President Joe Biden gave a speech yesterday evening that he probably hopes will be remembered as one of his most important and effective, Biden speaks on voting rights,
Here are some of the things that the President of the United States said about the ongoing and fast-moving voter suppression laws the Republicans are passing across the country:
"[T]he For The People Act [is] a national imperative."
The GOP is engaged nationwide in "election subversion" embodied in "odious laws."
"It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history."
Georgia just passed a "vicious anti-voting law" that is " racially discriminatory."
"Are you on the side of truth or lies; fact or fiction; justice or injustice; democracy or autocracy? That’s what it’s coming down to."
But do a quick search and see if you can find the word "filibuster" in it.
And that's the problem. Unless the filibuster rule is abolished or adjusted in a way that allows a vote on the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the two laws which Biden is nominally supporting in this speech, they won't pass.
That's why my first reaction to the speech is that it sounds like a de facto surrender in the face of what the President calls "the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history."
But it is full of phrases and clips that can be used in campaign ads and fundraising letters and pitches to sell voting-rights merch.
VP Kamala Harris offered this bland snippet of text on Twitter:
In 2020, more voters cast a ballot than ever before. Now, there are some pushing new laws across the country to make it harder to vote.
The Democrats control the White House and both Houses of Congress. If Biden and Harris and the Congressional Democrats are serious about blocking what Biden calls "election subversion" in that speech, they will pass those two pieces of legislation. Otherwise, we're stuck with the reality that the Democrats control the White House and both Houses of Congress and can't pass their own legislation. Even legislation as critical as this.
The EU is making moves to try to ease relations with Turkey and its authoritarian President Tayyip Erdoğan. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen of Germany and and European Council President Charles Michel of Belgium just held a meeting with Erdoğan in Ankara to discuss some major current issues. (EU-Spitzen beraten mit Erdogan über BeziehungenOberösterreichische Nachrichten 06.04.2021) The EU Commission and the European Council are the two executive bodies of the European Union.
The range of issues includes the long-standing dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus, Turkey's role in the conflicts in Libya and Syria, travel between Turkey and the EU, and human rights issues, including Turkey's recent decision to leave the Council of Europe treaty on combatting violence against women known as the Istanbul Convention. (Turkey quits Istanbul Convention on violence against womenDeutsche Welle 20.03.2021)
Turkey's human and diplomatic club: refugees
One connection between Turkey and the EU that I don't think receives sufficient prominence in news reports is the 2016 deal Angela Merkel negotiated with Erdoğan to hold millions of refugees from conflicts in the Greater Middle East. Robin Alexander gave a good account of the negotiating of that deal in Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik (2018).The Oberösterrichische Nachrichten describes it this way (Die EU-Spitzen reisten mit Zuckerbrot und Peitsche zu Erdogan nach Ankara 07.04.2021):
Beide brauchen einander – auch in der Flüchtlingsfrage. Diese nannte die Kommissionspräsidentin als eines von vier Themenfeldern, um die es in einem ersten Gespräch mit Erdogan gegangen sei. Themenfelder, "in denen beide von einer verstärkten Zusammenarbeit profitieren können".
2016 hatte die EU mit der Türkei einen Deal geschlossen, wonach das Land keine Flüchtlinge in die EU durchwinkt und dafür sechs Milliarden Euro für deren Versorgung erhält. Geflossen sind davon bisher mehr als vier Milliarden Euro. Erdogan fordert mehr Geld, die EU will ihre Außengrenze dicht halten. Also wird es auf eine Verlängerung des Deals hinauslaufen.
[Both {Turkey and the EU} need each other, including on the refugee issue. The President of the Commission mentioned this as one of the four topics discussed in an initial discussion with Erdogan. topics "in which both can benefit from enhanced cooperation".
In 2016, the EU struck a deal with Turkey under which the country will not to wave refugees through into the EU and receives six billion euros for its trouble. More than four billion euros have been spent so far. Erdogan is demanding more money, the EU wants to keep its external border close. So it will result in an extension of the deal.] {my translation}
That mention comes at the very end of the news article. But it's not only an intense issue between Turkey and the EU. It's also dramatic evidence of a current weakness in the EU, which is to rely far too heavily on a kick-the-can-down-the-road approach to significant problems. The EU faced a big and very unusual surge of refugees in 2015-16, which was met with a great deal of disarray among EU member nations. And not only far-right parties responded in many countries with a xenophobic political reactions to which the center-right and left parties generally did a poor job of responding in a constructive way.
