There Is Nothing Normal About the 2020 Presidential Election
Allegations of nationwide voter fraud that may give the White House to Joe Biden have eclipsed the news that the prestige press and social media worked so hard to stifle before election day. His son Hunter Biden’s laptop and a former business associate have provided ample evidence that the Democratic candidate and his family were paid millions of dollars by the Chinese Communist Party for unspecified services.
While that news may shock or anger America’s working middle class, whose jobs have been systematically shipped off to China the last twenty years, for the ruling establishment, the growing prospect of a Biden presidency comes as a relief. After all, they saw Donald Trump’s efforts to decouple the United States from China as an assault on their center of gravity—the decades-long trade relationship with Beijing that made America’s corporate, political, and cultural elite rich and powerful.
The political class can barely stifle its glee that Trump may be on his way out, especially in such vicious fashion. Even many conservatives see nothing but silver lining. The GOP gained House seats, they say, and attracted African American and Hispanic voters in record numbers. And if Republicans hold the Senate, that will put the brakes on any progressive initiatives a Biden-Harris administration is likely to push, like packing the Supreme Court.
That assessment is delusional. With a number of vulnerable GOP seats up for grabs in 2022, the Senate is almost certain to change hands in two years. In addition, given Biden’s rapidly declining mental state, it’s likely the presidency would by then pass into the hands of Harris, who owns the Senate’s most progressive voting record. Republicans appear to have forgotten that under a GOP-led Senate and House, Obama legalized Iran’s nuclear weapons program, despite the fact that they and most of the country opposed an agreement that gave the bomb to a longtime American enemy. The lesson conservatives should have learned was that with an allied press corps, an “echo chamber,” it’s not hard for a Democratic president to outmaneuver Republican opposition.
