America’s ongoing subjugation of Black people since they were first brought to America as slaves. On first blush you may revolt at such a claim, but when you consider the lessons Nazi Germany deliberately learned from white America’s racism and methods to suppress Black Americans, the comparison rings true. The Three-Fifths Compromise, a Civil War instigated by the Confederacy to protect the right to enslave Black people, Reconstruction, Plessy v Ferguson, the Tulsa Massacre, Brown v Board of Education, lynching, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, the Southern Strategy, the war on drugs, redlining, gentrification, broken windows policing, the Flint water crisis, the school to prison pipeline, police violence, Dylann Roof, Amy Cooper, Walter Wallace Jr: America’s history is inseparable from the violent, constant oppression of Black people.
When you look at the long history of structural racism in America, it’s hard to argue that we ever truly wanted to be multicultural and a home to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as the Statue of Liberty puts it. Every step of the way, Black Americans face hurdles, resistance, and skepticism. So when politicians argue that we’re beyond race or that they don’t see race, or, let’s say, they claim they are on par with Abraham Lincoln, understand that there is still a whole lot wrong with race in America, and it’s on us (in particular the white us) to do the work to rectify the generations of compound disadvantage heaped upon Black Americans.
Evidence of Systemic Racism
Do you really need a list of ways in which Black Americans are disadvantaged? Okay, here’s a (non-exhaustive, but exhausting) list:
Black workers have historically earned far less income than white workers.
The racial wealth gap means the median Black American owns ~$150,000 less in wealth than the median white American.
Figure 1. White families have more wealth than Black, Hispanic, and other or multiple race families in the 2019 SCF. Source: Federal Reserve Board, 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances. Notes: Figures displays median (top panel) and mean (bottom panel) wealth by race and ethnicity, expressed in thousands of 2019 dollars.
White high school dropouts on average have more wealth than Black college graduates.
Black mortgage applicants are more likely to be denied loans than white applicants.
Black women are 2-3 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women.
Black people are more likely to be killed by police officers than white people.
MappingPoliceViolence.org
Black people use marijuana about as often as white people but are arrested at significantly higher rates for possession.
Black prisoners make up the largest demographic of incarcerated people, way outpacing their overall representation in society.
Black Americans disproportionately are getting COVID-19 and dying from it compared to white Americans.
Black Americans saw a marked decrease in self-assessed life evaluation during the Trump administration compared to similar self-assessments by white Americans.
Black Americans face higher unemployment rates during the COVID-19 pandemic than white Americans.
The list could go on and on. Even something as innocuous as property taxes can disadvantage Black people, as property taxes are dependent on property tax assessments but these assessors do not account for the lower rate of home appreciation in minority neighborhoods, effectively charging minority homeowners a higher property tax for living in a nonwhite neighborhood.
From the moment Black Americans are born to the moment they pass away, they face an uphill battle that is meant to discourage them. It’s like running up a down escalator. You can make it to the top, and some will, but it’s pretty hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you have to put in so much effort just to stay where you are.
The Divider-in-Chief
But what does this have to do with this election? Diversity of course means much more than just Black vs white America, and Trump has a long record of ‘othering’ groups that don’t conform to the white Christian American mold:
Trump placed an ad in 1989 in four NYC newspapers, including the New York Times, calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were five Black and Hispanic young men wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in NYC.
Trump was a major voice of birtherism that questioned President Obama’s citizenship.
He instituted a Muslim ban to prevent travel to the US from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
He said there were “very fine people on both sides” after white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia chanted “Jews will not replace us” and murdered Heather Heyer.
He (and Jeff Sessions) knowingly separated children from their parents at the border in detention facilities in order to deter immigration. This may be the most overlooked part of Trump’s record — what has happened at the border under his watch is abhorrent and criminal.
Similar to the waves of evidence of systemic racism in America, the list of Trump’s transgressions against minorities is endless. I just got tired finding links to everything. And I’m sure you read this and thought of five more I missed. But when you hear Trump claim that he’s been the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln, the evidence clearly suggests otherwise. And with 91% of Black Americans voting for Clinton in 2016 and only 6% for Trump, it certainly seems that Black Americans know which political party actually represents their interests and don’t fall for revisionist history arguments about how Lincoln was a Republican and how Democrats owned slaves. These arguments are easily refuted by an 8th grader in Social Studies class who knows how party ideology has switched over the years.