The agreement with Turkey was established in early 2016, and it gives Turkey the ability to pressure European governments by threatening to send more refugees north. As of last September, there were some 3.6 million refugees in Turkey. (UNHCR Turkey - Fact Sheet September 2020 22.09.2020) As Robin Alexander reported in his 2018 book, "Erdoğan nutzt seinen Machtzuwachs und sein Erpressungspotenzial gegenüber der EU dazu, die Demonrage der jahrzehntelang gewachsenen Demokratie in der Türkei zu beschleunigen." ("Erdoğan is using his increased power and his blackmail potential against the EU to accelerate the dismantling of Turkey's democracy, which has been growing for decades.") He threatened the EU just over a year ago with sending a large number of refugees north toward Europe. (Turkey says millions of migrants may head to EUBBC News 03/02/2020)
The EU has had five years now to work on reducing this threat, which is basically only seen as a threat because of xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiments in various EU countries that way too many EU leaders would rather duck that deal with them straightforwardly. An EU burden-sharing agreement to absorb a significant number of those refugees could have steadily reduced that particular blackmail potential. And would have been a decent thing to do. A concerted effort during that time to reduce European arms sales to warring parties in Libya and the Middle East would have also been very helpful.
All this compromises the EU's human rights position considerably. Turkey has used some of the Syrian refugees to carry out an ethnic cleansing operation in formerly Kurdish areas it gained military control over in northern Syria, moving out Kurds and repopulating those areas with non-Kurdish Syrian refugees. The 2016 deal makes the EU at least passively complicit in that kind of operation.
And whether the issues are human rights or democratic governance or Turkish foreign policy mischief, the current refugee situation gives Turkey a big addition of diplomatic clout. Erdoğan knows it, and EU leaders know it. In Germany and Austria, rightwing politicians like to bitch and moan about Turkish funding of mosques that my promote jihadism and worries that Turkey tries to inappropriately manipulate the considerable Turkish minorities in those countries in service of Turkish foreign policy. Whatever real concerns there may be on that score - and my impression is that those are relatively limited - those are legitimate concerns. But, for better or worse, Germany and Austria are significantly constrained in taking action on such perceived threats because of Turkey's refugee club.
So it's not surprising to see Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence blog expressing low expectations and a bit of disgust at the EU's current situation with Turkey (Beware of photo-ops with Erdogan 04/07/2021):
They had to have the photo op with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and it turned out to be bad idea, as we predicted. ...
A video clip from the meeting went viral. It showed Charles Michel taking the seat next to Erdogan, forcing Ursula von der Leyen to sit on the sofa opposite the Turkish foreign minister. Symbols speak more than words, especially in countries like Turkey. The same is true for the official photo in which the two EU leaders smiled, while Erdogan looked like he just wanted to get it over and done with. If the EU does not know how speak in images, they are better off keeping meetings behind closed doors.
Erdogan may not be Sergey Lavrov, but his seating arrangements were enough to display the rift between European Council and the Commission, and male dominance over a female leader. The EU's concern over Turkey's exit from the Istanbul Convention on Discrimination and Violence against Women suddenly lost its bite.
Erdoğan pulled a similar stunt when Angela Merkel came to Ankara in 2016 to negotiate the refugee deal.
In the press briefing afterwards, von der Leyen said human rights are non-negotiable and that Turkey should respect the recent rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for the release Turkish businessman Osman Kavala and Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtain. She said the Commission will come up with a proposal for how to support Syrian refugees in Turkey in a show of good will. So goodwill first, non-negotiables after?
Hiding under the covers from the refugee challenge has a significant price for the EU, diplomatic as well as financial.
Joe Biden's early positioning with Turkey
US President Joe Biden sent an important diplomatic signal at the time of the recent EU (video) summit by singling out Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Misotakis as the only one of the Greek heads of government to whom he made a personal call, a significant diplomatic signal early in his administration that he's leaning toward Greece in its current disputes with their fellow NATO member Turkey.
