In the days after the 2016 election, I wrote a blog post titled Where Do We Go From Here?, a commentary about the runup to the election and the results. At the time, I was very disillusioned by the negativity of the campaign in the months prior to the election and while I was not at all pleased with the results, I wrote about keeping an open mind and hoping that the Constitution's system of checks and balances would result in limiting any drastic changes to policies in the years under a Trump presidency. And while I had full intentions to write this in a more timely fashion, the developments were moving so fast that anything I wrote would have been obsolete the moment I published it, and that may still be the case! In a review of this post four years later, so much has changed, but at the same time, not much has changed at all.
Four years under Donald Trump has made us more divided than ever. Issues that should not be politicized, such as racial equality, scientific evidence, and denouncement of hate and domestic terror groups, have divided much of the nation into distinct camps. Trump and his supporters have made bigots of many kinds comfortable to spew their hatred and misinformation like wildfire. He has sown distrust for credible media sources, teachers, doctors, scientists, and essentially anybody that does not agree with his agenda. And a pandemic that has been raging for months? Don't get me started on that...
To top it off, weeks after the elections and after the results of the election were called by major media outlets (across the political spectrum, mind you) and vote certifications underway, he refused to concede defeat and has filed lawsuits that claim rampant voter fraud without evidence, nearly all of which have been tossed out. Supporters continued to feed into the misinformation and other leaders within the party that has the ability to denounce it have enabled him even further. Then, the unfathomable happened: a sitting president encouraged a violent uprising in protest to the certification of the Electoral College results, leading to hundreds, even thousands, storming the Capitol in an attempted coup. If you would have told me in January 2017 that this would have happened, I would have thought you were writing a movie script.
As a historian, I can think of countless comparisons of leaders that did these exact kinds of things in dictatorships where misinformation, distrust, and questioning of legitimate election results have plagued nations and lead to outbreaks of violence and worldwide wars. But in the United States of America? The nation that is supposed to be the beacon of democratic principles across the globe? And to have an armed mob storm the Capitol, nearly without resistance, is something that you see on the news that "happens someplace else." (I recently watched both seasons of Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime and found it very chilling to watch people storming the presidential palace after a contentious election in Venezuala, events that are not true, but very realistic looking on the show.) Whether the security for the Capitol on January 6 was that ill-prepared or in cahoots with those responsible remains to be seen, but to have it be the first time that the Capitol had been breached since the British stormed Washington, DC in the War of 1812? I'll let you reflect on that...
Now that President Biden's inauguration is behind us, I have been overcome with a sense of relief. Not because things are going to change instantly and life is going to be "normal" again, but because of a lot of different reasons. I am relieved and excited that the new president is somebody that is not going to go out of their way to be divisive in their words and actions (politically, one may not agree with him, but let's face it, Joe Biden is not going to take to Twitter to belittle people and fire them from their jobs). I am relieved that the new president is surrounding himself with competent, intelligent people that have experience in their fields, not simply appointing friends and supporters like the spoils system of decades ago. I am relieved that the various government agencies are working diligently to bring those responsible for the insurrection of January 6 to justice, as arrests and charges are filed on a daily basis. And I am relieved that the problems that were brought into the open further by the previous four years can be addressed and work can begin to solve them.
This is not going to happen overnight. When the Allies defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, Nazism did not simply disappear. It took years for war criminals to be brought to justice and the effects that fascism had on German society to be eradicated, but even then, it wasn't eradicated completely. Is it fair to compare Trumpism to Nazism? Perhaps not, it is comparing apples to oranges, but many aspects are very similar, such as the disinformation campaigns, attempting to ignore legitimate elections, and the refusal to denounce xenophobia, racism, and white nationalism in the ranks of supporters. And this is not to compare all Trump supporters to those groups, but this country has, for far too long, ignored problems in the name of supporting a party or ideology, i.e. supporting law enforcement but turning a blind eye to systemic racism in policing.
And what does this mean for education? For starters, an educator, Miguel Cardona, will be leading the Department of Education, not a billionaire hellbent on destroying public education and helping for-profit schools line their pockets. There has already been discussion of forgiving student loan debt to help people get out of that debt and stimulate the economy (imagine where people that normally spend $500/month on student loans can put that money!), but with slim majorities in the House and Senate, it may be tough to pass large scale forgiveness. But perhaps the most important aspect of turning the page? It is even more apparent how important educators' jobs are to help mold informed citizens. Even after Biden's inauguration, there is still a large percentage of people that feel that the election was stolen and rigged, all because they were fed lies by the president and relied on QAnon and far-right "media" sources for their information. Teaching students how to analyze sources and determine if a source has a credible reputation (ex. Associated Press, Reuters, etc.) is going to be the catalyst moving forward for limiting disinformation from our lives.
As I mentioned, I was not excited for a Trump presidency in late 2016 and 2017. I kept an open mind but was sorely disappointed in those four years. And while I do not expect Joe Biden to be a miracle worker that will go down as the greatest president of all time, I do have hope for the next four years simply based on common decency and the decisions that he has made leading up to the start of his term, most notably, naming Kamala Harris the first-ever female vice president! We may not agree politically, but I look forward to the coming weeks of productive discourse without fear of reprimand from the Oval Office's personal Twitter account.
Until next time...
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