Now the electoral map is complete, and Joe Biden has 306 Electoral College votes, almost exactly the total that Donald Trump won in 2016. Biden's share of the popular vote has inched up to 50.9%, with a lead of 5.4 million votes.
Trump's legal challenges failed on several fronts yesterday. The system, it seems, is rattling toward resolution. It's not pretty, but it's working. So now some of the president's staunchest supporters are turning to the nuclear option. This is advocated not on the grounds that the election was rigged in favor of Biden (a contention that is nakedly false), but on the grounds that Biden would make a bad president. It would quite simply be the overriding of the popular will by 4 state legislatures.
Plus, it would be illegal. [And see also, it's completely insane.]
Meanwhile, the president's lawyer's, with their reputations to protect, are dropping out of the charade. The president, I believe, is working on his exit strategy, and all this attempted litigation is just buying him time, putting off the inevitable.
But I think that Trump can only try the patience of the 52.7% of the population that voted against him for so long. He wants to exit while still claiming victory, claiming the whole thing was a sham and he was robbed, but he's looking more and more like a helplessly beached whale. He may have missed his moment. I think that even some of his true-believers will begin to shrug and say, let's just move on. Not that they'd give up the fight, or quit believing the BS, but sometimes the conditions on the ground call for a tactical retreat.
I myself am beginning to think more and more about what a Biden presidency will be like. I don't expect to love it, but this election outcome may be about as favorable (by my lights) as any in my lifetime. That is, a Biden win (the crazy man in the White House is soundly rejected), but the Republicans hold the Senate and gain ground in the House (forming a check on the more extreme proposals coming out of the Democratic Party left). For a moderate-conservative like me, it's the best I could have hoped for!
[See also: A Moderate's Manifesto, by Ronald Dworkin]
Joe Biden has latched on the word "unity," but I think that's entirely the wrong word. There will never be unity between the factions that vie for power in the American system, and in fact there shouldn't be. But there can be (on occasion) cooperation, which requires compromise. That is not "unity," which is a sort of anti-political and somewhat Utopian mantra, but politics (something Biden has spent his career practicing, even with a certain aplomb, so now is not the time to spurn the real work before him in favor of airy fantasies).
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Like Donald Trump, I keep wondering how I'm going to make the coming transition. For Donald, it's the transition to private citizen, while for me it's the transition of this blog away from these daily musings about the election. I've got to quit sometime! I mean, it was never my intention to be a political blogger.
So then, I'm going to trend away from all this, although I still want to talk political philosophy generally, which has taken on a deeper interest for me. I'll also be going back to my old theme of musing through Bible passages. I hope my readership (we're talking a number well up into the single digits here) will stay with me.
As for my musing through this damned election, you can find them all here.
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