How is Biden Better?
During the primary, Biden consistently polled the highest with voters of color, and in particular the Black Democrats in South Carolina bucked Iowa and New Hampshire’s trends and gave Biden the key win he needed in the primaries to consolidate his coalition and dwarf the rest of the field. He’s done the work and built the trust with communities of color over decades in politics, and it does mean something that America’s first Black president chose him to be his VP.
This isn’t to say Biden doesn’t have his issues. Back in January I ranked Biden 7th in the Democratic primary field and had this to say:
From his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill at the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 to his vote for the Iraq war and his dreadful record on criminal justice policy (that absolutely contributed to the mass incarceration problem we have today), he’s been on the wrong side of a lot of issues over time and he’s been late to adapt his views and acknowledge the role he played in some of these areas, (e.g. supporting the Hyde Amendment).
I still believe Biden is weaker on race relations and progressive solutions to systemic racism than Bernie or Warren would have been. But there are reasons to be optimistic. His Lift Every Voice plan seeks to address racial inequities, and while it can improve, it’s miles better than Trump’s Platinum Plan (and, come on, Trump won’t actually follow a plan anyway). He’s willing to admit when he was wrong in the past, and two members of his inner circle are Black women, the Democratic Party’s core constituency. He chose a Black and South Asian woman as his VP in Kamala Harris, and he hired former Bernie 2016 national press secretary Symone Sanders to advise his campaign in the early stages of the primary.
But on a related, and more human level, I trust Biden to exercise empathy when it comes to understanding the impact of systemic racism and discrimination on the basis of sex, race, gender, religion, immigration status, or anything else. Biden’s firsthand experience with loss crystalized his ability to channel empathy for whomever he meets who has lost a loved one due to police violence, COVID-19, military duty, cancer, or any other determinant. That empathy cannot be taught, but it is critical in reflections on American society and the policy remedies that must be considered to achieve justice.
As Biden reiterated at the last debate, he will be a president for all Americans, which will be a welcome change.
The fight to protect liberal democracy is not only a fight overseas, as I wrote in my previous post. At home in America we face a democratic deficit that would make us raise our eyebrows if it were the case in a different country. At every level of government, the Republican party has fought — and succeeded — in tipping the scales to overvalue their own voters and impose minority rule.
The Electoral College
We elect the president through an archaic process called the Electoral College, which allocates electors on a winner-take-all basis within each state. Instead of merely tallying the total number of votes in the country and choosing a winner by popular vote, we instead immediately write off ~40ish states as too Democratic or too Republican to matter, leaving the actual election up to a few swing states that could feasibly go either way. So not only does someone’s vote in swing state Arizona carry more importance than someone’s vote in reliably Republican Tennessee (even though both states are worth 11 electoral votes), some states have a disproportionate amount of power due to the sheer mathematical way we determine a state’s electoral college allotment. Each state’s electoral college value equals the number of their seats in the Senate plus the number of seats in the House, so some states are disproportionately valued in the electoral college.
For example, according to the Washington Post after the 2016 election,
“Wyoming has three electoral votes and a population of 586,107, while California has 55 electoral votes and 39,144,818 residents. Distributing the electoral vote evenly among each state’s residents suggests that individual votes from Wyoming carry 3.6 times more influence, or weight, than those from California.”
Rural (and generally whiter) states carry more weight than their urban (and more diverse) counterparts, and since Republicans tend to perform best in rural communities (with Democrats performing better in urban areas), the Electoral College quite literally overvalues Republican voters compared to Democratic voters. It should come as no surprise that since the year 2000, two of the three times a Republican won the Presidency, they won without winning the popular vote. Bush lost the popular vote by approximately 0.5% in 2000, and Trump lost it by 2.1% in 2016. And according to 538, there’s a 9% chance that Trump wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote. (For comparison, he only has a 4% chance of winning the popular vote.) We need the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to instead elect the popular vote winner, and we need it yesterday.
