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The heart of Joe Biden's presidential campaign is the argument that it represents the "safe" choice. It is the candidate who can defeat Trump. He is the candidate with whom people are comfortable. (He is "Uncle Joe"!) He represents a "return to normal". He can "reach out to Republicans" and "bring people together".
But not only is it unclear whether Biden is really the "safe choice" – other Democrats have beaten Trump easily in the latest polls (Quinnipiac, Fox), while seeming more self-confident – it is not clear how safe is "security". A "return to normal" will do the trick nothing to tackle the underlying problems that led to the election of Trump in the first place – nor to the deep systemic problems of democratic decline around the world nor the specific problems of the American political system, driven by the long-term forces described by Peter Turchin in "Ages of discord"(Salon review right here).
The long-term trends of increased polarization and negative partisanship described by Alan Abramowitz in "The great alignment"(Salon interview right here) and Rachel Bitecofer (interview with the salon right here) are not going anywhere. The Republican Party will not magically reverse its transformation of more than 50 years, as explained in "The southern long strategy"By Angie Maxwell (Interview Salon right here) and Todd Shields. There is also no reason to believe that the GOP will stop playing asymmetrical constitutional hardball (Stories of living room right here and right here). Anything that basically made Trump's attack possible will continue unless there's something spectacular and extraordinary about it – and that's exactly what Biden's "back to normal" argument is about. assures us that we will not do it.
Future President Biden will not get much more cooperation from the GOP than Obama, but he will continue to play nicely while chatting about his "good republican friends" only to force them to spoil him with all that is wrong. . All of this will make even more massive mid-term losses in 2022 (at the end of 1994 and 2010, as I mentioned above). right here), and will set the GOP to lead a more professional and disciplined Trumpist to defeat him in 2024.
Of course, none of this is certain. The future is never. But what is certain is that Biden does not think at all about these serious problems. He can not. If he did, he should engage in a much broader discussion about the political realities that his whole candidacy is based on his will to avoid – not least because his entire political history of defensive political posture helped to create this disastrous situation at the beginning place.
There are at least four main arguments against the supposed security of the Biden election in 2020.
First, the election of Donald Trump completely discredited Biden's fundamental political orientation in favor of NDP "normality". The serious long-term advocates of this approach have explained earlier this year: it's based on a responsible Republican and Conservative behavior fantasy that recent history has destroyed.
Secondly, in this orientation, Biden's specific record is particularly bad. He has done a lot to contribute to the dysfunctions of our criminal justice system: mass incarceration, militarization of the local police, perverse incitement to the confiscation of civil society property, disparate condemnation for crack. All of these things reflect a state of mind motivated by political fears and the definition of a right-wing agenda, rather than by the facts or values of the Democratic coalition that it is supposed to represent. Biden's catastrophic failure at Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas's hearings in 1991 clearly underlines the fundamental weaknesses of her approach, as well as her lesser known role in setting up the appointment of Lani Guinier to head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under Bill Clinton.
Third, the once fairly just judgment of Biden's foreign policy has eroded over the years, as he was increasingly influenced by the conventional wisdom of center-right Washington. This culminated in his support for the invasion of Iraq, one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history. It shows no signs of understanding the proliferating threats that have emerged since then, and therefore can not be a stabilizing leader against them. Any leader will face unprecedented challenges because the threats we face are historically new. But Biden is singularly unprepared precisely because of all the questionable lessons he has learned.
Fourth, politics is like cycling: stability stems from change: stay still and fall. We are at a time when a wide range of progressive policies to address the failures of the past have begun to gain ground. Biden's retrograde message of returning to normal makes him far less capable of producing the stability that people project on him with hope.
Let's examine each of them in turn.
The failure of the "New Democrat"
Earlier this year, two serious thinkers of the "New Democratic" era – that is, the "neoliberal" Democratic party reinvented during the Bill Clinton years – explained why they considered their project had failed, asking them to support more leftist policies. simply for pragmatic reasons. Biden's deliberate blindness to what they saw is precisely what should worry any democrat thinking a day after November 3, 2020.
The first was Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of Berkeley, a so-called member of the "Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party," a reference to Robert Rubin, secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. The second was Democratic journalist Ed Kilgore, who became a Democratic strategist. a founding New Democrat who fell in love with Bill Clinton in the mid-1980s and with Barack Obama almost instantly.
