We made it. After all the editorials, fear-mongering articles, and genuine conspiracy peddling vis-a-vis Russiagate, after all the inattentive liberal hosts passing platitudinal drivel as legitimate, adversarial reporting, either agreeing or resigning to indifference on Trump’s worst crimes as they excoriate him on decorous quibbles and baseless speculation, after all the late-night tweets, grandiose chest-puffing, and arousing rallies, after all the supercilious deportment that looked down on any “deplorable” person willing to vote for such a depraved monster, after the palpable fear of America becoming a full-on fascist, totalitarian state, we have moved beyond the Trump presidency, and now, we move on to the Joe Biden administration, a proverbial “return-to-normal” for the vexed establishment. It’s time for many of us to admit that, even though Trump did pose a unique authoritarian threat (a childlike leader who lashes out on an emotional whim is not something America ever needs to experience again), and even though he did take many awful policy actions whilst in the White House, it never reached the Hitlerian levels that were initially feared. What occurred at The Capitol, as horrific as it was, amounted to more of a coalescing faction of typically disparate elements (Proud Boys, conservative members of the working class, privileged elitists), all uniting behind the mantra of “stop the steal”. Some of those involved in the diaper coup make up the wealthier ends of our society, so once this election nonsense abates, they are likely to return home to their castles, unscathed. Others make up the poorer, more hapless ends of our society, and their anger runs far deeper than just a “stolen election”.

There will be plenty of time to dig through the grime of what lies ahead in our troubled world, but for right now, it is pertinent to preview what’s in store for America in the Biden administration. His first few days have seen executive actions reversing Trump’s rollback of some of Obama’s policies, such as with Dreamers, the Paris climate agreement, and some of Obama’s important environmental regulations, as well as his own roll-back of some of Trump’s more regressive actions, such as the Muslim ban, the border wall, and his spiteful, petty decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization. Also on his first day, he extended moratorium for evictions, shockingly revoked the Keystone XL pipeline (which is throwing conservative media into a frenzy due to “lost jobs”), banned workplace discrimination against employees based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and froze student debt. To this point, he has been a pretty decent President, and in fact, some might argue that this will be the peak of his presidency, that once this string of executive actions tapers off, the Democrats will go back to pussyfooting around on the issues and pass meager legislation that is fifteen percent of what it should be. With it being just two days into his presidency, the verdict is still out on that, but hopes remain low among large portions of the American constituency, and we will know sooner rather than later if the Democratic party is actually going to take advantage of their majority or not.

The first real test for the Democrats and their current supermajority will be the stimulus checks. They have already backed away from the checks for $2000, bringing it down to one worth $1400, combined with the $600 check everyone already received (well, the ones fortunate enough to catch the elite’s crumbs, anyway); so, they’re already off to a bad start. Then, just one day after he was inaugurated, the Biden administration came out and said they’re considering pushing back the relief package until March, which is, to be quite frank, an expected abdication of his responsibility. Now their proposed relief package (to be voted on at some undetermined future date), worth roughly 1.9 trillion dollars, also includes other actions, such as expanded unemployment insurance, a fifteen dollar minimum wage, and aid for state and local governments. All of this is welcome, and it is desperately needed for our ailing populace, but the construction of this massive bill is flawed, and the galvanized energy around the Democrats “push” towards $2000 checks shines such a bright light on their conduct that concealment would make for a fool’s errand; everyone is watching them, and their actions will reveal much more than their Orwellian prose and deliberate obfuscations ever could. Now the main issue with this relief package is procuring enough votes (60 in total) for the bill to pass. Getting the 60 votes is not likely to happen, but there is a way to skirt the 60-vote requirement. The procedure is called budget reconciliation, and it simply alters how money is spent within the federal government; but, the important factor here is that a simple majority is all that’s needed, making the task of getting relief through the barriers of bureaucracy a much easier one. This way, if the bill can’t make it through with the nine or ten Republican votes it needs, then the Democrats can turn to budget reconciliation and pass a standalone bill containing just the $1400 checks. Right?

The Democrats just ran a run-off election in Georgia and won both seats, giving their party a supermajority in Washington for the first time since 2010. They won those races, in large part, because they campaigned on passing $2000 checks. We are in the middle of a global pandemic and people are hurting financially, so the prospect of receiving more relief money gave them a reason to go to the polls and elect Warnock and Ossoff. Their decision to backtrack on the $2000 checks and turn them into ones worth $1400 was bad enough, but now it appears as if the Democrats are turning away from budget reconciliation altogether. Is their plan to have the relief package blocked so that they can promptly blame the Republicans for it? Is their end goal to ensure that nothing large, bold, or broadly beneficial to the lower class gets passed while simultaneously promoting a bolstered image of a party fighting for the people? Are the Democrats really nothing more than wolf in sheep’s clothing, a bright, smiling face that rides the road of immodesty all the way to corporate joy, wearing a mask layers thick, globs of artificial probity sloughing off them like a snake shedding it’s skin?

