The Good, The Bad and The Joe Biden Presidency
‘Not Trump’ is Not a Meaningful Solution. Only a Revitalized Democracy Can Save America.
I caught sight of this video this morning from the Joe Biden campaign and while it was certainly a solid bit of activist politics, it was a little sad to watch.
This is a Joe Biden that would inspire votes, rather than just collect them.
What a shame that politics neuters so much passion and clear-headed morality, replacing it with complicity and compromise.
In the course of his career Joe Biden has been all over the place. As a senator he voted against gay marriage, for the Iraq War, for the Patriot Act and for the formation of Homeland Security. He also supported the War on Drugs, authored a prejudicial 1994 Crime Bill and was part of a presidency that helped torpedo, or at the very least undermine the Arab Spring. However, to his credit, he has also voted against tax cuts for the rich, against the Protect America act and warrant-less wiretapping on 2 occasions, authored a federal assault weapons ban, was responsible for introducing the first climate change bill to the senate in 1986 and has changed his position on a host of other issues including financial regulation, criminal justice and LGBTQI rights.
Point is though, he’s a political animal. A centrist by definition and an ‘American President’ in every depressing sense of the term. Whether he began that way, or just became that way, we will never know. But his record speaks for itself.
In the last year and a bit of campaigning, as a politics/democracy academic and an impassioned outsider, I’ve heard and read a lot of things about the coming US election and the people involved. One of the more optimistic comments that stuck with me amidst the general dreary disappointment of political reality was from none other than Jon Stewart who said “We are fearful and we are angry, and we are in pain. And when I see Biden past the shtick, I see a guy who knows what loss is, who knows grief. And I think that that kind of grief humbles you.” Stewart was making the case for why, in spite of a checkered past, Joe Biden might just be the man for the job. Someone who can acknowledge when they are or have been wrong and re-evaluate things. I think Jon was being a little too generous. Perhaps even a little naive. But the hope is still there. The anger makes us all desperate for it. I’ve been accused of being to generous and affording too much credit to politicians myself. But then, I generally try and make a habit of affording credit to everyone. At the end of the day I prefer to attribute wrongdoing to folly, over either malice or stupidity, unless there is direct evidence to the contrary. Makes for a more hopeful reading of the world. Call me naive too if you like.
Believe it or not, despite the fact that I rag on the guy all the time, that generosity also occasionally extends to Trump. I think he’s a terrible person. And a truly terrible president. But I also think he is terrified and was probably psychologically abused as a child. A lot of people follow him because they are also terrible people, sometimes with horrific ideologies that far exceed Trump’s evident solipsism in their potential destructive power, yet that can’t be said of every one. I think a lot of others follow him because they’re frustrated (sometimes rightfully), afraid, confused and often overwhelmed. More often a mixture. But then again, people have and will vote for Biden for some of the same reasons. It is possible that a few people vote for Trump out of a weird sort of empathy. Like the guy who sucks at his job, gets told off by the boss and reported by his colleagues, doesn’t understand exactly how everything keeps going wrong, but goes home, sees Trump “fighting against the eiltes and the media” and think “fuck yeah, my man”. Where we see a loud incompetent twit blustering his way through the halls of power, they see someone just doing their best to be President against all odds. At the end of the day, some people are just terrible judges of character. That might sound condescending but I’m afraid it’s the best I can do. Trump is so brazen, there’s not a whole lot of scope for sympathy.
My concern about Trump in leadership however comes mostly from the ripple effect that it has. I don’t believe that Presidents are really all that. I don’t think Trump is singularly responsible for all the bad stuff that has happened over the last few years. The media can be quite petty about it, but there’s a lot of overcompensation going on there and the fact is, while most of the allegations and scandals around Trump are likely true, there’s not a huge amount to back up a “Trump ruined America” narrative.
