Новости за 07.11.2020

The election of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States heralds a massive change in the U.S. approach to controlling the coronavirus pandemic—a shift from a president who has consistently downplayed it to one who has vowed to make the coronavirus response a top priority, starting Inauguration Day. But Inauguration Day is still nearly three months away. Even as analysts and the American public anxiously waited for the final battleground states to be “called,” U.S. coronavirus... Читать дальше...

Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States. But we are now in President Trump’s lame-duck period, a roughly two-and-a-half-month interregnum that the country must endure before Biden takes the oath of office to become the nation’s forty-sixth president. Until then, Trump retains control of the executive branch. His appointees remain in charge of federal departments and agencies; his orders to civil servants and the military carry legal weight and force; American diplomats around the world carry out foreign policy on his behalf. Читать дальше...

Let’s be clear about what we are seeing. President Trump is doing all that he can to prevent ballots against him from being counted in an election he has now lost. He and his surrogates are encouraging his supporters, some of whom are armed, to disrupt the final stages of the electoral process. Though his actual legal cases being brought in defense of his claims are weak, his surrogates are directly urging judges he has he appointed to back him anyway. If it were another country, few would hesitate to call this what it is: an attempted coup.

We have a new president, but little else has changed in terms of the work ahead. A Biden administration may be more vulnerable to pressure from the left, but its positions on climate disaster, police and private right-wing violence, mass precarity and poverty, and other compounding crises of our moment will do little to pull us out of the fire. Our elite institutions are largely incapable of responding to the urgency of the moment or the left movements rising to meet it.

An unshakable feature of the last four years has been this heavy, crushing incredulity that Donald Trump managed to become president. A lot of things had to go right for him at once, and he was incapable of recreating that stroke of luck in 2020. But it might be even more remarkable that President-elect Joe Biden managed to do it as well. After all, Trump was an extremely famous TV billionaire, and proved over and over that his core of support, about 40 percent of registered voters, would wade through fire or ice for him. Читать дальше...

Sisyphus finally got the boulder up the hill. And Joe Biden—48 years after he was elected to the Senate and 33 years after he launched his first race for the White House—is president-elect.

The defining story of the 2020 election is, of course, Joe Biden’s apparent victory over Donald Trump. Though Democrats fell short of a once-in-a-generation landslide victory, they convinced a substantial majority of voters to reject an irredeemable racist. But voters across America, from reliably blue states in the Northeast to ruby-red bastions in the South, also came out in favor of multiracial democracy in more subtle ways—even as they sometimes backed candidates with less tolerant views.