The Senate
The Senate is arguably even less democratic than the Electoral College. By giving two seats to every state, it clearly overvalues less populous (and frequently Republican) states. And since the Senate acts as the more important legislative body, responsible for Supreme Court confirmations among other duties, it is incredibly difficult for Democrats to win a majority. During the impeachment trial, we saw this come to the fore as senators representing 153 million Americans outvoted senators representing 168 million Americans to block additional witnesses at the trial. Even worse, the Senate under Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to be fair, has embraced another arcane tradition called the filibuster to essentially prevent legislation from passing with fewer than 60 votes in the Senate, so any progressive legislation is essentially held hostage unless we get a supermajority of 60 seats. By definition it’s anti-democratic when a majority of Americans are subject to the will of a much whiter, much more rural minority.
The House
And then there’s the House. In theory, it should be fairer, as House seats are allocated by population, but in 2010 we saw a concentrated effort from Republicans across the country to redraw congressional maps at the federal and state level to benefit Republicans after the 2010 census. By ‘cracking and packing’ electorates, they were able to craft maps that ensured the Republicans secured more seats with fewer votes necessary. For example, take our adopted home state of Wisconsin and its state Assembly, the lower house of our state government. According to the Milwakuee Journal Sentinel in 2018:
“GOP Gov. Scott Walker lost his bid for re-election by roughly 1 percentage point Nov. 6 to Democrat Tony Evers. Yet Walker carried 63 of the state’s 99 state Assembly districts.
In fact, the data show that 64 of the 99 districts are more Republican than the state as a whole, based on their vote for governor.
In other words, Republicans enjoy a built-in 64-35 advantage in the partisan makeup of the 99 Assembly districts. In a hypothetical 50-50 election, in which there are equal numbers of Democratic and Republican voters in Wisconsin, no one crosses party lines and independents split down the middle, that translates into a massive 29-seat GOP advantage in the Assembly. That’s very close to the 27-seat margin (63-36) that Republicans won last month.”
But gerrymandering isn’t restricted to state legislatures. An analysis of gerrymandering in US House races from 2012 to 2016 found that 59 seats per race shifted due to partisan gerrymandering. Yes, both parties are guilty of this, but Republicans got a net gain of 19 seats per election due to this practice. As we prepare to draw new maps following the 2020 census, Democrats have been far more vocal in calling for nonpartisan commissions to redraw state maps, taking the power out of the hands of the politicians. As the common refrain goes: “Voters should pick their politicians. Politicians shouldn’t pick their voters.”
The Supreme Court
In 2016, Mitch McConnell executed a brazen, calculated strategy to refuse a hearing to replace the recently deceased Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. At that moment in February 2016, with President Obama having already nominated Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the bench, the balance of the court sat at four justices nominated by Democratic Presidents and four nominated by Republicans. This vacancy would shift the balance of the court to the Democratic side if Obama could confirm Garland. So McConnell made a huge bet — that he could convince America that we shouldn’t nominate a new Supreme Court justice during an election year, and that Donald Trump would upset Hillary Clinton to win the Presidency. We all know what happened next. Four years later, Trump stole that seat and nominated Neil Gorsuch to the bench, and when the swing vote Anthony Kennedy retired a few years later, Trump nominated the aggressive Brett Kavanaugh to replace him, cementing a 5-4 conservative-leaning court. And then, as if 2020 couldn’t get worse, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a progressive icon, passed away two months before the election. So what did Mitch McConnell do? Did he accept the rule he so fiercely clung to in 2016 and waited until after the election to replace her? Of course not. Instead, we now have flagrant hypocrisy from Senate Republicans like Lindsay Graham (R-SC):
“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination,’ ” he said in 2016 shortly after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. “And you could use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right.”
He didn’t care. So here we are, with a deeply unpopular President who lost the popular vote working with Senate Republicans who represent a minority of Americans to cement a 6-3 conservative leaning court. And because Supreme Court justices serve for life, Trump’s nominees are all in their 40s and 50s, likely to serve for 30-40 more years.
All three branches of government have antidemocratic systems in place that overvalue the voice of white, conservative Americans, which in turn overrepresents Republicans in national politics.
Americans often say that we love democracy, that our Founding Fathers were geniuses who shouldn’t be second-guessed, but the way our democracy is functioning proves that something needs to change, as a person’s vote matters more or less based on where they live within this country. It’s not unpatriotic to admit we have a problem – patriotism is loving your country so much that you can point out where we need to get better.
