Take a breath.

Featured image by John Young. Follow the link for more of this artist’s work.

I think that we can all take a collective breath. The Electoral College voted, Biden is now President-Elect. The lawsuits were thrown out, and the legal challenge clock has hit triple zeroes. The results were unsurprising to me, and I am going to watch the next four years with a mixture of humor and dread, depending on what happens.

What frustrates me is as a Libertarian, I am used to defeat. But to see similar reactions to Biden’s victory from people who four years ago criticized the #notmypresident crowd is cringe-worthy. This election was a rebuke of Trump’s personality, not his policies. A closely contested election in the middle of a pandemic where the rules were being changed while the media ran the PR campaign on behalf of a political candidate was interesting to say the least. The level of attention that the media paid to any of Trump’s “gaffes” or decisions was on a microscopic level. And nothing that the President could do was good enough to be newsworthy. It was an endless refrain of failure, failure, racist, failure. I am of the belief that if the media were truly objective and gave the Biden campaign the same level of scrutiny, then Trump would have won. Oh well, I suppose.

So what have we learned? The American people have decided that attitude and demeanor do play a role in our political discourse, and that we want a President to sound “Presidential.” What that means is unclear, but certainly Trump’s penchant for firing off random tweets and using hyperbolic language doesn’t fit the bill. For many American’s, that made the difference. We want our government to take care of us, or at the very least, feel like it does. This to me is a recipe for the kinds of disastrous lockdowns we’re facing right now, but as HL Menken said, “American Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and should get it good and hard.”

We’ve also learned that you can win a campaign with proxies. The media no longer acts as a free press, but rather an extension of the government. There is an incestuous relationship that has formed between the media and government, and the offspring of this mating no longer sees the government as a necessary evil, but the source of goodness and light (except when their preferred party isn’t in power, then they’re bad). We see how much people have become dependent on technology for their answers, and how little people question the things being presented to them.

George Orwell said, “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” I supposed I rebelled against the system. But so many people think that they are the counter culture when they are the establishment. Big Tech, Media, Corporations, Activists, Celebrities, Politicians, Organizations, Musicians, Actors, all telling you the same line, all regurgitating the same dogma, and you believe you’re an independent thinker?

It won’t last, though. The tighter that the people in power wish to clench their fists, the more people will slip out of their control. It is like holding water in your hands, the more force you use, the more water escapes. We’re seeing that with lockdowns. A spike because people didn’t want to change their Thanksgiving traditions, more people telling the government to go and ignoring penalties and fines. More people growing tired of the perpetual cycle of shutdowns and uncertainty. The government, with all the best intentions, is ruining their hold over the people. And the more they try to control, the more pushback they receive.

But for the moment, let’s all just breathe. The world hasn’t exploded. We haven’t yet descended into a civil war, and there is still work to do. The vaccine is beginning to be deployed, and the excuses that our elected officials have for keeping things locked down are drying up. We’ll see what happens next, but there is still some hope.