US election 2020: Joe Biden home, but mandate is thin

How long will it take the movement represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to become frustrated by the failure to implement a radical agenda? Picture: AFP

The US election delivered the Democrats their president-elect, but hardly the avalanche of woke-ism we had been told to expect.

Instead, Biden is likely to be the first Democrat president since Grover Cleveland in 1884 to face a hostile Senate. The Republicans have increased their numbers in the House and did not lose a single state legislature.

The Democrat agenda was even thwarted in California, where voters flatly rejected ballot initiatives to raise property taxes and to abolish the constitutional restriction preventing the state discriminating on race.

Across the country, the attempt to play the race card against the President backfired. Donald Trump, the alleged white supremacist, increased his share of the vote in every ethnic category except white males.

Trump, the wall-builder, increased his share of the Latino vote from 35 to 45 per cent in Florida. Substantial numbers of Asian voters joined the ranks of the deplorables. The African American vote increased too.

It was a defeat for the patronising assumption that Americans are slaves to their skin colour. Non-whites cast their votes according to perceived self-interest, just like everyone else. Trump was more their kind of president than a stumbling Democrat surrounded by proudly anti-conservative young firebrands with strange ideas about gender.

Biden has been elected without a mandate to do anything much. There will be no green new deal, no massive fiscal stimulus or expansion of free healthcare, at least not without one hell of a fight. The Supreme Court won’t be packed nor new states created to lock in a progressive hold on power.

Never-Trumper Republicans got what they wanted. Trump has been removed in a surgical strike while leaving the GOP brand intact.

They might find it harder to accept that Trump has strengthened the party’s reputation by clarifying on which side it stands in the culture war. The Republicans present as the party that is unashamed of its country and wants to be proud of it.

It is the party that wants to see hard work rewarded, the middle class prosper, and the governments of other countries play by the rules.

By tweeting where others fear to whisper, Trump has hammered home the fence posts along the line between the contrived, false morality of the intellectual left and homespun common sense.

Trump has goaded the left, where polite politicians have sued for peace. He has incited his opponents to overreach, to up the charges against him from racist to fascist, a dictator in the mould of Hitler and an accomplice in the murder of George Floyd.

Under Trump, the left has hit peak Jacobinism, says conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson. The Black Lives Matter movement and its Maoist fellow travellers have tarnished the Democrat brand, forcing the party’s candidates to account for the company they keep.

Brand Democrat is in deep trouble, mired in campus culture and shackled to woke ideology that working-class Americans flatly reject. COVID-19, and a sharp recession, should have been enough to make toast of the President. Yet there was no blue wave, just a pale trickle. The Republican-Democrat balance in almost every legislature in the country is roughly identical to 2016.

There is undoubtedly some truth in the allegations of electoral fraud. Whether it was enough to alter the result is less clear, but it will taint perceptions of legitimacy.

Trump came within a whisker of a second term by mobilising armies of first-time working-class voters, the people who instinctively felt they belonged to Trump’s “us” rather than the “them” of the Democrat elite.

Split-ticket voting appears to have been rife among voters who had the stomach for neither four more years of Trump nor unchecked Democrat rule.

While some might have held their nose at Trump’s behaviour, the majority of Americans could not accept that Trump was irredeemably bad. They recognised his substantial policy gains. The economy was booming, and the US is a net exporter of energy for the first time in a generation.

Trump’s stand against the Chinese government and breakthrough for peace in the Middle East won him Asian, Cuban and Jewish votes. He will leave office as the first president in many years to keep America from entering costly foreign wars.

Above all, he has secured the middle ground for the next Republican presidential nominee.

The battle for the soul of the Democrats, on the other hand, is far from won. The movement represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is likely to grow frustrated by a weak president lacking the authority or the numbers to implement a radical agenda.

That is not to say the left has failed to make ground under Trump’s presidency. By clarifying the things for which Republicans stand, Trump has locked his opponents into contrary positions and driven the media to abandon any pretence of dispassionate neutrality.

Don’t expect Biden to continue Trump’s fight against disproportionately powerful digital platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter which egregiously interfered in the election by censoring the President. The unaccountable censors in Silicon Valley will be even less accountable in 2024.

The protests will continue, and not just because Antifa has its Christmas shopping to do. The riots were only superficially about toppling Trump. Instead they promoted an ever more radical ideological agenda to which there could be no compromise.

Despite the campaign’s messy finish, there is reason to marvel at the strength of American democracy, which frequently checks the waywardness of leaders with the wisdom of the popular vote.

“The men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs in the United States are frequently inferior, in both capacity and morality, to those whom an aristocracy would raise to power,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville 150 years ago. “But they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct hostile to the majority.” The result of last Tuesday’s ballot reveals that principle to be as strong as ever.