Joe Biden launched his campaign Thursday with a rather anodyne message: Donald Trump is divisive, and Joe Biden is a unifier. Only Biden can defeat the Orange Man and restore America’s values.
Although Biden’s reliance on lies about the infamous 2017 rally in Charlottesville, VA is demagogic in its own right — he perpetuated the myth that Trump praised white nationalists — his facile appeal to unity strikes a contrast with the resentful tone of the Democratic primary until now, and shows him to be out of sync with the ideological drift of his party.
While the Democratic debate has been driven largely by a focus on health care, intersectional grievance politics and an increasingly transparent, cynical embrace of mob democracy have come into focus as major ideological currents as the Democrats endorse reparations for slavery and a push to abolish the electoral college.
Given that Bernie Sanders is also a white male, older than Biden and a clear frontrunner, the idea that the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics precludes white men from leading the party is probably inflated. It’s not so much Biden’s age or identity that’s the problem, but his politics.
To those on his left, Biden’s politics are retrospective and shallow. While his message is milquetoast and hardly nationalist in any sense — America is an idea, he was careful to observe — he isn’t well attuned to the intersectional mob politics that increasingly drive his party.
Biden’s efforts to catch up have been awkward and frankly, painful to watch. So far, Biden’s campaign has been basically an apology tour — for his past interactions with women, his handling of Anita Hill’s testimony, his role in crafting tough-on-crime policy, and yes, his existence as a white male.
Biden’s campaign message, with its misty-eyed platitudes about our better angels, is distinctly un-woke when juxtaposed with the policies of his competitors. Token endorsements of slavery reparations, while meaningless as policy, are a clear indication of the growing influence of academic grievance politics on party ideology.
A more substantial indicator of ideological drift is the Democrats’ near-universal agreement that marijuana should be legalized to correct the ravages of mass incarceration. This area is a particularly vulnerable spot for Biden, who is still no friend of marijuana legalization after all these years and, to progressives, marked with sin for his role in the drug war.
To many on the left, the centrism of a candidate like Biden is a compromise with bigotry and the institutions that power it. Biden has Republican friends; the left wants to ensure Republicans lose power forever.
While Biden offers platitudes about national healing, those to his left envision a fundamentally transformed country. “Reforming” America’s institutions down to the level of the mob has been a defining thread of the 2020 debate.
Indeed, led in large part by Elizabeth Warren, several Democratic candidates have endorsed abolishing the electoral college and expanding the Supreme Court. Bernie Sanders’ unabashed support of felons’ voting rights — he went so far as to suggest the Boston Marathon bomber should be able to vote from prison — is the latest appeal to the mob.
Biden’s invocations of civility fall short of the left’s raw, will-to-power-driven embrace of democracy; his appeals to American heritage and “America as an idea” are backward-looking compared to their vision of national transformation.
Whereas Biden talks about values that America has lost to Trump’s “hate,” the left envisions a transformed nation, working out “America as an idea” to its logical conclusion. They seek not only to reform America’s institutions, but to reconstitute the electorate as well, whether with open borders or tapping into the prison population.
We can’t forget who we are, says Biden; but for the left, “who we are” is changing and that’s a good thing. They welcome America’s cultural and political transformation for its own sake and as a means to an end.
For the left, democracy is not merely a cudgel to enforce liberalism; democracy and liberalism are inseparable, in fact one and the same thing. Their ideal of democracy entails the ascendance of the “right” groups and the disenfranchisement of others, whether that means abolishing the electoral college to crush rural America or opening the border.
The “right” Americans are oppressed, they say. They need not be citizens, or have even set foot on American soil; anyone who wants to come to America is already an American, and doubly so if they will help the left gain power.
To the left, these measures are a necessary correction to an unjust, undemocratic system that privileges certain groups over others. Institutions like the electoral college are illegitimate not only because they are un-democratic, but because they perpetuate a system of injustice — one that must be destroyed — by denying progressives a monopoly on political power.
By this rubric, even the most modest restrictions to voting rights are a form of oppression. For the left, anything that contravenes their will is some form of illegitimate “voter suppression,” whether it’s requiring voters to have identification, or allowing the electoral college to carry on existing.
Given this trend, it was just a matter of time before they started talking about letting terrorists vote from prison. For Democrats, democracy is less about “counting every vote” than finding votes to get so they can hold onto power.
The most radical ideas proposed by 2020 Democrats, from reparations to abolishing the electoral college, are all of a piece: to make America a true democracy, it must become as liberal as possible; to become liberal, it must become as democratic as possible. The exigency of these aims calls for a total mobilization of power and an unrelenting pursuit of a liberal, multicultural agenda.
Biden’s focus on the low-hanging fruit of Charlottesville, and his insistence that America is an “idea,” gestures toward these commitments without completely reckoning with his own past ideological sins, or forcing him to commit to the party’s new ideologically approved viewpoints.
In a party increasingly driven by resentment and will-to-power, Biden’s cliché centrism is falling out of fashion. Even if he wins the nomination today, the Democratic Party of tomorrow will reject his banal “unity” to pursue a vindictive campaign of cultural and political transformation.
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