That’s more like it.

We’ll probably never get a true concession, and we’re going to have to account for that precedent in some way at some point. (Speaking of unpresidented, I wouldn’t be too surprised if a certain someone doesn’t show up for the big event.)

Nevertheless, things can now get underway that really need to get underway — like the Covid-response, economic, and national-security teams comparing notes.

As you Zoom through your turkey on Thursday, thank a Michigander.

So far, both the pollsters predicting a “blue wave” (remember those days?) and the pundits predicting widespread chaos in the streets — especially with anything less than an overwhelming Biden-Harris win — haven’t seen their predictions fulfilled.

Plus ça change, in the first case; thank goodness, in the second.

However, this leaves us facing the third risk: the most obvious, and therefore hardest to see coming, and probably the biggest.

Simply put, that’s the risk of deeply divided, more-or-less-nonviolent stagnation and decay. More of the same might not feel like much of a risk — it’s what we know, after all — but that’s no reason to underestimate it.

It might not be who you think (though he certainly has the worst loser title locked up for what I hope is forever).

In an especially perceptive FT column, Ed Luce wonders just what it might look like for the new administration to put the U.S. back at the head of the table of global democracies. Four or five years on, democracy ain’t what it used to be. No matter how powerful the urge to turn back the clock to the status quo ante, it’s now definitively post — and the status quo has changed in a lot of countries. If we convene the world’s democracies now, who would be invited or not, and why?

But the killer line — which Luce doesn’t explore as fully as I wish he would — is this:

Whatever else can be said about Mr Trump’s foreign policy, he did not start new wars (though there are still 60 days to go). When historians look back on America’s early 21st century politics, my hunch is they will say [George W.] Bush did more harm to global democracy than Mr Trump. [emphasis added]

This was the first campaign in almost two decades that didn’t center on 9/11 and the forever wars. But those — and the methods by which they’re fought — are now firmly bipartisan.

Trump’s style shocked a lot of people — so much so that I’ve heard a lot of nostalgia for the Shrub years. But, even if we don’t count Bush v. Gore, too many Americans still don’t appreciate how much damage the Bush/Cheney years did. As I once read, the world spent centuries trying to outlaw torture, mercenaries, assassination, and wars of aggression — only for the leader of the free world, at the height of the Pax Americana, to bring all of them back at once and with gusto.

If you’re still poring over the election results, wondering who we’ve become and how we got that way, it’s worth recalling Powell’s UN testimony, the Abu Ghraib photos, and Obama’s drone-strike (and deportation) policies.

***

Lagniappe: in the NYT, Mark Leibovich writes a “memo from Washington” with a sub-head that truly says it all: “President Trump and his lawyers are engaged in a spectacle that would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous, and if the stakes weren’t so high.”

Stay un-melted, my friends.

Of course it’s both. From mail carriers to cabinet secretaries, people working with the most classified intelligence to National Park rangers, the actual nature and content of the work vary widely.

But the impending transition is another huge opportunity to really rethink how we think about government work, which is famously (if not always fairly) pilloried for being stuck far behind the times.

Even under the present, Covid-denying administration, lots of work that was previously impossible to do remotely started getting done remotely. From January onward, with the virus raging out of control (and, yes, a vaccine on the horizon), what will an administration that’s serious about Covid do about workforce practices and policies?

If substance follows style, there should be room to make some unprecedented experiments with remote and digital work. This carries risks and inconveniences, of course, but it did the same for bankers, doctors, and other professions that were totally hooked on the in-person experience — and they’ve all more or less carried on.

I can’t enumerate all the downside risks here, but the upside seems significant: it’s a great impetus to make government more flexible, responsive, and secure. And it would seem there’s substantial downside risk in bringing everyone into the office — a West Wing outbreak would be bad PR on its face, and presumably quite dangerous for the oldest president in history.

We finally broke up with floppy disks a couple years ago. Let’s see how much we can catch up — or get ahead — over the next six months or so.

Prediction: the sooner vaccines help us get a real handle on Covid, the more like the old normal the “new” normal will look.

Right now, it sounds like the best guess for the earliest possible hope of something resembling post-pandemic life is the second half of 2021. And that means the race is on to get the presidential transition done, the cabinet members in place, and new laws and regulations approved that will shape the recovery.

What follows won’t be exactly the same as before, of course, but this is — to employ a really overused turn of phrase — a truly unique opportunity to set up some channels for the tsunami of economic activity that will follow the practical end of the pandemic.