First of all, America wasn’t that great to begin with. It was regularly innovative, certainly powerful and even occasionally impressive. But those aren’t the same as being great. It was/is just as often, backward, petty and disappointing, not to mention violently oppressive. To be truly great you have to have humility and constantly strive to be better and so paradoxically, as a result of exceptionalism, America lost it’s chance of being great the moment it started believing it already was. Second of all, there’s a pretty good case to be made that Bush Junior passing the Patriot Act, invading two countries and being responsible for close to a million deaths is worse than anything Trump has done. Thirdly, while significant erosion to the democratic process has taken place, American democracy had already become a pathetic “cluster fuck to the White House” every 4 years anyway. A lot of Trumps horribleness is more about the very real horribleness he brings out in others. The latent horribleness that never truly went away and has just sat round being politely ignored or pandered to for centuries. It’s like having a loud racist grandpa round for dinner. The bad jokes and wild shitty ideas start flying around and before you know it, half the table has gone from nervous laughter to complete cut-loose indulgence of their weaker shittier selves.
But when that person is President, orders of magnitude kick in. The president lies about the media and journalists get beaten up. The president gives an authoritarian dictator a pass and authoritarians everywhere get a little more comfortable in their politics and position. The President says immigrants are rapists and all the racist shitty people start coming out of the woodwork. The President sucks at organizing literally anything and a quarter of a million people die. The President questions elections and it eats away at the fabric of democracy a little more. The President flaunts any semblance of respect for diplomacy, due process, conflict of interest or anything and anyone for that matter and even the things that do work start breaking down.
This position isn’t unique to republican presidents however. It’s the position of all public officials and indeed public figures of any kind. Presidents have more deciding power but their power is still limited by a host of other factors and people, from senators and generals to civil service employees and the public at large. For better or worse, everything is a team effort. Terms of living in a democracy, however flawed. A descent into fascism and madness is not about the actions of one person, but the cumulative efforts of thousands. Progress is the same.
The chief difference between a good president and a bad president, in my mind, is that a good president emboldens goodness. A bad president, well, does the opposite.
Donald Trump is a bad president. He emboldens all the wrong things and he does so on a catastrophic international scale. But my concern with a Biden presidency is that it will embolden nothing. America passed up the solid opportunity to embolden goodness (and orient itself in the direction of greatness) when it passed up nominating Bernie Sanders or another progressive to the democratic ticket. But you work with what you’ve got and what you’ve got now seems like horrible vs meh.
A lot of people (including myself) ask themselves the difficult and almost comically unpredictable question of what happens next under either scenario. Does a second Trump term act as a referendum on horribleness and lead to something worse? Does it crush freedoms, break institutions and make America irreparable? Or does it provide the country with a proper wake up call and create a swing to something better in 4 years time? What about a Biden presidency? Do progressives exert influence or return to the margins? Does Biden embolden goodness, rise to the moment, eschew conventional wisdom and create a place where things get done? Or does the next four years crush everything under a blob of nihilistic neo-liberal centrism, with people forgetting their anger, losing their hope and sighing soulless relief at the return of America? Something that may well end up bringing us back to this same place again.
I’m not American. I don’t get to decide. But many of you do. A Trump win would be a disaster. But a Biden win could be too, unless you decide to hold on to all the emotions you’re feeling now.
Joe Biden won’t save America. Only relentless dissatisfaction and belligerent optimism can save America.
I’ve seen the beginning of democracies. And I’ve seen the end. And while a lot of things can strengthen them or eat away at them, there’s one thing that almost universally signals the end. A loss of trust.
In 2011 revolutions started in the Middle East because people realised they shared something — they didn’t like their governments. While living under authoritarian regimes made it hard to find, it was a form of solidarity that was easy to have. However what came next was more complicated. They were challenged to build something new, which meant wild disagreements on practically everything. Opinions and ideas long hidden and buried came flooding to the surface and left people scattered and confused. This is a historic progressive problem. While conservatism leans on what is or has been, change is an open field of possibilities.
Most of America agrees they don’t like Trump. But ‘not Trump’ is similarly an open field. Not all of it good. Almost all of it would be better. But some of it could be worse. The Arab Spring ultimately took a turn for the terrible, allowing established blocs of power to wrestle control away and plow everything straight back to where it started. By many accounts, worse. Elections were undermined. What people wanted didn’t matter and so people stopped showing up. The experiment was over. But the sentiment that fueled it doesn’t go away. It get’s trapped underneath like a pot of boiling water. You can put the lid back on if you like, but the pressure is just going to keep building. It needs an outlet. It needs democracy to work.