DeLong started on Twitter. He described the "Rubin Wing" as "those of us who hoped to use the market means for social democratic purposes in a bipartisan coalition with Republicans in search of technocratic win-win solutions."
Over the last 25 years, we have not been able to attract Republican coalition partners, we have failed to energize our own base, and we have not been able to produce enough obvious policy gains. to cement the center into a sustainable government coalition.
Biden totally ignores these failures in his call for "back to normal". are normality. They are what brought us Donald Trump.
DeLong continued, "There are other people to blame, but shared responsibility is not a diminished responsibility. The witness rightly passes to our colleagues on our left. We are still here, but it's not our time to lead.
In one Vox Conversation, Long elaborated further:
We are certainly 100% wrong about politics.
Barack Obama takes his responsibilities with Mitt Romney's health policy, with John McCain's climate policy, with Bill Clinton's fiscal policy and with George H.W. Bush's foreign policy. He has all these things not because the technocrats in his government think they are the best policies possible, but because [White House adviser] David Axelrod and the company say that they probe well ….
And did George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain say one positive word about all that Barack Obama has done in eight solid years?
No, they do not have fucking. No allegiance to the truth is based on the belief that John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are the leaders of the Republican Party and that they have decided to leave for a scorched earth, we must support them wholeheartedly. The policy was therefore completely wrong, and we saw that it started under the Clinton administration.
The values and ideology of DeLong have not changed. What has changed is his understanding of the world and its possibilities. His pragmatism is intact – Joe Biden does not have so much to do. He clings to a fantasy of responsible Republicans who simply do not exist. DeLong again:
Until something non-debris is built in the Republican Center, which could be good incremental policies simply can not be implemented successfully in an America as we know it today. ; hui. We need health insurance for all, financed by a carbon tax, with a whole series of UBI rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies.
The reflection of Ed Kilgore put more emphasis on the apparent success of the New Democrats:
They won seven consecutive Democratic presidential nominations (or maybe eight, according to your ranking, Michael Dukakis), and then won the popular vote at six of those general elections. This relative success came after the Republicans won five of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.
It sounds pretty impressive, but then it puts things in a more realistic light:
Yes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have remembered what seemed at times to be an irresistible conservative tide led by an increasingly irresponsible and extremist Republican party. But their positive achievements were limited and eroded by their Republican successors. Perhaps more importantly, their efforts to revive progressivism by marrying it to market mechanisms – partly to secure business and moderate Republican support – have never attracted public imagination or bipartisan support. It has instead become a vector of deregulation and speculative excess that contributed to the financial crisis and the Great Recession, a weakening of industries employing non-graduates and the kind of growing income inequality that seemed to mitigate a moment in the 90s. And even when this approach was successful initially, as for the classic public-private structure of Obamacare, it did not visibly inspire the kind of loyalty imposed by public programs allegedly archaic and sclerotic New Deal and Great Society.
And it was before 2016, "when the political premise of Democratic centrism sank into Hillary Clinton's shocking defeat against Donald Trump". To date, Biden has hardly shown the awareness of these deep failings, which means that he is powerless to fix them in the future. .
The descriptive framework used by Kilgore differs slightly from that of DeLong, but the result is the same: a theoretically plausible political economy project failed to find coalition partners. failed to generate public support, failed to inspire his base, was confronted with a relentless opposition of bad faith. and therefore did not keep his promises.
One could also add that the NDP project was saved or preserved, at least temporarily, by two of the most charismatic men ever to run for president – a description no one could apply to Joe Biden. The election victories of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, however, were followed by epic mid-term losses, not only in the House of Representatives, but in the state legislatures of the country. The NDP project completely failed in the building of the party and was in fact destroying part. There is no reason to expect anything radically different if Biden were elected president next year.
In simple terms: the two men were wrong about the world. As DeLong put it, "the world seems to be more like what leftists thought was what I thought it was for 10 or 15 years." But that's not a lesson Biden has learned. In fact, Biden is clearly more deceived than most.
Biden's assessment of crime and justice
As a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden's poor record of crime and justice is particularly important and not just a matter of the past, as most Biden apologists would say.
In early July, Biden was questioned about progressive proposals to rebalance the courts – more than three years after Mitch McConnell's unconstitutional refusal to let the Senate rule on Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland. Biden "Do not hit me!" Reply said, "I'm not ready to continue trying to pack the court because we will be living on the street that day."
