In 2019, Biden is waging another campaign for the Democratic nomination, and it is best summed up as “A noun, a verb, and Barack Obama.” Largely bereft of ideas proportionate to the political, economic, social, and ecological crises facing our world, and characterized by almost comical flip-flopping on a range of issues, Biden’s campaign is instead a plea for the status quo and good feelings of the Obama years.
To be fair, Biden’s campaign is marginally more complex than that, because of the inconsistency with which he invokes his role in the Obama years. When discussing a popular policy--turning the ship of state on civil rights issues, signing a climate accord, passing healthcare reform--Biden would have us believe he was the man in the room who held the president’s ear, pushed the executive envelope, and swayed the debate the right way. When discussing less popular policies--deporting “Dreamers,” blowing wedding parties to smithereens in Afghanistan, letting financial criminals go on their merry way--Biden would have us believe that he was nothing more than a helpless, rejected spectator to events, whose voice was whipped away by ill winds.
To be sure, Biden is not in solitary company as a politician of the “have his cake and eat it” school, nor is his inconsistency his only characteristic. Biden is also known for speaking as though he has a blender on low speed spinning in his head--as distinct from the high-speed model that mutilates Donald Trump’s “thoughts” as they emerge from his head.
Many Democrats view Biden’s “Noun/Verb/Barack Obama” campaign, and his tendency to commit what they call “gaffes” as evidence that he’s a harmless old duffer, who might not be the sharpest candidate on offer, but who has a solid working class shtick. Having my origins in the working class, it looks to me more like a fake, condescending, slimy “used car salesman” shtick, but that’s another story.
More dangerous than Biden’s hypocrisy over his role in the Obama administration, his general incoherence, and his 1950s-tinted views of the world, are other elements of his politics and his record.
Biden's style is is loudly and aggressively ignorant. He seems to hope that volume will be seen as a sign of strength. Like George W Bush and Donald Trump, Biden works hard to give the impression that he thinks with his alimentary canal rather than his grey cells. And like those two politicians, he practices a particular brand of machismo. In his case over the past few years, this includes repeated references to high school social dynamics and suggestions that he’d like to beat up Donald Trump.
While most Democrats share Biden’s outrage about Trump’s words and actions, no other candidate has had the crassness to suggest that this should be settled by some school-yard scrap. Biden’s words--repeated often enough that they suggest a strategy rather than a “gaffe”--are not just crude. They send the message that political differences should be settled by violence. And they play straight into the hands of the most fascist elements of the Trump campaign.
From the beginning, Trump has made clear with his words that his participation in electoral politics is conditional, and that reverses might well be met by violence. Spokespeople in 2016 said a Trump loss would have provoked a “bloodbath.” Trump suggested that his supporters might murder his opponent. He encouraged his supporters to beat up his critics at rallies. And he revelled in the notion that he could murder people on the streets without his supporters raising an eyebrow.
Trump’s politics are destructive, and the more chaotic our political discourse and behavior becomes, the more his lawlessness and cruelty thrive. In the 1920s and ‘30s, fascist parties in central Europe drew their opponents into literal street battles. The left won some battles and the right won others. But only the right could win such a war, because their success--as does Trump’s today--depends on destroying faith in the politics, processes, and behaviors that have traditionally enabled people to claim more civil rights and make social and economic progress. Biden’s chest-thumping might make some people feel good about his “strong” leadership, but he cannot beat Trump at this game, and whichever of them would win a brawl behind the gym, the real loser from this kind of talk is American democracy.
Another part of Biden’s strategy is the embrace of a kind of empty-headed nostalgia for the good ol’ days, when Democrats and Republicans worked together in harness. The problem with this nostalgia is that it ignores two factors.
Firstly, the Republican Party as an institution has moved far enough from the days when its top figures could be expected to lead the way on environmental and healthcare related issues that Biden’s teary-eyed reminisces serve no discernible purpose. Today, Republican white supremacists occupy the White House, corporate power appears to have an invulnerable grip on the jugular of the GOP and the American political system, and the politicians that populate the Republican Party could not assemble a spinal column between them on behalf of the public interest. What does cooperation with these kinds of interests mean? What’s the middle ground between white supremacy and a multiracial democracy? What’s the moderate version of a corporate death grip on our institutions and economy? What’s the bipartisan method for ransacking our democratic institutions?