And this isn’t even getting into the issues related to the lack of accountable democracy for American territories and protectorates like Puerto Rico and American Samoa, nor the taxation without representation happening in Washington DC. Or the fact that Republicans openly tried to manipulate the 2020 census by including a citizenship question to discourage immigrants from filling it out in order to decrease overall numbers of residents in primarily blue states to then decrease funding for those cities and states.
These efforts to discredit mail-in voting dovetail sickeningly well with the Republicans’ decades long voter suppression efforts in Democratic-leaning districts and/or bases by enacting voter ID laws, restricting when and how you can register to vote, purging voter rolls, closing polling locations to leave only a few sites in some of America’s most Black neighborhoods, and preventing formerly incarcerated citizens from voting. And now, the 2020 election offers a serious chance for Republicans to cash in their chips. Because record numbers of voters are voting by mail, we likely will not know the result of the election on the night of November 3rd. In fact, it may take weeks to determine the winner as mail in ballots will take time to count and as states differ on when they will start processing ballots and by when a ballot must be received and postmarked in order to count. Some analysts are talking about a ‘Red Mirage’ on November 3rd where Trump looks like he’s winning in key swing states because the election day in-person vote is more likely to lean Republican vs the mail-in vote which will lean Democratic. So if Trump claims victory on November 3rd only for more votes to come in and flip a state’s electoral votes to Biden, there’s a strong chance Trump will seek to discredit those ballots with cries of voter fraud. And with a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court in charge of sorting out any election questions, we could be staring down the barrel of a constitutional crisis. Trump already refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and he never promised to avoid claiming victory on election night. We are in this situation due to calculated antidemocratic systems that pervade every level of government.
And, of course, in the background of all of this lives a shady system of business interests masquerading as SuperPACs to fund politicians and secure favorable policy to help secure higher shareholder profits. The Citizen’s United court case (which allowed companies to essentially spend as much as they want on political races) was decided by a conservative court and exemplifies what McConnell and other Republicans are counting on: even if they lose majorities in Congress and the Presidency, the Supreme Court can step in and enshrine conservative policy while striking down any progressive policy passed by Democrats.
So what can we do?
Number one: Admit we have a problem. Number two: Tackle the corruption and symbiotic relationship between profit-obsessed business and politicians. I supported Warren in the primary, and this was her number one issue because without fixing this, we really can’t make meaningful change on climate change, health care, education, or any other policy we want to pass. Joe Biden understands what the Republicans will do if he wins — he saw it as Vice President, and by strengthening his relationship with Warren, I’m optimistic he will take on corruption in a similar manner.
But everything should be on the table. We should consider structural reform for the Supreme Court, ranked choice voting across the country, multi-member districts, statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington DC, and an abolishment of the Electoral College. Because if we don’t make these reforms, a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans will hold the rest of the country hostage with no incentive to change plans or policy.
But none of this happens if we don’t elect Joe Biden. And realistically, Joe needs to win the national popular vote by seven or eight points to make it clear on election night that Trump isn’t going to win. We need to prepare for a result where we truly don’t know the winner for days after election night, as ballots get counted. Otherwise, the ‘Red Mirage’ may lead to a ‘Red Minority’ entrenched for four more years.
Hey everyone – in advance of the election on November 3rd, we wanted to share a few of the reasons why we are enthusiastically supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We will post a few articles highlighting a few of our main reasons why we are supporting him in the coming days.
That Night in Copenhagen
Election day in 2016 will forever be seared into my memory. In Denmark for an important work trip, I went to bed early in order to wake up and watch the results in real time. In a solitary hotel room in Copenhagen, I watched as my country slowly, and unpredictably, descended into the Trump era. After hours of solemnly watching returns, I then had to get ready to work a full day and face my Danish colleagues who no doubt would have questions about the morning’s events. To the Danes I knew, Trump was fascinating — and nobody took him seriously. It felt like a bad joke that had gone too far. Faced with numerous questions of how this could happen in America, I shrugged and had to re-evaluate my own understanding of my country (and in particular the Midwest). A country that had elected its first black president (and then Nobel Peace Prize winner) had swung hard in the other direction and elected a brash, inexperienced reality television personality to the most important job in the global West.
