IIn the fall, suspicions about the consequences of the presidential election for America were often determined by a gloomy tone. The outlook was particularly bleak in an article in the magazine “The Atlantic”, which was translated as follows: “The election that could break America”.
The pessimistic outlook was based on the expectation that in the face of polarization, hostility and the heated atmosphere in the country, the losing side – usually Donald Trump was meant – would neither admit their own defeat nor recognize the legitimacy of the winner. The President actually did both of these things right up to the end.
The losing side would then do everything to make governance as difficult as possible for the new president – obstruction as a political method to thwart the outcome of a democratic process. The damage to key institutions of democracy would be accepted. Some even considered it possible that there would be open violence, that the “Cold War in America”, about which the political scientist Torben Lütjen wrote, would become “hot” – the “civil war scenario”.
Nobody could get a “6. January ”
And yet even the greatest pessimists could not have imagined that, after a cheering speech by Trump, in which he once again raved about the theft of a “landslide victory”, a mob would storm the Capitol in Washington. The events on January 6, 2021 stunned many because on the one hand it is against all democratic principles and customs, but on the other hand it shows the consequences that constant agitation and denigration of political opponents can have: radicals measured themselves grotesquely when the people to appear incite a riot.
The question arises whether this January 6th will have a purifying effect on politicians, more precisely: on Republicans who have benefited politically from the delegitimization of institutions and political tribalism; who only rarely contradicted a radical populist in the White House, if at all, and who until recently played a role in the legend of electoral fraud.
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“That’s what you got of it,” Mitt Romney called out to these senators under the impression of the events and physical danger. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, was one of the few to go unnoticed by opportunism and salaciousness in the past four years. There will be other Republicans who are honestly scared now; maybe also those who have only just discovered (want to) discover how destructive Trump’s rhetoric is.
Biden’s “progressives” are also a problem
Will these people soon go on a course of the fundamental opposition again and throw clubs between the legs of the new president at every opportunity so that he does not succeed, as they did with Barack Obama? In view of the division of the Republican Party, it cannot be ruled out that a moderate, refined wing will be willing to cooperate selectively. In Biden’s sense that would be – keyword non-partisanship, keyword reconciliation. In this way he could keep his distance from the “progressives” in his own camp, even if that were generally and especially tricky at the moment. After all, many Democrats have thoughts of revenge.
When Biden takes office soon, he will face a congress in which the opposition does not control one or even both chambers. This constellation – the White House and Congress are party-politically the same color – is not unusual at the beginning of a new presidency; it is the product of the swing of the political pendulum.
When Obama took office in 2009, “his” Democrats had a majority in both houses; when Trump replaced him in 2017, the Republicans had a majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. In 2001, under George W. Bush, things were a little more complicated in the Senate. But the general mood after the terrorist attacks of September 11th initially helped him to get majorities for his domestic and foreign policy projects.
Trump also had problems
“Unified government” is indeed the wish of every party strategist, but it is not a guarantee that the president will easily implement his program and get majorities for personnel proposals. Trump succeeded in doing this in tax policy and with his candidates for federal courts and the Supreme Court, but only with the acceptance of extreme party-political polarization.
He was no longer successful in health policy; Obama pushed through his health reform again, based solely on his own party. This ruling through against the party “on the other side of the aisle” is actually not intended; it does not conform to the spirit of the constitution.
The majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives are thin; there is a tie in the Senate, but this is broken in favor of the Democrats by the role of Vice President Harris. Incidentally, it was not necessarily to be expected that both candidates would prevail in the runoff elections in Georgia, but it is of enormous importance: for the state, for the balance of power in Washington, for the president’s room for maneuver.
It gets bigger, but it doesn’t make Biden all-powerful. The Republicans who are not Trumpists and those who are politically re-socializing under the impression of January 6 could be cooperation partners. But if the two parties continue to homogenize ideologically, Biden will also get to know the limits of the office. For an international treaty, he needs a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
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