Only Four Years Until The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime Again

By Every Single Goddamn Person Involved in American Politics

Washington, November 5 – It’s over. Or it’s just beginning. However you experience the aftermath of this exhausting election, we must all take a step back, take a deep breath, and let go of some of the tension we’ve been nurturing all year – perhaps even for five years. Even those of us who have not lived and breathed the campaigns recognize this was the most important, the most fateful  presidential contest in living memory, until the next one.

So many critical issues came to the fore, in a way that most of us feel is unprecedented: Middle East dynamics; COVID response; the Constitutional process; freedom of speech; censorship; moral leadership; media bias; fascism on right and left; political violence; involvement in overseas wars; the role and composition of the judiciary; relations with authoritarian governments; racism; trade; fracking; corruption; and a host of others. Seldom, if ever, have so many areas of controversy come to a head all at once, and they may never do so again. Unless you count November 2024, when we’ll do this all again with a slightly altered cast of characters.

A chief lesson we can draw from this, the most important election of our lifetime until the next one, is the value of voting. Even a Republican voter in a solid blue state, or a lifelong Democrat among the dyed-in-the- wool GOP crimson, felt the urgency, despite the futility of defying the overwhelming majority. For one thing, even given the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College model, the political and rhetorical value of the “popular vote” has gained new valence, lending symbolic significance to even the margin by which a state goes for one candidate of the other; for another, the Congressional and local races featured many of the same issues in play yet remained unaffected by the nature of any given state’s red or blue status, such that political-minority voters could make a difference locally where they could not in the presidential election. Voters haven’t felt this urgency since 2016 – and will not again in our lifetimes until 2024.

No matter what your political preferences or loyalties, now that the most important election of our lifetime has concluded, it’s time to exhale. We can go back to what we did before this seemingly-endless campaign, and dedicate ourselves to working up a froth over the same goddamn issues, with slight variations, that we will see as unprecedentedly fateful, existential, and do-or-die four years from now.

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