Old ‘normality’ got US in mess in first place

Those hailing Biden seem to forget the toxic state of America long before Trump picked up the populist baton, writes

IT was curious to watch Irish people who wouldn’t normally be seen dead saying anything positive about establishment politicians, for fear of being shunned by their more progressive peers, waxing lyrical all week about Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president. If he was called Micheál or Leo, and being crowned Taoiseach, they’d be the first to hiss at him as a relic of the old order.

To be fair, the giddy enthusiasm for Biden probably just comes down to a feeling of relief that the Trump era is now over, and that’s understandable.

Even those who don’t much care for the way the Democrats in Washington do business can be forgiven for sharing some relief that a line has been drawn under the lunatic excess of the last four years. What replaces it remains to be seen, but there is at least the possibility of forging something better. We’ve all had enough melodrama for a lifetime.

But do the Democrats have the wisdom and humility to bring about the sort of healing that’s needed? The rhetoric so far has oscillated wildly between calls for unity and reconciliation on the one hand, and angry demands for a crackdown on conservatives who dared support Trump on the other.

Something of the first mood was articulated by Biden in his inaugural speech. Listening to it was rather like playing Cliche Bingo. “Bringing America together” — check. “Uniting our people” — check.

It was given expression even more eloquently by young poet Amanda Gorman at the swearing-in ceremony. “To put our future first,” she declared, using a common rhetorical device of pairing and repetition, “we must first put our differences aside... We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.”

This is how Democrats like to see themselves, and would like to be seen. The reality is a bit different.

The desire to “never again sow division”, as Gorman phrased it, fell at the first hurdle as Joe Biden, whilst saying all the right things about the need to “see each other not as adversaries but as neighbours”, and to “join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature”, also firmly pinned the blame for what’s gone wrong in America on his opponents. Out went Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”. In came a ragbag of dog whistles about “political extremism, white supremacy, (and) domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat”.

Biden doesn’t just mean the small group of headcases who briefly broke into the Capitol building recently. If he had meant that, he could have said it. He was casting the net deliberately wide.

Conservatives are not stupid. They know they’re now being set up as the enemy within, the “other”. Democratic lawmakers in Congress have already filed ethics complaints against Republicans who raised concerns about electoral irregularities in an effort to have them thrown from office along with Trump.

They’re also urging social media companies to crack down on what they call “harmful disinformation”.

Sounds reasonable — except that what they call “harmful disinformation” generally means opinions which tens of millions legally hold, even if it doesn’t get them invited to the best dinner parties.

The move is aimed at silencing points of view which amplify “existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear”, as if anger, anxiety and fear are not entirely reasonable responses to certain kinds of political and social upheaval.

Former CIA director John Brennan even told CNN last week that the threat facing the US came now from “libertarians”. If security agencies have decided that the problem in the US is libertarians, they’re heading into a very dark place. Biden certainly has a cheek to slam the use of “fear and demonisation” as political weapons whilst himself using fear and demonisation to paint those who disagree with the Democrats as being beyond the democratic pale.

Democrats are trying to have it both ways, mouthing platitudes about togetherness whilst cultivating rancour, and the evidence so far is that the media will provide them with the cover in which to do it, because they see themselves as part of the same fight — another reason why, globally, public trust stands at an all-time low.

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer was published the day before the inauguration, and confirmed that of the four societal institutions studied — government, business, NGOs and media — not a single one now enjoys the trust of a majority of the population.

The collective response of politicians, corporations, NGOs and those in the media has not been to learn and change, but to conclude that it’s people themselves who must be to blame, and to devise ways to fix them, or at least keep tabs on them so they don’t get out of line.

It’s not even about politics any more. This divide is cultural. It’s about, on the one hand, collegeeducated liberals who are happy to cede economic control to corporations and tech giants as long as they make a show of projecting certain enlightened values around sex and race, and the “left behinds” on the other side who feel despised, and are reacting against it. They’re alienated, and painting them all as terrorists won’t help. There’s no possibility of bringing these two opposing mindsets together in the near future because they’re living in parallel universes.

One only has to look at the first tranche of executive orders signed by Biden on becoming president to see that dynamic in action.

Many may have been about new measures to fight the pandemic, but there were plenty in the list which were there as rewards for special interest groups, including orders forcing federal agencies to open “locker rooms or school sports” to anyone who identifies as a particular gender.

Each and every one of the measures signed by the new president, including others to incorporate radical racial social engineering into everyday life, and to open the borders to further illegal immigration, could be argued by Biden’s supporters to be justified, but they were also salvoes in that ongoing culture war. Enacting them on the very first day was an undoubted ideological statement of intent which can only further alienate those who think, for example, that identity politics is harming society, or that unchecked immigration puts too great a strain on the country.

That’s what’s so ominous about the uncritical approval which has greeted the start of Biden’s presidency in some quarters.

It may be forgivable to treat the new administration as a novelty in the short term, but it’s not enough to just hope that “normality” returns when that normality wasn’t working. It was that normality which fuelled the dissatisfaction that led to Trump’s rise to begin with.

Those hailing Joe Biden as if he was Zeus descending from Mount Olympus are choosing to forget what a toxic, divided mess America had become under the guidance of embedded regime politicians like him, long before Trump picked up the populist baton.

The best hope is that we can get a political vaccine against this virulent virus of American toxicity, but that doesn’t seem likely either.

The Americanisation of the world continues unabated, colonising our minds, even though much of its culture is alien to what we are. For many younger people in Ireland, possibly a majority, their entire cultural backdrop — music, TV, film, vocabulary — comes from America. It’s a natural step for them to get their politics from the US too, and import its more poisonous concepts, such as white supremacy, into Ireland.

It’s not only Trump that people outside America need to stop talking and obsessing about. It’s America itself. We need to build a mental wall to keep that benighted country out of our heads before it destroys us too.

‘Pro-Trump conservatives in the US are being cast as the enemy within, not just as political opponents’