This Just In — We’re not going back. We may stray in how we go forward, but America is not going back.
With Tuesday’s results still breaking records in surprising places, America’s biggest of big mouth bullies was silenced by the one thing that works against fools like him —overwhelming force. Numbers. Massive numbers.
The threats of “election observers” were greeted with those whose task was to watch and report on the “observers.” The countermeasures brought by Secretaries of State and election officials up and down the line worked, but nothing worked more than the sheer numbers of voters who turned out in this election.
Democracy is America’s preference, thank you very much.
This election’s results tell us much more than “when we vote, we win.” This is the launch of the third act of American Reconstruction. This is a transformation in our society that we’ve been chipping away at for decades, but it’s been three steps forward and two steps back.
Since the shocking result of the 2024 election, Americans have felt alarmed that a second term was going to deliver four years of unchecked cruelty, greed and rank corruption. Those things are repugnant to most of us, but they have nothing to do with your political affiliation.
These things are predictable. They’re a cliché about absolute power’s corruption. This president gave those with the most base urges a place to go and a Klan leader to follow.
In the Civil War’s aftermath, the Congress sought to create the first and most necessary pillars of our reconstruction – amendments granting citizenship and voting rights to former slaves – an extraordinary shift. Tectonic. Three steps forward.
Eventually, this gave us Jim Crow and a wide variety of nonsense to obstruct voting. At the extreme end of that spectrum was brutal intimidation, violence and lynching.
Years passed. We came to the late 1940s and 50s and partly by way of soldiers of every color fighting and dying together, we had our second reconstruction. This struggle occurred in the courts and in the streets – on the Edmund Pettus bridge and throughout the freedom rides across the south.
Public engagement in the struggle brought shocking images of people being subdued with fire hoses onto television screens and in newspapers nationwide. When 14-year-old Emmitt Till was murdered for (allegedly) whistling at a white woman, his mother asked that his coffin be opened so people could see what was done to him.
In retrospect, the outrage from Till’s kidnapping, torture and murder (and the all-white jury’s acquittal) is said to have triggered the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.
Over the last two years, the organizers of the “No Kings” movement have tapped into a critical need that a wide swath of Americans have. The vast majority of us at this point in our history are imperfect but basically decent people who hold a door open for an elderly person, wait our turn in line and merge in an orderly fashion on the road.
Most of us.
Over the last two years, we have gathered in our communities IN PERSON to stand with our neighbors and gleefully announce our allegiance to the Constitution and the prohibition of Kings in American society. It has been an amazing and uplifting experience to attend No Kings events in the last two years, especially when watching the news coverage of the day and seeing millions of people all over the world doing the same.
That is an epic movement. It is an actual benefit flowing out of social media – the easy sharing of places and times and cautions about protecting rights.
So when this iteration of white supremacy has put its very intentional cruelty on display, ordinary people have recorded and published the results in real time. Racism is a virus that attacks a weak body politic. It’s never gone, but our immune system is strengthening. We must continue to strengthen our politics to keep it at bay.
The MAGA movement and its leader have reached the end of their domination of this narrative. Now we can take some deep breaths and start sorting through the rubble. This will not be a quick “undo” kind of thing, but our sleeves are rolled up and as an actual leader puts it, we’re “fired up and ready to go.”
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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