Thursday, November 5, 2020

Biden As The Post Political Candidate


Introduction

With the election upon us (they are still counting ballots as I type this), there is an opportunity for investigation into the way ideology, rhetoric, and institutional politics intersect and enact force upon one another.  The election is, in the United States, by far considered the apex of political participation and democracy.  The politicians, the media, advocacy groups, etc all circulate information in the hopes of generating and shaping the political consciousness of Americans.  My focus will be on Biden as the democratic candidate.  I have chosen to focus on Biden instead of Trump for two reasons:  the critique of Trump has already saturated political analysis, and the democratic party is marketed as the party that is against the excesses of capitalism, markets, and inequality.  If there is a kernel of truth to any of these positions, then liberals and democrats should be open to investigating whether their political frame counteracts or contributes to the excesses of capitalism, markets, and inequality. I argue that Biden is fundamentally a post-political candidate.  His appeals are to a political consciousness that explicitly seeks to minimize, ignore, or obfuscate politics as a struggle over socio-political and socio-economic structures.  This is marvelously displayed in the famous picture showing a protestor holding up a sign at a Women’s March event that says “If Hillary were president we’d be at brunch.” The absurd implication of this joke is that, prior to the election of Donald Trump, women’s position in society was fine, and no protest was warranted. It takes a political issue (how society is hierarchically organized in ways that benefit men over women) and turns it into a matter of politics (the day-to-day management of those structures). 


Biden, the liberal pundit class, and the democratic party contribute to the depoliticization of everyday life as they construct narratives to activate and influence the political consciousness of the American electorate.  Biden’s focus on bipartisanship, healing divisions, empathy, and a return to normalcy are all ideological tropes meant to minimize criticism of institutions (political) and divert energy into the criticism of candidates (politics).  At first glance, this is self-apparent- the entire purpose of elections is for one candidate to best another!  It’s also a process that has been repeated many times- it’s a well-documented shift in democratic strategy since the 1980s.  Though this essay is focusing on Biden, we can also see these currents in all recent democratic nominees.  But each of these tropes are enacted to construct and maintain a specific ideological narrative that preserves the structure neoliberal capitalism.

Bipartisanship

Bipartisanship and ‘healing divisions’ are two consistent themes in Biden’s candidacy.  In fact, they are constructed as key mechanisms that are needed to achieve any policy changes.  In order to ‘get things done’ you have to work with the other side.  Bipartisanship is leveled as an intrinsic good, but what does it look like? There is no specific content that helps clarify the idea.  For example, you could have bipartisan agreement on how to enact austerity, increase tough-on-crime sentencing, pass trade legislation that grants corporations more power over labor, or deregulates the financial sector.  Under Biden’s metric, those are intrinsically good policies because they are products of bipartisan consensus.  Any criticism of these policies must inherently be counterproductive, because it undermines this consensus. 

There is no limit to this rhetoric.  Take the recent vacancy on the Supreme Court as an example.  This is an issue that has, in multiple elections, been framed by democrats as politically and even materially existential (the court will rule on climate change, it threatens us all!).  If the stakes are this high, then we must surely organize and wield as much power as possible to prevent disaster.  After the death of RBG, Biden took the opposite approach, calling for bipartisanship and appealing to the GOP to be sensible and rational.  Rather than emphasizing the structural deficiencies with the Supreme Court (the political)- it’s undemocratic, wields too much power over policymaking, and has historically been a regressive institution- Biden focuses on the importance of politicians in maintaining norms of civility (politics).  It presupposes that problems with the court are not with the institution itself, but with the people running those institutions.  This sidesteps that everything done by the GOP to take over the court is entirely legal and within the parameters of those institutions.  It’s an ahistorical reading of the court, discounting that it’s designed as an undemocratic and regressive institution, meant to constrain the excesses of political change and preserve a distinct political order.

The stance on the Supreme Court, as an example of how ‘bipartisanship’ plays out, is further proof of the naturalized tendency toward conservatism.  By definition, bipartisanship seeks to minimize conflict and controversy.  Policymaking has to bend toward the maintenance of the status quo in order to achieve this minimization.  It also delegitimizes the ability of politicians to wield power in an attempt to create political (structural) change. If you are the candidate that stands for consensus and bipartisanship, then fighting for your beliefs at all costs is a nonstarter.  Passionately wielding power is actually a bad thing that stands in the way of ‘real’ politics.

It is also a naïve perspective on how bipartisan politics works in America. Divisions are the source of change, not its obstacle.  It’s an intentional misuse of the idea of alliances or coalitions.  Yes, uniting people of different walks of life and perspectives is necessary to make real change, but those coalitions still face divisive opposition from without.  The civil rights movement wasn’t successful because it created a unanimous consensus for racial equality.  It did bridge divides between people, but they coalesced in order to win something greater that at the time most people fundamentally opposed.  I use civil rights as an example because Joe Biden has bragged on many occasions about how he was able to generate consensus with segregationists in order to pass tough on crime policies.  Even something so obviously abhorrent to anyone deeply concerned with racial justice is recast as an intrinsic good.  The metric is not the efficacy or purpose of the policy, the metric is whether or not you can get elites from both parties to agree with it.  It naturalizes the necessity of elites as the ultimate arbiters of what is right and wrong.  It elevates their power as a more important metric than how the policy materially effects everyday people.  It was fitting that Biden’s last push for healing divisions occurred on the grounds of the most famous battle of the Civil War.  Does Biden believe that such a conflict was not a reflection of a battle over the deep-seeded institutions of white supremacy?  Was it instead just an issue of getting “the right people in government?”  Was the compromise made to maintain slavery in some states and not in others the preferable option?

