The false hope of a Biden presidency
Nowhere is the power of capital, the power of a handful of billionaires over the whole of society, so crude and as openly corrupt as in America. Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society, and no democratic republic, no form of franchise can alter the essence of the matter.
Vladimir Lenin, 1919
The truth of the matter is … you all know… We can disagree in the margins but … nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.
Joe Biden reassuring wealthy donors on the prospect of his victory, 2019
Confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory and his looming inauguration as the next President of the United States has elicited a joyful response from large swathes of the press and across social media. Yet for those people who are aware of Biden’s politics and record, beyond the spurious ‘nice guy’ image projected by the media, and therefore understand what the implications of his victory are likely to be, witnessing the mainstream reaction to it has been a profoundly alienating experience. This feeling of isolation has been exacerbated by the fact that legitimate criticism of Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, has frequently been met with personal invective, as though it is an attack on the very being of those who are currently celebrating their win.
As Devyn Springer has explained, ‘the gutting of political education and virality of capitalist miseducation means that people offering valid criticism, analysis, and reproval are likened to “hating” and “not letting people enjoy things” in the stunted Amerikan [sic] political imaginary.’ Lamentably, the absence of critical thinking and political imagination in the US is also a feature of political discourse in the UK. Contrary to the idea that feeling no joy regarding the prospect of a Biden-Harris administration is driven by a mean-spirited desire to spoil the happiness of others, it is in fact a sentiment that springs ultimately from love and solidarity – a crucial distinction that Steven Salaita recently expressed with characteristic eloquence. The inability to feel any joy at Biden winning, even if simultaneously relieved to see Trump lose, is borne out of compassion for all the past (and future) victims of both Biden’s personal actions, and of the neo-liberal and imperialist politics that he so perfectly embodies.
It should be plainly stated that by any meaningful and honest measure, Biden is a monster who has caused an incalculable amount of suffering over his many decades as a senior official of the US empire. Given the length of Biden’s career, a comprehensive rap sheet requires a book-length study, but his ‘highlights’ include his central role in drafting a number of deeply racist pieces of legislation (including the infamous 1994 Crime Bill) that both exacerbated and consolidated the mass incarceration of Black Americans, and legislation that went on to be passed largely unchanged as the Patriot Act of 2001 that gutted civil liberties in the US; his prominent role in lobbying the Senate and the American public for the war on Iraq as Chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee; and his ‘unconditional, career-long commitment to Israel’ that has seen him develop close friendships with a number of fellow war criminals including Benjamin Netanyahu and the late Ariel Sharon, at whose funeral he delivered a eulogy. In short, Biden is a racist authoritarian at home and an enthusiastic and unapologetic imperialist abroad. On environmental issues, in spite of the hopes that liberals are already investing in him, Biden is little better. During the campaign he repeatedly announced that he will not ban fracking and his adviser on energy issues, who served as Energy Secretary under Obama, is a notorious lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. It is alarming to note too that Ezekiel Emanuel, a member of Biden’s recently announced Coronavirus taskforce, has argued that life is not worth living beyond the age of 75.
In addition to the long list of sexual assault allegations he has faced, something that is rarely publicised or discussed outside of pro-Trump media, is the deeply disturbing fact that even when the cameras are rolling, Biden appears to be incapable of not smelling, kissing, groping and otherwise acting wildly inappropriately with women and girls with whom he comes into contact. Such is the incredible power of the media to continually re-invent and sanitise public reputations, that virtually all of this lamentable record is simply cast aside and intentionally obscured. Instead, Biden is regularly portrayed in a highly favourable light as a ‘decent, empathic man’ who supposedly stands in stark contrast to Trump. The truth, as articulated plainly in a recent interview by Evo Morales – the former President of Bolivia deposed in a US coup in November 2019 – there is really little difference between the two men and the parties they represent, except for that Trump’s racism and fascism is more explicit. All this does not even address the other elephant in the room: namely that Biden is evidently undergoing some form of cognitive decline, which, on multiple occasions throughout the campaign period, has left him unable to form coherent sentences and repeatedly slurred basic words and phrases.
