Trump had to go if there was a sliver of a chance to save our democracy.
He is gone, thanks not to congress or the courts, but the American people.
But let’s be real. Saving our democracy will require much more than Trump’s defeat.
If Democrats were to lose the two Georgia Senate seats scheduled for run-off elections in January, the Biden administration will quite possibly encounter a period of obstructionism similar to what we saw during Obama’s term.
Under a Republican-controlled Senate, Biden would be unable to act decisively on a whole range of issues, to include the pandemic, climate change, a public health insurance option for Americans, judiciary appointments and systemic racism.
We expect partisan positions on various political issues. But regardless of one’s political views or party alliance, democracy cannot survive without strict adherence to transparency, truth, justice, and a predilection for empathy and decency.
Donald Trump ran a Mac truck over these democratic values, and the question before us now is whether they can be revived.
It’s an open question.
At the moment, Biden is on the path to garner over 75 million votes. No other American president has totaled that many. Before this election, the closest was Obama, whose 2008 win garnered 69,498,516.
Trump has received more than 70 million votes thus far in this election. While his total is some 4 million less than Biden’s, that is a lot of Americans voting for a man who is as antithetical to our democracy as communism.
Clearly, if Biden’s win is to trigger a rebirth of our democracy, the first item of business has to be a concerted effort to resurrect our shared values.
There is perhaps no better political duo than Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, to tackle this task.
However, let’s be frank. Trump delivered a near mortal blow to our norms and values, and it will take time, patience and dogged commitment to revive them, if at all that is possible.