The case for Biden optimism, starting with moral revival
Most calls to “national unity” are vacuous pap. They are unrealistic, kumbaya pleas to “come together” around nothing.
But, as Richard Hughes Gibson wrote last week in The Hedgehog Review, the best calls to national unity are arguments. They are aggressive calls to come together around a specific idea of America, a specific national project.
What idea of America does Joe Biden call us to unite around? It’s the old one. As Walt Whitman understood, America was founded mostly by people fleeing the remnants of feudalism, the stratified caste societies of Europe.
Today we have homegrown feudalism. On the right, we have white supremacy, an effort to perpetuate America’s racial caste system, and Christian nationalism, an effort to define America in a way that erases the pluralism that exists.
On the left, less viciously, we have elite universities that have become engines for the production of inequality. All that woke posturing is the professoriate’s attempt to mask the fact that they work at finishing schools where more students often come from the top 1% of earners than from the bottom 60%. Their graduates flock to insular neighborhoods in and around New York, D.C., San Francisco and make everybody else feel invisible.
Enter Joe Biden, repelled by the ancient feudalism of the right and is outside the “meritocratic” feudalism of the left. Here is a Trumanlike figure, whose inaugural address was spoken in the plain words and with the plain values of Main Street.
My favorite passage was this: “Here is the thing about life: There is no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days you need a hand; there are other days when we are called to lend a hand.” The Biden values are there: humility, vulnerability, compassion, resilience, interdependence, solidarity. Donald Trump’s patriotism was bloated and fear-based. Biden’s is the self-confident patriotism he absorbed by growing up in a certain sort of country.
Every president sets the moral and cultural tone. We saw that in a terrible way over the past four years. Biden sets the stage for a moral revival. His values cut across the left/right, urban/ rural culture war.
This will begin to heal a broken nation. Next, Biden will work to depoliticize American life. Over the last years, politics was about everything except actual governance. Under Trump, partisanship was about personal identity, class resentment, religious affiliation, racial prejudice and cultural animosity.
Biden has been a genius at sidestepping the Trump circus. We have endured an age of affective polarization. Under Biden, the emotional temperature will go down.
Biden has the right agenda, the redistribution of dignity. A politician can tell the people who have been left behind that he hears them, and that’s words. But Biden wants to present them with a $1,400 check they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, increase the child tax credit to $3,000 and create infrastructure jobs. That’s proof that somebody in Washington understands what you are going through.
Will he be able to pass this sort of sweeping legislation? I have far from given up hope. Every day, I read that Republicans will never go for these spending plans, and I always want to ask the writer: Have you noticed that Republicans have already voted for roughly $3 trillion in new spending over the last 10 months? Do not underestimate how divided and confused their party is.
Recently, I was on a call with the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus and a similar group of senators. I was struck by how passionately these Republicans and Democrats are committed to one another across party lines, how deftly they used the evenly divided Congress to restart the COVID-19 relief effort in December.
If this doesn’t work and Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster.
I was shocked by how moved I was by the inaugural. We’ve been through an emotional hailstorm. Suddenly the sky has cleared. It’s possible America may emerge from this trauma more transformed than we can imagine.