Empathy

Empathy was another trait cynically deployed in the Biden campaign.  I am not going to argue empathy is bad.  To the contrary, empathy is a vital emotional and intellectual skill, and inextricably linked to critical thinking skills. What I take issue with is the use of empathy as a political quality even as it’s disconnected from actual policies.  It is the humanization of a candidate that is used as a cudgel to deflect criticism of that candidate.  Empathy is also not political, because it is devoid of any meaningful insight into the distribution of power.  It’s a characteristic promoted by individuals with diametrically opposed political viewpoints. Absent from the discussion is any understanding of what the empathy is wielded for.  Media coverage is saturated with stories about how Biden’s experience with family tragedy and his riding the train everyday to work and back is proof of his ability to connect with and understand the working class.  It’s another frame that depoliticizes the candidate- the primary concern is not how the candidate believes we should organize and distribute power in society, but their personal ability to empathize with others.  That empathy is a factor to consider is not a problem, but its use to displace and distort the political is a crucial ingredient in the maintenance of ideology.

True purpose of centering empathy is revealed through the final component of Biden’s narrative that I will focus on: the return to normalcy.  While each instance I have covered contributes to the naturalization of our current socio-political order, a return to normalcy is arguably the most explicitly ideological.  The invocation of the phrase itself implies that, prior to the election of a specific politician (in this case Trump), conditions were acceptable and even ideal.  It brackets any understanding of what ‘normal’ means, and fails to ask the central political question:  normal for who? It isolates the problem as a candidate that is too disruptive to norms or too outside the box.  It never questions who the implied audience is- is it black people?  The poor and dispossessed?  The indigenous?  For which groups was the period prior to Trump an optimal or laudable state of affairs?

The Return to Ideology

The naturalization of elite perspectives, structures that benefit limited portions of society, and the minimization of change is not a benign accident; it is the purpose of ideology- to reproduce social and political conditions by getting people to passively accept them as ‘common sense,’ ‘normal,’ or ‘just the way things are.’ In doing so, it has detrimental effects on the lives of millions (or, globally, billions).  The tendency toward conservatism that the use of ‘bipartisanship’ as a positive pole mobilizes goes hand-in-hand with lowering of the bar for modern candidates.  It is hard not to see this play out every day in electoral and campaign coverage.  In an election framed as the most important of our lifetimes, against one of the most unpopular candidates in modern US history, under conditions of rapid economic and social deterioration, the democratic party consolidated forces to push a lifetime Senator who had failed in two presidential runs.  The result was a candidate propelled by the narratives I have outlined above- empathy, bipartisanship, healing divisions, returning to normal.  None of these factors are directly political and, as I have shown, many are its opposite.  Do any of these items necessitate or construct a more equal and just society?  Do any of them solve the economic and social misery that millions of Americans suffer under? How can we juxtapose empathy with the crime bills that have increased mass incarceration and created fundamentally racist categories in the criminal justice system (the since defunct distinction between crack and powder cocaine comes to mind)?  Is increasing the use of the death penalty empathetic?  These questions are intentionally never explored by political and media analysts, much less by elites that have the most direct power and agency to change those structures.

Perhaps its most insidious effect is that it naturalizes the perspective of people who benefit most from the very structures that generate economic, social, and political instability.  For the professional managerial class-- people that work for non-profits, universities, in finance, health care, law, and of course the media-- I have little doubt that the ‘normal’ of the pre-Trump era was just fine for them. What did they ever need from government?  I am skeptical that talking heads on television, many of whom have salaries entering the low millions, have any material incentive to push large scale restructuring of the distribution of economic and political power in society.  This is a crucial point to understand- the absence of this critical analysis in any mainstream or official capacity is not an accident.  It is not something that is merely ‘not done’:  it is a conscious and sub-conscious choice made to sustain and perpetuate the material and ideological needs of the most well off members of our society.  I am not implying that everyone outside of this class of people has some autonomous or uncorrupted truth- yes, people who are hierarchically placed in lower status due to class, race, ethnicity, or gender may also hold these beliefs- but they are not in positions of power that generate and disseminate these beliefs. 

As we hear people passionately react to the results of the 2020 election, this must be kept in mind.  Any outcomes that are detrimental to the liberal media and political class will be reframed as problems with the voters themselves.  They will be rendered as problems with politics- who is coming out to vote and who are they voting for!  What they will not do is entertain the possibility that it is not the voters, but the institutions that generate the candidates meant to represent the voters, that is the true problem.  These positive poles of valuable attributes of Biden- empathy, return to normal, healing divisions- also assume that criticism from the left and right are equivocal (this is often called the horseshoe theory of politics). People that want to restructure economic, social, and political institutions to be more just, equal, and democratic are inherently violators of these norms.  They are divisive; they lack empathy for the situation of those in power; they don’t understand how thing really work; they want to disrupt the normalcy that came before.  The left must remain vigilant in pushing against these narratives- the possibility of an egalitarian and just society, and the fortunes of the billions who reside in the bottom tiers of our hierarchically organized world order, depend on it.