The election isn’t even over, and when it is over, it will go down in history as one of the most divisive contests ever. And yet, as I predicted, Joe Biden is already claiming a ‘mandate for action’.
Although 74 million votes were cast ‘for’ him, a huge number of those votes — almost certainly a majority — were actually cast against his opponent. A lot of people who voted ‘for’ Biden would be just as happy to have a crash-test dummy in the Oval Office, so long as Donald Trump is not there.
And even if we entertain the fantasy that every single one of those votes was cast for Biden, instead of against Trump, it still represents only 1/3 of the number of qualified voters in the country.
Mandate? I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.
But because there’s no way for voters to oppose the candidate they hate more, except by ‘supporting’ a candidate they hate a little less, once again we face the prospect of our elected officials acting as though what ‘the people’ really want is for the 1/3 that came out on top in a deeply flawed electoral process to wield the force of government like a club to beat the other 2/3 into submitting to policies that they find, not just misguided, but abhorrent.
Like all recent elections, this is presented as a contest between the Donkey and the Elephant, but at heart it’s a replay of the fable of The Wolf and The Lamb.
