We're being told Biden won't be able to achieve much. We must reject that idea
One thing we have learned from this election is just how crazy our democratic system is. Many crucial victories came down to slim margins in swing states and the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college.
Moving forward, progressives need to rally around serious democracy reform. Every issue we care about, from heathcare to climate justice, flows from that. Without a major intervention – and even with radical candidates winning office here and there – our political system is becoming less and less representative and responsive.
We need to start thinking about voting rights as operating on multiple levels. One is access to the ballot box: are you able to vote? Two: is your vote counted? Then there’s a third – does your vote have consequences? In other words, is your vote impactful politically? Does it lead to the ability for your chosen candidate to govern? That is where we are now. Even after our votes are counted and Joe Biden has sealed the deal to become presidentelect, we’re being told that it will be impossible for him to accomplish anything given that the Republicans will likely control the Senate.
We have to challenge that logic as much as we can. The fact that the Democrats didn’t sweep Congress – that Biden may be dealing with a divided government – is extremely disappointing. But there’s actually a lot that a president can do with a divided or weak Congress if they have a spine.
For example, Biden can use the same tactics that Trump used to fill various high-power positions without having them confirmed, by using the Vacancies Act and making recess appointments. Biden can also use executive power in bold ways, including to cancel all federal student loan debt using a legal authority called “compromise and settlement”. We must remind the incoming administration of the power it possesses, even if the circumstances are less than ideal.
We simply cannot accept the idea that it will be impossible for Biden to govern. He has a progressive mandate and must use all the power at his disposal to materially improve people’s lives and boost public morale. We are in a public health and economic crisis; if he doesn’t act decisively, Democrats will face a bloodbath in 2022 or 2024. The fascist threat of Trumpism is not going away. If anything, we’ve learned that Trumpism is very popular. But
Mitch McConnell is not the president, and his influence must be diminished as much as possible, which will require Biden to do something not in his nature – fight Republicans.
Part of the problem is that in the US we effectively have two rulingclass parties; that’s why our politics and governance are so muddled. The Republicans denounce the Democrats as “cultural elites” while stirring up racial resentment and playing divideand-conquer politics in order to cut taxes for the rich. Corporate Democrats, beholden to their donors, are incapable of offering an adequate response. They refuse to campaign on and go to bat for the social policies people need to survive and thrive.
This dynamic is extremely dangerous. The only way we break it is by strengthening our social movements. (It’s not enough to point to poll results showing that robust majorities support progressive policies in the abstract; survey results are not solidarity, which can only be built through the hard work of organizing.) This is where I see a small silver lining: after the 2016 election, it was popular for pundits and academics to talk about the problem of “populism”. That discourse was totally misleading. Populism is always a codeword for the people: the people are the problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fortunately, there is a belated and growing awareness that our political institutions are the actual problem. At long last, liberals are talking about the foundational flaws and structural imbalances that shape our reality – the malapportionment of the Senate, the supreme court’s rightwing tilt, the absurdity of the electoral college, the pathologies of winner-take-all elections, and so on.
This is a welcome shift. There’s a reason that the famous abolitionist William Garrison called the constitution “an agreement with hell” and a “covenant with death”. We must further delegitimize these arcane and anachronistic institutions and recognize the ways they sabotage the progressive will of the majority of American people, turning our ostensible democracy into an oligarchy. And we have to be aware one party is determined to exacerbate this descent into despotism. Republicans want to further enshrine minority rule, forcing Democrats to have to win an ever-larger share of votes in older to hold power. Republicans are increasingly at war with democracy itself.
The left is in a challenging spot, in terms of the rules of the game. The rules are, to a certain extent, stacked against us. That’s part of what makes the road ahead so tough. It’s better to not be sanctimonious and romantic about “institutions” and “norms”. The norms are the problem. And if we’re going to ever have anything approaching justice, we will have to bust a lot of them.
Astra Taylor is the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and an organizer with the Debt Collective
This is an abridged and adapted transcript of remarks Taylor delivered at Where Do We Go From Here?, a Haymarket Books event on 6 November 2020
Biden has a progressive mandate and must use all the power at his disposal to materially improve people’s lives and boost public morale