With people knowing full well who and what he is

Decades ago I heard the aria Lascia ch’io pianga from the opera Rinaldo by George Frederick Handel. I first heard it in the 1994 movie Farinelli. It’s a beautiful tune and I thought I could arrange it for handbells (because that’s what I do). But I did only the basics before changing music programs (the first time was 23 years ago) and the file didn’t transfer. A new music program with a better way to read old files revived my interest and I spent this afternoon pulling it into my program. I had heard the aria sung in its original Italian on the radio and hadn’t paid much attention to the English translation. While working on it today I took a moment to read the English. And it is appropriate for today:

Here let my tears flow! Let hope my soul know, My heart is longing For Liberty. Assuage the sorrow to chains belonging O, grant tomorrow That I may be free.

Yeah, the nasty guy will squat in the Oval Office again. That is difficult to take. The Michigan House flipped to Republican, so no more improvements in LGBTQ rights. I’m glad Democrats did quite a bit while they could. The lame duck session could be busy. Democrat Elissa Slotkin will replace retiring Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, winning a tiny margin while the nasty guy took the state. But the US Senate flipped to Republican with a decent (rather than thin) margin. As of this writing the US House hasn’t been called yet. We may see the nasty guy take office with unchecked power. There are a few other bright spots. Sarah McBride easily won to be the first transgender person in the House, filling Delaware’s single seat. Yes, she is a Democrat. Abortion rights were on the ballot in ten states and passed in seven. Those that approved their proposals are: Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York. Those that did not are South Dakota, Florida, and Nebraska. Florida is important because it got 57% of the vote but needed 60% to be approved. Nebraska is interesting because the ballot had to opposing measures. A majority approved a ban after the 12th week. The proposal to ensure abortion rights got only 49%. To be approved a proposal had to cross 50% and have more votes than the other. And South Dakota simply didn’t pass it. That’s the end of my good news. There is very much the possibility Congress will pass a national abortion ban and the nasty guy will sign it, even though lately he’s been saying he won’t. Even if they don’t manage that, Project 2025 calls for banning mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions. Kos of Daily Kos posted just before 6:30 this morning. Articles on Kos usually are topped by an image. For this post the image is solid black.

In 2016, people were dazzled by Donald Trump, and he ran up against a great but unpopular candidate. In 2020, Trump barely lost, but hey, incumbency has its advantages. And here we are, with people knowing full well who and what Trump is, and they still voted for him in big numbers. Vice President Kamala Harris was not a flawed candidate. She was near spotless. And she was objectively more popular than Trump. (Exit polling shows Trump’s favorability at 44/54, with Harris at 48/51.) And we did what we needed to do. And it was still not enough. All the money in the world, all the door-knocking in the world—none of that could overcome the reality that more people were convinced that Trump was the better choice.

So don’t accuse Harris of this or that supposed failing. This is too big for that to matter. Even so, Democrats will hold a postmortem to try to figure out why they lost. We liberals need to rebuild, to create a movement that can weather the worst Republicans can do. And we need to listen both to what people say and what they aren’t telling us. Some racists and misogynists are hopeless. And some are not. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos wrote this morning:

Dear Benjamin Franklin, This letter concerns our republic. We regret to inform you that, despite your most fervent wishes, we were unable to keep it. Sorry. We tried. Best to you and the other Founders, We The People ... JEERS to our profoundly broken country. This election should’ve ended last night in a landslide for the presidential candidate of truth, fact, and decency, even with a bunch of mail-in votes pending. I really don’t know what to say. Holy cow, seeing a massive chunk of our fellow countrymen choose hate and ignorance and outright gaslighting over the alternative is not what I signed up for.

Well a bit more good news: Maia Sandu was reelected president of Moldova, in spite of Russia’s attempt to undermine her and the country’s election. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, included some quotes worth mentioning. From a tweet by Osita Nwanevu:

Many Americans of all races do not believe our norms and institutions work, and a message about protecting them from a force promising to upend them will not be effective.

