Where will America be after four years of Joe Biden?

It can all feel pretty bleak. The death toll from coronavirus has raced past 300,000 and may have hit 500,000 by the time everyone who needs the vaccine gets a shot. President-elect Joe Biden warns of a “dark winter” and offers empathy to those with “a black hole in your hearts”. The man he has beaten still refuses to go quietly, continuing to make threats, while possibly planning a rally to announce a second run on Inauguration Day.

And that is just part of it. The climate crisis, ignored or denied for so long, warns us like a beacon fire with each extreme weather incident, of what is in store. Many are broke and out of work, with little chance of being rehired. We can barely speak to each other across the political divide with civility, whether in the street or on social media. Indeed, we are ever more unsure whether those platforms are a friend, or an unregulated menace that does little more than spread disinformation.

The marches and protests for racial justice that consumed our attention this summer may have quietened down, but the problems and injustice they sought to address have not gone away – anything but. People may be truly glad to see the back of 2020 and wish one another a happy new year. But it is more in hope than in certainty that we do not have similarly vast challenges ahead.

But imagine, if you will, we are four years from now. The United States is drawing to the end of four years of a Biden-Harris administration. Does the world look any better, any less bleak? Did it take those four years and squeeze out of them every drop of opportunity for bettering the nation. Has it created a more equal playing field? Has it taken action – real action, not just warm words – to address the racism and discrimination that runs like steel cables through so much of the nation’s functioning?

Did it actually do something to move the country away from a fossil fuel economy, or was that rejoining of the Paris Accord just a feel-good photo opportunity in the first few weeks of the term?

And what about our politics? Is Kamala Harris now the president-elect, or did  Donald Trump just win the election for a second term at the age of 78, “the most amazing and beautiful” political comeback of modern times?

It is natural, says Kristie Ebi, professor of global health and environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, to focus on national leadership. But it is vital, she says, when considering the climate crisis to think sub-nationally. Amazon has persuaded more than 30 companies to join its pledge to go carbon neutral by 2040, she says. Microsoft has vowed to do so by 2030.

“Thousands of cities have signed on to pledges for reducing their emissions. Governor Jay Inslee has been working really hard to get through a carbon tax in the state of Washington,” she adds. “And all of this has been going on despite the Trump administration.

“Think what you could do in four years when you actually have national leadership, when you invest in the research and technology and development that you need. When you give that green light to industry to move ahead.”

There are numerous ways to move away from fossil fuels, she says. The pandemic has shown the relative ease of telemedicine and online learning. What if we made this even better, and more money went into training people in everything, such as physical therapy that could be done over a video link. Ebi says work done by organisations like the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has shown simple changes could result in huge advances in terms of sustainability.

“There are lots of innovations that are underway that could be unleashed. Think what you want about Elon Musk, but he’s really made electric cars that everybody wants. And everybody’s coming out with those. What if you could really set it up so you’ve got the charging stations, you’ve got the subsidies. And we could just rapidly transition to electric vehicles.”

One thing you have to say about Biden, says Robin Leeds, is that he is loved around the world. Whether it’s the G20, or Nato, or the UN, or other international organisations such as Davos, the president-elect already has relationships that will allow the US to move rapidly in rebuilding some of the alliances in which Trump decided the US should take a back seat.

“His pre-existing relationships with other democracies are so strong,” says Leeds, founder of consulting firm Winning Strategies LLC, and a former member of the Clinton administration.

She says his selection of a skilled team – people such as John Kerry in charge  of confronting climate change – suggest he is serious about taking on the biggest issues. He will also address challenges such as China, though as part of an alliance of western nations rather than by launching trade wars.

“I think you have to look at the international dynamics in the context of the domestic situation,” she says. “We have a global pandemic, that has left nobody out.”

She says that may take up much of Biden’s time and energy. “No nation can do anything, unless the public health of our globe is intact,” she says. “We have to re-enter the WHO, we have to have relationships with countries around this mission of making our planet a safe and healthy and vibrant place to live.”

Leeds says she hopes that four years from now, the US will have addressed many domestic issues – for instance, racism – in order for it to take up more authentically a position of leadership.

“Biden is a coalition builder. He values relationships, he values conversation, he values allyship,” she says.  “Those are going to be at the front of the agenda for our role in all of these international organisations, which have been literally destroyed.”

The pendulum is swinging the other way, believes writer and novelist Joan Gelfand. When people were not stuck working from home, trapped in front to their laptops and Zoom screens, reading news and even books on a small device may have seemed fine and even efficient. Now they’re desperate for real books and real conversation, she says.

“I think people are getting tired of not talking to people [in person], and not hearing the nuances,” she says.

The San Fransisco-based Gelfand, whose latest novel Extreme, is a thriller set in Silicon Valley, bemoans the way social media has added to the toxicity of our political and civic culture. She says Trump’s rhetoric has been a major contributor.

Gelfand, who believes the difficulty of talking to “the other side” is even greater than during the administration of George W Bush, offers tips to people on how to communicate more effectively using email. A key point: “It’s all about the tone. If your gut says that your writing might be misunderstood, sleep on it until you can read it again with fresh eyes,” she adds.

Going forward, Gelfand hopes the Biden administration will invest heavily in public education. Students should not be saddled with vast debt for going to college, and pupils will struggle to learn in a class packed with up to 37 children.

She hopes that after the pandemic, people will return to book and conversation clubs. Gelfand, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, is a regular mediator and says it is essential to listen to people’s “pain”.

“I would want to find out where the pain is, what is bothering people,” she says. “Is it race, then start a conversation about race? It is immigration, let’s start a conversation about immigration.”