It's certainly true, if people like Biden lead the party. Because his record in this regard is atrocious, as I told here in September 2015. Four things I focused on at the time deserve to be remembered here:
First, Biden's image as a progressive is somehow belied by his righteous drift in the Senate. Of He entered the Senate from 1973 to January 1987 and was on average 16th of the most liberal Senate; since January 1999, he had an average of 30th the most liberal; and from that point on, until he left the Senate in January 2009, he averaged 38th most liberal member. His DW-Nominate score (based on roll-call vote) has moved 10% to the right during this period.
Second, Biden played a leading role in building the war on drugs, as a summarized by Jamelle Bouie at Slate. This included:
- Help develop and succeed in 1984 Global Control Act, in collaboration with Republican Senator Strom Thurmond and the Reagan administration) "which resulted in improved confiscation of civilian assets, and gave local police access to some of the assets seized"
- Cosponsorship of the 1986 Addiction Act, "Who has created new mandatory minimum sentences for drugs, including the infamous disparity in penalties for crack, vesus and cocaine"
- Playing a major role in the formation of 1988 Anti-Drug Act"Who has strengthened the mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession, strengthened the sanctions for people who carry drugs and created the Office of National Drug Control Policy, whose director was baptized" czar of drugs "by Biden"
- Author of the 1994 Law on the Control of Violent Crimes and the Law Enforcement, which "increased money for police and prisons, fueling a considerable expansion of the federal prison population" and "also contributed to the rapid growth of militarized police forces using new federal funds to buy hundreds of thousands of military equipment ".
There were voices of reason that Biden simply ignored. An example I quoted was the Book 1994, "Rabies to Punish: The Unintended Consequences of the Mandatory SentenceDe Lois Forer, a Philadelphia judge with 16 years of experience, who focused on the use of reparations for damage to non-violent offenders. Now that we finally have a robust mass movement that puts forward similar arguments, Biden seems hardly qualified to lead, much less the "safe choice".
In connecting these first two points, I noticed that Bouie city of Naomi Murakawa's book, "The first civil right: how liberals built the American prisonIn which Senator Orrin Hatch accused the Democrats of "siding in front of the Liberal wing" for criminal justice issues. As Bouie explained:
Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party claims 60 new death sentences … the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, a hundred cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 125,000 new prison cells.
Third, I focused on Biden undermining Anita Hill, which put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. I drew Overwhelming Steve Kornacki's Summary of Evidence Against Thomas for Salon in 2010adding that "there was already overwhelming evidence of return at the time of the Senate confirmation hearing "in 1991, and that Biden played a key role in removing this evidence. I quoted Hill from one 2014 Huffington Post meeting:
I think he did two things that were detrimental to me, certainly to the public. It was a public hearing. We were there to inform the public. Three women were waiting and were summoned to testify about similar behaviors they had experienced and witnessed. He failed to call them. There were also experts who could have given real information, as opposed to misinformation given in the Senate, who could have given information and helped the public to understand sexual harassment. He failed to call them. That was two things. I think there were probably more if I played.
As I concluded in 2015, "Biden has failed in his leadership. Instead of leading his committee through an informed deliberation process, he helped perpetuate a cover-up that put a sexual stalker in front of the country's highest court. This is not what a safe and stable leadership looks like.
Fourth, I looked at the fact that Biden silenced DOJ candidate Lani Guinier, in which he participated in the baseless racist propaganda campaign to demonize her, rather than bothering to use her. listen to herself. This story has been largely buried by history, but it is worth going back to.
Guinier was a voting rights pleader in the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund hearing room, who later became a professor and developed a sophisticated analysis of the voting rights law. I have cited a precedent interview with Ari Berman, author of "Give us the ballot"Where he explained his analysis in three phases – the first phase removed the obstacles to voting, the second phase removed the discriminatory electoral systems that prevented minorities from being elected, and the third phase was to" give people a fair share of political power. "
"There were mountains of evidence documenting this [Guinier] spoke of, "I wrote. "But it was deeply at odds with the right-wing narratives flooding Washington at the time, like the wildly deformed "queen of well-being," & # 39; a racist trope that has been reassigned to attack Guinier ", returning to Berman's description:
Instead of Congress getting involved with its ideas, it was demonized by this right as a "quota queen". There was therefore no serious discussion about the remedies she was proposing because people were so worried that she was going to demand an affirmative warrant. action in the electoral field. It was really a weak point, I think for Congress …
As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden was the first person responsible for this failure, as I indicated:
[H]He failed in the same way that he had failed with the criminal law and Hill / Thomas hearings: he based his thoughts and actions on Washington's customs, postulates and attitudes, rather than on the country he is supposed to represent.
