The roller coaster of the 2020 election count moved many in the country from a grinding descent into despair into gravity-defying elation at Joe Biden’s election to the Presidency. And, of course, a little less than half the country experienced the exact same sequence of emotions in reverse order.

Few elections have so simultaneously exposed the virtues and flaws of our peculiarly American electoral system. The election went off virtually without a hitch. Despite widespread threats of voter intimidation and veiled threats of violence, actual outbursts were localized and limited. It’s too early to say what exact effect voter intimidation had, but with turnout at the highest level in a century, the most plausible answer is that it backfired spectacularly. Election officials, with a few notable exceptions, did their work in a diligent, competent, non-partisan fashion that gave the clear impression that everything was under control. The wave of legal decisions before the election, though not always just, largely cemented the ground rules in advance of the actual event, in stark contrast to the chaos surrounding the Florida recount twenty years ago. The people voted, the votes were counted; democracy was done.

Of course, that roseate description ignores the glaring injustice, arbitrariness, and anachronism of the overarching framework under which presidential elections are conducted. The 2020 election evinced, yet again, the utter hollowness of arguments in favor of the Electoral College. It does not confer preeminence to small or rural states, but rather designates states that matter, so-called battleground states, as those with a roughly even distribution of Democrats and Republicans, and then orders that subgroup of states by population, the most important swing states being those with the most electoral votes – the literal opposite effect that Electoral College proponents espouse. Arguments that the Electoral College must exist simply because it is in the Constitution are at least being honest that there are no merit-based arguments to support it; however, they fail to explain how an institution that has never been practiced as described in the Constitution can be justified by its mere presence there. The mechanism by which Electoral College supposedly benefits Republicans’ “real America,” namely winner-take-all allocation of electors, is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, and was very much opposed by the document’s primary author.

Biden held a clear, convincing, wire-to-wire lead in total votes, the method used to determine winners in every other election in the country. The only exceptions in modern times are the Mississippi governor’s race (abolished and replaced with a state-wide popular vote this year via ballot initiative) and the Republican nomination race, which allowed Trump to be nominated with a plurality of votes in 2016. The election seemed to hang in balance for days despite a clear indication of the will of the people, by millions of votes. Whatever the benefit of the Electoral College, no one can argue with a straight face that it is worth its concomitant uncertainty and undemocratic distortions to the American political system.

Constitutional issues aside, what are we supposed to make of the election results? Donald Trump was defeated, although Republicans clearly beat expectations by (likely) retaining control of the Senate, and making gains in the house. Democrats got the turnout they were looking for, only to watch in horror on election night as it was matched by an almost equal showing by new Trump voters. The New York Times’s map of partisan directional movement looks like some multicolored, fractal mess with giant swings in both directions from unexpected and, like those in south Texas and Florida, seemingly inexplicable locations.

But the tyrant was defeated and that’s all that matters, right? Your answer to this question probably depends on how seriously you took the Trump-as-symptom argument of the past four years. Democrats’ jubilation after the presidential election call was as good an indication as any that they never really internalized this idea, but rather viewed Trump as an aberration, a cancer on the body politic that could be removed surgically and, once removed, would allow for healing.

Those of us who did take this idea seriously, however, knew the instant the AP called Florida for Trump that, while the most immediate threat to the Republic may or may not be vanquished, the underlying condition would not be cured in this election.

The term “White Nationalism” gets bandied about without much thought to its underlying meaning. The idea is rooted in the understanding of a nation as a grouping of people formed on the basis of common language, history, and/or ethnicity. More importantly, nationalism extends this idea to say that individuals’ rights are only guaranteed by the nation’s sovereignty; a multicultural society denies the nation a state, and thus threatens the nation’s citizens their fundamental rights. One need only consider conservatives’ historical ease in denying rights to those they view as enemies, or even simply outside the nation (blacks, communists, “illegals”, terrorists, etc.), to show that American conservatism has never taken seriously the idea of human or “inalienable” rights, but rather has always considered rights to be granted by the nation in control of the state. Likewise, conservatives have always assumed that they would lose their rights if the state were to fall into the hands of any other group.

Photo by Mert Kahveci on Unsplash

This idea of the nation-state as the only guarantor of rights is viewed by many conservatives as the natural order of things, and more importantly that it was made that way by some larger, benevolent force; whether that be God, “the Framers”, social Darwinism, etc. The world has a structure, and conservatives need only trust the plan: have faith.

The world, of course, is more complicated than that. It exists, as is, due to forces intentional and otherwise, compounded over generations. The goal of the Enlightenment was to improve the human condition by identifying and controlling these forces: accept and understand past wrongs, work empirically and collectively to address present problems in order to insure a better future.

Trump is, in fact, a symptom. He is a symptom of a fully realized reactionary movement which rejects Enlightenment ideas of human progress and regards criticism of the status quo as the primary threat to stability rather than the underlying systemic problems that criticism seeks to address. Like all reactionary movements, this movement has resorted to restorative authoritarianism in defense of the status quo: a savior for the white nation-state that will swoop in and silence all the chaos by disappearing critics and sending undesirables back where they belong. This world-view can only render the entire Enlightenment project’s empiricism, skepticism, and reason as threats to the established order.

It is no irony that Trump launched his political career by telling a bald-faced lie, that the then President of the United States had a sordid origin on the dark continent which, to Trump’s mind and the fevered imagination of his reactionary followers, meant the first Black President ought to simply “go back where he came from.” Barack Obama’s presidency, like all inconvenient facts, represented a deep disruption to reactionaries’ sense of equilibrium. America doesn’t have a racist past you see, it’s just minorities “playing the race card,” as if liberals magically willed racism into existence by speaking its name. Obama was a daily reminder of the fragility of the white nation-state, which explains the mouth-frothing vitriol leveled at him, despite being quite politically moderate, initially quite open to negotiation, and ethically unimpeachable.

Engaging this mindset on the facts is counter-productive, however, because stated facts are viewed as the genesis of the underlying problem. Conservatives aren’t homophobic, it’s just that the gays keep rubbing everyone’s noses in it. Climate change isn’t real, it’s just liberals looking for signal in the noise to impose their economic plan on the rest of us. Instruments of violence are the only tools to provide peace in our homes. Trump and his lackeys aren’t incompetent, their agenda isn’t illegal, it’s just a “deep-state” backed by a cabal of liberal leaders who devote their global power to abducting children, raping them and stealing their blood. It is a world-view immune to evidence, which leads ineluctably to immunity to empathy and morality.

Trump has lost the presidency, but the reactionary movement he spearheaded remains, and will remain until it is rendered insignificant through the democratic process, or it ensconces itself into minority rule. What began in 2010 with the birther/Tea Party electoral reaction to Barack Obama will continue for at least another four years, and likely much longer than that.