Joe Biden: Radical leftist and neo-liberal sellout

Jon Chait has a long essay on the apparent fracturing and/or enervation of the political coalition that elected Biden, or more accurately defeated Trump, in 2020. He makes two points that deserve particular attention:

First, the establishment Republican types who were generally hostile to Trump in 2016 prior to the general election, and at least still somewhat ambivalent to him in 2020 — a number of prominent GOP figures, including several who had been in the Trump administration, did not endorse him in 2020 — are now inhabiting a strange fantasy world in which the very obvious fact that Trump is an authoritarian threat to liberal democracy is treated as some sort of hysterical over-reaction on the part of “the Left,” while Joe Biden, of all people, is some sort of genuine leftist of the woke persuasion.

Even conservative intellectuals have come to see power itself as the ultimate end, convincing themselves that the Democratic Party embodies a terrifying cultural revolution. Lance Morrow wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal embodying this assumption with the astonishingly revealing headline “Trump vs. the Woke: Let the People Decide” — as if the alternative to Trump were not the decidedly un-woke Biden but instead the left-wing protesters who mostly hate him. Conservatives have talked themselves out of joining an anti-Trump center-left coalition by defining it out of existence, imagining that the only alternative to Trump is Students for Justice in Palestine.

Among what used to be the anti-Trump right, it has become a settled fact that those who warned about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions have been proved wrong. The Journal famously published a column by Mick Mulvaney in November 2020 headlined “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.” Rather than be chastened by the extremely predictable failure of that prediction, it continues to invoke Trump’s first term as if this were actually correct. A recent Journal editorial sneered that Chris Christie’s “warnings that Mr. Trump is a threat to the republic won’t persuade GOP voters who remember Democrats saying the same in 2016.”

The Journal editorial page was obviously never going to support a Democratic presidential candidate. But the Republican elite’s attitude toward Trump filters into the political bloodstream. The reason a small but crucial sliver of voters in places like Phoenix and Atlanta abandoned its Republican voting habits to reluctantly cast a ballot for Biden is that it had absorbed the idea that traditional Republicans couldn’t abide Trump.

The collapse of the Republican primary into a Trump coronation, with Trump’s main opponents all pledging to back him in November and seemingly leaving the door wide open to serve as his running mate, likewise confirms the expiration of any serious reservations within the party over his fitness to serve. Where the notion that Trump is a bad person who shouldn’t be president was once declared boldly by the party’s leaders, it is now muttered by its oddballs. The once-revoked permission structure to support him has quietly returned.

One thing that isn’t being sufficiently appreciated at the moment is that the 2024 “race” for the GOP presidential nomination has played out in a way that is destroying any possibility of further denial among erstwhile Republican elites about what their party has become.

The conventional wisdom has always been that Trump won his party’s nomination in 2016 because he took advantage of a radically fractured primary field. This year, we are in the unprecedented position of a non-incumbent major party presenting its voters with just two presidential candidates before the first presidential primary has even been held. And what’s going to happen is that Trump is going to walk away with the nomination without even the semblance of an actual contest, because there is no significant opposition in the party to his brand of authoritarian ethno-nationalism. Certainly not from Nikki Haley, who’s only real objection to Trump is his purported weaknesses as a candidate in the general election, which indeed is, as Chait points out, now the only objection that the Wall Street Journal and National Review crowds have to him.

Second, an even weirder basis of opposition to Biden comes from at least putatively centrist No Labels types, who at least in theory have no party loyalties of the type that have led the entire formerly non-fascist wing of the Republican party to prostitute itself in the pursuit of power:

One surprising aspect of Biden’s presidency is that while the partisan elements of his domestic agenda fell well short of liberal hopes, the bipartisan elements have exceeded all expectations. Biden successfully negotiated deals with Republicans on infrastructure, scientific research, critical domestic manufacturing, veterans benefits, and modest gun control. Yet he is facing the serious possibility that he will lose reelection because of a spoiler candidacy by the self-styled bipartisan movement No Labels.

The corny premise of No Labels is that partisanship is destroying America and that solutions can be found by listening respectfully to one another and compromising on common ground. To whatever extent you find this theory persuasive, it’s impossible to deny Biden has done more to make it a reality than any president in decades.

