It's not over. It's never over.

If there is one thing that can be read in the results of yesterday’s elections, it is that we’re in this together – all of us.  Not just us liberals trying to save democracy from a MAGA wing of the Republican Party that is trying to destroy it. That is part of what’s going on, sure.  But the mixed results in the elections for the House and the Senate, in which Democrats did much better than expected, show that this struggle over what kind of country we’re to have will be with us for a long, long time.

We’ve gone through a series of periods when many of us thought that the big battles we care about were won.  The passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act was one of those times.  The two laws which reasserted the rights of Black Americans to vote and went beyond the Brown v Board of Education decision to end segregation, were a watershed moment in this country, the first attempt to give equality between the races the force of law since the 14th and 15th Amendments were passed after the Civil War.

It seemed we had reached a major turning point when in 1973, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v Wade declaring that a woman’s right to control her own body and end a pregnancy was a constitutional right.  Fifty percent of the American people, whose decisions about their own reproductive health had for more than a century been made for them by state legislatures that were at first completely male and still largely male, could now make that decision for themselves.    

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and his reelection four years later seemed like a watershed event.  That this country had elected the first Black president in its history seemed like more than an electoral victory.  It was taken by many of us as a statement of who we are.