Washington’s intention to support Athens was reportedly made loud and clear in the telephone call between US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last Thursday on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the start of the Greek War of Independence.
“If you need anything, call me. I’m here to help,” Biden reportedly told Mitsotakis – an offer which carries added significance given that no one can discount Ankara’s stance in the coming months. At the same time the foundations were laid for Mitsotakis to visit to the White House within the year.
If anything, the phone call reflected the open line of communication between the two capitals, and the US involvement in the region after its resounding absence during the era of Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, during which time Ankara challenged Greece’s sovereign rights, not least with its Oruc Reis research vessel conducting surveys over several months last year.
One "boring" improvement from the new Administration is making the official White House website a useful information source again. So the transcript of the press conference is available there, Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference 03/25/2021.
In the Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden Administrations, the White House website regularly provided transcripts of Presidential speeches and press conferences. Obama had a weekly video message that was posted there. Under Trump-Pence, it deteriorated fast. It had spotty information, and that crowd were such dishonest clowns, I wouldn't have even taken official transcripts as accurate. So this little bit of "normalcy" under the current administration is a welcome bit of boring but useful improvement. Although I haven't seen any videos popping up there yet, which strikes me as a bit odd.
Biden's press conference itself was "normal," rather than the theatrical Rumpelstilzchen shows that Trump put on in his press conferences and Nuremburg rallies. But he provided useful information and I would say good framing for his policies. I'm on a trust-but-verify basis with Biden's Presidency. And on some issues like immigration, it's more like don't -really-trust-but-demnad-they-do-the-right-thing-anyway basis.
Left-leaning media critics let out a collective sigh about how the press is also more-or-less back to pre-Trump "normal", i.e., they still obsess over horserace question (Are you going to run for re-elction in 2024?, Do you have the votes to do away with the filibuster?) and they still take their cues from Republican framing (Are more refugees coming because they think you're weak on immigration?)
There were no questions about any element of the Covid crisis – not the vaccine, the prognosis, the economy, nothing! – although it’s by far the most important issue on any normal person’s mind right now. There were no questions about the substance of Biden’s ambitious plans related to infrastructure and climate change, immigration and voting rights.
And he also notes, "after four years of the media desperately needing to fact-check the president (and often failing), now the president has to fact-check the media."
I won't add any theater-criticism type comments on the press conference. That's why we have our Pod Pundits on TV ...
Immigration was a mjor topic in the debate, not least because the Republicans have been beating their drums over it. They claim there is a "crisis" on the border because there's a new flood of refugees due to Biden being President. There is a real humantarian crisis on the border, and Biden emphasized that in his press conference. But as he also explained, the "crisis" the Republicans are yammering about is bogus, for reasons he explained well.
It features Erika Andiola Advocacy Chief for RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services). Good discussion on how the press is still using Republican/xenophobic framing of the border issue.
Despite the somewhat ditsy questioning, Biden also talked about the necessity of getting important legislation passed, changing the filibuster rule if necessary. And he made it sound necessary.
And he did talk about the COVID relief bill and some about his plans for a new stimulus/infrastructure bill. Very importantly, he strssed the benefits that ordinary Americans are going to get from the relief bill.
I do think that Biden needs to move faster on cleaning up the mess in the immigration system that was left immediately by the Trump-Pence Administration. But the legacy from the Obama-Biden Administration in that regard was bad in many ways.
I've followed immigration policy to some extent my whole adult life. So it's unsurprising that the US has lurched alone with such a bad system with Latin American immigration for so long. But it's still terrible that it has, because it's heavily based on shameless exploitation of immigrant workers.
The last substantive US immigration reform was during the Bush I Administration. In a short book I think is terribly underrated, The Culture of Contentment (1992), John Kenneth Galbraith included a chapter called "The Functional Underclass," in which he discussed the US economy's dependene on what he called a low-paid underclass, which he described this way:
What is not accepted, and indeed is little mentioned, is that the underclass is integrally a part of a larger economic process and, more importantly, that it serves the living standard and the comfort of the more favored community. Economic progress would be far more uncertain and certainly far less rapid without it. The economically fortunate, not excluding those who speak with greatest regret of the existence of this class, are heavily dependent on its presence.
