The leaves are spectacular in the mountains of North Carolina at this time of year. You cling to them desperately, and try to savor every moment, because you know they’re doomed. They’ll be gone in a week or so. Winter is coming.
It’s hard to avoid seeing this as a metaphor for the election and our political system. If Trump somehow leverages vote suppression and the support of “his” Supreme Court into an unlikely victory, he will (probably correctly) view it as a successful referendum on autocracy, and behave accordingly. The next four years will be about the Orban Option, and whether it can be stopped. If Biden–the most inoffensive Democrat available–wins, he will have to deal with the fact that 30-40 percent of the voters consider his presidency illegitimate, because the bulk of his supporters aren’t straight white Christians. That, not the innumerable shortcomings of Trump’s personality, is the central problem of American politics today.
The only hope for our system is a successful Biden presidency that moves America to the left on economic issues and accommodates the right on cultural issues. It will be an exercise in threading the needle. The odds are against it. But it’s all we’ve got.