5 minute read
ANALYSIS
BACK TO (WHAT) NORMALITY?
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BY TAMÁS MAGYARICS
Barring any unexpected event in the courts, the 46th President of the United States will be called Joseph R. Biden, Jr. The democratic President-elect promised, among others, a return to ‘normality’ during the campaign – that is, a resumption of a less chaotic and divisive leadership.
A liberal centrist At face value, we may as well believe his words: Joe Biden has been anything but a bombthrowing radical in his long political career both in Congress and in the White House. He has been on the liberal side all along, there is no question about that, but has been a centrist as well, who was able to reach across the ’aisle’ to work with members of the Republican Party on issues from questions such as prohibiting federal funding of abortion (the Hyde amendment) to a tougher criminal justice system in the Clinton presidency in the 1990s and immigration reform plans in the 2000s. However, times are changing, and the current Democratic Party is not anymore the party of Bill Clinton’s with his ’triangulation’, and not even that of Barack Obama’s cautious centrism. A strong and widespread sentiment was expressed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier during the primaries, when she said the only country she could imagine herself in the same party with Joe Biden is the United States.
Biden and the progressives One of the key questions of the Biden presidency will be the interaction between the centrist and the leftist (a.k.a. progressive) elements of the Democratic Party. It is beyond question that the support of the progressives was crucial in this past election; as was their reluctance to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. It may also be assumed that their support has a price Joe Biden has to pay as president. The Trump campaign repeatedly characterized the Democratic Party candidate as a stooge of the far left of the party – the ’Squad,’ Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, among others –, and Joe Biden had to distance himself from the progressives and their radical economic and social programs, including the so-called Green New Deal. President Biden will be in a rather precarious position. He has not clearly received a mandate to pursue a radical transformation of the economy and society (and even the government structure and the system of checks and balances) demanded by the progressives, so the latter would likely be disappointed to some extent with the more moderate measures that would come from the White House. Moreover, as things are standing at the moment, the Republicans are likely to retain their majority in the Senate (in practice, the Democrats should switch both seats in Georgia in early January 2021 to get a majority there), and a Republican majority under the leadership of Mitch McConnell is bound to water down, or altogether to kill an ambitious health care reform, criminal justice reform, tax reform, ’green’ reforms, and so on. Paradoxically, Biden may benefit from this situation to some extent, as he may defend his less radical agenda than the one demanded and expected by the progressives by pointing out the strong Republican opposition in the Senate. Serious battles can be envisioned for the soul of the Democratic Party at least behind the scenes, but the raw power ambitions of the Squad members and others to pull the Democratic Party even further to the left, and to replace the ’old guard’ of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Co. with young progressives may spill into the open after some time.
Will Trumpism stay? Soul-searching is almost a political must for a party after losing an election. That is what happened in the Republican Party after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012; the ’autopsy’ resulted in attempts to open towards previously neglected social and racial groups, including women, the Hispanics and the African-Americans. Donald Trump did not really make inroads into these groups, with the possible exception of white women, in 2016, but this year, he scored better among the latter two groups. The 70 million plus votes cast in favor of Donald Trump far exceeded the expectations of most of the observers and pollsters, and it may as well indicate that despite the fact that Trump was defeated in the presidential election, Trumpism may stay. That is, among others, an anti-elitist, populist, protectionist, anti-immigration set of policies which attract a large segment of American society.
To bridge the widening gaps Joe Biden has promised to be the President of all Americans; it will be a tall order. The American society is split almost right in the middle, political life is extremely polarized, identity politics on both sides is popular, the commonly shared values have largely disappeared, to mention some of the pressing problems in present-day America. The demonization of Donald Trump has been useful in the short run for the liberals, but they also alienated tens of millions of people whose mental and moral integrity was also questioned only because they supported Donald Trump. Moreover, a cultural cold war was also started by extremists on the liberal side who attack the values that had made America ‘great’ from the Declaration of Independence to the principles embodied in the Constitution, and the people who made America ‘great’ from the Founding Fathers through Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt – and the list could be continued ad infinitum. The real challenge for Joe Biden will be to bridge these ever widening gaps in society, without which his domestic and foreign policy agendas are bound to be doomed. A President who is not able to overcome all of these centrifugal forces will not be good for the U.S. and the world either. Both will continue to be drifting as they have been in the past few years at a time when internal and external challenges should be met and handled with determination and a steady hand. There are legitimate doubts that this will be the case.