Even in 1992, this was not a "respectable" way to talk about the economy. But Galbraith was usually more focused on getting it right than in pandering to fashionable respectable opinion at any given moment.
And he described how Latin America was providing a considerable part of that "underclass" at the time:
In more recent times, migration from Mexico, Latin America and the West Indies has become a general source of such labor. For many years now, legal provision has been made for the importation of workers for the harvesting of fruit and vegetables, there being very specific acknowledgment that this is something native-born Americans cannot be persuaded in the necessary numbers to do. There is here, somewhat exceptionally, a clear legal perception of the role of the underclass.
In the immigration legislation of 1990, there was at last some official recognition of the more general and continuing need for immigrant labor. Although much of the discussion of this measure turned on the opening of the door to needed skilled workers (and compassionately to relatives of earlier migrants), the larger purpose was not in doubt. There would be a new and necessary recruitment of men and women to do the tasks of the underclass. Avoided only was mention of such seemingly brutal truth. It is not thought appropriate to say that the modern economy - the market system - requires such an underclass, and certainly not that it must reach out to other countries to sustain and refresh it. [my emphasis]
The dependence on undocumented immigrant labor in the US economy has increased greatly since then. But the refugee issue is a distinct one, although it is a closely related issue. Refugees are fleeing intolerable conditions, though if they are coming to the US, they normally hope to be able to make a living there.
One of the things that American and European xenophobes like to claim is that a decent policy on refugees - and only policies that meet the minimal standards of internal law should even be considered as fitting into that category - will encourage even more immigration. In both the US and Europe, this is meant to convey images of hordes of dark-skinned foreigners from poor countries coming in to take advantage of institutions created by respectable, hard-working white folks. But it's at least 99% a bogus argument. and Biden did a good job of explaining that in the context of the moment in his press conference.
Cecilia Vega of ABC News posed this question:
Q I’d like to circle back to immigration, please. You just listed the reasons that people are coming, talking about in-country problems, saying that it happens every year; you blamed the last administration. Sir, I just got back last night from a reporting trip to the border where I met nine-year-old, Yossell, who walked here from Honduras by himself, along with anoth
er little boy. He had that phone number on him —
THE PRESIDENT: Astounding.
Q — and we were able to call his family. His mother says that she sent her son to this country because she believes that you are not deporting unaccompanied minors like her son. That’s why she sent him alone from Honduras.
So, sir, you blamed the last administration, but is your messaging — in saying that these children are and will be allowed to stay in this country and work their way through this process — encouraging families like Yossell says to come?
And Biden addressed the propaganda claim the Republicans are making in his reply:
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, the idea that I’m going to say — which I would never do — “if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side” — no previous administration did that either, except Trump. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it.
That’s why I’ve asked the Vice President of the United States, yesterday, to be the lead person on dealing with focusing on the fundamental reasons why people leave Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in the first place. It’s because of earthquakes, floods. It’s because of lack of food. It’s because of gang violence. It’s because of a whole range of things. ...
That mother did not sit around with — on the kitchen table and say, “You know, I got a great idea: The way I’m going to make sure my son get taken care of is I’m going to put a…” — how old was he, or she?
Q He’s — he’s nine. I also met a 10-year-old.
THE PRESIDENT: A nine-year-old. “I’m going to send him on a thousand-mile journey across the desert and up to the United States because I know Joe Biden is a nice guy and he’ll take care of him.”
What a desperate act to have to take. The circumstances must be horrible. So we can do something about that.
It's good to have a President making that straightforward argument.
In the 1930s, CIO union organizers used the slogan, "The President Wants You to join a Union." Franklin Roosevelt didn't specifically say, "I want every worker to join a union." But he had expressed his support for the labor movement and signed the Wanger Act into law that gave a federal framework for union organizing.
Biden offered a "God bless the workers" line at the end. So may the union organizers at Amazon should come up with a slogan like, "The President says God is on the side of the working class."
Workers in Alabama – and all across America – are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. It’s a vitally important choice – one that should be made without intimidation or threats by employers.
Biden needs to back his pro-union rhetoric with policies, appointments, and legislation to strenthen the position of unions and protect union organizing. Legislation will require ending the Senate filibuster.
