Like millions of other people who voted for the Democratic ticket in the general election in November, Joe Biden was decidedly not my guy. As a Democratic Socialist I believe that the kind of governmental reform that Bernie Sanders has been advocating for the past decade is not only desirable, but necessary for the long term viability of our democracy. I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary, but would have been quite happy to cast my vote in the general election for Sanders. And early in the primary campaign that appeared to be the consensus of the rest of the Democratic voters as Sanders took an early and commanding lead, while Biden didn’t appear to have a chance of becoming the nominee. After Super Tuesday, however, it was all over but the shouting. Covid-19 had been allowed to sweep through the country by the inept and criminally negligent occupant of the White House, and somehow Joe Biden had captured the momentum and the Democratic nomination, and went on to deliver a crushing loss to the man-child who had used the highest office in the land as the platform for his own criminal enterprise. Though Biden was definitely not my guy, like so many other millions of people in this country, I was ecstatic that the country would no longer have to suffer four more years under the worst president in the history of the United States.
But even with two weeks until the Electoral College ends the massive disinformation campaign being waged by the petulant child in the White House and his propaganda arms in the media—and another month beyond that before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice-president of the United States, I’m actually concerned that this might have been the worst thing that could have happened. Not worse that four more years of fascist and anti-intellectual rule, don’t get me wrong; nothing could have been worse than that. But historical precedent has me worried. I was in elementary school when Watergate engulfed the nation and was only vaguely aware of the specific details about it at the time. And it was only a few weeks before I was to start junior high when my dad made me come into the family room to watch President Nixon resign. Gerald Ford then made things worse by pardoning the disgraced president, denying the country the ability to hold Nixon accountable for his comparatively minor crimes when viewed from our perspective today. As a result, the voters not only rid themselves of Republicans in the White House, but voted in a complete Washington outsider, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, to be the new president in 1976.
But Carter was ill prepared for the job, in both experience and personality. Endlessly empathetic and a devoutly religious man, he also micro-managed his subordinates and seemed far more interested in foreign affairs than solving the multiple crises at home, which included massive inflation, rising oil prices, and a military-industrial complex looking for a new war and itching to use the nuclear weapons that had been denied to them during Vietnam. Ironically, for a guy who negotiated a truce between Israel and Egypt, and eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize, the worst foreign policy disaster ever to befall a presidency came on his watch during the Iran hostage crisis. The real nadir of his presidency, however, came during the “malaise speech” in which, like a disappointed father looking over a bad report card, Carter took to the airwaves and essentially told the citizens of the United States that it was all their fault because they had such a bad attitude. In the end, voters were so sick of Carter that they inadvertently ushered in twelve years of militarized, anti-regulatory, predatory capitalism under Regan and Bush. And it was only another outsider—way outside this time—in the form of billionaire Ross Perot, who siphoned off enough of Bush’s votes in 1992 to throw the election to Bill Clinton and save the country from even further middle-class devastation.
The parallels with today are too similar to ignore. The country didn’t vote for Carter because he was Carter, but because he wasn’t Nixon and Ford. Likewise, a large percentage of Biden voters this year did so not out of a desire to see him in the White House, but because they wanted the dumbest man to ever hold the office out of there. Similarly, Biden, like Carter, is an empathetic and devoutly religious family man. And like his Democratic predecessor, he seems just as ill equipped for the task at hand, this time to take on a rogue Republican Party bent on destroying democracy as we know it. The most troubling thing about Biden is his political history. This was something recounted in detail back in a March 2019 cover article in Harper’s called “No Joe! Biden’s Disastrous Legislative Legacy.” The article, written by Andrew Cockburn, is a cautionary tale published just ahead of Biden’s announcement of his presidential run, and should be read by every American to acquaint them with the new president’s political predilections. In it, Cockburn begins with Biden’s apparent willingness to compromise with the right on just about anything.
“I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” he
declared in the Rose Garden in 2015, renouncing a much-anticipated White House run. “It’s mean-
spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve
to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look on Republicans as our enemies.”
This does not bode well for the next four years because Biden believes that he’s a deal maker, someone who can work across the aisle and get things done. He may, but in the end they won’t wind up being the things this country really needs. For one thing, the landscape has changed, and dramatically so. Biden came of age during a time when Democratic stalwarts like Edward Kennedy and Tip O’Neill actually could get things done—to a certain degree—by compromising with the Republicans. But politics in the twenty-first century is so completely different that it no longer bears any resemblance to the political world that Biden inhabited before being tabbed as Obama’s VP. The public heard something similar in this campaign, when Biden proclaimed that he will govern for all Americans, not just Democrats. But as Cockburn stated, “By tapping into these popular tropes—‘The system is broken,’ ‘Why can’t Congress just get along?’—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy.”