That got me thinking. I’ve said many times in various ways that Republicans invest strongly in the social hierarchy, with themselves and their financial backers near the top. People invested in the hierarchy oppress those below them because they believe the size of the gulf between themselves and those below is how their worth is measured. But that does not mean Democrats are the party that will subvert and eliminate the hierarchy. Yes, they welcome the working class and people of color. But they had chances to subvert, or at least blunt some of the oppression of, the hierarchy and they didn’t take them. They didn’t pass voting reforms (including rules to end gerrymandering). They didn’t tax the rich. They left the Senate filibuster intact. They allowed Republicans to deny approval of federal judges (Biden got a huge and diverse class approved, but many more languished in the Senate). The Department of Justice didn’t go after the nasty guy fast enough. They didn’t challenge monopolies (the meatpacker monopoly affects huge numbers of farmers in rural America). There are many other similar things I can’t think of right now. At our last lunch together my friend and debate partner talked about the young men in the 1980s and 90s who decided college was not for them. How are those men faring now, thirty and forty years later? Did we give them a path to a decent life or were they forgotten and left to low wages? Do they have resentments today, resentments they hope the nasty guy will fill? Back to Dworkin’s roundup. Heath Mayo tweeted:

Whatever happens, one thing is clear: Trumpism is now the GOP permanently. There is no battle for the future of that party. It believes different things now and doesn’t think character matters—and Americans appear to have plenty of appetite for it. It has no incentive to change.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

I wrote yesterday that I thought Harris ran a near flawless campaign. I still think that. And that removes one excuse. If she had run a mess of a campaign that would be one thing. She didn’t. I think she ran about as good a campaign as possible. I’m sure some people will blame her. I don’t think that will be fair. But big picture it doesn’t matter. Trump is the exception. Nobody gets a second chance to run for President. So blame her or not, it doesn’t matter. She won’t be running again. The reality we need to keep in mind is that incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic. From one perspective it’s no surprise that the U.S. appears to be following that pattern. But Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways was the option.

A tweet from Matt Ortega:

Classic Vidal Gore quote and he was right. “We live here in the United States of Amnesia. No one remembers anything before Monday morning. Everything is a blank. They have no history.”

For a while I wondered if Republicans won by fraud. I was thinking about Ohio in 2004 that tipped the Electoral College to Bush II, who got another four years. See the book What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election by Robert J. Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld, Harvey Wasserman published in 2006. I just read the description again and the level of Republican fraud was more involved and more extensive than I knew (and I had heard about the book back when it was published). So did that happen on a much more massive scale this year? Part of me wants to say, nah, the votes for Harris were down even in solidly blue states. Also, Michigan’s elections are overseen by Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. But in Michigan there are a lot of county election panels run run by people who supported the Big Lie in 2020. The next few weeks will be interesting, because this stuff won’t remain hidden (and partly because some people like to brag). I’ve been thinking of this morning’s news and what it means for the country and the world. Say goodbye to the robust economy that Biden guided us into. The nasty guy is promising tariffs which would cause inflation and retaliation. He has also promised mass deportations, depriving the economy of workers. Say goodbye to your neighbors from Central and South America. Being a citizen won’t matter. Say goodbye to health care. He has talked about bringing back the worst of insurance plans before the Affordable Care Act was signed. Say goodbye to safe women’s health. Say goodbye to the social safety net. He has promised to bring Elon Musk and his chainsaw to clear away anything that doesn’t help those at the top of the hierarchy. Say goodbye to efforts to curb global warming. He continues to chant “Drill, baby, drill.” Say goodbye to environmental protections. Corporations want permission to pollute. Say goodbye to consumer protections, what corporations call “regulations” which they declare are evil. Say goodbye to your transgender friends. If they don’t flee they could well be driven to suicide. Say goodbye to the filibuster. Republicans have been wielding it to great effect over the last few decades, blocking many Democratic initiatives to help the country. Yet, enough Democrats let them, declaring the filibuster to be more important than whatever democracy-preserving plan they were trying to pass. Republicans already blocked use of the filibuster for judges and justices. In the upcoming Congress they will have more than 50 but less than 60 votes. This should mean Democrats could use the filibuster against them. And Republicans will make sure that can’t happen. Say goodbye to Ukraine. Say goodbye to Gaza. Say goodbye to NATO. Say goodbye to a government for, by, and of the people. Say goodbye to civility. I wonder if, before four years are over, I’ll be saying goodbye to this blog. I’m not going to get my Christmas wish of never hearing his voice again. But I doubt he’ll live long enough to finish out his term. He’s declining too rapidly. Which means a new vice nasty will take over. And he’ll be worse.