That Was Glorious and Amazing and Both an End and a Beginning

All yesterday I kept recalling Oakland's ice-skating champion Alysa Liu shouting in joy as she came off her winning Olympic performance early this year: "That's what I'm fuckin' talking about!," meaning this is what I intended and now I've done it. We did it. So many thanks to all the people and groups who never quit, never surrendered, never said victory was unlikely or impossible when the mainstream press insisted that the 2024 Trump election was a permanent mandate for fascism, just kept working toward liberty and justice for all regardless. To Indivisible and Third Act (whose members sent 800,000 GOTV texts) and everyone mobilizing and protecting the vote, supporting the campaigns of all these magnificent people headed to Congress and governors' seats and state legislatures, to everyone who dared to dream big and go hard after the dream of a better nation and a better world. We won because of remarkable voter turnout for Democrats , generating a remarkably huge shift (and low turnout by demoralized conservatives in many places, helped along by Trump's handpicked repulsive candidates: Paxton in Texas, Ramaswamy in Ohio, and the rest).

What comes after hope, when hope is realized, when hope is no longer necessary? Joy (and in this case some very justifiable gloating and relief and other related emotions, and I'm good with schadenfreude too). The results were astonishingly great in many states in what I think might be the best political night of my adult life so far. This election brought the first Native woman to become a senator with Peggy Flanagan (and maybe a second one coming with Mary Peltola), the first Black woman governor with Keisha Lance Bottoms and first Latina with Gina Hinojosa in Texas and first Native American with Deb Haaland in New Mexico, the first out gay senator with New Hampshire's Chris Pappas, Democrats in fuchsia-red Kansas, Iowa, and Ohio, the incredible victories of James Talarico in Texas, Troy Jackson bringing an end to Susan Collins's reign of mediocrity, and results still out on a close race that could bring us Mississippi's first Black senator since Reconstruction. And the election map showing a blue sweep of senatorial victories all along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Georgia (and Angie Nixon coming pretty close in her Florida race) was just staggeringly great. Two seats are still in play, but Democrats flipped seven. The majority is so secure it no longer depends on a single unreliable figure, as Manchin was in the Biden era, as Fetterman is now.

Serbia and Brazil rejected authoritarianism less than two weeks ago, and now we have the answer: so did (a whole lot of) the USA.

The Red South has fallen. We went to bed in a better country than we woke up yesterday, a day when it felt like we were coming closer to having representatives who truly represent us, us being the whole USA in all its beautiful diversity, this country whose future will soon be majority BIPOC, this country that has always been half women, this country that is Christian (Talarico!), Jewish (Ossoff!), Muslim (El-Sayed, first Muslim senator!), and atheist (Congressman Jared Huffman, representing California's north coast, is speaking out for the non-religious and fighting Christian Nationalism). About that Mississippi race: Alex Burness of Bolts writes: "With Mississippi's U.S. Senate race effectively tied, know this: About 70,000 people in Mississippi are blocked from voting because of felony convictions. *Two-thirds* of them are Black—a huge overrepresentation in a state where Black people make up less than 40% of the overall population." He also reports, "Virginia voters have toppled one of the nation’s harshest felony disenfranchisement schemes, ending a Jim Crow-era policy of exclusion that has blocked millions of people from voting since 1902."

The 2016 election was when I first became fully aware of the impact of voter suppression both in Trump's 2016 minority victory and in the Republican agenda. At some point well before then, Republicans hit a fork in the road: the electorate was becoming more diverse and more progressive. To win elections, they either had to evolve to appeal to more of that electorate or just try to brutally suppress and corrupt the vote, and you know the rest of the story: they chose the latter. I remember when Democrat Doug Jones won Alabama's special election to replace Jeff Sessions, when Sessions became Trump's first attorney general; it was a good victory and Jones was was a good man, but if Alabama had had truly free and fair elections it might have been sending Democrats, possibly Black women senators, to Washington all along. Yesterday, a Black woman, Juliana Stratton, won 61% of the Illinois vote and will in January will join two other Black women senators so we'll have three serving simultaneously for the first time (which is still a gross underrepresentation: Black women are about 7% of the population).

Texas and the south have looked so red thanks to massive suppression of the Black vote in its many forms, first as Jim Crow and then as various forms of intimidation and harassment and ways of limiting access (to students, the young, the poor, and others, but especially to Black citizens). As a Californian who can just wander down the block to drop off my mail-in ballot with ease, those long lines to vote in red states are both moving demonstrations of the will of the voters and outrageous because no one should have to stand in line for hours to vote. The fact that voters in many states overcame those obstacles does not excuse those obstacles. We need a new voting rights act. And maybe now we're positioned to get one.

Because what happened last night will bring the end of two years of unhindered destruction and corruption of the federal government, the transformation of it into a personalist regime and a persecution machine. In a sense we defeated the Confederacy last night. But this time we must get Reconstruction right and not let it get sold out the way it was in 1876-7. All this week annoying pandering centrist-leaning-right voices have been explaining why a huge Democratic victory isn't really a victory and why Democrats must be modest and mild and full of self-doubt and all the usual rubbish never levied against Republicans (Washington Post: "How a "Blue Wave" Could Ultimately Cripple the Democratic Party": Axios: "Democrats Could Learn Wrong Message from a Blowout Victory"). And some Democrats themselves have spoken as though – well the boiled noodle that is House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries asserted "The American people don't want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf." But those are not two different things, because "get even" trivializes the need for what Congressman Jamie Raskin has spoken so compellingly about: the need for accountability, hearings, and criminal proceedings for all the crimes the Trumpistas have committed over the past two years.