America cannot make the same mistake. In rejecting Trump, it needs a plan for how to make things better. Radically better. It needs to confront the fact that things as they were before, weren’t great at all. Not for progressives. Not for workers. Not for middle america or immigrants. Not for liberals or conservatives. Not for most people. It needs an ambitious plan to genuinely and unironically make America ‘great’, discarding any pretense of ‘again’. One that gives people what clear and repeated data suggests the vast majority of them want. Justice, immigration and political finance reform, anti corruption legislation, paid leave, higher wages, higher taxes on the rich, public healthcare, fresh infrastructure, something resembling a green new deal, a bit of hope and perhaps a little integrity. To do that, someone might need to piss a few people off. Some of the folks that voted for Trump may have had a sense of that last part. They just picked the wrong guy. The system failed to provide them with a candidate they could give an emphatic thumbs up, so they used a middle finger instead.
There is a tradition, enthusiastically adopted by Biden’s best pal and former President Obama of ‘reaching across the isle’. It didn’t work out so well. Republicans don’t play so nice. When Biden gave a speech at Gettysburg recently, he spoke of Lincoln and his own personal desire to reach across the isle, in the same breath. He appealed to the same centrist strategy, while “governing for all Americans”. He perhaps neglected to remember that Lincoln fought a war before setting the country on a better path. There was no luxury of centrism. What Lincoln tapped into, whether consciously or not, was the fact that the political center and the ‘real’ center were two different things. The rubber band was stretched thin and he snapped it back. He fought for what America wanted to be, what it should be, rather than where it’s politicians maintained that it was. Kennedy, in some sense, did the same. All the best presidents do. It is a tough reality to accept, but governing for all Americans might mean telling a few Americans where to stick it. It certainly means playing hardball and it often means going against your own party as much as the opposition.
There is little doubt the Republican Party as it stands is a blight on America, persistently and consistently working against the best interests of a majority of the people they claim to serve. They have actively engaged in antidemocratic and authoritarian practice, enriched themselves at the expense of ordinary people, led the country into war, buried it in debt without purpose, played sycophantic bobble-heads to a narcissist and sold lies every step of the way. The democrats meanwhile have played Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde. They benefit from being better, without actually being any good. In so doing, they benefit from the above practices while being publicly appalled. It is an arrangement which actively annihilates meaningful change. A monstrous system. In some ways a Trump presidency uncages the monster, while a Biden presidency would, if the democratic establishment has it’s way, simply continue feeding it. It is sometimes hard to process which is ultimately worse.
Both courses would seem to be a recipe for disaster. Indeed, the disaster may already be here. There are now established narratives in place to explain or dismiss an electoral loss for either party. If Biden wins, Trump supporters will say it’s because the democrats stole the election through mail in ballots and unprecedented deep state corruption. If Trump wins, Biden supporters will say it’s because the republicans suppressed votes, reduced polling places and manipulated the electoral infrastructure. There is certainly far more truth to one side than the other, but ultimately, it won’t matter. America is on a trajectory that is extremely difficult to adjust mid-flight. Trust, once lost, is tough to regain.
However, it’s not impossible, and very often the first step to correcting a problem is recognising that it exists. Given the fact that voter suppression of one form or another has been common practice for literally the entire history of the country and G W Bush became President (despite losing) based on an erroneous supreme court decision 20 years ago — perhaps that recognition is settling in. Perhaps the erosion of trust in the election amid the glaring obviousness of it’s fundamental inadequacies is just expectations dropping to meet reality. Should this election devolve into chaos, conflict and endless legal battles that bring the US to the brink of political collapse, it might be just the recipe for change that is required. Provided whoever comes out on top has the stones to go through with it.
Should America make it through this election with a political system somewhat intact, the problems will be different. If Trump comes away with another term (which remains a possibility), there will be further rises in everything we have seen thus far from corona deaths and the abhorrent treatment of migrants, to white supremacy and right wing terrorism. The uncaged monster will be free to continue stomping around breaking and smashing things and all the little monsters will follow suit. Another four years could see the US become an altogether different and no doubt scarier beast from what it has been before, abandoning any illusion of shining beacons or hills. It would be a difficult place to come back from, assuming there was the will to do so.