What makes this outdated attitude even worse in Biden’s case—or if looked at another way, actually explains it—is that as a senator from Delaware, he was in the pockets of big money from the very beginning.
There are some causes that [Delawareans], or at least the dominant power brokers in the state,
hold especially dear. Foremost among them is Delaware’s status as a freewheeling tax haven.
State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks, and
it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half
of all US public companies are legally headquartered there . . . [as such] Biden was never going
to stray too far from the industry’s priorities.
This is a situation that led Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren to state of her Democratic presidential rival: “His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.” Given all of this, it’s also quite possible that his cozy relationship with the banking industry explains his inexplicable overtaking of Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Both Sanders and Warren have been outspoken advocates for banking and finance reform, and because of that earned the wrath of the moneyed interests and inspired completely fictional hyperbole on the right to the effect that either one of them as president would mean the complete destruction of the American economy.
Biden’s hand-in-glove relationship with Wall Street, however, is nothing new. John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic president—with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter—who wasn’t beholden to big business and the banking industry. And just look what happened to him. Lyndon Johnson was the absolute worst, rubber-stamping a war in Southeast Asia that killed tens of thousands of Americans, with the only result that it fattened the wallets of defense industry owners and executives. In fact, it was the utter failure of the eight year Obama administration to make any substantial reform of the financial industry during the Great Bush Recession, anything that might stem the tide of the shrinking of the middle class and the wage slavery that is the daily reality for most of the citizens of this country, that resulted in the devastating election of 2016. Slick Willy was even worse, which not only tainted Hillary by association, but in point of fact. She was unable to escape her own Wall Street ties, dubious ethics, and the devastating policies of her husband, especially in regard to black incarceration—something that Biden had his hands in as well. According to Cockburn’s article,
By the 1980s, Biden had begun to see political gold in the harsh antidrug legislation that had been
pioneered by drug warriors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and would ultimately
lead to the age of mass incarceration for black Americans. One of his Senate staffers at the time
recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think
‘Joe Biden’” . . . Despite pleas from the NAACP and the ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from
Biden’s crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian
laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would
be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden
encouraged him to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative” with suitably tough legislation. The
ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administra-
tion pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars.
One hopes that Biden has seen the error of his ways, and his selection of Kamala Harris as vice president may be the evidence for a genuine reversal of policy in the coming years. But Harris has no executive powers, and it remains to be seen how seriously Biden takes on nation wide systemic racism in law enforcement.
There’s no doubt that Biden will have his hands full with his response to the coronavirus, something his immediate predecessor ignored and which resulted in over a quarter of a million U.S. deaths—a total that is still rising. The attendant economic collapse of small businesses and growing numbers out of work employees is only slightly less urgent. Foreign affairs as well have been an unmitigated disaster under the current administration, and though Cockburn’s article demonstrates that Biden’s reputation in this area is also greatly exaggerated—“Biden’s claims of experience on the world stage cannot be denied. True, the experience has been routinely disastrous for those on the receiving end, but on the other hand, that is a common fate for those subjected, under any administration, to the operations of our foreign policy apparatus”—it will command much of the commander-in-chief’s time as well. But if Biden is going to avoid the ignominious fate of Jimmy Carter he’ll need to focus on three areas of domestic policy that compelled voters of all stripes to the polls to get rid of the current president: healthcare reform, economic reform, and law enforcement reform—including a wealth tax to pay for it all. Currently, however, the president elect has no plans to deal with healthcare at all, other than by attempting to expand the Affordable Healthcare Act, a half-hearted compromise in the first place and something Republicans have been trying to kill almost from the moment it was passed.
It’s criminal that this country is the only advanced nation in the world that doesn’t have universal healthcare. But again, the reason for that comes down to political support for the moneyed interests that control politics in the first place. To allow something as critical as the health of a nation to be held hostage by the profit motive is unconscionable. Privatization of health insurance in this country has been a travesty, especially since these companies stand to make even more money beyond their overpriced premiums by denying benefits to their customers. Meanwhile we have a system already in place, Medicare, that could be extended to all citizens and solve the problem almost at once, and yet the very people who benefit themselves from free government healthcare, Congressional Republicans, are the same people most actively trying to do away with that system for the rest of us. Unlike any president in the last fifty years Biden has a golden opportunity, in the midst of a worldwide medical crisis, to effect real healthcare reform, and yet it’s doubtful Biden will come anywhere close to solving the problem. That’s what happens when politicians seek only compromise rather than reform. And like appeasement with the Nazis in Munich, Biden may face the same consequences as Neville Chamberlin by doing likewise with Republicans.