Trump immediately was ridiculed around the world. After Trump’s inauguration and his doubling down on “America First” (a problematic slogan tied to anti-Semitism in World War II), comedians around the world created an avalanche of parody videos mocking the concept of America First, like this one that claims “America First, Denmark Second”. He was comedic fodder, a buffoon. But this sentiment wasn’t restricted to Denmark. I was lucky to work with a group in Helsinki Finland from 2017 to earlier this year, and through those trips to Finland and other countries in Europe, the same morbid curiosity arrived each time I said I was American to a local. International polling supports this claim, as Pew shows the collapse in favorability ratings for the US among our allies and a serious lack of confidence in Trump.
A Troubling Trend
But the election of Donald Trump wasn’t an anomaly. It was, and continues to be, a disturbing trend in the rise of ‘strongman’ type far right leaders elected on the back of nationalist rhetoric. We saw these themes rise in the Brexit vote of June 2016 (and the subsequent ascent of Boris Johnson as UK Prime Minister), in the continued reigns of Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Modi in India, and maybe most notably Bolsonaro in Brazil. Every country seems to be facing a rise in far right populism, but luckily the world has battled back a few similar movements in France’s Le Pen and the Finn’s Party in Finland. Make no mistake, the Western world is largely locked in a battle between these far right, anti-democratic nationalists, who wish to shatter political norms, seize power, antagonize others, and lead by fear, and everyone else who still believes in a healthy democracy.
We saw this in 2016 and we are seeing it again in 2020. The Democratic Party coalesced around the more moderate candidate, who then positioned themselves in the acceptable middle for the electorate. Hillary had Mike Bloomberg speak at the National Convention; Joe had John Kasich speak at his. The coalition necessary to defeat far right populism spans the center-right to the far-left, so we should not be surprised that our nominee largely sits in the middle of that coalition. However, thanks to the tireless efforts of progressive activists, the normalized party platform both in 2016 and 2020 has been the most progressive its ever been. As Andrew Yang said during the convention in August, “The magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable.” And thanks to the work of those activists we have Joe Biden on stage at the debate this week calling for a full transition away from oil and forcefully arguing for a $15 minimum wage. We can achieve real progress in a Biden administration.
Trump’s Record
Aside from the broader themes of global politics, when you actually look at Trump’s foreign policy record, it’s abysmal. He has routinely embraced his far right nationalist autocrats (Putin, Kim Jong-un, etc) over our allies, threatening the stability of NATO, arguably the best peacekeeping alliance of all time. Trump’s disdain for mainstream media, refusal to say if he’ll accept the results of the election, and his ‘joking’ about staying in office for beyond eight years, are just a few examples of Trump flirting with unabashed authoritarianism.
Thankfully, we haven’t entered a full-scale military conflict, but Trump’s constant preference for Putin over our allies meant zero consequences for Russia’s known interference in the 2016 and now 2020 elections as well as the literal bounties put on American soldiers’ heads in Afghanistan. This is a man who said that Americans who died in military service are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ and mocked a mourning gold star family while he dodged the draft during Vietnam. And, of course, Donald Trump became the third president of all time to be impeached for pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden by withholding military aid. This man does not care about our troops or our allies; he cares about himself.
Joe’s Record
Meanwhile, Joe Biden met many of these same global leaders as Vice President and had two kids serve in the military. This is a man who understands the sacrifice made by gold star families and will bring a steady hand and a reaffirming of democratic values to the Presidency that will restore America’s image abroad.
Yes, Joe voted for the war in Iraq, and it was a massive mistake, which he acknowledges. He also pushed Obama to remove troops from Afghanistan faster than other advisors recommended, and he wants to rejoin the Paris climate agreement. In general, I want America to scale back our omnipresent military presence all over the world. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as the world’s police. But in this election it’s really a question of who we trust with the full force of the US military behind them, and that’s not even a question.
Joe Biden will restore America’s image overseas as a leader of the free world and a bastion of liberal democracy. We cannot tempt fate for four more years and risk getting America in a major foreign conflict with Trump at the wheel, denigrating our allies and cozying up to authoritarians.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/1400134/Median.0.png)
Purple State Progressive 