Twitter and Facebook decided to censor all references to the corruption scandal. It even locked the New York Post — America’s oldest newspaper — out of its own account and muted the Post’s story on their platforms. So except for the small number of people with unusual interest in hard-to-access stories, that portion of the country which gets its news from Twitter or Facebook did not actually know what the Biden laptop story was about. It simply doesn’t exist in that universe.
Half the country knows that the laptop scandal appears to contain questions about the Biden family’s search for funds. The other half either believes that the story is entirely fabricated or was content to pretend to believe that right up until the day of the election. Because whatever the Bidens may or may not have done, it was worth ignoring in order to see Donald Trump and his family leave the White House.
And now we have the biggest disagreement of all about reality. One portion of the country — some way over half — believes that Joe Biden won this election. Another portion — nowhere near a majority, but possibly a majority of people who voted Republican — believes that Donald Trump won. Trump himself is irresponsibly laying the groundwork for the next four years of his career by sticking to this claim. And while he may at some point say that he is stepping aside for the good of the nation — which would not entirely be in character — he and his many supporters are likely to hold to the idea that this election was stolen from them by a corrupt and rigged system.
The only counter that the Biden camp currently has is to pretend that this is wholly untrue and that there is no corruption in the US voting system, especially not when it comes to mail-in votes. And all the while, that crucial middle ground, those people who recognise that there certainly are voting irregularities in the American system and that, notwithstanding, Donald Trump lost the election, is vacated.
At such a moment, a society enters a crucially dangerous juncture. Because once we no longer share the same reality, we can no longer empathise with our opponents or compromise, and from that point on absolutely anything can happen.
The incoming president and vice-president will naturally state that they now seek to put an end to all this. In his first speech since the vote appeared to go his way Joe Biden invited the United States to end what he called the “grim era of demonisation”. The President-elect begged: “Let’s give each other a chance.”
And yet that is exactly what he and his party spent the last four years not doing. After the election of their adversary in 2016, the Democrats came up with a fake allegation about Russian interference in the election. They claimed that Trump and his family colluded with the Kremlin to get him into office, and when the official investigation into that bogus claim found it was indeed bogus, the same people then attempted to impeach the president on the basis of a phone call with his counterpart in Ukraine. And now they say that people’s families are off-limits and that it is time to come together? It is obvious that Biden and the Democrats only want the “era of demonisation” and divisiveness to come to an end so long as it does so on their terms.
What if the Republicans decide to do to the Bidens what the Democrats did to the Trumps, by delegitimising the election result and with it the democratic process. And why not? Since the Democrats spent four years pretending that the last election was fixed, why shouldn’t the Republicans spend the next four pretending that this one was, too? Even if they do not believe so — as many Democrats doubtless did not sincerely believe their own claims about 2016 — that’s the game now.
And if the Democrats can pursue Trump and his sons over claims of collusion with a foreign power, why should the Republicans not as a first order of business order an official investigation into Joe Biden and his family? Indeed why should they not announce (as Democrat operatives did after the last election) that they intend to impeach President Biden the moment he enters office?
All of this would be to play the game in kind — it would indeed be “fair” — and would have as much point to it as the Democrats’ Russian vendetta had between 2016 and 2020. It would also tear this country further apart.
The problem is that neither side is any longer dedicated to viewing the truth in neutral terms — and the Democrats are still at it. At the weekend, one former National Security Council spokesman for President Obama condemned Boris Johnson’s message of congratulation to Joe Biden. Calling the British Prime Minister a “shapeshifting creep”, Tommy Vietor said “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama.”
But Johnson never made any racist comments about Obama — the Prime Minister had remarked in 2016 that Obama’s far from warm attitude to Britain may have been influenced by his Kenyan heritage, something no one would find remarkable if applied to, say, an Irish-American like Joe Biden. Vietor had simply elevated his personal interpretation of Johnson’s words into the status of fact and then used them as a political weapon to use against the enemy. He does so at the moment of his own side’s victory and triumph, a lack of magnanimity that bodes ill for the future.
Trump has gone, but if anyone thinks the age of vitriol and division is over, then they are truly living in a different reality. If you liked the last four years of American politics, you’re going to love what comes next.
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