“President Trump and his partisans… will certainly argue that he was robbed of a second term by the ‘China virus’ and its impact on the ‘greatest economy ever’ that he claimed as a personal accomplishment. But the president’s job-approval rating was the lowest this year in January, before the pandemic began, and reached its highest point in March, when the first big wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths had already hit.”
Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

“Biden needs to depoliticize the pandemic and remind Americans of their mutual interest in keeping it at bay. The country can’t waste more time on culture-war imbroglios over mask-wearing. Biden should work with state governors and health officials to marshal the unified national response… Biden should be prepared to work with both parties to pass a bill that supports ailing state and city governments, prudently extends supplemental unemployment benefits, and offers additional targeted relief for low-wage workers…

“The new president also needs to push reforms that respond to Trump’s repeated abuses of power. House Democrats introduced a raft of such measures in September, including provisions meant to curtail abuses of the pardon power, prevent presidents from profiting from their office, and protect the integrity of the justice system. These are reforms that would serve the country well regardless of who is president, and Republicans have no proper basis for opposing them. A deal on such a bill should help all sides.”
Editorial Board, Bloomberg

“It was working people’s organizations that had millions of conversations with voters this year. It was not the political operatives at the Lincoln Project or the Third Way who knocked the doors, who spoke to the voters, who heard their concerns. It was laid-off union members in South Phoenix; African American community organizers in Kenosha, Wis.; Latinx zoomers in Reading, Pa. None of us intend to let the far-right of the Democratic coalition claim a mandate for status-quo politics…

“In the midst of overlapping national crises, [Biden’s] administration has a critical window to deliver for the working people and young people who got him elected. If he fails to meet the moment — if he seeks instead to return us to a ‘normalcy’ marked by corporate handouts and extreme inequality — then the next Trump might be far more dangerous than the one we just defeated.”
Nina Turner, Washington Post

“While calling Trump out plays extremely well on MSNBC, it abjectly failed to deliver the electoral repudiation Democrats so desperately hoped for… As the researchers Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito pointed out in September in a prescient article warning of Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos, simply denouncing Trump’s racism often fails to move people who are not already opposing him. Instead, the message that resonated in their testing is one that combines opposition to racism with class politics… What Democrats need to do, they suggested, is not call out Trump’s ugly racism, but rather point out how his racist scapegoating is an attempt to divide Americans and allow the rich to continue their plunder of the country.”
Paul Heideman, Jacobin Magazine

“Trump wasn’t wrong to perceive China as a competitor and threat, even if his trade and tariff responses proved largely ineffective. Trump’s promise to deliver an alternative to Obamacare went unfulfilled, but he did break with conservative orthodoxy by refraining from cuts to the social security, Medicare and Medicaid programs on which the working class heavily depends. Trump’s anti-establishment shtick proved hollow, but he tapped into legitimate outrage against the ways in which both parties permitted elites and special interests to capture so much of the economy through tax dodges, anti-competitive arrangements and outright corruption…

“The Trumpian indictment of the status quo, in other words, corresponds to reality and can’t be dismissed as mere demagogy… The prospects for populist-nationalist conservatism will depend, more than anything else, on Democratic performance over the next four years. If Democrats fail to address the economic plight of the working class or check the excesses of their cultural left wing, or if they allow unauthorized immigration or crime to return to past peaks, the banner of Trumpism may once again fly over the White House.”
Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Guardian