Excellent essay, Umair. Yes, the pundits' sighs of happy relief are way WAY premature. Yes, Trump will double, triple, quadruple down. Why do you think he encourages lovely white supremacists like the Whatever Boys?
I know you know why. It's also why he's carefully nurtured ICE to be his Brownshirts.
The fact is that right deep down at the base of politics, institutions and law is one thing nobody likes to admit to or think about.
Violence.
Law is actually dependent on the state having more or less a monopoly on organised violence in the police. The relationship between institutions and violence is more tenuous but still there. Politics? Very very obvious, especially when we get down to brass tacks.
Violence is the final arbiter of politics - whether externally applied in war, or internally applied in revolution (the poor) or coup (the rich) or civil war (everybody).
This means that it's highly likely Trump will need to be removed from the White House by force whatever happens. I hope somebody is laying plans for that rather than sticking their heads in the sand and going "Nah nah nah!"
Let's hope Trump loses by a landslide (I don't believe the polls either) and the Supreme Court and Amy Coney Barrett wimp out of giving him the presidency on a platter. He will refuse to go and some time in January will have to be grabbed and carried out - quite possibly after the Whatever Boys and evangelicals have spilled their blood all over the lawn and the Rose Garden for him.
Even if that goes better than expected, the uncontrolled problems of covid, inequality and worst of all climate heating will still need radical solutions.
Yet I continue to believe in the radical smartness of the ordinary American people - and the radical dumbness of the elites.
So let me echo one of the comments below.
What can ordinary people do in the short term - apart from voting, obviously - to protect their country from President Trump?
And what can ordinary people do in the long term to rid their country of covid, inequality and runaway climate heating?