There’s probably not enough time, for example, to aggressively pursue antitrust cases against Big Tech. But the more that can be done to encourage a small-business-led recovery (not to mention some real competition or innovation in the tech industry), the better. Ditto infrastructure, health, and, above all, climate.

For practical purposes, the first six months of 2021 are likely to be defining for both the Biden presidency and the trajectory of the pandemic. Buckle up.

Slow and steady often wins the race against human perception and action.

A 20-degree temperature jump in March has everyone commenting, but a few catastrophic degrees over a few decades can’t be acted or even agreed upon. And so forth.

With the exception of Covid — which sort of crept up on us in its own way — all of the most interesting problems we face now are slow-and-steadies that have “suddenly” become huge and immediate.

Injustice. Inequality. Globalization or deglobalization. Environment. Education. The future of work. Artificial intelligence. And on and on.

To say that all these are waiting for us on the other side of the pandemic is to miss the point. Like the endless tropical storms this year, they’re still going on, whether we choose to focus on them or not.

In a thought-provoking FT column yesterday, Janan Ganesh writes:

If this year has thrown up a lesson beyond the coronavirus pandemic, it is that a — perhaps the — culture war burns within the left, not between left and right. On one side are liberals who define justice as equality before the law. On the other are those who see this republican idea as a sham, preferring group rights along ethnic and gender lines instead.

As Democrats prepare to transition into power, it’s worth considering very carefully the extent to which a or even the culture war is more of an internal problem than an epithet to throw at Republicans.

It’s also worth looking carefully at the battle lines as (reductively) drawn here. Even if it’s true that the standard of justice before the law hasn’t been met — as so clearly appears to be the case — arguing that some groups are more equal than others is a position with an unhappy history.

Even if a left-right culture war continues (and I’d argue that that’s likely), the left-left conflicts are about to be extremely public, and arguments for relative, group-based rights are a recipe for bitter division.

Here, via NOBL, and in much greater detail than I could manage on Sunday, is New York magazine’s longform take on what’s happening over at the NYT.

There’s a lot here, but I’m especially impressed with the typologies (institutionalists vs. insurrectionists vs. techsurrectionists) and the conundrum expressed in the killer closing line.

Who’s editing the paper, who’s reading it, who’s writing it, and what each wants of the others is a matter worth paying attention to. The world keeps asking, it seems, if all that matters still fits, or if what’s fitted really matters.

No prescriptions on this, yet, just an observation: it’s much too rare to find solid, effective explanations of complicated and complex problems where we need them most — in politics and business leadership.

Complexity, like innovation or disruption, is a buzzword. But it’s arguably more descriptive of today’s world than the other two: even while almost everyone is using the same search engine (and the same one as 15 or 20 years ago), the world we’re seeking to comprehend is getting more complex.

This places a high premium on accurate and effective description, to be sure. But we clearly can’t describe the world as quickly as we can complicate it, and most of the problems worth describing are worth acting on.

(It’s also interesting that complexity is increasing at the same time that we’re all being taught to have shorter and shallower attention spans. How that’s going to play out over the long term is outside my lane, but it’s hard to imagine that we’re not doing ourselves any favors by consuming less about more, rather than learning more about less.)

Action generally starts with a specific handle: you can write an infinitely long paper describing and complexifying the food system, but the solution has to start with a specific intervention.

It must be possible to learn how to better describe problems, assert solutions, and make the case for particular interventions. That seems like a skill worth practicing and selecting for.

I’ve read perhaps a bit less than usual this week (in current events, anyway).

But one thing I’m noticing more and more clearly — in daily reading of the FT and in a three-person panel of foreign correspondents in the United States hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday — is that the non-U.S. press seems much more focused on the long-term trends in U.S. politics and culture, while the domestic press (especially and exemplified by the NYT) is focused on the immediate and personal.

There are exceptions on both sides, of course, and it’s often easier to spot your neighbor’s faults than your own. (Remember how bad austerity was in Europe, while we somewhat less blatantly choked our own recovery in 2008-09?)

But it’s often worth hearing what your neighbors are noticing and care to share. And it’s a really useful reminder of how much the U.S. press has changed in the past several years.

The NYT, for example, sends a lot more push notifications than the FT does, and the NYT’s are almost all highbrow clickbait.

A truly great newspaper is still a great luxury. And, even as the “media” landscape continues to change before our eyes, it’s worth asking if it’s wise for the paper of record to go on a years-long, barely-disguised marketing campaign against a sitting head of state.

It’s hard to know how to proceed when not all news is factual and the consensual delusion of “objectivity” is melting away. But I don’t think we can pretend by this point that even the most stolid sources aren’t pretty heavily filtered in their own ways.