Dangers of a Biden Administration

Trump is terrible, okay we got that out of the way.

Biden’s attacks on the collapsing Trump "government," despite a few rhetorical bows to Bernie’s platform, is heavy on symbolism in the domestic realm. In foreign policy the Biden-ite discourse is arguably worse than Trump’s, who has been fairly consistent in avoiding new wars and even has taken steps—horror of horrors—to end old ones.

One thing you have to credit Democrats for: they know how to sniff the winds for the aroma of shifting zeitgeists. They’re all over getting rid of Confederate flags, ending the celebration of slave-owning rebel generals, and sporting kente cloth at their kneeling ceremonies. They will publicly worship the late John Lewis, who was a loyal member of their team, and quote Martin Luther King (except not the antiwar or anti-capitalist parts).

Of course, in another era mainstream Democrat symbolism took a slightly different tack, such as when Bill Clinton staged his 1992 campaign event at Stone Mountain, Georgia, [top] where the new Ku Klux Klan celebrated its revived role during the Jim Crow era. Clinton was making sure no one would Willie Horton him and so arranged a line-up of black prisoners as the backdrop to his speech, flanked by a phalanx of southern Democrat pols hostile to the fading civil rights movement.

And the Clinton flirtation with southern fried racism didn’t end with mere gestures. Sax-playing Bill, the “first black president” according to Toni Morrison, followed up with the hugely successful 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—if you define “success” as putting hundreds of thousands of black guys in prison for long periods. Also if “vote blue, no matter who” is your entire political philosophy: cue today’s Democrats vowing to “fight for” reductions in these Draconian mandatory minimum prison terms that they were so instrumental in establishing. If they fail, of course, it will be the meanie Republicans’ fault now that the damage is done. Few will want to dredge up Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s statement that “This is a Democratic bill. The author of the bill is a Democrat. The principal supporter for this bill is a Democratic president.”

I rehash this old news to remind those eager to go back to bed—once Joe Biden is at the White House podium and putting everyone, including himself, to sleep with his recitation of bland nothingburgers—that the nation faces a series of deeply threatening crises that will not go away once Trump is dispatched to the dustbin. Simply removing the killer clowns from outer space who have leered at us for 3 ½ years won’t do a thing—we need radical policy changes and a fighting spirit equivalent to that of the white supremacists and neo-feudal minions of billionaires who now populate our mis-leadership class. We need someone who will jettison the Obama legacy of buckling to the felonious plutocrats, roll back both Bush’s and Trump’s obscene tax giveaways, resuscitate the long-dead antitrust function of government (targeting especially the internet mega-monopolists who mouth woke platitudes while ripping us off), immediately restore some emergency environmental protections, break with neoliberal orthodoxy to refashion an industrial policy that serves workers rather than corporate grifters, and come to the rescue of a populace caught between the Scylla of coronavirus and the Charybdis of debt peonage.

Bernie Sanders seems to think Biden is up to this, and while I find Bernie painfully credulous, he may be right about one thing: the pressure from below is going to be immense. Whether that pushes the corrupt Democrat machinery into first gear or not remains to be seen or, more exactly, forced to occur, by us. But there are possibilities not glimpsed in a long time.

That said, we should take note of a likely diversionary tactic emanating from the permanent war party frustrated by Trump’s unwillingness fully to indulge their belligerent fantasies: Democrat-led war scares. Biden has already said he has no interest in restoring the treaty with Iran (even if the U.S. were to be suddenly deemed agreement-capable), has attacked Trump from the right on Venezuela, and of course echoes the Putin Derangement Syndrome that has occupied Democrat hearts and minds since the first week of Trump’s presidency and the framing of Michael Flynn. His team is comprised of the usual gaggle of war-industry shills who think Trump leads a White House 5th column because he thinks nuclear war would ruin his business opportunities.

One need not sympathize with anyone in the sleazocracy to see that many shadowy forces did their damnedest to undermine Trump’s prerogatives as civilian head of state. They couldn’t tolerate any independence on that front despite Trump’s willingness to shovel ever higher mountains of public cash into the coffers of the arms makers and the uniformed services. He gave them vast opportunities for corruption and endless gifts like the destruction of nuclear weapons treaties, but it was never enough. Any attempt by Trump to pull back from Iraq or Afghanistan or not plunge further into the Syrian quagmire was instantly countered with lurid headlines of Russkie perfidy in our elections, our cyberspace, and no doubt tomorrow our underpants. All these howler propaganda campaigns based on “intelligence sources” whispering to stenographers at the Times and the Post got the full backing of the Democrat “resistance,” such as Adam Schiff (D-Raytheon).

And don’t expect any let-up in the relentless campaign to criminalize dissent on these and other fronts, such as the attempt to railroad Julian Assange for exposing U.S. war crimes. Biden’s Justice Department isn’t likely to be any less enthusiastic about dragging the much-abused Assange to a U.S. prison for “espionage” and drumming up long discredited theories about his links to the Russians (again). Nor should we expect self-appointed defenders of press freedom to endanger their access by dissenting from that shameful display.

Speaking of dissent, Trump’s experiment with disappearance squads via the deployment of Border Patrol kidnapper goons in Portland, Oregon, may give the Biden Administration creative new policing ideas. We shouldn’t succumb to any naïve fantasies about how Biden, a driving force behind the federal crime laws, will react to sustained challenges to his rule any more than we doubted Obama’s willingness to pull out the militarized police to crush Occupy.

We have our work cut out for us, and oh yes, Trump is terrible, I nearly forgot.