The twelfth and last item on my list concerns the nature and quality of our public discourse in these last decades. So much of it has been built around importunings from the darker angels of our souls. It’s been pathetic, frankly, to see the most decadently wealthy and obscenely powerful country in the world reduced over and again to indulging in a politics characterized chiefly by fear and hopelessness. Really shameful stuff. Fortunately, those days may now be over. The emotional outpouring from this election felt like a dam bursting open. And that wasn’t so much because of this or that passionate policy preference on No Child Left Behind, or even the Iraq war. Mostly it was people, collectively and individually, breathing again, believing again and hoping again. You don’t have to have been a clean and smiling extra in an Obama campaign commercial see that. This was a step out of darkness and into light.
In the days ahead, there will be myriad disappointments for progressives, and missed opportunities aplenty. My guess is that the new president will be about as centrist as events and his base allow him to be. I hope I’m wrong about that, and it’s truly too soon to tell (I suppose it would only be fair to let him be inaugurated and actually govern for a month or two before passing judgement, eh?), but if I had to guess now, that’s my sense of it.
Even if that’s how things turn out, however, we should recognize (without being satisfied by) what a major change this represents, and the degree to which we all dodged a huge bullet, even while getting peppered repeatedly by many other lesser but still highly destructive ones. Imagine a second 9/11, for example, and think how little it would have required to transition the US from Cheney to Putin under those circumstances. Eight years of the little dictator was horrific enough – could you imagine our very own President-For-Life, Jefe Arbusto?
But the twelve items listed above are not merely negative victories. Even if only some of these predictions pan out, the America of 2012 or 2016 will be nearly unrecognizable from the swamp in which we’ve been mired since 2000, and all those changes will be for the better.
And they will have hugely salutary effects well beyond our borders as well.
This truly was the ballot heard ‘round the world.
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