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.