Waiting for Joe Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress to begin this week, I observed at New York that Republicans were struggling to define him consistently, which felt like a familiar problem for them:
When Bill Clinton was at the pre-Lewinsky peak of his powers, he drove Republicans nuts. They alternated between accusing him of “stealing our issues” with his triangulating pitches on welfare reform and crime and the size of government, and of being “liberal, liberal, liberal!” — a sort of boomer love child of George McGovern and Janis Joplin in a deceptive deep-fried southern packaging. Eventually the opportunity to depict him as a lying sexual predator solved the conservative dilemma, though you could argue he never stopped throwing them off-balance.
Republicans are similarly having problems getting a clear focus on Joe Biden, as the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bierman observes:
“Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who has advised Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, [says] that his party’s two main messages about Biden are at odds with each other, blunting their impact. ‘The thing you hear Republicans say most is that he’s too old for the job, which isn’t consistent with saying he’s doing too much,’ Conant said. ‘You can’t effectively argue that he’s incompetent and that he’s too effective.'”
This dual framing of Biden was evident during the 2020 campaign, when Trump called him “Sleepy Joe” and with his usual lack of subtlety suggested his opponent was senile, even as he assailed Biden’s party of radical socialist aims. The 45th president and his surrogates squared the circle by treating Biden as the half-there puppet of the real powers, particularly the “communist” Kamala Harris.
But now, 100 days into the Biden-Harris administration, even though the new president has kept an unusually low profile, there are no signs of Harris or anyone else manipulating him. Indeed, so far his White House has been remarkably free of the factionalism that often undermines clear presidential leadership. With Clinton as president you had a White House staff famously divided (ironically, given the later reputations of the First Lady and the veep) into progressive “Rodhams” and centrist “Gores” who jockeyed for position and placed their varying stamps on administration policies. George W. Bush’s presidency was also marked by competing power centers (e.g., his terrifying vice-president and the “Boy Genius” Karl Rove); to a lesser extent, so was Obama’s. As for Donald Trump, hardly a week passed without someone — particularly his rotating cast of chiefs-of-staff — being described by “insiders” as the real power behind the throne or perhaps as the wild man’s lion-tamer.
Trump, of course, created some of the same problems for Democrats that Clinton — and now Biden — posed for Republicans. Was he the “toddler president” who ran a hollowed-out administration with no real core of convictions or goals? Or was he a putative Il Duce craftily planning an authoritarian takeover of the country? Up until the day he left office there was evidence for both descriptions. Indeed, the coda of his presidency, the January 6 Capitol riot, was variously regarded as a fascist coup attempt and a clown show.
Trump’s successor will have an opportunity in his first address to a joint session of Congress to add to the impression that he is quietly but firmly in charge of the executive branch, and has imposed order on his fractious party as he unveils yet another massive proposal. Kamala Harris will be sitting (and often standing and applauding) behind him, likely looking more like an adoring protégée than any sort of puppet-master. But if he stumbles at all, or looks tired, or says things that supposedly centrist Democrats like him don’t believe, the knees of many elephants will jerk and out will come the mockery of the old man who is a reassuring front for the Marxists actually running the country.
Such confusion if it continues will be of great service to Biden, much like the current Republican tendency to focus on irrelevant culture-war themes while a mostly united Democratic Party enacts legislative initiatives of a magnitude we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. For all their political gifts, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — who, lest we forget, both had a much more firmly Democratic Senate and House the first two years of their presidencies — couldn’t come close to the mastery of Congress Biden has exhibited up until now. As Republicans watch Biden’s speech, they should soberly realize that before long it may not matter that much if they bust up the Democratic trifecta in 2022. The damage to GOP policies and priorities wrought by “Uncle Joe” and his “senile socialist regime” could be too large to reverse by then. While Republicans fret about Trump and rage about “cancel culture,” Biden is eating their lunch.
Democracy is hard. It takes practice. Expecting it to blossom at national parliamentary scale with no minor league farm system was unrealistic.
Before a large political aggregate can successfully decide questions by democratic mechanisms, it has to come to some understanding of what the decidable questions are. It has to reach a broad consensus about how sentiment is divided on those issues (axes of polarization and planes of cleavage) … what opposing coalitions are feasible … where the middle grounds are. Minorities need practice uniting behind the wills of majorities, and majorities need practice refraining from abusing minorities.
National scale is the wrong place to develop these understandings and practice these disciplines, and what emerged was division along convenient, familiar (sectarian) lines of division — which naturally became more polarized as a result.
Iraqi national democracy would have had a better chance if it had been preceded by a cycle or more of limited, local democracy. Town and provincial councils, etc, where the issues are public works and local regulations.
Even monocultural provinces can learn a lot about coalesence and compromise from running their own sewers.
So Bottom Up isn’t off by 180 degrees. 179? Maybe.
There has always been a “shadow” rationale for the U.S. presence in Iraq – a supposedly “hard-headed national security” argument that the region is strategically vital to the U.S. and profoundly unstable and therefore requires an ongoing and substantial U.S. military presence (one that, for religious and political reasons Saudi Arabia could not be asked to play).
From this perspective, all the other rationales for the invasion of Iraq and continuing U.S. presence over the years — Finding WMA’s, rescuing Iraqis from dictatorship, creating a beacon of democracy, preventing chaos, honoring the sacrifice of the troops — are all window dressing.
The real unspoken philosophy is that as a great military power we have the right to enforce stability in areas we consider strategic and we simply will not allow any indigenous insurgents to drive us out.
This is a fairly standard mental framework in the history of 20th century colonialism – it was the underlying attitude behind the French marching through the streets crying “Algeria is French” during the Algerian war of the 50’s and the stuffy British officers drinking to “The Empire” in the decades before World War II.
These days Americans need a more comforting rationale then dreams of imperial glory for occupying foreign countries — but the truth is that pretty much any rationale will do. The gut-level attitude is simply that once America commits to a military presence somewhere it should always “win” and never “give up”. In practice this means mantaining an occupying force on an essentially permanent basis.
Seen in this light, it is not really surprising that the various rationales being tossed around are almost completely incoherent, self-contradictory, and so on. People are not really supposed to believe them as logical arguments, any more then the French in the 50’s actually believed that Algeria was part of France.