And not a minute too soon. In many ways — often aesthetic, but also his unabashed corruption and criminality, willingness to openly embrace the extreme right in ways even Reagan wouldn’t — Trump was anomalous, but in just as many he was an inevitable outcome of what we are accustomed in the United States to calling “conservatism”. (In the GW Bush era, we used to call it “movement conservatism”, trying to draw a distinction that might always have been more spurious than we wanted it to be, between it and a more “traditional” notion of “conservatism”; but “movement conservatism” won decisively, and there is no other kind of “conservatism” anymore.)
The transfer of power doesn’t instantly fix any of the horrors Trump inflicted, but it does prevent him and his array of accomplices and sycophants — the Millers, Bannons, Barrs, Pompeos, Kushners, et al. — from continuing to worsen them, and it gets a lot of open white nationalists and would-be genocidaires out of positions of power. It doesn’t fix the underlying conditions, too many and complicatedly interrelated to get into here, but it does shift the possibility space: it’s not a given that Biden will do everything right (indeed, it’s a given that he won’t do everything right) but it’s a more realistic possibility that he can be pushed to do most things better.
Fascism isn’t dead, and the next four years will, I fear, see a lot of homegrown right-wing terrorism; there’s going to be a lot of work to do in and out of politics to try to make real progress on repairing the harms of the past and building a better future. A lot of that work will be done pushing against the Biden administration, not necessarily in cooperation with it, but it’s still a plain fact that this government will not be so resolutely opposed to progress as the previous one was, and will be more responsive to pressure toward doing the right things.
We can’t be sure of a better future, but there’s a little more reason to hope — if enough people work hard enough at it — for one than there has been for the past several years. That’s not nothing.
Scott Madin 