Name: Biden may take the White House, but this is hardly a new dawn for the Left
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Biden may take the White House, but this is hardly a new dawn for the Left

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As I write, . If so, he will duly be elected the next President of the United States of America when the Electoral College meets next month. But note a certain tentativeness. Here in Britain, most of our media, following – as usual – the lead of the main US TV networks expressed outrage at President Trump’s claim that the election was being stolen by Democrat voting fraud.Yesterday morning, BBC reporters spoke of Mr Trump’s “false claims”, as if they knew them to be so. How could they? The claims concerned details about voting and vote-counting practices in several states: no reporter could pronounce on their validity. All that could be accurately stated was that Mr Trump was making the claims and was not, at that point, producing evidence to support them.Obviously, and as usual, Mr Trump was jumping the gun and – to mix the metaphor – firing it wildly. His words were unstatesmanlike, and they were delivered because he feared he was losing. But it is important to understand that his opponents, though behaving with more apparent decorum, played a similar game.The joint effort of media, pollsters and the Democrats themselves for months now has been to try to make a Biden victory – and a Democrat surge in both Houses of Congress and state legislatures – a foregone conclusion. Mr Biden was being given poll leads of 10 per cent over Mr Trump. Such figures were so exaggerated, and so wrong on the night, as to suggest , or both, in sampling methods.One way of assisting the pro-Biden push was to use Covid-19 risk as a chance to encourage more “mail-in” and “absentee” ballots. Even in Britain, where voting rules are nationally uniform, it is well known that too easily available postal votes are more subject to fraud than the ballot box. In a federal country like the United States, state rules vary considerably. There is a much greater danger than in our unitary system that one-party control of a US city or county may result in abuses – an issue, for example, in Democrat-controlled Philadelphia.Mr Trump’s Wednesday outburst did not come out of nowhere: Republicans have worried about for years. Indeed, they would be better criticised not for complaining about it, but for not having done enough about it earlier. Democrats have tended to encourage “mail-in” voting since their natural constituency is harder to persuade to enter the voting booth. In close contests, as several states are this time, doubts about the process matter. Recounts are provided for.When the Republicans started complaining about voting irregularities, the hostile reaction to them was almost Trumpian in its anger. Commentators tweeting in support of the president’s concerns found their and replaced by the words “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civil process”. So indeed it might, but how does that distinguish it from millions of words spoken in any election campaign in a free country? When President Trump appeared on television again to expand on his accusations, the three national networks withdrew their coverage after his initial remarks. The word “media” means mediating news and views to others: when media organisations start blocking both, something is wrong.The effect of such behaviour is, yet again, to provoke in Trump supporters the belief that they are being cheated by the system and resentment that they are seen as either fools or knaves by the country’s elites. Yet again, Trump’s belligerent exaggeration and the elites’ self-righteous and repressive disdain form an unholy alliance of opponents to embitter the conflict.One suspects that the Republican establishment, which has never liked Mr Trump, is content for this to happen. In the Bush vs Gore 2000 election – when Democrats were not so high-minded about contesting ballot results as they are this week – it all came down to disputed voting in Florida. The Bush team, led by the Bush family consigliere, lawyer and ex-secretary of state, James Baker, quickly and publicly flew there to start fighting the legal battle. They won. One does not detect a similar Republican enthusiasm this time. The party grandees would prefer Mr Trump to depart with dignity, though the concept is as unnatural to him as brushing one’s hair is to Boris Johnson.What is broadly clear about the results, however, is that the Democrat dream of a blue revival has died. The American people have not cast out the Trump era as an aberration. Indeed, Mr Trump has won the highest vote for a Republican presidential candidate in history. By his capacity to speak and lead from the front all the time he has been in office, he has made himself his party’s best (and worst) campaigning weapon. In this election, it did much better than expected at all electoral levels and it did so chiefly because of the value he added.The best Trump qualities displayed were – truly phenomenal in the wake of getting Covid aged 74 – and his continuous courage in challenging the powerful on behalf of the grumpy. For 99 per cent of world leaders, it is very seductive to be glad-handed by others of your kind at Davos and the UN and wherever they choose to enlarge their carbon footprints by meeting to “save the planet”. You are pleased to have joined a powerful club. Donald Trump seems to have been totally unseduced, if only because his own ego is too great to need the validation of foreigners (except, interestingly, dinner with the Queen).As a result, his leadership has not been a dead end for the Republican Party. It has helped reshape it. It was a rather fearful, declining tribe too much associated with hanging on to economic gains. Now it is a movement with much more working-class support and even, against expectation, rising ethnic minority backing. A typical old-style Republican white leader would have responded to Black Lives Matter and the pulling down of statues with limp words of half-baked disapproval. The Trump style is to repudiate such movements firmly, invoking American pride. His style of leadership – entrepreneurial, buccaneering, assertive – appeals more to new entrants than to the comfortable.This has made life much more difficult for the Democrats. They can no longer assume working-class support. In economics, they can be outflanked. In the culture wars, they have the awkward problem that lots of militant minorities do not add up to one harmonious majority. They have so often thrown accusations of racism against voters who worry about issues like immigration and crime that they have built a silent resistance into a large section of the population (hence, in part, the misleading polls). People simply will not vote for a party they sense disapproves of them.In terms of leadership, the Democrats personify the famous line of W B Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Hence the emergence of conviction-free, elderly Mr Biden, who prefers to stop working after lunch.Under President Biden, as he will probably become from January, things may not be so bad. The close results and the failure to take the Senate, may hold back his crazies. But for the Democrats and for America, this is not a new dawn, more a new dusk.&nbsp;Related TopicsThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our.You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. Find out more.Show commentsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

As I write, . If so, he will duly be elected the next President of the United States of America when the Electoral College meets next month. But note a certain tentativeness. Here in Britain, most of our media, following – as usual – the lead of the main US TV networks expressed outrage at President Trump’s claim that the election was being stolen by Democrat voting fraud.Yesterday morning, BBC reporters spoke of Mr Trump’s “false claims”, as if they knew them to be so. How could they? The claims concerned details about voting and vote-counting practices in several states: no reporter could...

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Charles Moore

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Biden may take the White House, but this is hardly a new dawn for the Left

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