A friend shared an article with me the other day that offered a simple-yet-conflated explanation for why so many Americans voted for President Trump again: essentially, they’re lazy, selfish, and racist.

The author spends a dozen pages explaining in strenuous detail that is true, dammit: we’re not who we say we are, but rather a lot of couch-potato has-beens snarfing junk food and buying cheap plastic stuff while talking about the good ol’ days.

Even if this is true, methinks the author doth protest too much. More than yelling at the reader to look at reality, I get a sense that she’s shocked, shocked to find that Americans are, on the whole, at least as lazy, selfish, and/or racist as any people to have walked the earth.

To admit that humanity has angels other than its better ones is not to excuse or enthuse over a blatantly venal, corrupt, and lying politics, though. That some are cynical enough to do so, given the choice, should not be a surprise — but it should remind the rest of us that presidential speech and actions matter.

We’re human, and no president can compel us to be more than that. But they can encourage us to be better to each other and the world beyond.

Building back better has to include government. In many ways, it might have to start there.

But, as New America’s Mark Schmitt correctly pointed out in the NYT yesterday, there’s a lot of building to do, and the opposition is likely to be fierce. Plus, he continues:

Mr. Biden and his team might also not realize how much has changed, and how many of the basic structures of daily governance have been broken. One value of democratic norms is that they create expectations that allow smooth transitions across administrations or within them. As those norms have been broken in the Trump years, so have those expectations.

People’s direct experience of government and the services and security it provides, or fails to provide, shapes our sense of ourselves as citizens in a democracy as much as, or more than, elections and legislation. Much will depend on the Biden administration’s preparation for what it finds when it finally takes the keys to the White House.

The Trump administration didn’t fill a lot of jobs (or filled them with incompetents, sycophants, or permanent temps) precisely because it wanted to change how government is experienced. So there’s an enormous amount of rebuilding to do, but it will be vulnerable both to Senate obstruction and public expectation.

That’s a very long lever in the hands of the dear leader of the (probable) Senate majority. With a country desperate to be well served by a new administration, it’s all too easy to prevent the appointment of competent people and then — shamelessly as always — blame the other side for incompetence.

Just about everyone agrees that much U.S. infrastructure is “crumbling.” So, what to do about it?

The obvious answer is to fill the potholes and fix the bridges. And a large chunk of post-2008 federal stimulus money went to doing exactly that.

But it’s worth remembering that roads and bridges presuppose cars, which presuppose carbon. To paraphrase a quip from Dr. Russell Ackoff, making the best cars in the world sounds great, until you consider that the world can’t bear so many cars.

Rather than going down the tired old road of declaring war and/or calling for a “moonshot” on an issue — infrastructure, healthcare, or anything else big and complex — only for it to devolve into squabbling over the details and eventual, ineffective compromise, it’s worth thinking about leverage points and leapfrogging.

With the twin forces of a historic presidential transition and a pandemic, there’s both a need and an opportunity to build what really matters — systems, infrastructure, and services that work.

This might be more retail-politics than some progressives are comfortable with, but “better” needs to be clearly and effectively defined. If climate is the challenge, paving isn’t likely to be a long-term solution. And if it’s a diverse democracy we want, safe, secure, accessible, and guaranteed voting systems will go a long way.

Some things might best be left to crumble. And we don’t need to go to the moon tomorrow. What if, instead, we combined broadband, bicycles, trains, and small planes to work and travel more efficiently — with nary a pothole in sight?

Something I’m pondering: is hindering the transition categorically different (in terms of norm-breaking, gravity, or culpability) from abetting the outgoing administration?

If there are going to be any consequences (and that’s worth thinking through very carefully in its own right), it might be logical to draw some kind of dividing line at the time the results were determined, and possibly to put a higher price on misbehavior in the next ~70 days.

Mean-reversion is the idea that the status quo usually wins. We make a change, it sticks for a while, and then we snap suddenly or gradually back to the way things were.

It’s an extremely powerful force, and often under-appreciated. (We all know the statistics on new year’s resolutions, but we keep making — and breaking — them anyway.)

As we look forward to a presidential transition, then, it’s worth considering how mean-reversion is going to show up in the new administration.

On the one hand, part of the promise is that we can all get back to living our lives without so much doom-scrolling of Twitter and “news” feeds. A calmer, more professional, and more political politics is to be welcomed in many ways.

And yet it’s also clearer than ever that the old status quo was mean in every sense: not only averaged-out, but actively unjust, inequitable, and unsafe for far too many people. The promise of restoring normalcy shouldn’t be taken as license for inaction.

Drama might not be the best metric by which to measure an administration, but it’s one we’ve been taught to apply over the past dozen years.

Eight years of “no-drama” turned out to be too easy to spin as under-delivery.

Four years of extreme drama partly obscured spectacular failures to deliver, but kept the whole world transfixed at an unhealthy and unsustainable level.

And so the new administration will face a serious choice: how dramatically will it take on an opposition that’s sure to be just as intransigent as they remember — and then some?

It’s high time for a calmer, cooler-headed presidency. But it’s also going to be important to dramatize obstinate obstruction — who’s responsible, what they’re doing, and what it costs.

With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory, the next step on the path out of the Trump presidency has been cleared. Thank heavens.

But where are we this morning, and where are we heading now?

