Welp

The Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett yesterday in a party line vote, I will not be wasting the words on explaining why this is horrible and hypocritical, you all know them and if you don't, well, I dunno, message me or something and we can go into it.

As with most things this isn't the end of the world, this is a true statement, very little is the actual end of the world, but the only people you hear saying that when shit like this happens are folks like me: White, cis, straight, and safe. For everyone else their world got a little bit darker yesterday.

I do not think things like Roe V Wade and the ACA are automatically doomed, the right has been consistently disappointed by it's appointees over the last few years and while things on those fronts certainly got worse there is still a pretty high chance that stuff survives, that said you can certainly be forgiven or panicking and are not wrong to do so, nothing about this is good, at best it maybe won't be quite as bad as we fear.

I am saving my worry for the election, I do think that even with a great deal of cheating from the GOP the vote will end up in Biden's favor, and I think we'll probably know that by election night. So outside of the nightmare scenario of Trump reusing to admit defeat and the Supreme Court handing him the election, which is a possibility, we'll have the Biden administration in January.

There my worry starts, you see, Joe Biden is in many ways to the right of Reagan, at least based on his voting record and statements. I do think he either supports, or more likely just doesn't care enough to oppose things like LGBTQ rights and he probably will contribute to pushing the white power folks back into the shadows, but I do not expect him to work for true Medicare for all, or to fix the family separation crisis, or the student debt crisis, or the racist police, or to scale back our military interventionism, or the drone program.

He'll put the kind mask back on American politics or a few years, and try to return to normalcy as fast as possible. To avoid looking like he's retaliating and making enemies on the other side of the aisle, he will not do much to purge Trump appointees and it is very likely that a sort of "Deep State" will actually form in the bureaucracy working against him anyway. I would be shocked to learn that he supports expanding the Supreme Court. He'll do these things because that is how American politics have always worked and he is old as hell and knows nothing else. His return to normalcy is the ideal because he cannot fathom that people outside politics have life experiences different than his own. This is not unique of course, most national level politicians have this attitude

He also possesses the same narcissism that everyone who runs for president possesses, he is a better actor for sure, but make no mistake that ego plays a larger role in everything he does than we can really comprehend, Trump took the mask off, but it's there in most of them. Trump might shoot an opponent dead on 5th Avenue, Biden would too, the only difference is he'd make sure there were no witnesses first.

I'm not saying don't vote, by all means go and do so, it's easy to do(sort of, location depending) and while the long term benefits are minimal it's got more of an immediate return on investment than anything else you can do to create change right now. Long term though the only answer is the dismantling of the American empire of course, but we can't do that between now and November 3.