(Posted to FB by Anthony DiMaggio.)

Today is the day I get to be the unceremonial wet towel for all my liberal friends who are breathing (understandably) a sigh of relief now that the malignant narcissistic, wannabe fascist, has been defeated. This was never really about Trump. This nation is teetering on the brink of disaster and collapse, between the mounting climate crisis, a broken economy, and the Covid crisis. But the failure to respond to these challenges is a product of a longstanding dysfunctional political culture that's been building for years (decades). It's going to take years to climb out from under this mess, if we are able to do it at all. And one major problem is that we have a fundamentally broken political system. We now have a White House populated by relatively sane competent neoliberal managers who are not going to put forward an agenda (without mass pressure) to combat the defining challenges of our time, including record inequality, ecological devastation, and rampant racism and white supremacy, among countless other problems. The other political party has totally abdicated when it comes to any notions of responsible governance. The cuckoo birds have taken it over, and it is now dominated by conspiratorialism, white supremacy, militant anti-science, and authoritarian/ascendant fascist politics. A country can't survive with that sort of status quo moving into the future. It's totally unsustainable and is going to end in disaster. We have to keep this in mind, as we hear calls to "get past" our differences with white nationalist enablers, conspiratorial Qanon sympathatizers, and climate change flat earthers. And the pathological notion, held by at least a third of the public (those infamous non-voters), that we can now get past politics after election day and sweep everything that's happened in the last four years under the rug needs to be rejected outright. We desperately need a real progressive mass movement. And that's not going to be built by ignoring the dual threats of rising reactionary extremism and pathological apoliticism. The rest of the world knows the U.S. is one election away from a return of the cuckoo birds to power. The sooner we join the rest of the world in recognizing the horrific threats, the better.