And his Vice President Kamala Harris needs to overrule the parliamentarian who said the $15 minimum wage can't be passed in the COVID relief bill through reconciliation. And Biden and Harris need to make sure all 50 Democratic Senator vote for it, with Harris' vote as the tie-breaker.
But Biden's message in support of the Amazon workers, even though he didn't mention the company by name, really is an unusually strong statement of support for union organizing by a President.
Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook (02/05/2021) summarizes Biden's framing in the speech this way:
Not surprisingly, Biden announced a return to a more traditional foreign policy than his predecessor’s. But he did more than that: he tied foreign policy to domestic interests in a way that echoed Republican president Theodore Roosevelt when he helped to launch the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century.
She distinguishes this from Trump's framing in which he "wrenched U.S. foreign policy from the channel in which it had operated since WWII, replacing it with a new focus on the economic interests of business leaders."
I assume she's not trying to imply that economic and business considerations didn't previously play a huge role in foreign policy. She's rather addressing the thematic positioning of the national foreign policy narrative and the difference between Trump's and Biden's:
Trump chose as Secretary of State the former chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, who oversaw the gutting of career officers in the State Department. When the department lost 12% of its foreign-affairs specialists in the first eight months of 2017, it was clear that the Trump administration was abandoning a foreign policy in which the United States tried to defend the idea of democracy and to advance its interests through diplomacy.
But she uses Trump's Saudi policy that included backing it in its war in Yemen with its horrendous humanitarian consequences as nn example of the change. Biden's comment on Yemen during his speech drew a lot of attention:
We’re also stepping up our diplomacy to end the war in Yemen — a war which has created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe. I’ve asked my Middle East team to ensure our support for the United Nations-led initiative to impose a ceasefire, open humanitarian channels, and restore long-dormant peace talks.
She rightly calls attention to the important symbolism in Biden giving his first Presidential speech on foreign policy at the State Department, the first agency that Biden visited as President:
The next thing Biden said was to assure the world that diplomats around the world spoke for the country again: “when you speak, you speak for me.” Later on, he reiterated that idea: “I value your expertise and I respect you, and I will have your back. This administration is going to empower you to do your jobs, not target or politicize you.”
Biden didn't signal that he was giving up Realpolitik for promoting democratization above all. The most urgent foreign policy problems for the human race are nuclear proliferation and climate change. Finding cooperative international solutions cannot wait until the US decides all other countries meet American standards of democratic governance. Cox takes note of the power-political role of NATO, which she calls "a military alliance among 30 nations of Europe, the U.S., and Canada, formed in 1949 to stop the spread of Soviet, and now Russian, aggression in Europe." (One of the tragedies of post-Cold War US foreign policy is that there was never a serious effort to redefine NATO's basic purpose and expanding NATO eastward with less careful consideration than was called for.)
Cox calls special attention to how Biden talks about the success of the economy and democratic governance as a key to the international strength of the US. It's certainly more appealing that Trump's chaotic combination of plutocracy, militarism and adoration of foreign strongman rulers. But Biden isn't pledging to annual the influence of the military-industrial complex on US foreign policy. And, so far, he's not signaling a fundamental shift in the policies the US pursued under the Bush-Cheney, Obama-Biden, and Trump-Pence Administration of leaning heavily against left-leaning democratic governments in Latin America.
Foreign Policy provides commentary on the speech in a (somewhat annoying) pop-up form from Amy Mackinnon, Robbie Gramer and Jack Detsche, Understanding Biden’s First Foreign-Policy Speech 02/05/2021. Mackinnon observes:
It's hard to cover the entire world in one speech, but even with that said, what's not in the speech is as interesting as what's in it. Note that there was no mention of terrorism, North Korean, Venezuela, Cuba, or the United States' closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. And, for that matter, there was not even a passing mention of the entire continent of Africa."
So there is still a lot for us to learn about Biden's foreign policy.
Mackinnon also calls attention to the fact that despite a more publicly critical stance toward Russia, Biden is not continuing with Trump's completely irresponsible stance toward nuclear proliferation. "The New START treaty is the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between Russia and the United States and has been renewed for five years. It was set to expire on Friday [February 5]."