As Andrew Cockburn’s Harper’s piece points out in detail, Biden looks to do no better with financial reform. Rather than sweeping regulatory limitations placed on big business and financial institutions—including paying their fair share of taxes—his only economic plan seems to be his “Build Back Better” program of expanding the clean energy industry. One can already see the growth of lending and subcontracting that will continue to support and grow wealth for the top end of society, while completely ignoring necessary reforms like a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, strengthening manufacturing unions, addressing income inequality, closing loopholes for overseas production by U.S. businesses, and putting a stop to a host of other practices that continue to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Biden’s obligation to big money will likely prevent any meaningful change for the working class he panders to, a relationship that he carefully cultivated during the campaign. Finally, racial tensions, exemplified by the continuing spate of preemptive murders of blacks at the hands of white police officers must be dealt with in some kind of substantive way once and for all. Defunding the police—an unfortunate term, if an extremely accurate one—has real potential. By farming out many inappropriate police responsibilities to other agencies, especially those dealing with domestic abuse, homelessness, and drug abuse, those funds typically allocated to police departments could then be diverted to fund groups better equipped to deal with those issues than uniformed men carrying guns.
What’s so frustrating about Democratic centrist ideology is that it doesn’t work. Not only hasn’t it worked for the past fifty years, it has failed miserably. The tremendous irony is that, were Democrats able to embolden themselves to run roughshod over the corporate tools that the Republican Party has become, they would finally be able to institute much needed reforms that would help everyone, not just those with money. And once that happened all Americans, especially the working class, would be able to see the benefit to themselves and others, and finally be able to understand the disinformation that is being fed to them by the right for the lie that it is. Instead, centrist Democrats have been cowed by the very propaganda coming from the right that insists “socialism” is a dirty word, and that they can’t get elected by pursuing a progressive agenda. Well, the most recent election has put an end to that particular myth. All of the Democratic senators and congressmen and women who stayed in the center lost their races, while those on the left with progressive ideology won or held their seats. The new reality in politics is that the wealthy oligarchy fears the power of the majority as a threat to their tyranny in a way they never have before. That’s probably the reason that Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination in the first place, and from the looks of things he is busily assembling a third, do-nothing Obama administration, with cabinet picks like Neera Tanden promising to make things even worse.
Again, however, I do want to emphasize that the colossal difference between the last four years and the return to normalcy that Joe Biden’s election represents will possibly go down as one of the most important turning points in United States history. And the people were right to celebrate in the streets at the removal of the most corrupt, hate-filled, democratically corrosive administration in our history. I’m sure I’ll cry watching the inauguration, just as I did when I watched Obama’s first acceptance speech in 2008. But it’s the very idea of a return to normal that worries me, because there is a new normal today. And in this new, severely altered reality, “normal” is not going to succeed. This is something that Republicans figured out back in 2014 when they gained control of the Senate. They began then, and have never stopped, their all out assault on democracy through complete Congressional obstructionism, a far right Supreme Court judiciary, and the use of full-time propaganda arms in the form of right-wing news networks. And if working class voters elect another fascist that is even marginally more intelligent than the imbecile in the Oval Office now, the country is going to be in real trouble. Meanwhile, Democratic politicians still wring their hands and profess a desire to “reach across the aisle.” It’s a recipe for disaster if the left doesn’t push back against the anti-democratic policies of the right with equal force, because we may not get this chance again.
If Joe Biden continues with Democratic business as usual, or worse yet, makes poor decisions like choosing to ignore the current president’s crimes for the sake of healing and deny the country justice yet again, he runs the very real risk of handing the reins of government over to the Republicans for a long time to come—the very thing that happened in 1980 when the following 12 years of uninterrupted Republican control nearly destroyed the middle class. With any luck Biden will decline to run in 2024. He’s already the oldest president ever elected; four years from now he’ll be 82. That may be fine for Supreme Court justices, but an old man is still an old man, however sharp mentally, and if he’s saddled with a Republican controlled Senate, accomplishes nothing and still runs again, it seems impossible that he could win a second term. Kamala Harris is the one bright spot on the horizon. A Democrat with a progressive ideology and agenda, she could be the way forward for the party, but only if Biden does the right thing and steps aside when the time comes. Morning in America has mercifully come and gone, but now that it’s Midnight in America we still have a long way to go until the true dawn. Control of the Senate may help, but only if Joe Biden has the fortitude to do what is absolutely necessary for this country to survive. We need Joltin’ Joe rather than Grandpa Joe, and so let’s all hope that he steps up to the plate and delivers. If not, in a cruel twist of irony, the last four years may turn out to be the good old days.
