The US presidential election
As we speak, the suspenseful question on everbody’s lips across the world reverberates: who will win the US election today? All of the polls have turned out in Biden’s favour, but that being said, the same was the case for Hillary. And we don’t need a second country-wide, MSM-covered, narcissistic book tour belatedly explaining to us “what happened” — and there’s more to it than Butler’s take of psychoanalytically “licensing the (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, nativist) unconscious” of Trump’s bigoted voter base.
Biden, for all his agenda of finally removing Trump from the White House and being the neoliberal less of two evils, remains an emphatically decrepit and demented old man, at times struggling to remember the names of Obama and even of his presidential opponent, having trouble with articulating powerful messages in coherent sentences, and looks more elderly than Trump. However, he is the bastion of the pre-Trump status quo, and as such he’s preferable in several respects.
As it stands, the way to the White House is open if either candidate wins Pennsylvania or the Rust Belt in general. If the legacy of gerrymandering and of discouraging the black voter base from having a high turn-out counts for anything, the Republicans may well have four more years in office. However strong an impact those institutions may make in the present, the ongoing pandemic, economic and ecological crises have hopefully overriden their influence to a greater degree.
What’s more worrisome is the prospect of how long these institutions may endure, and the future harm already done by this administration: six out of nine Supreme Court justices are, as of Barrett’s recent confirmation, conservative. And that’s a visceral threat that will persist for several decades onward, likely to undergo the process of constricting abortion, gay marriage and transgender rights. Transgender people have historically already faced heavy discrimination in the U.S. military service and been barred from it by Trump, and that’s not to overlook the ghastly possibility that the conservative 6–3 majority could completely overhaul the Affordable Care Act by deeming it unconstitutional. The road to sociopolitical perdition is polarisingly clear.
I hope Biden prevails, and the numbers certainly tick in his favour. If Trump is going to win this election, he will have to secure critical states such as Florida by a thin margin, where Biden only has a slight edge, so it’s going to turn out close no matter the result. May the Red Wave cease.