Not surprisingly, Biden described china as "our most serious competitor." Biden will be under serious pressure from many in the foreign policy etablishment to pursue a "new cold war" approach to relations with China. That's an outcome that US policy should seriously try to avoid.
Part of what we're seeing with Biden is not just a set of policies, but also a big step back to basic diplomatic competence. Competence, of course, isn't a purely neutral state of affairs. Competence applied to bad goals is likely to do more harm than good. But to achieve major international priorities like nuclear disarmament and successfully dealing with the climate crisis, requires very serious competence in diplomacy and national security affairs.
There have, of course, been a number of reports taking early stock of the meanings of Biden's foreign policy speech.
Meanwhile, Biden's speech comes at a time when France and Germany, among others, are calling for EU "strategic autonomy" after Trump showed the risk of Europe's dependence on US power.
The EU recently irked the US by signing an investment treaty with China without waiting for the Biden administration to take office.
The EU's top diplomat also went to meet Russia's foreign minister in Moscow before he had first met Biden's secretary of state.
And Biden did not mention two potentially divisive issues among Western allies: Nord Stream 2 and Iran.
Trump imposed sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 Russian gas pipeline to Germany in a move which Berlin has lobbied Washington to also overturn.
The Nord Stream 2 project is a particularly interesting example of an issue that is part of a complicated balancing act among conflicting interests. In particular, it's a major piece in the power balancing among China, Russia, the EU, and the US.
Julian Borger and Patrick Wintour (Biden announces end to US support for Saudi-led offensive in YemenGuardian 02/04/2021) highlight the significance of the switch in Yemen policy. But they also stress the diplomatic signal he gave for a more decent and practical refugee policy:
In order to rebuild American “moral leadership” Biden said he would also restore the US refugee programme, and announced an executive order that would raise the number of refugees accepted into the US in the first fiscal year of the Biden-Harris administration to 125,000. That is higher than the 110,000 accepted in the last year of the Obama administration, which had dwindled to less than 15,000 in the Trump administration.
As Biden was speaking, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) announced it had canceled a deportation flight to Cameroonian and Democratic Republic of Congo, while it conducted an investigation into allegations of abuse by Ice agents against the deportees. The announcement marked a significant change of approach since the Senate confirmation of a new homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
“The United States’ moral leadership on refugee issues was a point of bipartisan consensus for so many decades when I first got here,” Biden said. “We shine the light, the lamp, of liberty on oppressed people. We’re offering safe havens for those fleeing violence or persecution, and our example pushed other nations to open wide their doors as well.”
Aljazeera takes note of this aspect of Biden's foreign policy signaling that was not specifically addressed the State Department speech (Biden lays out foreign policy plan to reverse Trump agenda 02/04/2021). Not a good signal, so far as I can see:
The Biden administration is also set to continue with aspects of the Trump’s policy towards Venezuela, the South American nation that has been at odds with Washington for more than a decade.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Wednesday the administration would continue recognising interim President Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s leader.
Price called Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro a “dictator”, but did not call for his removal.
Bidenism, if it can be called that, doesn’t entirely abandon Trump’s nationalist vision. Quite the contrary: Biden’s goal of making the welfare of the middle class the central tenet of U.S. foreign policy bears the imprint of the populist message that propelled Trump to power. Once a champion of a globalized economic system that included free trade, Biden now pledges that every foreign-policy decision must be taken “with American working families in mind.”
Michael Hirsh (‘America Is Back,’ Biden SaysForeign Policy 02/04/2021) applies some imagination to find a "populist" message in the speech, which I would say requires a fairly broad concept of what populism is:
Overall the speech was presented as a mixture of populist, anti-Wall Street ideas stemming from the Democrats’ powerful progressive wing and Biden’s declared intent to make the rest of the world forget the turbulent four years of Trump’s presidency and, instead, to see the United States again as a global leader and force for democracy and human rights. [my emphasis]
There has been a large amount of academic and journalistic work on populism in recent years. Almost none of it would conclude that "populism" is saying something that someone who is not an investment banker might agree with.