If Biden wins and a transition takes place somewhat as usual, then it will be less bad. But the chance for it to get worse will not have vanished as many would like to believe. There will still be the threat of the virus, not to mention massive recession, or even depression. The responsibility of which will begin to fall on the left. And what if Trump doesn’t go so easy. It’s hard to tell if false or early claims of victory will garner any traction. Trump is unlikely to have the guts for a coup, but that doesn’t mean an army of lawyers and media won’t be out there pushing his narrative anyway. Or that his supporters won’t be fighting (in some cases literally) the case. Widespread conflict is possible. But the point is, getting rid of Trump is not the solution. It is just part one. In this scenario Biden and the democrats will be responsible for making sure that, as above, things get markedly better. They will be responsible not just for fighting a pandemic and restoring an economy, but rebuilding trust with the American people. All while being pressured to hold the former administration accountable. If they lean on established practice, they’ll fail. Success would mean a battle, as much with their own party as anyone else. It’s not going to be pretty. Because if Biden doesn’t shake it up. If democrats (and the odd republican) with that fruitful combination of ethics and a spine don’t capture some serious ground, then the next election will be worse. If things continue as they are, then there really is only one more chance.
I spoke earlier of how Presidents are just people. They don’t define society. They don’t even define politics in the absolute. They just influence it (a lot) and are influenced by it, creating space for good, bad or entirely average things to happen. That’s true. Regardless of what happens next week, the next four years and indeed the future of the United States and the world will be defined as much by what ordinary people do as what presidents do. It is on all of us to not be broken by this, to find solidarity and push relentlessly for those good things we know we can agree on, irrespective of context. That sounds excruciatingly difficult and it is.
I also spoke of hope. And there is hope. One of my most ambitious hopes for this election is that should he win (and I do hope he wins), Joe Biden will find buried in him something that surprises us all a little. Something resembling the video I watched. A little boldness and clarity on something that truly matters. Climate, Justice, Economic Policy. Whatever. Something that moves the ball forward, rather than just returning it to the center. Joe Biden is not Franklin Roosevelt. But if he wants to be more than a stepping stone between one era and the next, that is precisely where he needs to draw his influence from. I hope he makes the right choice. That there is enough wind behind him, blowing in the right direction to get it done in the face of often unassailable forces of obstruction. And I hope that it delivers for all Americans. The real center. Not the political one.
However my greatest hope has nothing to do with Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or anyone currently in the political sphere for that matter. My greatest hope is that, contrary to popular belief, this isn’t an end to American democracy at all, but a rebirth. And so far there are indications that it might be. Americans are heading to the polls in record breaking numbers, with more mail in votes, more early votes and more passionate argument than ever before. In Texas for example, there have been more early votes cast, than votes cast in total in 2016. The conflict, the anxiety, the country at stake. It creates a powerful draw card and increases the pressure on electoral infrastructure. But if it can cope and if it can survive the next few months, it may come out better than its been in a long time. And if not, the demand for reform will have never been higher. One way or another, 2021 looks set to have more people invested in politics than ever before. And that’s a good thing.
It’s also an obligation. It means change ‘has’ to happen. It creates added pressure and added responsibility on whatever crowd of people is in power to not squander that burst of energy, but build on it. To demonstrate that participating matters, so that millions of people don’t return to the shadows. That means a whole lot more than just ‘not Trump’.
Those voters will be needed again and next time it might matter even more.
Perhaps through it all Americans will remember what this whole democracy thing was all about in the first place. I hope it can earn their trust again — that they can see it’s imperfections, yet believe in what it can and should be. I hope they work tirelessly with each other to make it better, by not only voting, but getting involved in media, in civil society and yes, even in politics.
That is, after all, the only way to make America genuinely great and more importantly, ensure it doesn’t come this way again. It’s gonna get ugly. Biden may help. He may not. But if enough good people can embolden themselves, it might not matter.
