A fantastic piece:

The Fraudulent Universalism of Barack Obama
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/12/the-fraudulent-universalism-of-barack-obama

One of the worst passages in that God-awful burlesque of a memoir is when Obama can’t even summon up the courage to admit that he was responsible for murdering innocent children abroad, pusillanimously claiming that:

“In places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead."

Behind all that cowardly bluff and bluster is a wicked war criminal, just like the presidents who preceded him and those who will follow him.

What an astoundingly awful piece of shit.

Remember when Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel's brother, wrote that article in the Atlantic about how life after age 75 wasn't worth living?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/

Ezekiel Emanuel is now on Biden's COVID advisory board. Given the demographics of who COVID usually kills, it's not clear to me if Emanuel will be advising for or against COVID.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-medicines-ezekiel-emanuel-named-bidens-coronavirus-task-force

Anyone care to place a wager over how many Tyson managers will survive being guillotined?

"Tyson supervisors at a pork processing facility in Waterloo, Iowa took bets on how many workers would get infected with Covid-19, even as they took measures to protect themselves and denied knowledge of the spread of the illness at work, according to new allegations in a lawsuit against the company and some employees."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/business/tyson-coronavirus-lawsuit/index.html

Because Biden wants no association with any of the policy goals that Bernie, AOC, and other progressives in the Democratic Party have pushed for. He corrects his interlocutors anytime they accuse him of being a socialist or even being a "trojan horse" for socialism.

See who Biden taps for his Cabinet. I will put money down the pool of candidates will be CEOs, moderate administrators from non-profit organizations, and other liberal like-minded lawmakers.

And what's really frustrating is how the rightwing media and many conservatives love to label the Democrats as being communists wanting to usher in socialism. They are hysterical about it. If only the Democrats had the cojones to fully embrace the label and be a communist party...

Bernie was already the compromise candidate for the left. And even still you had primary candidates like Michael Bloomberg who fought so hard against Bernie becoming the nominee. Biden is A-OK because he isn't a threat to Bloomberg's way of exploitingliving. The financial capitalists can rest easy knowing there will be no intrusion on what they do. Heck Biden was the only "barely-just-left-of center" primary candidate.

And to be fair to Biden, he is already hamstrung with both a Republican controlled Senate and Supreme Court. So if he wasn't already going to be a worthless agent of "change", it's all assuredly guaranteed.

What can Biden do to "unite" this country then? Take a page from Obama's playbook on more "hope and change" platitudes? Trump's loyal base already thinks he's an illegitimate president-elect so I can't see what Biden can say that would change their minds. He's got to do something but how can he? Stifled by the separation of powers and ideologically not capable of radical change that so desperately needs to happen with American politics.

Watch this clip:
Donald Trump Voter Lost Her Home, Blames Trump's Pick For Treasury Secretary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jIpkrelra0

HAYES: "You voted for Donald Trump, tell me what drew you to him and why you voted for him."

COLEBROOK: "Like many of the people I'm in touch with who were foreclosed on by Mnuchin, we voted for Trump because we are fed up like most of America with the politics as it is. We're fed up with a government and all those elected officials who were elected to serve the people but they are really only serving themselves.They vote in special compensations for themselves, everything. They are not really working for us, its all lip service and we believed Trump would be an outsider, for the first time, who would work for the people as his campaign promised....He's quoted as saying is 'to you the American people not major donors, the party or corporations now.'

....

HAYES: "So do you feel like you were played, you feel like you were hoodwinked?"

COLEBROOK: "I think yes in some instances, I understand that he's got to you know bring in a good team, but this one? There's plenty of qualified people out there who are not Wall St. insiders who are not billionaires that were made billionaires off the backs of the working class people. The alternative wasn't great either..."

This is just one voter, but I think its fair to say that she represents millions of other voters just like her and I'm going to use her reasoning as a springboard for discussion.

Most of the commenters call this woman a naive idiot, she should have known better, you get what you voted for, etc. etc.

They are missing an important point which I bolded above which fueled so much of the anger within Trump's coalition.

For decades now, we've had career politicians come and go in our government that don't truly work for the people. We all know the Republicans only care to work in the best interests of the rich, but the Democrats also only care for a small elite group: the professional class. They've since long abandoned the working class in this country. We've since seen enormous inequality that continues to worsen which has made that precarious working class a lot bigger, and there hasn't been someone that can represent the anger and betrayal so many of these working class voters have felt until Trump came a long and gave them a voice.