This summarizes the long history of Biden's failures in crime and justice – the political domain in which he played his most important role. That alone should clarify that Biden can not provide safe and reliable leadership in the future.
Joe Biden's judgment on foreign policy
Biden's foreign policy judgment was once quite healthy. A 2008 editorial of the Wall Street JournalHe voted for a cut in funds to end the Vietnam War and opposed Ronald Reagan's financing of right-wing terrorism in Central America, the "Star Wars" fantasy of Reagan. and George HW The 1991 Gulf War of Bush asked: "What vital interests of the United States justify sending Americans to die in the sands of Saudi Arabia?"
But after that, his judgment began to falter. In 1998, as a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Biden "expressed support for the use of force" in Iraq, as the Washington Post reported at the time. "The inability to do so," said Biden, "will only encourage Saddam to adopt an increasingly aggressive attitude towards weapons production … and to threaten again his neighbors." Biden also called for a sustained effort to "dethrone him against the long haul."
Four years later, as chairman of this committee, he told "Meet the Press" that Saddam Hussein was "a long-term threat and a short-term threat to our national security. We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. It's a guy who is an extreme danger to the world. " Presented with this clip by Tim Russert five years laterBiden insisted, "I was right." It is therefore not surprising that he is one of 29 Senate Democrats. who voted for the war in Iraq in October 2002.
Let's be clear. Saddam Hussein was an oppressive dictator, but scarcely the only one in the world and was by no means a serious threat to the national security of the United States. The threatening figures should be managed with diplomacy. That's what mature global leadership does. Once upon a time, Biden knew it. Somewhere along the line, he forgot.
Moreover, Biden shows no signs of understanding the wide range of threats that have emerged since the war in Iraq – in particular, cyberwar, hybrid war, and the global rise of ethno-nationalism and white nationalism. particular. Biden's stubborn refusal to acknowledge his past mistakes makes him particularly ill-suited to the proliferation of new threats. He does not have solid know-how on which to rely on old acquaintances. He can not therefore be a stabilizing leader in today's world. If he had recognized the mistakes he had made in the past and was surrounded by a new set of advisers, it might be reasonable to give him another chance. He did not do that.
Stability and change
In our personal lives, a stable person can often be a person who seems immutable. But in the field of public affairs, change comes with the territory, and stability comes from accepting and controlling it. Biden is still attached to the past, looking for "inexperienced Republicans" with whom to associate.
The disruption that brought us in the first place Trump will not disappear, no matter who we choose or which course we follow. But there are plausible tracks to move forward that go in a different, more progressive direction. For example, Data for Progress recently unveiled a national survey on a dozen progressive policies. "These policies have lasting support and can withstand the right-wing counter-arguments of the right," DFP wrote. "We have good reason to believe that even if they become politicized, they will remain popular with persuasive and grassroots voters in many geographic areas."
Policies with majority support in the 50 states include legalize marijuana, red flag laws regarding firearm sales, 15% capped rates on credit cards, extension of the new START treaty on nuclear weapons, employee governance in large companies (in practice, this means that employees must elect certain board seats), corruption reforms (such as banning the holding of actions by congressmen and senior officials) and so much more. Paid family leave has majority support in all states except Wyoming. Automatic registration of voters polls are a bit lower, but have a majority of votes in states like Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas, where increased voter turnout would likely have a huge impact.
This is not just the Democratic base, but America as a whole that is moving in a more progressive direction. The fight against this tide – as Biden's "return to normal" makes clear – is not a way to achieve greater stability, but a deepening of frustrations and schisms. Democrats have a particularly serious problem with voter turnout in the mid-term elections that immediately follow a victorious presidential campaign. A president who disappoints and frustrates the democratic base makes the party particularly vulnerable to electoral disaster. Joe Biden could definitely become our next president. But this is by no means a safe bet for the future.
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