What’s next?

Biden has pledged to be the president for all Americans, including the more than 74 million Trump supporters. Many of those people are still convinced that Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide, and that Biden used a massive vote fraud scheme to steal it from him. Already right-wing groups are mobilizing – and committing acts of domestic terrorism – to try to ‘stop the steal’.

It’s complete nonsense, of course, but four years of Trump have successfully created an alternate reality for his legions of followers. Courts have thankfully adhered to the law – and common sense – and thrown out dozens of frivolous lawsuits before the Electoral College vote. That included a particularly insane suit by Texas to overturn the election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. More than 120 Congressional Republicans signed onto a brief supporting that suit, as did 17 Republican state attorneys general (including most of the former states of the Confederacy).

Still, millions believe that the election was stolen: Powerful voices in Washington, such as US Sen Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, held a hearings into bogus allegations of voter fraud; State-level Republicans have called for secession or for Trump to invoke martial law to seize power. Add to that the fact that the economic forces that facilitated Trump’s rise are even stronger today than they were in 2016.

Beginning day one, President Biden will have to deal with what amounts to a recalcitrant fifth column in American society that stretches into the government, and which has been conditioned to see his administration as illegitimate. Biden will have a hard enough time governing without having to worry about the schism in the body politic.

If the Republican Party holds onto just one of the Georgia Senate seats in the Jan. 5 runoff, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t hesitate to use his de facto veto power to hamstring any legislation that doesn’t include major giveaways to big business. A Supreme Court newly cemented on the hard right wing – similar in judicial outlook than the infamously anti-civil rights and anti-labor “Lochner” court of the early 20th century – is unlikely to endorse broad-based changes in the economic structure of the nation, even as climate change poses an existential crisis.

And so we have to acknowledge and be prepared to take on the challenge(s) ahead. One of the hallmarks of cultlike behavior, which is being demonstrated by Trump supporters, is a resistance to facts that conflict with the adopted narrative. The illogicality of that belief system also shields adherents from logical persuasion. We won’t be able to argue our way out of this without fundamentally changing the facts on the ground.

That means addressing those basic economic issues that have been ignored by both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades. Since the pandemic began, 8 million people have fallen into poverty.

Excerpted: ‘Biden Won. Now Comes the Hard Part’

Commondreams.org