You can see so many communities in America hollowed out thanks to offshoring and outsourcing, wages that don't grow, trade treaties that have only benefited business owners, corporate monopolies that have run out the smaller competition out of business, diminished public infrastructure investment, lack of adequate healthcare access, austerity, etc etc.

All of these conditions together make for the perfect storm of a backlash against the ruling establishment.

How many Americans rightfully feel their government doesn't serve them when they've used their taxpayer dollars to bailout the banks that engineered the financial crisis of 2008, while in return doing nothing for Americans who wound up homeless due to predatory mortgage servicing and other fraudulent schemes? How many financers and bankers were actually jailed due to the crisis? They got away practically scratch free and a financial system that caused this still intact. Wall Street hugely influenced how the government was going to respond to the crisis. That's why the recovery skewed favorably for them. And those on Main Street can suffer austerity in return.

Look at the measures of how much anxiety and stress Americans have lived through the past couple of decades. The world most Americans experience feels increasingly unfair and uncertain. Trump tapped into all this unease and anger that has been caused chiefly by neoliberal capitalism. Until you make radical systemic changes that decouples us from neoliberalism, the conditions your average working American finds themselves in will continue to get worse and in turn so will their anger as a voting bloc. It's very possible an even more evil version of Trump can come out of this. Biden and the rest of the Democrats have no strategy or plan to deal with this, they want a status-quo return to the Obama years and it's going to backfire against them even more than it did in 2016. Obama's (and his administration) failure to turn this country in a different direction during the financial crisis is directly responsible for Trump to have the political clout he does.

How can people celebrate this election result?

Trumpism has not been vanquished, as so many smug Democratic pundits predicted a landslide due to his "unpopularity".

Liberals are confirming my worst suspicions that they only care about throwing one man out of office and not doing anything about the material conditions that allowed Trumpism to emerge in the first place.

It's like "Now we can clink our champagne glasses, have brunch at the local vegan bistro, talk about the latest Real Housewives episode to the hairstylist at the upscale salon in peace, never needing to be shocked at whatever crazy Trump tweet today."

Trump has inconvenienced the liberal class daily by his brutish vulgarities. They simply want a return to their "normal" hedonism; free from the anger, resentment and spite so many of Trump's supporters have for them and their way of life.

They do not care at all to make those Trump voters lives any better (even if it meant not even inconveniencing them a little bit), so Trumpism will continue to grow even bigger as neoliberalism remains unchecked.

Make no mistake, Trump is a monstrous buffoon that deserves to be flushed down the toilet, but his whole movement ain't going anywhere anytime soon. Trump will return in 2024, either himself or a surrogate. And considering the lasting damage caused by the pandemic, Biden (or anyone else in his position) simply will not have enough time during his term to make noticeable improvements for the majority, especially with a Republican Senate that is going to obstruct any kind of Democratic agenda (even more so if they firmly believe he is an illegitimate president). 2022 will be a vicious backlash against Biden and the Democrats, setting up the stage for a massive re-take by Republicans in 2024 for the White House and whatever other levers of government not controlled by Rebpuclians then.

The sigh of relief couldn't be more fleeting. The next four years are just as worrisome as they were when Trump was in office. Every future election is going to be "the most important of our lifetimes".

America will continue to teeter on the brink of catastrophe.

Well if Trump thinks he won a second term for the next few months, he might not go full scorched earth. I could see that situation where it was absolutely clear he lost and then he would thrash about to make Biden's presidency that much harder.

The problem is it is impossible to have 3 (or more) viable parties in America due to FPTP voting system. I'm all for scrapping it for something else so progressives don't always feel like they have to compromise with liberals in the Democratic party.

I don't know that you can overstate how badly the Dems lost on Tuesday, even if Biden wins.

The strategic position that the GOP is now in is perfect. Completely perfect. Flawless. And that is with a Biden win. The set up for the 2022 and 2024 elections is astounding. Had Trump won, even with increased gains from even more gerrymandering there would still have been a backlash in 2022 against the GOP. Now that backlash will be against the Dems but at a much bigger scale. And the GOP will be better positioned for the midterms than perhaps any party at any midterm ever. Seriously. This could be a midterm swing that approaches 1894 levels.

Seeing things align with such amazing symmetry has to make one wonder if there was deliberate orchestration with this exact end in mind. A barely won Biden win with the Dems otherwise in a nosedive and losing on every other front. Yet the GOP still has them there as the foil.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/statehouse-elections-2020-434108