Biden and Harris can restore sanity
Standard mental health protocol for patients suffering psychosis is, first, to stabilize their behavior with medication. Once their reasoning powers have been restored, a more sustained recovery can begin that may include various kinds of therapies to enable the patient to resume normal relations with other people. The toxic contagion of sociopathic behavior is thus contained and corrected through a series of restorative steps rather than some instant miracle cure.
For the past four years our body (and psyche) politic has been suffering by association the psychopathology of a seriously disturbed president whose detachment from consensual reality has been most dramatically demonstrated by his bizarre refusal to acknowledge much less graciously accept his electoral defeat, culminating this week in his incitement of a mob to attack the Capitol. Combined with the already tremendous national distress of the pandemic, this mentally unstable head of state — encouraged by a deranged assortment of Republican enablers — has driven us all to the edges of our minds. As if fighting off an infection, the electorate has definitively rejected this madness by choosing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as an antidote whereby our sanity can be restored.
This is why Biden’s moderate liberalism and Harris’s nonideological progressivism are as promising a combination as we could hope for to lead our country at this critical mess of a historic moment. Biden’s postelection conduct and demeanor have been impressive and exemplary in his calm self-confidence and managerial composure. His speech during the siege of Congress displayed his moral leadership as well has his solid political instincts. Leftist Democrats disappointed that Bernie Sanders was not the party’s nominee must face the reality that socialism is a hard sell to most Americans — and even to most Democrats. The real base of the party, Black women of a certain age, mainly in the South, are looking for representation, not a revolution.
Biden’s choice of Harris as his partner in leadership is another example of sound political judgment and an acknowledgment of Harris as the multicultural embodiment of the future. Raised in Berkeley and Oakland by activist academic parents — her mother was a cancer researcher and her father an economist — Harris carries the progressive values of her political formation in her pragmatic approach to reform within the system. She knows that righteous demands for justice are not enough; advances in the law move slowly and are established by elected legislators. As president of an evenly divided Senate, she will wield real power to bend the arc of justice gently forward.
By the time you read this, who knows what new outrage will have been perpetrated by the increasingly desperate and erratic outgoing president. We can only hope that come Inauguration Day what we once knew as our democratic republic will still be a functioning democracy where a decent human being in the White House, supported by a competent staff, can make a positive difference. I can imagine the trespasser-in-chief being escorted from the executive mansion by a team of large Black men in white coats and spirited off to an appropriate institution for evaluation and incarceration.
As Biden and his team take the wheel of government we can at least feel confident that they will make a rational effort to control the spread of the coronavirus, revive the economy with relief checks to the people who need the most help and restore some semblance of integrity to a system that was already corrupt enough before it was hijacked by mobsters. I have no illusions of anyone coming to the rescue or our cascading crises being resolved anytime soon. But Biden’s tragic personal history, his political mistakes and humiliations over half a century of public service have given him a wisdom beyond the reach of someone less seasoned. The experienced technocrats he has chosen for his cabinet, practical problem-solvers, are our best hope to cool a collective psyche inflamed by more than a virus and in dire need of professional intervention.