This Election Result Will Provide a Welcome Breather, But Not Really Address America's Issues in Depth

One of the truest opinions I heard (which I am going to post and not forget, as it summarises what I have studied and analysed for years), voiced by an American lady, follows below:

‘’I think that what may be people don’t quite get, is that America is NOT a democracy. It’s an oligarchy, run by corporations — and regardless of how many Republicans or how many Democrats have been elected presidents in the last 30–40 years, it has really gone high in that direction. Do the Democrats hear what people want? — yes. Do they do it? — no. Because it’s been proven and studied that if it’s something that the corporations want as well, then it will happen; but if it’s people that want it…..oh, then there’s other people to blame if it doesn’t happen. …. it’s corruption on both sides; it’s not just one, it’s continuous’’.

This is what I myself found when I studied American literature and philosophy at Sofia University and analysed Thoreau, who called for ‘civil disobedience’; this is what Steinbeck taught me in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and ‘Of Mice and Men’, or O’Neill in ‘Desire Under the Elms’. This theme of the traumatic death of a lost lonely man in Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’ still haunts me at night and I vouch to never re-read the book again — I could not stand it. ‘American Tragedy’, ‘The Great Gatsby’ — they all disclose the myth of the American dream — that it is a myth, rather than the truth, and nothing more. It is not a democratic society; the small man often does not have a chance, if finding himself alone against the greed or the god that is most worshipped — money. Money is the actual president of the USA.

Writers and thinkers for centuries have been trying to reveal this myth — people still refuse to clearly see it; people still insist that it is not society’s responsibility to care for the individual, that it is not the state that should pay for school lunches, so kids go hungry, or have sex with older men in exchange for dinner; that the state should not pay for medical care, so thousands just die, or, if resorting to treatment, end up thousands of dollars in debt (the average American dies owing up to $64 000 to corporations). The latest I heard was about a man who had contracted the coronavirus and was hospitalised for 6 weeks, after which he was sent a bill of one million dollars. One million dollars for getting his life back.

The US is also the biggest global aggressor, who, to keep prices of goods low for American citizens, decides to instill unrest or bomb regions like North Africa, South America or the Middle East, and then refuses asylum to the very local people they have caused displacement for, by labeling them ‘illegal immigrants’, crowding them in concentration camps, forcefully sterilising them against their consent and driving their children, parentless, over the Mexican border, careless that these innocent souls will very likely immediately become victims of slavery, exploitation and abuse beyond belief.

One president dared fight the corporations — Kennedy — and he lost his life.

Roosevelt, perhaps, only managed to successfully establish an era of dignity and prosperity with his New Deal, which created jobs, introduced the social welfare system and the idea of a pension to guarantee peaceful old age, based on socialist democratic principles, because he was lucky with his timing — he took office straight after WWII, when people, still reeling from its aftermath and witnessing so much death, dared acknowledge that life mattered more than money.

This lasted only for a short time. People soon forgot and reverted to their ways of greed.

Good luck to Biden with restoring at least a little of the dignity, grace and decency in the White House, as well with getting rid of nepotism, ignorance and checked rhetoric of abuse. Perhaps he would close the concentration camps and improve the immigration policy, as well as restore good political relations with other major world forces. Good luck to him with managing the coronavirus. Still, he may not be fully able to respond to the many needs of most ordinary working Americans — because simply not he, but the corporations run the country. And as many political analysts have said, ‘Trump lost these elections, but Trumpism is still alive’’. The failures of Joe Biden against a system stronger than him, may be superficially interpreted as the failures of democratic ideas themselves (like it happened with Obama); Trump may resurge again in 2024.

And then — God help America, indeed.

Let’s just take it one day, one step at a time.