The Biden-Harris victory is an unalloyed good thing.

A clear majority of Americans — well apportioned among key battleground states — rejected Donald Trump at their first opportunity following his Electoral College victory in defiance of a popular vote majority in 2016. Joe Biden — a decent, caring, well-qualified man, who will genuinely seek to represent the whole country — will replace him.

No, the Democrats didn’t win the Senate (though there will be another go-round in Georgia in January), they lost seats in the House, and upwards of 70 million Americans voted to reelect a man monumentally unfit for the presidency. Mitch McConnell will relish obstructing Joe Biden at every turn. Republicans in most states will control redistricting for the next decade. Enacting a progressive agenda is not yet on the horizon.

The next four years will be highly challenging. But I’m too much of an optimist to presuppose that the Biden presidency is doomed to failure, that the 2022 elections will mark a further setback, or that 2024 will return Republicans to the White House.

From the January 2017 Women’s March through the 2020 voting that concluded on Tuesday, Americans have organized in opposition to Trump and the GOP. The political struggle is hardly over. But it brought an extraordinarily significant victory this week.

That’s cause for celebration.

(Photo of the President-elect from Wikimedia Commons.)