Just Security surveys a variety of views of Biden's speech, Diplomats, Top Experts’ Reactions to Biden Foreign Policy Speech 01/04/2021. Keith Harper, for instance, notes the return-to-normalcy tone of the speech: "What is striking about this speech, its extraordinary quality is how ordinary it would be for an American President prior to these last four years."
Stephen Holmes observes, "The world before Trump is gone forever." He expresses optimism that this may result in a more realistic and less arrogant foreign policy:
That means that American diplomacy is going to be compelled to take an imaginative, out-of-the-box approach to defining America’s new role and place in the world. Our own struggles with authoritarian nativism and xenophobia should also steer our diplomats away from lecturing other countries in counterproductive ways. Simply reverting to familiar patterns, however appealing that might initially appear to the highly skilled professionals now celebrating the return of “normality,” is not really an option. That is all to the good. A time for some serious rethinking has arrived.
What was not clear from his somewhat brief remarks today is exactly what that will look like in practice, as the 16 years prior to Trump were marked by U.S. wars and counterterrorism operations in several countries, with an accompanying refugee crisis, and plummeting regard for American influence across the board.
But in Biden’s telling, it was Trump’s destruction of democracy at home, and his eschewing of traditional allies which tarnished our reputation as a model for democracy abroad. Diplomacy is the only way to get it back, he said. “We need to be re-forming the habit of cooperation and rebuilding the muscle of democratic alliances that have atrophied over the last few years of neglect and I would argue, abuse.”
“We have to earn back our leadership position.” But don’t worry, he stressed, “America is back.”
Going "back" to invading Iraq, or "back" to supporting coups in Venezuela or Honduras or Paraguay, or militarily intervening in Syria and Libya, would not the best policy.
Vlahos, who served for three years as executive editor of The American Conservative, also finds some of the omissions particularly notable:
Strikingly the president skipped over some of the greatest foriegn [sic] policy challenges of his early term. The words “Kim Jong Un” or “North Korea” never left his lips. There was no mention of the 20-year war in Afghanistan or the pending May 1 deadline to withdraw the remaining 2,500 American troops there. He said he has directed Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to review the entire U.S. force structure worldwide, but aside from announcing that he is stopping a Trump plan to withdraw some 12,000 forces from Germany (only half were actually supposed to come home, the rest were headed to other NATO outposts), he said nothing about our country’s longest war in history.
As for the Iran nuclear deal and Washington’s return to it, he was silent, even though the JCPOA is probably the best example of multinational cooperation of the last decade, and Trump leaving it in 2018 the starkest exemplification of the former president’s disregard for diplomacy in his tenure.
But aside from Yemen, this was not a newsmaking speech. It was more of a pep talk, aimed in part at State Department employees hoping for a morale boost and their own reset after the lean and anxious years under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a political striver with his own agenda.
I hope it's not going to be a weekly ritual for me the next four years to post quotes like this with some form of the commentary, "I don't think this is gonna work. (Eye roll, Deep sigh)"
President-elect Joe Biden expressed optimism that he will be able to work with Republicans because of his years working alongside them, despite a sharply divided Congress.
“My leverage is, every senior Republican knows I’ve never once, ever, misled them,” Biden said on a telephone call Wednesday with several columnists, according to The New York Times. “I’ll never publicly embarrass them.” [my emphasis]
The sad part is, that's not even the biggest groaner in the story:
Asked this week if he is up to the fight with Republicans and members of his own party, Biden told the columnists, “I respectfully suggest that I beat the hell out of everyone else.”
The president-elect noted he topped Trump with more than 7 million votes and won the Democratic presidential nomination, beating several prominent progressives, according to the Times.
“I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ve been pretty damn good at being able to deal with the punchers. I know how to block a straight left and do a right hook. I understand it,” he said. [my emphasis]
Can one of Biden's advisers please explain to him that the left Democrats are the ones he has to depend on to fight for even his most minimalist domestic proposals because they are on the same side as him, i.e., the Demcoratic Party? His own party, the one that he is the official head of?
And that the Republicans are the other party, aka, his opposition? You know, Republicans? The ones out there howling at the moon about how Trump really won the election and that Biden is a ChiCom agent who is protecting a child self-trafficking ring being run out of underground bunkers by Satan-worshippers like George Soros, the Clintons, and Hunter Biden?