It is telling, if not surprising, that many of those who have thus far publicly celebrated the election results with the most glee are those liberals who in their own words, cannot wait to stop caring about politics again. It was Trump’s overt racism, crude style and unpredictable theatrics on Twitter and elsewhere – the cause of such embarrassment to them and the US liberal establishment as a whole – that they opposed, not the actual content and results of his policies, so many of which were in fact a direct continuation of policies inherited from the Obama-Biden Administration, including the caging of migrant children and the much-derided ‘Muslim ban’. In fact, Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, one of his most criticised decisions internationally, was only legally possible as a result of earlier legislation that Biden himself voted for and was later supported by Obama. It is evident that for many of those who formed the so-called ‘resistance’ to Trump, their opposition to his presidency was not driven by the harm that it inflicted, but rather by the damage it caused to America’s reputation globally and the subsequent embarrassment and discomfort they felt.
A widespread concern among elements of the US establishment, especially early on in Trump’s Presidency, was that he would make good on some of the anti-war rhetoric he had occasionally deployed during his campaign and not be sufficiently imperialist in outlook. It is for this reason that Trump received perhaps the most unanimously positive coverage in the media on the day on which he authorised air strikes on Syria. No such fears exist with Biden, who, as though such reassurance was required, has repeatedly gone out of his way during the campaign to demonstrate his hawkish credentials on a host of foreign policy issues including his stance on China, Syria and Iran. Accordingly, The Guardian has already called on Biden to ‘reassert America’s role as the global problem-solver’ because under Trump ‘the “indispensable nation” disappeared when it was needed most.’ A sentiment that is a perfect illustration of John Pilger’s maxim that ‘the task of liberal realists is to ensure that western imperialism is interpreted as crisis management, rather than the cause of the crisis and its escalation.’
In essence, liberals are fawning over Biden solely by virtue of him not being as obscenely and openly racist as Trump. To do so in spite of his disastrous record and in the absence of him running on any meaningful policy platform or alternative vision brings to mind C. Wright Mills’ scathing assessment of liberalism from his work The Marxists (1962), which is relevant enough to quote at length:
As a set of theories – or better, of assumptions about man, society, history – liberalism today is at a dead end. The optative mood has so thoroughly taken over that liberals often appear out of touch with the going realities. That is one reason it is so difficult to sort out distinctively liberal theories as such. Often failing to recognize facts that cry out to be recognized, liberalism is irrelevant to much that is happening in much of the world. Liberal ways of looking at these facts too often become mannerisms by which liberals avoid considering the structural conditions of social life and the need to change them. In fact, liberals have no convincing view of the structure of society as a whole – other than the now vague notion of it as some kind of a big balance. They have no firm sense of the history of our times and of their nation’s.
Under Trump’s leadership, most notably at the height of the vicious repression of the Black Lives Matters protests in May and June of this year, the superficial mask of American liberalism dropped entirely, exposing the ugly fascism at its core. Biden’s win is undoubtedly the start of a concerted effort to lift that mask back up, restore America’s image and get back to the business of imperialism disguised as ‘global problem-solving’. Trump’s overt racism will be replaced with the more refined, tacit variety at which the Democratic Party excels, and his candid admissions regarding the true motivations behind US military action substituted with statesman-like messaging about humanitarian intervention and the international community’s ‘responsibility to protect’. That Biden’s Vice-President will be Kamala Harris, a half Black, half South Asian-origin woman – regardless of the fact her politics are as reactionary as his – will also be used to project an ostensibly progressive image of the incoming administration. All those who are committed to opposing all forms of racism and imperialism, of the refined variety or otherwise, must resist these dishonest attempts to portray a Biden win as anything more than an administrative reshuffle within the bi-partisan management of a genocidal empire that, whoever is President, represents a grave danger to its own people and the future of everyone else on this planet.