She is hopeful people from across the political aisle will be talking to each other in 2024.

“I think not only are we going to have an improvement in education, I think we're going to have an improvement with climate change. And that's going to bring a lot of jobs back, and get these people working and busy. I think things will tone down.”

When it comes to addressing the problems of racial justice, the US does not need gentle tinkering, says Lina Srivastava. Rather it needs a complete overhaul. Representation may be something, but simply having a woman or a person of colour on the presidential ticket, or elsewhere does not by itself indicate progress. Just look at the case of Amy Coney Barrett, she says.

Srivastava, the founder of the Creative Impact and Experience Lab, a cultural innovation strategy group in New York City, says activists need to be optimistic in order to give fuel to the movement. She is equally clear that talking about a “melting pot” or a “coat of different colours” is going to do nothing to help communities.

One of the most important lessons of the four years of Trump has been how quickly advances on social and racial justice can be rapidly overturned, what she terms the “precarity of progress”. The movement has learned a lot she says, and has new tools, but one key lesson is that people cannot stop pushing and organising and working for change, simply because they appear to have made progress.

“I am hopeful that if we keep this forward movement, if we keep pushing, I think in four years we will have seen the progress that we have made become more solid,” she says.

What would that progress look like? Srivastava, the child of immigrants to the US and director of the documentary Traveling While Black, says indicators would be: has life become better for people of colour, what services are available and who speaks for those communities?

“When you’re talking specifically about racial justice, there are so many steps to get to that, like stop killing black men, and black women,” she says. “If we could see progress on policing, if we could see progress on incarceration, if we could see progress on taking away the death penalty.”

A third indictor would be large-scale investment in projects, processes and our programmes operated by people of colour. “That’s not to say take it away from any other populations.”

She says such things would be major, massive. “But we need an overhaul. I'm looking at wholesale overhaul. I'm looking at transformation. But it does not have to be transforming everything at the same time.”

“Can we get there in four years – we can get far,” she says. “I don’t think we’ll get there exactly.”

Joe Biden is going to have a number of challenges when he gets his hands on America’s economy. But, says economist Mark Weisbrot, he is also stepping in at an historic moment.

Firstly, the challenges. There is the economy itself. As we stand, the US economy has only recovered around half of the 22 million jobs lost when the pandemic struck this spring. Not surprisingly, the fallout is hitting those in the lowest income brackets the most, and a full 25 per cent of people are struggling to pay bills. People are using up savings if they have them. Lines at food banks continue to grow.

Another challenge is that 2 million of the jobs that were lost were the result of a fall in exports to other countries. A major drag on America’s recovery is the slow pace of recovery in places where it buys its goods.

A third challenge will be the tactics of Republicans trying to dilute or block stimulus packages, a problem that will grow if the GOP retains control of the Senate.

Yet Weisbrot, co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC, is optimistic about where America might be four years from now.

He says the pandemic has shown that the US economy can run up a huge deficit while costing itself almost nothing in interest. That means a Biden-Harris administration can spend money on things such as a Green New Deal that would create jobs in infrastructure and green energy, as well as moving the nation and the world away from fossil fuels, invest in businesses owned by communities of colour, and spend heavily in new skills training to prepare for the changing world ahead.

“The pandemic has made it worse. You’re going to have a lot of scarring, as it’s called, because there are big changes taking place in the economy,” he says. “A lot of jobs that are disappearing now, they’re not going to come back. And then people won’t necessarily be able to find other ones.”

Yet, he says there is a unique chance for Biden to spend his way to a solution that is more equitable for everyone.

“Progressive economists who were a minority until recently have won the debate on monetary policy for the foreseeable future,” he says. “That’s not to say it can’t change. But we have zero interest rates, and we have quantitative easing. And inflation is not an issue, and neither is the creation of money.”

Predictions are never more than guesses, gambles about the future. In politics in particular, it seems unwise to try and imagine where the nation might be.

So much could depend on two factors: whether Democrats manage to win control of the Senate, something that will be determined by the outcome of two run-off races in Georgia that both look pretty close.

Republican David Perdue is running for reelection against Democrat Jon Ossoff, while incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler, appointed to her seat in January after Johnny Isakson resigned, faces a challenge from Raphael Warnock.

Both Republicans have echoed Trump’s false claims about the election being rigged in an effort to earn the votes of his supporters. Biden has hit the ground running in a gentle way to campaign for the two Democrats.

Biden’s supporters say if he has a Democratic-controlled senate to work with it will be much easier for him to push through many of his more ambitious bills – a stimulus package, investment in green energy, money into infrastructure. If Mitch McConnell and the Republicans retain control, things will be much messier.

And then, of course, there is Trump. Does he really want to govern again, or simply retain the spotlight. He has shown little appetite for the hard working of governing, much more for the trappings of the presidency.

Once he is no longer president his influence will immediately dip. More Republicans are likely to position themselves away from him,

Yet he will retain a grip on a solid number of the US public who have stuck with him through every scandal and controversy. If he does decide to run again, he will do so as the clear Republican frontrunner.

Alternatively, he may throw his support behind a run by one of his children, or else someone such as senator Tom Cotton, who would be happy to continue to push Trump’s nativist ant nationalist agenda. With Trump’s backing he could well win.

“I have no real idea,” says Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia.  

“Don’t eliminate the possibility that Biden, if he stays healthy, will run for a second term. Sounds preposterous since he’d be 82 and then 86 at the end of a second term. He’ll probably bow out, except presidents never want to go. They all wish the 22nd Amendment (limit to two terms) had never been ratified. The rest is total speculation.”