The pandemic makes all celebrations hushed and a little strange, including political-victory speeches. A little after 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and presumptive senator from Georgia, flickered onto a live stream, sitting alone in a small office. Over his left shoulder was a cross; over his right shoulder was a copy of Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.” Jon Ossoff, the other Democrat in Georgia’s twin runoffs for the Senate, appeared likely to unseat Senator David Perdue, but on Wednesday morning the race remained too close to call. If both Democrats win, they will give the Party, improbably, control of the U.S. Senate in January and President-elect Joe Biden a much better shot at passing meaningful legislation.
Warnock was reading from a prepared speech, at times a little jerkily, but he had a conversational tone and an easy grin. He barely mentioned the stakes of this election for Democratic policy goals, focussing instead on his own biography. Warnock is the eleventh of twelve children, was raised in a Savannah housing project, and now is the pastor of the church in Atlanta where Martin Luther King, Jr., served as pastor and John Lewis prayed. Warnock spoke of his mother. “The other day, because this is America, the eighty-two-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator.”
All kinds of historical loops were closing in Georgia on Tuesday night. There were long ones, like those that Warnock mentioned. He will be only the eleventh Black senator in American history, and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate from the South. His victory, and Ossoff’s apparent one, was powered by very high turnout among African-American voters and comparatively low turnout among the rural white voters on whom the Republicans have increasingly come to rely. But there were shorter loops, too. Almost exactly six years ago, Mitch McConnell became the Majority Leader of the Senate, and, ever since, politics in Washington have been in what was starting to seem like a permanent state of stagnation. McConnell operated as a hand brake on Washington, and Washington as a hand brake on the country, until it was hard to separate the political condition from the national one. Problems festered. Scant legislation passed. Nothing ever seemed to change. Republicans fought eternally to manage their own extremists, never successfully, while deepening their institutional control, of the judiciary most of all. The progressive certainty that the arc of history was bending only strengthened, but Democrats continued narrowly losing all of the most important votes. Everything kept coming down to a coin flip, but the coin always flipped the same way. Continue reading.