South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Great things Biden has done
Many of our best presidents have been underestimated. Harry S. Truman was seen as the tool of a corrupt political machine. DwightD. Eisenhowerwas supposedly a bumbling middlebrow. Ulysses S. Grantwas thought a taciturn simpleton. Even FDRwas once considered a lightweight feather duster.
I’ve been reading Joe Biden’s speeches, and I’m beginning to think even his supporters are underestimating him.
He’swalking across treacherous cultural ground, confronting conflicts that are shredding the nation, and he’smastering themwith ease. Biden is campaigning in a country that has lost faith in itself. Sixty-six percent ofAmericans believe our nation is in decline, according to a study fromthe Institute forAdvanced Studies in Culture.
He’s also running in the middle of a political and cultural civilwar. Eightytwo percent of Biden voters believe that “DonaldTrumpwould like to gradually transform our country into a dictatorship,” according to that IASC study. Ninety percent ofTrump voters believe that the Democratswant to gradually turn America into a socialist country. According to a survey conducted byBraver Angels, a group that sponsors bipartisan conversations, 70% of Americans believe that if the “wrong” candidate wins, “America will not recover.”
Biden is campaigning in a land filled with fear, hatred and apocalyptic thinking. Itwould be so easy for him to reflect that fear and hate back to voters. That’s what Trumpdoes. But Biden is not doing that. Never inmy life have I seen a candidate so confidently avoidwedge issues. Biden is instead running on the conviction that, despite it all, Americans deeply love their country and viscerally long for its unity. He’s running with the knowledge that when you ask America about the greatest threats to our future, “political polarization and divisiveness” comes outNo. 1.
It’s easy to say you’re for healing division. But here’s what Biden has actually done:
He’s de-ideologized this election. He’s made the campaign mostly about dealing withCOVID-19. That’s a practical problem, not an ideological one. Conservatives and moderates don’t have to renounce their whole philosophy to vote for him. They can just say they’re voting for the personwhocan take care of this.
He’s separated politics fromthe culture war. Over the past generation, culturewar issues have increasingly swallowed our politics. Trump has put this process into overdrive. He barely talks about policies. Instead, his every subject is really about why “our” identity group is better than “their” identity group.
So nowthe positions people take— on issues ranging fromclimate change to immigration— are determined by whether they see themselves as part of the rural white Christian conservative army or part of the urban multicultural secular progressive army. Policies are no longer debated discretely; they are just battles in one big, existential fight overwhowe are.
ButBiden goes back to theNewDeal, to an era of policymakingwhen there really wasn’t a polarized culturewar. He sidesteps theKulturkampf issues— which statues to take down— to simply talk about helping the middle class.
Biden has scrambled the upscale/downscale dynamic. The most important fissure in our politics is education levels. The Democratic Party’s greatest long-term challenge is that itmight become the party of the highly credentialed college-educated class and let somefutureRepublican rally a multiracialworking-class coalition. EvenTrumpis nowmaking surprising gains among Latino and Black men.
Biden has avoided all the little microaggressions that cultural elites use to show they aremorally superior. Wokeness, for example, is partly about fighting oppression, but it’s also become a status symbol. It’s showing people that you are so intellectually evolved that you can usewords like intersectionality, decolonizing and cultural appropriation. Political correctness is not just a means for the less privileged to set standards of behavior; it is also sometimes theway people with cultural power push others around.
Unlike, say, Hillary Clinton, Biden has aworldview and a manner that is both educated class andworking class and defuses the divide.
Biden has avoided the stupid binaries about race. Trumpwent toMountRushmore and made a speech essentially saying you can either believe in systemic racism or you can love America. Bidenwent to Gettysburg and argued that you can “honestly face systemic racism” and love America. He argued that you can believe in fighting racism and believe in lawand order. Hisworldview is based on universal categories— the thingswe share— not identitarian ones— thewayswe supposedly can’t understand each other across difference.
He’s done a good job reaching out towhite evangelicals. Right now, many of them think he’s a godless socialistwhowill usher in a reign of anti-religious terror. In his campaign he’s done a pretty good job reaching out to those voters. His campaign has run ads on Christian radio and reached out aggressively to evangelical leaders. If he can allay their cultural fears (by making it clear he will not shut down Christian charitable groups) and win them over with working-class economic policies, he can create a long-term governing majority.
Seventy percent of Americans in that Braver Angels survey say America is facing permanent harm, but70% also say the most important job after the election is to heal our enmity, to do the hard job of working with people whose viewswe find completely objectionable. This unity impulse is powerful in the populace, but it is deeply hidden.
Biden knew itwas there.