Some Final Reflections on the 2020 Presidential Election and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender within the American Electorate
by Kofi Natambu
December 31, 2020
The Panopticon Review
Eight
weeks ago on November 3, 2020 the national voting public of the United
States—an alltime record of over 155 million citizens!—elected
Democratic Party candidate Joseph R. Biden as the 46th president of the
United States in what many observers and analysts have deemed the most
important and consequential national election since 1860 on the cusp of
the Civil War. The deeply alarming, even terrifying rise and emergence
in just the past five years of ideologically malevolent forces both here
and abroad and rapidly metastasizing in the form of the wildly chaotic
and authoritarian neofascist regime of Donald J. Trump had sent the
entire political system and much of U.S. civil society itself into
widespread turmoil, conflict, and panic. This stark reality only greatly
increased deep seated anxieties and fears throughout the Republic over
centuries long structural, institutional, and systemic fears,
dislocations, corruption, and demagoguery regarding addressing the
foundational public categories of race, class, and gender in the
American body politic at the levels of both political economy and
cultural identity.
As a result what ultimately distinguished the 2020 election from its historical predecessors was a tsunami of bizarre and deeply disturbing behavior and actions involving openly public confrontations, endless disinformation campaigns and venomous rhetorical assaults by President Trump on not only his Democratic Party opponent and challenger Joseph Biden but an ongoing series of unrelenting attacks on virtually any and everyone the president thought, felt, or simply imagined were opposing, slighting, or otherwise dismissing him and his bluster. This included not only many Democratic Party politicians and stalwarts like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer but also many others like progressive politician Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez and what was known as “the Squad” (fellow progressive Congressional representatives Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib) all of whom happen to be both women and people of color, two of Trump’s favorite punching bags, but many members of his own subservient enabling Party as well on the vary rare occasions when they didn’t openly kiss his ass and sing his praises. The impact on the general election outside of these machinations and ID-fueled rages by the president and the ugly destructive fallout from it was complicated and made even more sinister and disruptive given the extensive racist police violence against African Americans throughout 2020 (e.g. George Floyd, Armaud Arbrey, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake etc.). Meanwhile a massive deadly global pandemic ravaged the entire country making it virtually impossible for the Democratic nominees (Biden and Kamala Harris) to campaign in any traditional or conventional manner which involved appealing to large crowds live in realtime. However even this clear and present danger of spreading the virus via live events which led inevitably to the direct transmission and eventual infection of thousands of supporters didn’t stop the wild antic “super-spreader”events in which thousands of Trump’s supporters endangered themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.
Despite all the many distractions and the often patently cruel and simply braindead demonstrations of a national cult of fervent supporters of Trump’s despicable rightwing demagoguery and rank exploitation of not only the general public (most of whom were intensely opposed to the president on both a personal and political/ideological level) but of his most dedicated followers as well. Meanwhile the already very deep and persistent divisions of the country along racial. class, and gender lines and revealed once again (as they have for over 70 years now) just how dependent the two major political parties remain on the electoral and ideological domination of these divisions. Thus while Trump continued as he had in 2016 to garner a very substantial majority of white American voters (over 57% of all white voters—which collectively numbered over 100 million people this year!-- cast their ballot for Trump, with 58% of white males and an equally distressing 55% of all white female voters also voting for Trump’ despite his deeply white supremacist, corporate, and misogynist agenda.
As a deeply determined counterweight to this huge national surge of white American “vote of confidence” in a clearly fascist regime and its raging sociopathic leader nearly 80% of a huge number of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American voters voted against this same regime and leader with the national black vote as usual leading the way with 87% of its voters refusing a replay of the last four years despite widespread voter suppression. As a result, over 81 million American voters collectively voted for Biden while an astonishing 74 million still voted for Trump (a very ominous sign of just how "popular" FASCISM currently remains in American politics and culture). This gigantic turnout meant that the two candidates individually received the most votes of any two candidates in the history of the Republic. That the country is still reeling from an extremely deadly pandemic (over 350,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus as of this writing), a rapidly collapsing national economy, and a frankly maniacal and equally deadly national rightwing coalition led by the heinous Republican Party and the brazenly ruthless likes of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, as the rabidly criminal and fiercely antidemocratic antics of the now defeated president continues to assault the political system in general it’s clear that the 2020 election has merely delayed but is still nowhere close yet to firmly and decisively DEFEATING what is as of January 1, 2021 still a clear and present danger to not only this nation but the entire world. Stay tuned because the political, economic, cultural and ideological war that MUST be waged in this society and throughout the globe against the still gathering and rapidly expanding forces of fascism, whether we “win” an election or not and especially whether we “like it” or not is more imperative than ever …
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
