The price of real political reconciliation is real repentence.

This country has made the mistake of attempting reconciliation without repentence. That what happened after Reconstruction collapsed in 1877.

We cannot afford to do that again.
And the problem is that we all know that there will be no repentence on the part of the people in power who led and enabled Trump, i.e. all Republican elected officials.

And there will be very little repentence on the part of the voters who supported them.
There will be little to no repentence because none of them think they did anything wrong.

They supported white supremacy and policies that have killed a quarter of a million of their fellow Americans in less than a year.

And they continue to support these things.
Let's, by all means, be willing to accept real change, if and when we see it, on the part of those responsible for the last for years.

Bit let's be very careful not to imagine it when it hasn't happened or act as if it has when it doesn't.
The fantasy of a Biden landslide was largely a fantasy about real change on the part of the voters who gave us the last four years. Tuesday night proved that was indeed a fantasy. Trump ran as Trump and his voters stayed with him...and grew in number from 2016.
We won. There are more of us than there are of them. But fascism has a huge base in this country and the fight against it is anything but over.

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More from @Ben_Alpers

8 Nov
Is there a common political take that is lazier than the argument that an election that results in divided government means that Americans want divided government?
To begin with, the Senate does not remotely reflect popular will (nor is it even designed to do so). And even the House, which in some sense is so designed, is gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
However disappointing the results of congressional races in this election were for Dems, more Americans cast votes for Dem House candidates than GOP House candidates. And the same is true for the Senate as a whole (though I'm not sure about the 1/3 that is being elected now).
Read 5 tweets
7 Nov
I've already seen a bunch of Republicans suggesting this was an unusually close election. But it really wasn't. Biden will likely end up with both very solid wins in both the electoral college and the popular vote.
That an unusually large number of states were very close (and more _looked_ very close than will likely end up that way) made for a lot of tv drama but ultimately didn't make the election unusually close, at least for this young century.
Both 2016 and 2000 were clearly closer elections than this one. And 2004 (which could have flipped with one close state, OH, going to Kerry) was arguably closer, too.
Read 6 tweets
19 Oct
This piece is practically journalistic malpractice. The US has long lines because the GOP wants fewer people, especially people of color, voting. And when it controls state governments, it does what it can to make voting more difficult. Long lines are an intentional outcome. 1/
Long lines at polling places are not a technical problem. There's no mystery at all in how to eliminate lines. Plenty of (blue) states do so. Solving the problem of long lines will involve either shoring up the constitutional right to vote or simply defeating Republicans. 2/
Unfortunately, the latter solution is at best temporary and the former solution can always be undone by a GOP Supreme Court, as the Roberts Court turned the 15th Amendment's enforcement clause into dead letter in Shelby County. 3/
Read 5 tweets
18 Oct
At the start of the year, PM Jacinda Ardern was in danger of losing the next election in NZ. But she just won a historically large victory, likely allowing Labour to be the first party to govern NZ alone since 1993, when NZ reformed its constitution to encourage coalition govts.
Nobody should be surprised that the key to Ardern's victory was her successful response to COVID-19.
If Donald Trump loses in two weeks, many will blame the pandemic for his defeat. But this would be getting things precisely wrong.
Read 8 tweets
18 Oct
I find this Jill Lepore op ed extremely frustrating. 1/ washingtonpost.com/outlook/truth-…
To begin with, though Lepore treats them as essentially similar, a truth and reconciliation commission and criminal prosecutions of the Trump administration represent opposite impulses. 2/
As their name suggests, truth and reconciliation commissions trade away justice for knowledge of the truth and a chance to reestablish social solidarity. They often feature amnesty for witnesses and perpetrators willing to come forward and tell their stories. 3/
Read 22 tweets
20 Sep
That serious people argue against Democrats adding seats to the Supreme Court BECAUSE OF THE NORMS is extraordinary and depressing....though at some level unsurprising. 1/
I am not one of those who think that norms are unnecessary or a pack of shitlib nonsense (that was the Flavor of the Month among the anti-anti-Trump "left" a couple years back). In fact, I don't think any constitutional arrangement is meaningful without functioning norms. 2/
But (and I feel silly writing this because it should be so extraodinarily obvious) norms are not an absolute good. Some norms are, in fact, terrible. Racism and patriarchy, too, rely on norms to function. 3/
Read 20 tweets

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