Biden’s bleary-eyed, simplistic reading of the past also demonstrates the lack of self-awareness that is his other trademark. In the glory days of yore, his role in this happy bipartisan world was to serve as cover for segregationists, the kind of man who decades later will still chirpily say that he wasn’t exactly opposed to de-segregation. He just didn’t think the federal government should do it; it should be left to the states run by segregationists to look into their hearts and miraculously find it in themselves to do the right thing. I’m not sure whether I’d rather believe that Biden is really this naive or that he’s actually this malicious. But I’m quite sure that someone who expresses these views in these ways should not be president.
Biden is also of the “When I was a kid I walked uphill to school in a blinding snowstorm, both ways!” school. Such utterances, like some of the above, are often interpreted as “gaffes” or part of his folksy charm. But when combined with his history of attacking “whiny” millennials, it tells us something else about his politics and prospective presidency. Biden has deployed these attacks on young people in particular over debates about the cost of higher education, mounting levels of indebtedness, and intergenerational inequality.
His suggestion that young people should quit “whining” (by which he presumably means “accurately describing their social and economic worlds”), get to work, pay their way through school, and get a good job--just like he did!--represents a particular lack of awareness from a member of a generation that grew up at a time when the American government was at its most generous and redistributive, and who attended public universities when they were tuition-free. In Biden’s case it was the University of Delaware, which today charges around $13,000 per year. Biden’s attempts to make bankruptcy processes more punitive--attempts that found him challenged by the likes of Elizabeth Warren--also speak to a callous side, and to profound ignorance of or indifference to the changes that unfolded during his golden age of bipartisanship.
If civil rights--see here, here, here, for example--and political economy (also here) are sticky ground for Biden, he would have us believe that foreign policy is his preferred turf. Joe Biden is often described--most often by himself--as having robust foreign policy credentials. But there, he is mostly robustly wrong and dangerous.
For Biden was among the supporters of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. The supposedly brilliant foreign policy mind claimed that he didn’t have enough information to determine that the war was illegal, immoral, and ill-judged. (Never mind that an 11th grader with a newspaper subscription and a bad dial-up internet connection could figure this out readily enough.)
This invasion was a clear war of aggression--a crime in international law--launched on the basis of transparently fabricated evidence. The war was launched in the absence of evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, never mind any immediate threat to the U.S., and in the face of a great deal of evidence suggesting otherwise. The war was launched in defiance of the United Nations and the efforts of its weapons inspectors to arrive at clear conclusions about the existence or absence of Iraq’s weapons. And the war was launched as a part of an open effort by the Bush administration to use 9/11 as an excuse to create their twenty-first century version of a violent American imperium that served no discernible public interest.
As predicted by those onlookers who applied even a modicum of critical thought to the exercise, the Iraq war destroyed Iraqi civic and physical infrastructure, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans, and led to the proliferation of international terrorism, including the rise of ISIS, with dramatic spill-over effects into neighboring countries and terror attacks in the west.
Along with 9/11, the war was used by the American security state to expand its power at the expense of Americans’ civil liberties. The war was used by the CIA as an excuse to deploy torture against its prisoners and create a parallel “legal” system outside the reach of U.S. law, something that has cascaded into the realm of horrific drone strikes. The war and its aftermath eroded Americans’ faith in their government, indirectly contributing to the rise of Donald Trump.
Despots and demagogues around the world, recognizing the blindness that bloodlust induced in American decision-makers, declared their own fealty to the war on terror, winning moral and material support for their tyranny. Previously disparate, local conflicts, were welded together by the irresponsible words and actions of the Bush administration and those who voted for its dangerous war.
A vote for this war does not count as a “gaffe.” It was a vote to suspend international norms, critical thought, and the American public interest in pursuit of a conflict that violated international law, unleashed unspeakable horrors on Iraqis, and endangered Americans. No elected official who voted for such a war and the catastrophic consequences with which should be rewarded by voters.
