The US will rejoin the Paris climate accords. Right-wing autocrats like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Victor Orbán and others no longer have a powerful backer in the UN. Israel’s hawkish prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lost a staunch ally. The list could go on.
But at home, there’s no clear mandate for change. Strikingly, too, Trump looks set to lose by only a slim margin. Millions more Americans backed him than did in 2016 – despite a pandemic which has already claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
How has this happened?
No justice, no peace
We’ve been travelling through the key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and the Republican heartland of Kentucky, and speaking to voters across the country for weeks. If you spend long enough talking to anyone, they’ll say things you might not expect.
In fracking country, western Pennsylvania, we met a young Romanian immigrant who voted for Trump but backs Canada-style lockdowns to contain COVID-19.
A Black Biden-supporting woman in her sixties told us “all lives matter” because “we all bleed the same colour: red”.
We met a registered Democrat in a crucial swing country who voted for Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen because she’s a feminist who will legalise marijuana.
And a convicted felon on the New Jersey border told us he’d have backed Trump if he was allowed to vote – even though he wants universal healthcare.
But a defining feature of countless conversations has been the largest and most ambitious racial justice movement this country has seen in generations.
Black Lives Matter has birthed a new generation of civic leaders and inspired and activated voters across all fifty states. In the city of Louisville, we met women who rose up in March when Breonna Taylor was killed by police, and who have been organising, protesting and building “love, passion and community” for more than 160 days since.
Yet the movement has also sparked a fierce backlash.
“I don’t support what we’ve seen of Black Lives Matter… The looting, the destruction, those aren’t protests. That’s not Black Lives Matter. That’s people going out and destroying their communities and hurting and killing each other,” Aaron Johnson, a former police officer, told us in our recent podcast episode.
Like so many Trump supporters we met, he claims he supports racial equality but says “structural racism” is just media hype.
“People take the idea that there is a problem with racism in this country, and they blow it out of proportion. They make it so much worse than it really is. Is there racism? Yes. Is there systemic racism? No.”
Others write off the whole movement as “radically left driven” – and claim Biden is just a “puppet” for what they see as this more extreme, hidden agenda.
The irony is that – far from being their puppet – Biden failed to win support among many of the Black Lives Matter activists we spoke to.
Despite running on a Democratic ticket, Jecorey Arthur, the youngest person ever to be elected to the Louisville City Council, refused to vote for or publicly back Biden (he gives his reasons in the film below).
Milly Martin, who knew Breonna Taylor, also put it bluntly: “I do not like him at all.”
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Mary Fitzgerald Aaron White | Radio Free (2020-11-05T14:03:02+00:00) Americans didn’t vote for change. For many, it wasn’t on the ballot. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/05/americans-didnt-vote-for-change-for-many-it-wasnt-on-the-ballot/
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