No Labels explains that its campaign to put a centrist candidate on the ballot is needed because “we see our two major political parties dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics rather than what’s best for our country. We hear reason and persuasion — the pillars of our democracy since its founding — being replaced by anger and intimidation.” This indictment might apply to one of the two major candidates but not to both of them.

The organization’s remedy is even more curious. It calls for a “common sense” platform of negotiating prescription-drug prices, stricter enforcement of immigration laws combined with higher legal immigration and amnesty for Dreamers who came to this country as children, universal background checks for gun purchases and closing the gun-show loophole, an all-of-the-above approach to energy, funding for localities to hire and train police, permitting reform, and strong support for NATO and other allies. What about abortion? The “common sense” solution No Labels embraces (“Abortion is too important and complicated an issue to say it’s common sense to pass a law — nationally or in the states — that draws a clear line at a certain stage of pregnancy”) is a gentle way of saying “pro-choice.”

Literally every item on this list is supported or has already been accomplished by Biden. When you consider this fact, the group’s refusal to endorse him is baffling, and it becomes obvious that No Labels’ approval of a presidential candidate would come mostly at Biden’s expense. Any scenario in which he wins the election would involve the race polarizing around Trump, which in turn would require Biden to pull together liberals and moderates. Running a candidate who promises moderation, compromise, and decency — let alone a platform that could be swiped from Biden’s own campaign page — can serve only to divide the anti-Trump coalition.

The most obvious explanation for this weird disjunction between rhetoric and reality is that, as Jon emphasizes, the No Labels opposition to Biden is an impure product of Mark Penn’s and Joe Lieberman’s petty personal grudges against Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, rather than any ideologically coherent basis of opposition. (An almost equally obvious explanation is that No Labels is first and foremost a money-making grift).

But the No Labels campaign dovetails nicely with the delusional and/or dishonest Republican claim that Biden is some sort of wild-eyed leftist, rather than a fundamentally centrist figure. What’s interesting here is that similar delusions about Obama and Hillary Clinton had self-evident racist and misogynist roots, but even Biden’s status as America’s most anodyne old white guy has not kept him from being similarly transformed into some sort of cartoonish figure out of right wing fever dreams of “cultural Marxism.”

On the left, criticisms of Biden have a much more rational basis, in that they’re based on the accurate perception that he is, in fact, a fundamentally moderate figure, who represents and fully embraces the neoliberal order. Rationality flies out the window, though, when the Weimar Republic’s Greatest Hits get cued up on the turntable:

In [Cornel] West’s telling, not only are both parties rotten, but Trump deserves commendation as a critic of neoliberal capitalism. “When Trump was critical of the neoliberals, he was demonstrating that he understands people’s concerns about neoliberal arrogance, and neoliberal condescension, and neoliberal haughtiness that hides and conceals its own structures of domination, its own operations of power,” West told the socialist magazine Jacobin recently. “And that’s where the Left hasn’t intervened in the name of truth and justice.”

West argued that Black voters themselves are part of the problem because they have been captured by the neoliberal elite. “That Black neoliberal hegemony in the Black community cuts very deep, it really does. Because Black people are convinced that, like most Americans, there’s no alternative to neoliberal leadership other than the Republican Party. And so they remain captured and locked in over, and over, and over again.” The theory at work eerily echoes the reasoning of the Weimar Communists, who believed workers were attracted to the radical right because they were alienated from capitalists and would eventually attach themselves to the radical left if only the more moderate progressive options could first be discredited.

West is just another third party grifter, but his invocation of this sort of heighten the contradictions nonsense does appear to resonate with many people, especially young people, on the progressive left.

The big unanswered question here is this: Will the apparent lack of enthusiasm for Biden across what was the anti-Trump coalition translate into support for, or at least lack of sufficient opposition to, Trump in November? Jon is right, I think, that the dominant mood at the moment in that former coalition is one of exhaustion in the face of Trump’s constant attacks on democracy. The key, I believe, is to make sure that as many exhausted and disillusioned people as possible come to focus on the fact that the threat that Trump poses to liberal democracy is far clearer now than it was in November of 2020, let alone in November of 2016.