The first cliche being repeated ad nauseam by the incoming Biden people is "We've got a lot of work to do." The second is "What unites is far stronger than what divides us," or words to that effect.
So regarding the first, assuming that the Dems don't get at least 50 in the senate, what work can they really do? There are the executive orders that Biden can make to reverse some of the more bizarre Trump orders. But what can he actually get done in the legislatures?
And the second cliche just isn't true. What divides us is far greater than what unites us. If we were all in our right minds, yes, there's a case to be made that we can find common ground, agree to disagree about irresolvable differences, and work things of mutual importance out. But there are two fundamental reasons that is not likely to happen.
First, Republican leadership has no incentive to compromise. Their policy agenda is to dismantle all domestic governmental programs that benefit ordinary people. It's only real political challenge is to maintain its base despite the party's promoting policies that work against its base's interests. It accomplishes this in two ways, first, by persuading its base that government isn't the solution but the problem, and, second, by hiding the party's central policy objectives behind culture-war conflicts.
And its most successful tactic in making the case that government is the problem rather than the solution is by aggressive obstruction. By obstructing the good faith efforts of Democrats to actually solve problems, they prove that government can get nothing effective done, and this in turn supports their narrative that government can't be trusted. This explains the freakout after passing the Affordable Care Act, a program that bent over backwards to accommodate corporate interests that ordinarily Republicans support.
Republican leadership adamantly opposed the ACA not because they thought it wouldn't work but because they feared it would, that it would become popular, and if it did would undermine their narrative that government is never the solution but always the problem. These are people who want to get rid of effective, popular programs like Social Security and Medicare because they fear that the more government succeeds in solving problems, the more they will come after the rich to make them pay for them.
All Republican leadership cares about is protecting the freedom of the most powerful, and the only way to do that is to diminish the power of the government--the only entity powerful enough to rein them in. This was Paul Ryan's life mission. The government must be emasculated and proven ineffective at all costs. The idea of adding the ACA as another successful government program was a deeply significant defeat in their longer term goal of getting rid of all such programs. It could not be tolerated, it had to be sabotaged, and so arose the Tea Party.
What was truly remarkable about the Tea Party was the way that culture war issues and Tea Party participant self-interest were in direct conflict. The people who were most virulently anti Obamacare saw it not as a well-motivated attempt to solve a significant problem, but a socialist plot by Libtards to destroy America. The Tea Party was never about solving a serious problem but about pushing back against a government they had been brainwashed into thinking they could not trust because it was run by the godless communists, aka, the Democrats.
Obamacare was a deeply flawed program, but it was never what its opponents made it out to be. I understand why the pro-oligarch Republicans wanted to repeal it, but it's truly astonishing that they were able to muster such grass-roots/astro-turf resistance to it. The Tea Party fury was real at the time and it led to the midterm electoral disaster and its redistricting repercussions after the census in 2010, but I wonder how many of the people who were so apoplectic at those congressional town halls in 2009 and 2010 feel the same way about Obamacare now. It was a really astonishing moment of extreme political irrationality.
The Tea Party fury was real, but misplaced. It should have been directed at the Republicans, but it wasn't because the Republicans have developed an effective way to deflect perception of the real implications of their policy by making it instead about cultural identity. This was made far worse during the Trump years, and that's why Republican politicians didn't disavow him. Republican leadership whose political imaginations have been shaped by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich in the 90s don't think they need a competent president. They just need someone who is capable of signing bills that lower taxes and deregulate business. With Trump they got that and more--someone who excited the base in a way stiffs like Romney could never do. He might be an incompetent ignoramus, but in the end, he did everything they wanted, at least domestically. His most prodigious accomplishment was to further destroy the legitimacy and efficacy of the federal government.
And it's for this reason that it's hard to see how Biden has a way forward, no matter how hard 'he works to overcome what divides us'. It will be hard enough even if he has 50 in the Senate with the VP tiebreaker. No matter how good Dem policies are in solving the very real problems that rank-and-file Republicans share with rank-and-file Democrats, conservative media will make sure that they see Democrats as making things worse rather than better. People in Red America will never trust Democrat proposals because they've become brainwashed into thinking that these policies are driven by godless, communist, gay-loving, radical feminist baby killers and child molesters. They are not going to be fooled by Joe Biden's moderating rhetoric. He's a Trojan Horse.
I don't blame the people in Red America for believing this. I blame the Republican Party and its cynical, divisive dishonest propaganda to do whatever it takes to keep entrenched wealth and power entrenched.
How do Biden and the Democrats overcome that?
Over 70 million people voted for Trump. It really turns my stomach to realize that so many Americans hate Democrats so virulently that they will vote for this madman instead of a moderate like Biden. The people at the MAGA rallies are sad souls on the fringe--and the fringe we shall have always with us--it's everyone else who voted for him that is truly disturbing. These are people who should know better but who have become convinced by conservative media that Democrats are out to destroy everything they hold sacred. It's nonsense, and it's just not possible, even if Democrats wanted to. But a clear, level-headed assessment of what is likely to happen is almost always eclipsed what people fear might happen. Trump and Republican leadership know how to enflame those fears.
