Competence and reality will win over ineptitude and lies

Today’s news is full of contrasts. The Administration has managed to ensure sufficient vaccines for the entire American population will arrive a couple of months earlier than previously programmed. The Texas Governor is lifting all COVID-19 restrictions, without any scientific basis and in the midst of a modest rise in cases in his state. Neera Tanden is withdrawing her nomination because she offended some Republican senators, who weren’t nearly as offended by Donald Trump’s grossly inappropriate tweets that got him banned from Twitter. The FBI director testified that the January 6 insurrection at The Capitol was domestic terrorism committed by Trump supporters and rightwing extremists, several hundred of whom have now been charged, while some Republicans are continuing to spout the lie that it was the work of leftists associated with the non-existent organization Antifa and maybe Black Lives Matter.

In short, we are living in an America where there are people in good touch with reality who are able to get difficult things done and others who prefer their own fantasies. Damn the consequences, even if that means shutting down the country’s second largest state for a week because it didn’t require electric utilities to prepare for the cold or connect the state’s grid to the rest of the country. Republicans in a way are proving their point: government really can be a menace, but mainly if it is incompetent, capricious, and ignorant. They are accusing and convicting themselves, not President Biden and his still new Administration.

The country is responding well to Biden, whose calm and restrained demeanor and popular proposals for reviving the economy are gaining approval ratings Trump never even came close to. Trump is still thundering, but like a storm that has passed. His speech at CPAC got little reverberation. He will nevertheless be able to keep control of most of the Republican party, as he is amassing a lot of money that can ensure primaries against those who want to turn the party back to its true, and desirable, conservative vocation. Trump will ensure that some of the worst candidates ever nominated win Republican primaries, people who make the QAnon fantasist and racist Marjorie Taylor Greene look reasonable. That’s fine by me: they’ll win some elections in safe Republican districts, but wherever there is serious political competition they will go down to defeat as true conservatives and independents flock to more reasonable Democratic candidates.

The party in the White House usually suffers losses in the mid-term elections. 2022 will therefore be a test of my proposition: Biden stands a good chance of doing better than usual and maintaining control of both the House and Senate, which both have narrow Democratic majorities. That would be the kind of electoral defeat for Trumpism that is needed to end Republican infatuation with racism and flirtation with violent extremism. It will be a fine November when competence and reality again win over ineptitude and lies.