The Morning After

“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” — Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1849) (“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”)

Well, I won’t be taking my wife out for a celebratory dinner. I promised her an opulent night out if Stacey Abrams, Cheri Beasley, Val Demings and Reverend Warnock all won. It wasn’t a bet, only a promise to celebrate what I’d hoped would be sheer joy.

Of course that won’t happen now. Reverend Warnock is the only one who still has a chance to win, and we won’t know that answer until after the Georgia runoff December 6.

But if Warnock wins in Georgia, or if Catherine Cortez Masto, who is trailing now, wins in Nevada, the US Senate will be pretty much back where it started. It’ll be evenly divided, with VP Harris casting the deciding vote. Senators Manchin and Sinema will still clutch the filibuster like a sacred amulet, and nothing much will get done there. Even if both Warnock and Masto win, the resulting 51-vote majority will still require Manchin’s or Sinema’s vote to get anything filibusterable done.

As for the House, it’s likely to change hands. The spineless weathervane Kevin McCarthy will likely become Speaker. The radical rightists will launch a series of investigations. They will make Hunter Biden’s already miserable life even more miserable. They might even impeach his father, the President, without the faintest chance of convicting him in the Senate.

So the House will become a stage for political theater, nothing more. Democratic control of the Senate—not to mention the presidential veto—will prevent anything but truly bipartisan legislation from passing. The House may flirt with extortion again, as the Tea Party (now renamed “Freedom Caucus”) once did. But, one hopes, it will not go so far as to provoke a national-debt default and trigger a global financial meltdown.

Not much substantive will get done, except in the bowels of our federal agencies and our courts. Will our people begin to understand that those agencies—which the Demagogue derides as the “Deep State”—keep our air, airplanes, cars, drugs, food, highways, soil, water and workplaces safe, keep those Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and VA checks coming, and collect the taxes to make it all possible?

Don’t count on it. Fox and friends will continue persuading vast swathes of American that the folks who protect us from unsafe surroundings, misfortune, unleashed oligarchs and unfettered corporate greed, not to mention Vladimir Putin, are incompetent bureaucrats, “Marxists” and their enemies.

Then what, if anything, will have changed, other than giving the right wing a bigger stage for performative mischief?

Deep down below, I think, something is moving. Abrams, Beasley, and Demings, like Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, may not have won. But they came damn close—all within the low single digits. And Reverend Warnock appears to be on track to win his runoff in December.

What unites all five is that all are singularly attractive candidates, and all are Black. All except Barnes ran in the South, which is just beginning to take down the statues and amulets of slavery, 157 years after the Civil War ended.

Watching culture change is like watching grass grow, but in epochs, not days. Tribalism is deeply embedded in the human psyche, as shown by recent experiments with kids split into arbitrary “teams” with orange or green T-shirts. The particular kind of tribalism that we call “racism” is especially rooted, but even it is not immune to change.

Yes, all five candidates were and are attractive. Yes, all are smart, articulate, and relatively moderate. All were very careful not even to hint at any bias in themselves. But only one is on track to win: the Reverend Warnock.

For opponents of the other four, it was sufficient to mumble, in various coded ways, “But, she (or he) is Black.” The codes vary with the candidates, localities and seasons: “soft on crime,” “left-wing,” “extreme leftist,” “Marxist,” “socialist,” “enemy of mainstream values,” and “not one of us.”

For Warnock, that distinction was impossible to make, because his opponent, Herschel Walker, is also Black. So Georgia was faced with a choice between two Black men. One is a blithering idiot accused by women (claiming to be ex-girlfriends) of paying for abortions at his request. The other is an intelligent, caring, wholly decent man of the cloth, who’s already done the job for 18 months. The good people of Georgia appear to be making the obvious choice. That’s what progress looks like, at least in the South.

I write this with only a modicum of irony, because tribalism is a veritable force of nature. Just look at Russia and Ukraine to understand how nonsensical and durable it can be. So yes, Warnock’s future confirmation in his specially-elected Senate seat will be a baby step, but a firm step in the right direction.

As the Old Guard dies off, as youth arise to replace the gerontocracy, as our population changes through in-migration and differential birth rates, those steps will accelerate. And some day, maybe not in my lifetime, the best women and men will win despite any T-shirts they cannot remove.

To see what we’re all missing right now, you have only to watch Stacey Abrams’ gracious and eloquent concession speech. It’s one of the most moving I’ve ever seen. It covers all the points of Democratic policy in a few, well-chosen words. It rings the bells of decency and family. (Abrams’ own family is large.) It promises never to stop fighting. And it does it all with the grace, precision and beauty of language that one might expect from a graduate of Yale Law School, which Abrams is.

Watch that speech, and take encouragement. Abrams, who is still only 48, is not going anywhere but up. And so are the fortunes of all who can hear clearly, through the dog whistles of tribalism, the credo of unequivocal equality that is our nation’s gift to our species.


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