Biden is among the high-ranking Democrats who have offered tortured justifications for their vote. Such mangled explanations for an inexplicable and unforgivable vote cost John Kerry the presidency in 2004, Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination in 2008, and likely contributed--along with a range of other factors--toward Clinton’s loss of the presidency in 2016 (Trump taunted her mercilessly about the war, and his own abysmal views were subjected to little scrutiny).
Only two of Biden’s rivals for the Democratic nomination today were in a position to cast a vote on the decision to go to war. But both--Jay Inslee and Bernie Sanders--had the sense to vote against the war.
Lest his initial poor judgment not be sufficient to condemn him--and it ought to be--Biden’s attempts to wind down the Iraq war were equally contemptible. Biden routinely suggested that, having eviscerated Iraqi institutions and killed thousands of the country’s inhabitants, the U.S. should repeat the original sin of European colonialism in the Middle East, and forcibly break Iraq into multiple states. That level of imperial hubris alone should be a disqualification.
One of the jobs of a president is to be able to see a a few presidencies, and a few generations into the future; to consider the long-term consequences of actions, including those that might offer the most enticing of short-term gains--in the case of Iraq, the opportunity to “get” a dictator and for Democrats to look “tough” on foreign policy. At the very least, a president should be capable of posing the kinds of questions that invite experts to offer their informed prognostications about the likely long-term consequences of actions. When it came to Iraq, the most consequential foreign policy decision by the U.S. government for generations, Joe Biden demonstrated none of these qualities.
Joe Biden spent his career as a mediocre senator from Delaware. Absent Barack Obama’s strategic act of charity toward Biden in 2008, he would never have been plucked from well-deserved senatorial obscurity to ill-deserved executive stardom, and would not be seen as a significant contender for the presidency today.
The final line of defense offered by Biden’s supporters, is that his views have evolved and that today he holds reasonably progressive views, even if they seldom rise to the standard of the transformative politics offered by the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, or offer laser-like focus on particular issues of significance like Jay Inslee and Andrew Yang. But such a defense is hardly a ringing endorsement, there is a lesson there, as well. It is incontestable that Joe Biden has decent views about a respectable number of issues. But it is equally incontestable that Joe Biden was initially wrong--loudly, mulishly, intractably--about most of these issues, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. I appreciate evolution as much as the next science-loving person. But I prefer my national leaders to be people who get things right the first time and can be expected to act accordingly in office.
A Joe Biden campaign might consist of a noun, a verb, and Barack Obama. But a Joe Biden presidency, on the basis of an even cursory examination of his record, would consist of three and a half years of getting it wrong on every important issue, a lame-duck Damascene conversion, and the loss of the subsequent election. We can't afford to waste our time waiting for Biden to evolve.
Because in addition to all of the serious flaws in Biden’s record noted above, it is his determination to run on a “moderate” or “centrist” platform--which accepts capitalism's cruelty, the market's preeminence, and a stunted role for the democratic state--that means that even if voters prove more forgiving and forgetful than Biden (or the country, for that matter) deserves, there is significant historical precedent suggesting that Biden’s tepid liberalism and fiddling on the margins of policy is a recipe for disaster and defeat.
The racism, corruption, and plundering of the Trump administration must be answered not only by a basic level of decency and condemnation. Trump’s central logic--that nationhood and belonging in the United States should be based on race--needs answering. And the best answer is the form of civic nationalism that results from the creation of a durable, universal, generous, and broad-based welfare state, in which civil and political rights come accompanied by social and economic rights. The best of the Democratic candidates recognize this, and are proposing a range of imaginative, compelling, generous policies that would refashion the American economy for the benefit of the public interest. Biden offers nothing like this.
Whomever the Democrats choose to represent them in 2020 will face a would-be tyrant, a man prepared to promise and do anything to retain power. It is no exaggeration to say that this man and the ideas that he and his party advance pose a mortal threat to the future of our democracy and our planet. This man has aligned himself with a host of authoritarians around the world, some of whom will be actively assisting him in his re-election campaign.
It seems absurd that the best we think we could do against such a man, who arose himself partly from the void left by the paucity of imagination and courage of an earlier generation of Democratic leaders, is a mediocrity like Biden. We can and should continue to debate Barack Obama’s legacy, but in a campaign for the future of the republic and the planet, we need more than “a noun, a verb, and Barack Obama.”
