My hope for Biden is that he’s enough of a politician that he’ll be susceptible to big changes in the larger social world such that he moves (eppur si muove, as one might say): no creature of fixed ideology or, really, deep conviction he. As Keynes apparently did not say when accused of changing his mind: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” People do “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances,” as one clear-eyed observer really did say with respect to another “change in leadership”. So, obviously, context matters: consider the effects of the 60s on some policies that Nixon, no less, put into place due to the times (and the customs), and the ways in which even such conventionally minded, if preternaturally ambitious, folks as the Clintons could be nudged out of their dogmatic slumbers. The worry is that Biden’s habits are so ingrained, and his advisors so out of touch, that he’ll not move as he could . . . and must.
My fear is that running ONLY on “Trump is impossible”—while obviously true–is still a bad idea, just as it was in 2016, when it was also obviously true. These days, I find myself in great sympathy with the writings of Joseph O’Neill in the New York Review of Books: hammer home that the entire GOP has shown itself unfit to be in power—name the party, not just Trump—and pursue “policies that are both effective and popular with Democrats” (his emphasis). (https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/joseph-oneill/)
The problem is the donkeys have tried to cozy up to the elephant in the room: “Biden’s career has largely coincided with the moral, intellectual, and electoral capitulation of the Democratic Party to the GOP. Like his contemporaries Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, he has been programmed to not use power in a way that will anger Republicans or upset bankers or frighten the horses in an imaginary Middle America.” Instead of being such jackasses, they ought to have been more mules.
Happily, then, it’s crucial to trash the GOP—we better go “low”—while sadly, perhaps, it’s not enough—we do need to go “high”. Discussing E.J. Dionne’s argument in his new book, O’Neill writes “Democrats require a moral claim to power that is fresh, clear, and collectively shared. ‘The galvanizing idea,’ [Dionne] says, ‘should be dignity’.” This, Singin’ in the rain to the contrary notwithstanding, is a pretty attractive suggestion. “Dignity” has some genuine intuitive appeal, with most of us feeling we have a real sense of what it’s about, as long as we don’t take too seriously its being a favorite plaything for distinction-making among philosophers and political theorists.
Anyway, Biden’s acceptance speech was good, even if it, and the DNC, tended not to mention the actual problems faced by the VOTERS who live in the areas that got Trump the Electoral College (viz., opioids, deaths of despair, the specific conditions leading to these), a point that has been noticed, if not exactly widely. This is from last week’s “Vox“:
…Overdose deaths increased again in 2019 and are set to increase further in 2020.
But you wouldn’t know Trump’s failure from the Democratic National Convention. Based on the transcripts for all four nights of the DNC, Democrats didn’t mention “addiction,” “opioid,” or “overdoses” a single time at their convention. It’s not because they don’t have a plan. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, has a very good plan — one that would make a serious investment into treatment and harm reduction as well as crack down on opioid prescriptions.
So the Dems weren’t merely stupidly derelict. Their class blinders and biases are such that they can’t even mention this pain and suffering in . . . polite company–even when they have something to say that would help!
Election Day, 3 November is, by the way, six days before 18 Brumaire.