In other words, what exactly is different this morning to the way it was yesterday morning?

If you have been (or remain) fixated on the presidency itself, the easy answer is, “everything!” Insofar as the president is a symbol of the nation, at home and abroad, that’s essentially true.

But with the largest sample size in 120 years telling us the nation is really divided, with Covid still surging, and with more than 70 days to go before the keys to the White House actually change hands, some sober reflection is probably in order after the exhalations and exuberance of yesterday.

We have a chance to move forward, and that’s precious. (After all, the first rule of holes is, when you find yourself in one, stop digging!) But consider what we’re moving on from: much of what has become true over the past four years and what was true over the past four days is still true now.

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A few readings I’ve found helpful on the long-term view of what’s happening:

• George Packer, “There’s No Escaping Who We Have Become.” An excellent, brief take written between election and decision by one of the original chroniclers of the “unwinding” of modern America.
• Janan Ganesh, “A Fickle America Cannot Lead the World.” In the Financial Times — always valuable for its less-U.S.-centric perspective — Ganesh notes that, having experienced Trump and learned to hedge against the United States, the rest of the world will still cover its bets even as it joyfully welcomes a more traditional U.S. president. (If you knew that another Republican was going to be elected in the next decade or so, wouldn’t you do the same?)
• Marilynne Robinson, “America — A Nation Out of Joint.” Also writing in the FT, Robinson takes stock of a country and a culture badly wrenched by five years of out-of-line behavior.

I would bet a fair amount of money that Mitch McConnell wants to see Biden win the White House.

With his own position assured as leader of the intractable opposition, I bet he’s more than happy to gloat over the successes of the past four years (binders full of judges) while settling back down to his familiar role as the most powerful person in politics. Wouldn’t you rather hamstring a no-drama type than see where a briefly-useful renegade is going to lurch next?

The good news is that even such a cynical betrayal might be enough to send Trump packing. As with Nixon, the end of Senate support will mark the end of the viability of the presidency.

The bad news is that McConnell will remain as the American Deng Xiaoping, charting the country’s course even as he assiduously avoids the “top” job. (Seven terms in the Senate is far more time than any president ever gets in the limelight, after all.)

If we don’t want to find ourselves in an America with Kentuckian characteristics [as defined by McConnell, that is], it’s essential to come out hard and fast making clear that McConnell is the one standing in the way of the progress everyone wants.

And the place to start is with economic stimulus. Nearly half the country voted for the economy over the pandemic (as if such a thing were possible!), and everyone who’s not worried about a potential wealth tax wants a stimulus.

If the flatlining patient in 2008 was the economy in general, which is to say the banks, in 2020, it’s the American people. So the Democrats need to present a united front, immediately, in proposing legislation that would unambiguously benefit the average Kentuckian. And if it’s blocked, as McConnell determined that everything should be during the Obama years, then, instead of taking the easy way out with executive action, it’s essential to keep the heat on the person — and party — responsible.

It’ll be slow and ugly, but the opportunity in divided government is to further expose the lies. And I hope we can agree that Dear Leader McConnell shouldn’t be the architect of the third decade of this century, too.

The biggest theme I’ve noticed in conversations over the past few days — almost exclusively with people who could too easily be lumped together in some kind of “liberal bubble” is a shift in the question they’re asking.

Four years ago, it was generally something like, “How could they?”

Now, it’s almost universally either “How could we” or “Who are we?”

There’s no relishing, no reveling in this uncomfortable revelation.

But if it’s true that “the quality of your life is the quality of your questions,” this could be a much more fruitful starting point for a new beginning than the naïve innocence of a “repudiation” would have been.

As of this writing [Wednesday evening], we’re still in limbo. And I know I’m not the only one asking how we got here and what it might mean.

Three early notes on this difficult time:

1. It’s not decided yet. A quick, decisive victory would have been a blessing, but it was not to be. However unsatisfying, though, limbo is not the same as a loss — so do not give in to despair or defeat.
2. “Over” is still multiple steps in the future. The coronavirus continues to rage (much worse than when the world was ending in March and April); the response isn’t looking more effective; and the current administration still has two months in office, no matter what. Too, the election still needs to be tabulated, decided, certified, and conceded before the next term begins.
3. To the extent that this is a “battle for [or referendum on] the soul of America,” the results so far indicate that this nation is deeply sick in our collective soul.

And it’s that last point I really want to dwell on here. Even if a presidential transition is in the cards, those of us hoping for one cannot forget these days and what they felt like. To do so would be to let ourselves much too far off the hook.

In a way a “blue wave” could never have done, these days should — at long last — puncture the persistent sneer that those people can’t really be serious about all this, after all. The tightness of the margins in such a large sample size, and in a contest where the choices couldn’t be clearer, clearly shows that whether or not we were this way four years ago, we most certainly are this way now.

It’s perfectly understandable to be heartsick at the depth of our soul-sickness. In fact, it’s probably necessary — coming to know ourselves is often painful.

And that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Anecdotally, the most consistent theme in my conversations over the past few days has been a chagrined sense of coming to see our shadow.

If we get the result we want in the end, it will be awfully tempting to forget this time and what it might say about strategy or governability or morality. But we must not forget. Having renounced “hopey-changey” stuff, we cannot now deny our shadow. It can change us for the better, if we let it.