"Will [Biden] deliver is the question?"And not only will he, but *can* he deliver, faced possibly (that's still to be decided) with a hostile Senate and a blatantly loaded Supreme Court.Simon Schama set it out clearly in an FT article last weekend:"More than any election in living memory, this one is not so much a choice between opposed policies as a totalising and bitter fight to the death between two mutually exclusive visions of what America is meant to be. In the way of such battles of beliefs (more akin to a war of religion), each side is convinced that the victory of the other spells the end of the republic, so the contest turns into a competition of terminal nightmares.Mike Pence declared with frosty certainty that in Biden’s America “you won’t be safe”, and the Trumpian nightmare features a socialist apocalypse in which the suburban idyll is invaded by low-rent riff-raff, city streets reduced to carpets of broken glass through which looting anarchists carry off appliances of their choice before setting your parked SUV ablaze. In this communist inferno much will be abolished, including, inter alia, Christmas, cows, large windows, the entire gas and oil industry and God. An opposing dystopia features the purging of civil service professionals and their replacement by political trusties; the demotion of science when its findings run counter to presidential self-glorification; the corruption of history into a cult of uncritical flag-wagging [and we don't know all about that here in England?]; the conversion of the Department of Justice into the enforcing arm of the executive — in sum, the end of constitutionally protected democratic America and the birth of a tinpot autocracy wallowing in spoils.-------------A moment of truth is at hand. Or perhaps a trial of strength, not just between two mutually and grievously hostile political tribes, but of the fortitude of American democracy itself and, above all, its presumption of a peaceful transfer of power from the defeated to the victorious candidate. In an unprecedented and shocking departure from normal practice, Donald Trump has given notice that his acceptance of the election result could be conditional on the decision going his way. Should that not happen (and at the time of writing it seems that it won’t), the cry of “rigged” will go forth from @realDonaldTrump." As, indeed, it has. “The two Americas” - https://on.ft.com/2JnII0l
Richard Carter ● 2193d