ArcaMax

I’m allowing myself to believe that sane people may be in charge of Congress starting next Jan. 20. I know, I know: Polls have gotten our hopes up before only to have them dashed on the rocky shores of political reality.

But this time it does seem as if congressional Republicans will finally get their comeuppance for their blind loyalty to Trump.

The sense of relief in the land is palpable.

We may soon witness the beginning of the end of this daymare — unless Trump goes full-throttled dictator and prevents votes for Democrats in the Senate and House from being certified.

It’s important that we acknowledge that the forces that made Trump president — twice — are still embedded in America. I’m not referring to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” or Mitt Romney’s “47%.” They aren’t to blame.

I’m talking about the anger and frustration tens of millions of Americans began to feel some 40 years ago when the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy — that if you worked hard and played by the rules, your standard of living would rise through your working life and your children would eventually do even better than you — started coming undone.

Since the 1980s, an increasing amount of wealth has been siphoned off to the top — which has given those at the top enormous power to alter laws and rules, and thereby siphon off even more. It’s been a vicious cycle of compounding riches for a privileged few accompanied by compounding anxieties for almost everyone else, especially working Americans without college degrees.

Trump has channeled their anger into rage at carefully selected scapegoats — immigrants, trans people, Black people, “socialists,” women, Muslims — and asserted white male Christian nationalism as a cure-all.

But it’s become evident to a growing number of Americans that white male Christian nationalism has cured nothing whatsoever. It’s just made it more difficult for us to join together to reestablish the basic bargain.

If all goes well in a few weeks (and I write these words with a mixture of hope and trepidation), we will have a chance to start anew, to plunge into the work of rebuilding what has been destroyed. But also to go beyond rebuilding. To join together to change the balance of power in this land so that we, the majority, can decide our fates — not the billionaires, the tech bros, and the titans of Wall Street.

We can get big money out of our politics. We can achieve Medicare for all, universal childcare and excellent schools, and affordable homes. We can bust up monopolies that keep prices high, rein in AI and its data centers, and provide a universal basic income so AI doesn’t take away our livelihoods. And we can raise taxes on the super-wealthy and the richest corporations to pay for what Americans need.

We can do all this and more — not immediately, not with Trump and his regressive regime still occupying the executive branch and much of the Supreme Court — but we can prepare for it; we can lay the foundation for our future.

That’s what the beginning is all about.