As a mere individual observer, I can only offer my honest, forthright opinion. The Democratic Party is not a party of the people, and it hasn’t been for several decades. Their constituents consist of Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Cobra, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Wall St., Boeing, United Airlines, and many other businesses constituting the corporate class. Both parties operate as representatives of these business elites, and the regular citizens of this country are left to decide which party of oligarch’s they prefer. Normally the oligarch’s aren’t too concerned with which party occupies power (as long as the divisive duopoly is perpetuated, they tend to be content), but the Trump era has posed problems for their credibility around the world. For better or for worse, Trump has been the great unmasking of the United States, an unveiling of the authentic, rotting core at the heart of America’s capitalist society, and this unveiling, in all it’s shit-stained glory, has caused many problems for the wealthy, out-of-touch aristocrats. Joe Biden gives a much more palatable face to the American empire, and his election is an attempt for the establishment to return to the “good ‘ol days” of the Clinton and Obama administration’s. What, then, will this “return-to-normal” actually bring for the people of this country? What will the Biden administration actually achieve?

In my view, he will do a handful of good things, but overall, not much will change. Biden himself said, in a statement to Wall Street some months back, that “nothing will fundamentally change”. He said he would veto medicare-for-all if it got to his desk, and now he’s even backing away from his original position of the public option, opting instead to focus on expanding Obamacare. He’s also stuck in the “just-say-no”, 1980-mindset and thinks it’s not the right time to end the drug war, or even legalize marijuana, a predictable drawback from the guy who authored the ’94 Crime Bill. He’s in favor of free college to a certain extent, his tax policies, if implemented, are pretty reasonable, and he at least nominally understands that containing the virus is essential to recovering our tattered economy. His cabinet is full of nothing but corporate lovebirds and party careerists, a cabinet devoid of even the faintest hint of progressive ideology; but, the cabinet is the most diverse in U.S. history (a fact already being vomited out of the groveling mainstream publications at light speed). They have their progressive bone. They will continue to wield identity politics to mollify the progressive wing of the party, and with that, the ideology of wokeness will worm it’s way further and further into the fabric of our culture and society, setting up a diversion away from the more tangible, urgent, economic goals (such as healthcare, economic stimulus, and criminal justice reform) to the more aesthetic, cultural ones (such as diversity training, speech censorship, and gender pronouns). Now, speech censorship is going to be a mainstay for the Biden administration. Over the past 10–12 years, as politics and everyday life quickly became intertwined with social media, the pressure for tech oligarchs to censor certain viewpoints grew to a breaking point, and now, the dam has broken, letting the whims of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s army of tech minions regulate content at their own discretion. I expect this discretion to be amplified, and soon (as we are already seeing), the extreme fringes will no longer be alone in having their content suppressed and/or pulled down. Any content threatening establishment power is now a censorship target, as these social media sites have already shown massive favor towards the Democratic Party, extirpating the NY Post story on Hunter Biden just a few weeks before the November election. So, it’s reasonable to conclude that this curating of “acceptable” information will continue, hurtling us straight into a ministry-of-truth reality that would induce a hearty chuckle out of George Orwell himself. And the war machine will move onward, full-steam ahead, with a renewed cold war sentiment ratcheting up as global resources become more and more strained. Biden has already hinted towards a troop surge in Iraq (following a pair of suicide bombings in Baghdad), and our forever-war in Afghanistan is sure to see some tepid meddling throughout Biden’s first term. His initial promise to reenter into the Iran Deal seems to be on shaky grounds (because those pesky Iranians need to tidy up and follow what they already have been but what we refused to), and he has already made the all-important declaration, recognizing Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s official leader, because why not, right? That’s a thing we can do.

In a nutshell, the Biden administration will usher in more milquetoast, incremental policy proposals that do little to actually benefit the lives of regular people, and his obsession with bipartisanship will often bring the two parties together in war-making and corporate pleasing. The two sides will go tit-for-tat, setting up the show of conflict needed to keep the masses distracted and deflecting blame wherever it may land. The few will accumulate more, the many will slip further and further down, and the fabric of American society, as well as our global civilization, will continue to unravel. Left and right-wing political rallies have grown over the last decade, and now, they are ubiquitous, a daily grind in the trenches of humanities millennia-long class war. Sometimes these rival political factions clash, and over the next four years, more of these clashes are likely to occur, as the establishment works to foment sustained division among the lower classes. Most people are still living paycheck to paycheck, and, oh yeah, there’s a pandemic that is ravaging the economy and killing thousands of people, so most of Biden’s time in office will be defined by how he responds to this crisis. Will he be the next FDR, or is Herbert Hoover a better model of what we can expect? And, on a more sinister note, is Joe Biden the final, dying gasp of a sequestered elite, separated from the pack and unaware of the rumblings that may mark a portent to their demise? Will his administration’s inability to effectuate popular, supportive policy action bring about a fascist demagogue with the measured competence that Trump lacked? How far will America fall on their indubitable tumble towards unmanageable revolutionary fervor? The answers remain to be seen, but as we roll forward, it behooves us as a people, as an informed, engaged electorate, to vote on the issues that matter to us, and also to recognize the limits inherent to electoral politics, because, the truth of it all, is that real change, the change required for human civilization to sustain itself in the long-term, has no real mechanism for success within electoral politics, and with that knowledge at hand, we must set forward in our hopeful blaze, organized, energized, and indefatigable in our efforts to overturn the established order and usher in a tranquil, autonomous system that transcends our primal proclivities and tucks us into an invigorated slot of human empathy and belonging, the true, unobscured nature of our humble nature.