A scene near the end of the Beethoven biopic “Immortal Beloved” captures joy arriving not as a final coda but as an emotional lifeline — a brief escape from harsh reality. By the time Ludwig van Beethoven wrote the “Ode to Joy,” the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony and his setting of Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem “An die Freude,” he was functionally deaf, a memento left from a brutal childhood. Despite his genius, Beethoven in his advanced years was a tormented, lonely man, relatively impoverished and cut off from the world. It was in that harrowing, broken state that he wrote the “Ode to Joy.”

In the film, as the Ninth Symphony premieres at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna in 1824, the camera leaves the orchestra hall and pulls back to Beethoven as a young boy. The boy climbs out of his bedroom window onto the roof to escape a drunken father hunting for his whipping post. He slides down the roof as his father yells, then runs with abandon — and runs, the music climbing toward crescendo, until he reaches a silent, inky black lake holding a skyful of stars.

When he finally slips into the black water and floats on his back, his abusive father howling in the distance, the chorus explodes in the “Ode to Joy”: words of universal brotherhood, freedom, joy and the unity of mankind. (“Freude, schöner Götterfunken” — “Joy, fair spark of the gods…”) Cradled between the dark water below and the stars above, the boy cannot hear his abuser’s calls. He knows the man is still out there wielding his club, but it does not matter. The boy has found an untouchable moment of transcendent joy. Accounts of the actual 1824 premiere describe the deaf composer being turned around to face an ovation he could not hear; the melody’s reach has since extended well beyond the concert hall, as the official anthem of the European Union.

That, columnist Sabrina Haake writes in an Alternet exclusive, is how it felt to wake up on Wednesday morning.

The abuser remains

Democracy, like Beethoven, has outrun her tormentor — for now. International headlines on Wednesday morning, together with the nationwide vote counts, celebrated the fact that, despite harsh odds, democracy managed to fight off her attacker. The abuser and his well-funded club are still lurking there, menacing and waiting, but for the moment she has escaped his reach.

Midterm elections fall at the midpoint of a president’s four-year term, when all 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate are on the ballot — a nationwide checkpoint that has historically gone against the party in power, and one both parties read as a verdict on the country’s direction.

The midterms, Haake argues, were never about red versus blue or right versus left. They were about greed — about how the nation’s richest 1% have been allowed, under Trump, to divide the nation’s assets among themselves while everyone else goes without. The onslaught of abuse at Trump’s hand was too exhausting to follow: his cacophony of illiberal fronts, in the mold of Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” theory, was so persistent and so multi-tendrilled that trying to track it was folly.

Americans, she writes, have suffered mightily under a president she calls a criminal — one who destroyed the White House, started a war in Iran he cannot win, stole billions for himself, his family and his donors, threw brown people into concentration camps, threw millions of Americans off their health care, kidnapped Venezuela’s president and stole the country’s oil, and committed war crimes in South America, then posted snuff videos to brag about it.

Trump Republicans, in her account, embraced corruption, empowered a secret police state, empaneled a mob-boss lawyer as attorney general, and rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin — even as he aids Iran. The economy, she adds, is now in a freefall of Trump’s own making.

Unintended history lessons of the Trump years

The Trump years have been an education, Haake writes — an unwanted lesson in how fragile democracy truly is. America was founded on an idea, a simple but novel leap of faith that people could govern themselves. The flawed men who wrote the Constitution had just escaped a tormentor of their own. King George III taxed starving colonists to help pay for Britain’s wars, punished dissent and flexed his power to show that he could. When they drafted the Declaration of Independence, the instigators of the Revolutionary War began with a list of grievances, a litany of “repeated injuries and usurpations” that Britain had used to make their desperate lives even harder.

In the 1700s, the world still operated under the assumption that kings were anointed by God, and that their “divine rights” translated into unquestioned power. It is not hard to see, the column notes, how “divine” authority leads to gross inequality, cruelty and suffering for the governed — an understanding that fuels the fiercest rejection of Christian Nationalism and of Trump’s attempts to arrogate divine power for himself.

America’s founders were the first to reject that assumption. In its place they presented only an untested theory to the world: that all men are created equal and entitled to the same pursuit of happiness. Steeped in the conviction that it could be done, they hammered out an extremely sophisticated roadmap of balanced and shared powers, strictly governed by the rule of law rather than by a king.

The system has never been perfect, and some of its early goals remain miles away. But until Trump, Haake argues, the country at least continued to embrace its ideals and pursue those goals. Trump, by contrast, rewrote 250 years of history in an attempt to subvert the rule of law into whatever he said it was. His staggering corruption and lawless, unchecked cruelty, she writes, yanked the nation back nearly full circle — to rule by king rather than by law.

America educated herself

The most angst-producing part of watching Trump’s mounting acts of cruelty, malfeasance and incompetence, Haake writes, was wondering whether Americans were even paying attention. Fox News “continues to lie to” 38% of the public; the rest of the mainstream media, now owned by Trump donors, sugarcoats Trump’s worst instincts.

It became clear on Tuesday that, despite the right-wing media landscape, voters were, indeed, paying attention.

There are miles and years to go to unravel Trump’s trail of destruction, she cautions: millions of Americans are now without health care; ICE is out of control; the war in Iran is intractable; the national debt is unsustainable; climate change is accelerating; interest rates are climbing; and 80% of federal agencies — including education, FEMA, the DOJ and the EPA — must be rebuilt, putting a pin, for now, on holding to account all the criminals who made it happen. The civic calendar moves on regardless: certified results will seat a new Congress in early January, and the balance of power there will shape what legislation — and what oversight — can advance.

But Haake is not ready to argue about priorities. Not just yet. She wants to float on her back and stare at the night sky, unable to hear the barking tormentor, and to embrace that we are made up of the same constituent components as the stars — which makes men like Trump irrelevant, for just another day.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and a federal trial attorney with more than 25 years of experience, specializing in First and Fourteenth Amendment defense. She writes the free Substack newsletter “The Haake Take.”

Editor’s note: This is a standardized English edition of an exclusive Alternet column by Sabrina Haake; the characterizations and assessments are those of the original author.