All He Won Was a Reprieve
Biden will occupy the highest office, but nearly everything below is broken, blocked, or locked into dysfunction.
On wednesday, as vote totals grew slowly toward a likely Biden presidency, more than 100,000 new American coronavirus cases were reported—a record for a country that has already experienced two devastating pandemic peaks. More than a thousand people died, an average toll, these days, equivalent to two 747 crashes, but which may soon come to seem “light” in retrospect. Those planes are going to keep taking off, and crashing, every day for months. By the time Joe Biden takes office in January, perhaps 100,000 more Americans will have died. And while it seems that no Western government is capable of truly suppressing the pandemic for long, any interventions implemented by the Biden administration, even on day one, will still take weeks, likely months, to roll out—arriving only in the spring, when vaccines will be rolling out too
and when warmer weather will mean the disease was likely abating anyway. Especially in the rollout of vaccines and mass testing, better management will help us; indeed, any management would help. But to a large degree, the damage is already done.
It is not simply that his presidency will arrive too late to address the pandemic’s winter surge. The tragedy is bigger than that, with Biden hamstrung to act not just in the months before Inauguration Day but, maddeningly, in the months immediately after as well. Faced with a likely Republican Senate, Biden has dim prospects for filibuster reform, criminal-justice reform, or court reform, not to mention other meaningful legislative action like a publichealth-care option or the $2 trillion climate plan around which Biden— surprisingly, laudably—actually built a blitz of closing-message ads. Biden and the Democrats also now face strong opposition on the Supreme Court, which threatens not just the Affordable Care Act and Roe v. Wade but the very legitimacy of the administrative state through which presidential action without Senate support would have to pass. And the failure of Democrats down ballot from Biden means that the party whiffed on the once-in-a-decade opportunity to flip state legislatures and at
least even out the gerrymandered playing field that has tilted so many elections GOP-ward over the past decade. Democrats have won the presidency but probably only the presidency, with nearly everything below broken or blocked or locked into cross-purposed dysfunction.
In March, as the coronavirus was first devastating New York, the country’s basic incapacity to respond was already clear. Donald Trump was the last man you would want presiding over such a crisis, but the problems didn’t stop with him; the dysfunction, it was apparent even on March 12, went much deeper. The CDC failed, developing a flawed test, and the FDA failed, refusing to let anyone else design one at first. And while these agencies had been damaged by federal interference and would continue to be, the failures weren’t just those emanating from the White House. Instead, the failures were signs of a country starving for social trust, overstuffed with social cruelty, and ill served by institutions damaged by a decades-long culture war against not just the government but informed authority in general.
The Senate failed to deliver meaningful pandemic aid in the form of funding for testing, tracing, and PPE—producing only economic aid, which then ran out. Many local school systems failed to find ways to safely stay open, as even those in hard-hit countries have managed. We still don’t have sufficient testing to catch asymptomatic cases, which represent almost half of the problem, and we are far behind where we should hope to be on rapid testing, which could easily and affordably suppress that asymptomatic spread. Contact tracing, the great hope of American technocrats, has failed utterly, with response rates in some places as low as 15 percent; in the U.K., which has probably mounted the worst coronavirus response in all of Europe, they are counting rates between 50 and 70 percent as a catastrophic failure.
For most of the past nine months, American liberals who were distressed about the state of the country could look at the polls and comfort themselves with the thought that the man presiding over all of this suffering, torturing the nation and its tattered self-image with his narcissistic indifference, had merely hijacked American politics and its arc of history for the length of one presidential term, now set to expire. On the campaign trail, mostly virtually, Biden spoke of his hopes for an FDR-size presidency. Many of his voters reminisced about Obama’s historic margin in 2008, though that victory opened a window of aggressive progressive governance that lasted only 18 months. And some on the left fantasized about a Trojan-horse presidency— fuddy-duddy Biden, the Democrats’ Gipper, letting the Warren and Bernie wings of the party at least into the room, if not handing them full control. But while Biden’s national margin is in some ways heartening, what he seems to have won with it is less like any of those transformational models and more like the lameduck presidency we expected for Hillary Clinton four years ago. Given the historic stakes of the present, it also raises the possibility of a bleaker medium- or even longterm future: a lame-duck nation, in which neither real reform nor real political progress appears all that possible anywhere on the federal horizon.
To the many millions of Americans radicalized by Trump, his four years in office amounted to a kind of unmasking of America—the sequential revelation of a basic national ugliness previously acknowledged primarily by the sorts of radicals who are typically dismissed by our civic religion and its high priests as naïve or rageful or both. But the election of Biden represents an unmasking too: a showcase of just how poorly divided government functions, even in times of screaming need, and how frustratingly little will change, in concrete policy terms, through the replacement of one presidential hood ornament with another. For decades now, political insiders have mocked those disengaged outsiders and third-party voters who insisted there was no real difference between the two parties. Of course, they were right to. As anyone with eyes should be able to see, the two parties stand for very different things, with factions inside them even more divergent. But when structural roadblocks and divided government mean nothing much can actually get done in a time of great and protracted suffering, simply standing for something different and more humane is cold comfort.
Millions have now fallen sick, many of them still ailing months later from aftereffects that doctors call “sequelae.” We are dealing with sequelae socially, too. Anxiety and depression have by some accounts tripled during the pandemic, and the number of overdoses has grown too. American GDP rebounded dramatically in the third quarter, but hundreds of thousands of Americans are still filing new unemployment claims each week— numbers higher, every week, than for any previous week before the pandemic in the history of the statistic. Millions have lost health insurance in the midst of a health crisis. Protections for renters and those carrying student loans will expire too without additional aid from Congress, which has, to this point, refused aid to state and local governments as well. New York State alone is facing a $59 billion shortfall. These are just the very short-term challenges, leaving entirely aside the howling need to address injustices far more longstanding (race, inequalities of income and opportunity) and more lastingly consequential (climate, American “democracy”). If ever the country needed a mandate election, this was it. And even with a national margin that could grow to 6 percent, and with support from a larger share of the American electorate than Obama or Reagan achieved in their landslides, Biden has won, instead, a sort of stalemate, if one that comes wrapped in a blue bow.
This election seemed, for months, to have much grander possibilities than that, but its resolution in a Biden presidency probably feels to most liberals less like a victory that points forward than a reprieve from what might have been. And if the most we can hope for from political victory in a time of crisis is psychological comfort, rather than policy transformation, we may be in for some very bleak times indeed.
Biden has won a sort of stalemate, if one that comes wrapped in a blue bow.