Raskin, a constitutional law expert and boldly progressive legislator who led Trump's second impeachment in the House in early 2021, said in June, "what I want to focus on as one member in what we hope will be a new Democratic majority: We have two different visions for government in the country right now. One says that the government must be an instrument for the common good for everybody, healthcare for everybody, voting rights for everybody. The other vision is that government is an instrument for private self-enrichment and corrupt moneymaking for the guy who gets in, his family, and his best friends. So we need an agenda that is going to be all about promoting strong democracy in America as opposed to corruption for the few. Nothing is off the table. You know, we have a number of different mechanisms for checking the corruption and lawlessness that have overtaken our country."

Elsewhere, in an interview with the New Yorker's David Remnick (who insisted "the greater public wants to move on with it" and criticized and argued with Raskin), Raskin spoke about how the Democrats are becoming a bolder party and why going after the criminality is necessary. I think most of the newer members in both houses are done with the appeasing, pseudo-centrist version of the Democratic Party that let off the financiers who crashed the 2008 economy and said silly things about finding common ground with Trump: there is no common ground or halfway measures about whether or not women or immigrants or trans people have certain inalienable rights, about the rule of law, about using federal funds as personal piggy bank. A background to this is the habit of blaming Democrats and progressives for what Republicans and right-wingers do, on the basis that they are not responsible for their actions and positions, we are, which is essential to the centrist insistence that the right must be handled with kid gloves. (I wrote about that last year in the "She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything" and after Biden's victory in 2020 in the essay "On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway.")

Last night, Raskin posted a quote from Tom Paine: "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, but we have this consolation: The more difficult the struggle, the more glorious in the end will be our victory." We have the victory over our age's Confederacy– that's an end of sorts– but now comes the Third Reconstruction* we must begin. This is why I've been going on about centrists and moderates: we cannot go back to the way things were. The way things were let the hideous destructiveness of the Trump era happen, let Trump win a first term thanks to big tech propaganda, unlimited corporate and billionaire spending, foreign influence, and the anti-democracy of the electoral college, let him go back to the White House thanks to the supreme corruption of the Supreme Court which protected him from the consequences of his crimes again and again. We must go forward to change our laws and systems and maybe our Constitution to make a more perfect union, one that is ready to defend democracy and the rule of law and meet the rising electorate, the electorate that gave us last night's champions and victories. There is a lot to be done, but that is not reason not to celebrate that yesterday we reached the reward of a lot that was done to build this glorious, this astonishing, this earthquake, this tsunami, this watershed of a victory.

*"In his landmark work on race and democracy, historian Peniel Joseph introduces the concept of “The Third Reconstruction,” a term used to describe the current era of racial justice movements in the United States. According to Joseph, the First Reconstruction (1865-1877) followed the Civil War, when newly emancipated Black Americans fought for civil rights and political inclusion. The Second Reconstruction (1954-1968) came during the Civil Rights Movement, a time when activists and Black communities dismantled Jim Crow laws and secured landmark legislative victories. Now, in the 21st century, Joseph argues that we have entered a Third Reconstruction, marked by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, renewed demands for racial equity, and the systemic pushback against these efforts." I would argue that a Third Reconstruction must include all human rights, including women, queer and trans, immigrant, disability, all racial and religious categories and maybe also the rights of nature.

p.s. I've wondered for a while if the future of the Republican Party is no future: it has utterly warped and compromised itself to try to ride Donald Trump's coattails to victory and it will be glued to them as he stumbles into obsolescence. The party stands for nothing but hate, cruelty, and corruption; it has driven out every member with integrity (I love seeing Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie fuck shit up on his way out – he's going to move next week on impeaching Secretary of Playing War Hegseth and was a key force in releasing (some of) the Epstein files, which is why Trump pushed him out; Massie is not very lame as ducks go, but Trump is just waddling and quacking, I dunno, into the unreflective reflecting pool). They're transactional, not loyal, and Vance is already blaming Trump's Iraq War for the defeat, which is just a nice reminder that Vance will never take responsibility for anything and learned nothing useful last night, but Trump is a stain they can't wash off, and the voters repudiated the cruelty, corruption, grossness, incompetence, and dishonesty Vance embodies and thus will never acknowledge). One of our jobs going forward, sorry centrists, is to reiterate every time it's relevant who wrecked the economy, the environment, the functioning federal government, food safety, education, international relations, and so much more. Memory is a superpower here.

There were too many victories to sum up, against data centers, for abortion rights, reclaiming state legislatures for Democrats in what might give us enough of a majority there to pass constitutional amendments, in local measures of all kinds. Of course there were also losses but it was a very, very good day. Onward!

And here's Stacey Abrams's reflections this morning. Her extraordinary work over the past several years to get voters to the polls and reform the voting process are no small part of last night's victories.