Biden Is Wrong. America Is Like This.
Appeals to decency won’t mend the great divide
Joe Biden officially won the Democratic primary on June 6th, smack in the sticky middle of the summer’s racial justice protests. Though he was leading in the state primaries, the timing still felt odd. In the midst of a furious fight against systemic, violent racism, summer voters chose a fabulously lukewarm candidate with a spotty record on progressive voting. Biden’s greatest selling points through primary season were his willingness to reach across the aisle, years in congress, slow-and-shameless approach to social progress, and his willingness to fight hard against Trump. Still, his most frequent rallying cry has been similar to his January 6th tweet:
While I can understand the appeal of this kind of haughty and negligent hope to voters, the events of that day transpired nonetheless, and they happened because American citizens stormed the American capitol building. No amount of hope or historical revisionism can change that.
Lessons from 2016
After Biden won the nomination, I felt struck with that sense of history repeating itself that’s been all too familiar these last few years. Voters and news outlets four years ago became more vocal about their discontent with establishment candidates, especially establishment Democrats. In the early 2016 polls, Bernie Sanders blew both Clinton and Trump out of the water. In spite of this, that summer’s voter turnout was low for Democrats, and bureaucratic hiccups in Nevada early in the season made many Sanders supporters believe the system was rigged against them. The resulting malaise charted the course for record low turnout in November, making the perfect storm for Trump to win, despite his low polling.
Double standards are a cornerstone of American politics.
This isn’t to downplay the forces of sexism in the November 2016 race. Fox ran wall to wall coverage on Benghazi and Hillary’s email upset amidst the backdrop of Trump’s dozens of weekly scandals. Trump even had a nearly identical security failure within the first five days of his presidency, and the media largely didn’t touch it at all. None of this was surprising, double standards are a cornerstone of American politics, and when conspiracy theorists can win House races, commitment to truth often serves to set the bar higher for a politician when they slip up. This doesn’t mean that candidates shouldn’t strive to be moral, but “reasonable” Democrats have to do more to be likable (or at least, less unlikable) without the crutch of faithless nonsense. Clinton didn’t succeed in this, and through most of the fall, we were scared to death Biden wouldn’t be able to either.
Biden’s blind spot
Back to 2020, voters in state primaries chose Biden handily, with Super Tuesday alone handing him ten wins against Bernie’s three. It makes sense that the largely whiter, older, and wealthier voter base that decides primaries, the same kind of democrats that were slower to get on board with BLM, favored Uncle Joe. He’s appropriated Obama’s Audacity of Hope aesthetic in a dark time, but both of their optimism directs itself at the character of Americans, implying a tender-heartedness and love for democracy. It isn’t goal oriented, and it certainly doesn’t acknowledge the type of American we saw in the capitol building last week.
The fact alone that our order of succession has passed from Obama to Trump to Biden paints a more realistic picture of American culture and democracy. Many Americans voted for all three. In very different ways, all three preach the idea of a “restored” nation, though it’s never specified exactly what we’re restoring. We’ve switched from a leader who embodied the potential and the genius of black life, to one who disparaged it openly, to one who will praise it, while never accepting responsibility for all the ways his own legislation has harmed it.
Biden was picked, in short, because he was a middle-ground candidate that, even begrudgingly, was easy enough to vote for if you sit anywhere to Trump’s left. It’s clear that he believes his hope-talk and messaging about “who we are” will win Republicans back, even when half of them believe that he didn’t win the election, much less the number of them that believe we’re meant to be a conservative Christian theocracy. While it’s necessary for a Nation on the brink of civil disaster to turn down the heat, a peace that ignores our core issues, the scariest ones to confront, will be very temporary. The hope is audacious indeed.
Biden’s ideas about restoration are a snooze button.
The culture that built a rogue state around slavery is still alive. The culture that drone-bombs hospitals with indifference is still alive. Most importantly, the culture that repeatedly upheld institutions of moral bankruptcy from slavery to school segregation, even to the point of sedition, is more than willing to continue doing so.
Biden’s ideas about restoration are a snooze button. They won’t give us unity. His administration will, at best, establish a head of state who’s willing to pass bills in the fights for civil rights, for healthcare, against the pandemic, and against the looming climate disaster. A cleaner Twitter feed and stronger leadership will be nice, but they’re not enough to heal a divide built on our love for magical thinking and our misguided taste for conspiracy theories. The conversations that we’ll need to have on our most divisive issues are going to have to upset people when we’ve spent years being horrifyingly, dangerously wrong. We can’t just agree to disagree, nor should we, if that disagreement is over whether the loser of an election should stay in office.
Perhaps the best thing for our healing is if, for once in American life, we actually feel ashamed of our behavior. Patriotism built on romantic lies about “the kind of country we’ve always been” creates a national identity that’s no more than a delusion, one that clears the path for the next Donald Trump to rise to power. America’s got a lot of growing up to do, and hope isn’t going to get us there until we confront our deadliest realities; to do that, we must ditch our bloated exceptionalism and be honest with ourselves. The United States isn’t better than what we saw on January 6th, and because the events of that day occurred, we can be sure of that.