Nevertheless, I blame Bill Clinton and the other Neoliberal Democrats--and Biden was complicit in all that in the 90s. And I blame the way the Democrats have become knee-jerk capitulators to the more extreme elements in the politically correct cultural Left. (Defund the police? Really?) It doesn't matter that Biden disavowed that nonsense. He's a Trojan Horse for it. And so here we are in a situation where Clinton's Neoliberalism lost the rust belt so that for most of middle America all the Democrats stand for now is a priggish, politically correct silliness. It's not a fair picture, but Democrats' behavior has given Republican propagandists plenty to work with.
But now the question is who will step up to help us meet the future that is rushing toward us. Biden is all we got, but while the Democrats are far better equipped to solve problems, they can't if half the country is unable to trust them.
I'm almost done reading David French's Divide We Fall, and I'll have more to say about it in future posts. As I mentioned in an earlier post, French is a very conservative, fair-minded evangelical Christian who understands how people think and feel on both sides of the cultural divide. He's a principled conservative rather than a tool of cynical Republican politicos, and he's interested in laying out a path to restore the nation by embracing pluralism. This is precisely what Republican leadership doesn't want. (I have many criticisms of French and one is it's not clear to me that French understands that. More on that when I finish the book and have more time to digest it.) But French's point is that Liberals might think that they're all for pluralism and diversity, but they're not when it comes to respecting traditional religious values. Liberal Democrats have to grok this.
So, French points out, we have a choice: All-out culture war where one side wins and the other loses or finding a way to live together. Liberals know what they want Red America to concede, but what are they willing to concede? Would most Democrats be able to live with allowing local communities to determine abortion laws If it would allow Democrats to move ahead with policies designed to solve problems around income inequality, clean energy and the environment, healthcare, and infrastructure?
Abortion really is as crazy a symbolic issue for the cultural Left as Gun control is for the Right. Any issue that is so radioactive as to prevent a civil conversation on the merits means that craziness is at the heart of it. And on some irresolvable issues we just need a way to agree to disagree about these intractable divisive issues so that work can get done in other areas where a consensus is more likely to be built.
Hatred, anger, and fear arise when one side tries to force its values on the other at the national level. Certainly a part of the solution is to find a way to live and let live on the local level. That means that Liberals have to give a little on allowing conservative regions of the country be conservative by opting out of the Liberal cultural agenda so long as Liberal areas of the country can pursue it. That's how democracy is supposed to work, right? Can Liberals get off their sanctimonious high horse long enough to just give a little on some of these intensely divisive cultural issues. Why must they force their cultural views on those who simply cannot accept them? They might find that if they lose the culture war, they might have conservative cultural views imposed on them.
So is a truce in the culture war possible? The devil is in the details, I know. But some gestures would be a good start. So if I were president, the work that I would see before me would be on two levels. First, do whatever I could to defuse the culture wars--that means reaching out to conservative religious and cultural leaders, make them feel heard and understood, help them to see that Democrats are not completely captured by the secular cultural left. Biden is well positioned to do that. And second, build a consensus around opposing the agenda of entrenched wealth and power, which is the only thing the Republicans stand for on a policy level.
You can't do the second without first laying a foundation for the first. Although it's unlikely that most Democrats will agree with me, I think that the winning formula for a vibrant future Democratic party is for it to be neutral on cultural issues and progressive on economy, environment, healthcare, and other issues that only a small group of Libertarian oligarchs oppose.
If it comes to all-out culture war, there's a good chance that Liberal Democrats will not win. I laid out that scenario in yesterday's post "When the Temporary Stay Is Removed". Democrats are feeling great now because they won, but it's likely to be a Pyrrhic victory if they can't defuse the culture war. The Republican Party is committed to oligarchy, and it only uses democratic institutions and practices so long as it serves its oligarchic agenda. As soon as it doesn't, they will leave them behind.
The Republican Party and its propaganda are in the conservative media are the enemy, not the conservative Americans who have been seduced by them. Yes, many in the Republican base are white supremacists and proto-fascists, but most are not. Nevertheless, those who are not white supremacists will align with those who are unless the Democrats give them a reason not to. That's what we saw in the last week.
The GOP leadership during the Trump years has shown that it has no compunction about caving to the caprices of an authoritarian mad man, and it will have less of a problem supporting an authoritarian who is slicker and more strategic. And they will do it unless more of middle American can be won back by the Democrats. Democrats who put their hopes into the so-called demographics of an emerging black brown majority are indulging in a pipe dream.
70 Million Americans voted for Trump. More will vote for the slicker demagogue who is sure to arise in the near future if the culture war keeps raging. That's the real danger we face, and then all the arguments we are having now about abortion and gay rights will be resolved permanently when a victorious right wing authoritarian reverses the cultural Left's gains in those areas throughout the country rather than in just some areas of it.
So Liberal Democrats have a choice. Do they really want to fight an all-out culture war that risks losing everything, or are they willing to compromise in the short run on culture issues so they can work on deeper structural issues that relate to power and wealth distribution?
The biggest obstacle for sane Americans who want to preserve democracy in this country is the divisiveness that comes from both sides being absolutist about cultural values. I'm not saying these values are unimportant, but I am saying that because they are irresolvable except by a complete victory by one side or the other, the saner path for Democrats is to put them to the side so that serious people from both sides of the cultural divide can work together in good faith on other pressing issues that are resolvable. The enemy is not religious conservatives, but oligarchy.