The politics of the COVID relief bill are changing quickly now that Congress is scrambling to respond to Trump's last-minute veto threat during his last minute scramble to attempt to pull off his clown coup. David Dayen has a breakdown of th stte of play as of 1272372020, Miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue The American Prospect:
The politics, then, argue for higher payments. It was Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans who kept them artificially low. Now here comes Trump asking for them to be nearly tripled. It’s amazing that he waited until after losing the election to flash the old-time populism and wedge both parties, but here we are. And then came the moment where Mitch McConnell’s head blew up like in Scanners.
As soon as Trump posted that video, I suggested that the House pass a one-page bill, increasing the checks from $600 to $2,000. Much to my delight in seeing that political instincts in the Democratic Party aren’t totally dead, about 10 minutes later, Nancy Pelosi suggested the same thing, saying she would offer unanimous consent to amend the bill. Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) even wrote the amendment. (I gave it a name: the $2,000 Does Offer Long-Lasting Available Relief or $2,000 DOLLAR, Act.) Eventually, Chuck Schumer got on board as well. Joe Biden hasn’t said anything, but he was on the record for seeking more money when he became president. So the Democratic leadership beat him to it, and called Trump’s bluff.
David Sirota and Andrew Perez mention (in a salty tone) Joe Biden's publicly quiet but privately active role in the negotiations over the relief bill (Where In The World Is Kamala Harris?Daily Poster 12/23/2020):
[P]resident-elect Joe Biden, seems to have completely checked out of the current debate, after helping create a debacle.
He reportedly convinced congressional Democrats to get steamrolled by Mitch McConnell and agree to provide just $600 in direct aid — which Georgia Democratic senate candidate Jon Ossoff rightly called “a joke.” Biden has vaguely promised to push more aid in 2021, but he is not weighing in forcefully on the budget showdown that is unfolding right now. An austerian to the core, Biden took a dump in the middle of the process, and is now running away from the mess he helped create.
Here's the New York Times letting us know that Biden played a decisive role in compelling Democrats "to pull back on their demands" and helping Mitch McConnell cut the stimulus bill in half. https://t.co/1GLR950tlDpic.twitter.com/XfmgFwxTI9
This conflict over the stimulus bill and the responses to Trump's clown coup provide early insight into the political strategies of the two parties for the upcoming Biden-Harris Presidency.
David Dayen is also feeling salty about Biden on Christmas Eve:
Biden during the transition has been offering a conciliatory, "bipartisan" posture, in other words. That was painfully obvious in his December 22 speech and press conference, in his role in the relief bill negotiations, and in his pointed refusal to use the threat of Executive action to force Republicans to support legislation. But he has been willing to continue to directly attack Trump.
President-elect Joe Biden gave a pre-Christmas message and took press questions at the end. He sounded good on the cybersecurity mega-breach. And sounded serious and sympathetic on the pandemic. Biden Delivers Remarks On WilmingtonNBC News 12/22/2020:
But, at just after 3:40 he says, "In this election, the American people made it clear, they want us to reach across the aisle and work together on matters of national concern to get something done." Words that translate to Republicans as, "We surrender!"
This after the Republicans' appalling, months-long obstructionism on the COVID relief bill. That kind of phrases from Biden encourage Republican intransigence, period.
But Trump took some brief timeout from frantically plotting in his desperate clown coup to call for higher individual relief payment, which lets him do a bit of "populist" posturing. After Biden was just praising the high-minded bipartisanship of the relief bill. (Kelly Hooper, rump takes aim at Covid stimulus bill, raising specter of veto Politico 12/22/2020)
While Trump did not directly threaten to veto the bill, his message raised the possibility that he might do so.
In a video tweeted by the president Tuesday evening, Trump delivered a four-minute speech listing his many grievances with the bill — which would send much-needed aid to Americans struggling amid the pandemic. Trump specifically criticized the relief package for including “wasteful spending” on issues unrelated to Covid-19, only providing $600 to individuals and families, and not giving enough emergency aid to small businesses.
“For example, among the more than 5,000 pages in this bill, which nobody in Congress has read because of its length and complexity, it’s called the Covid relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with Covid,” Trump said.
As is often the case with Trump, his latest intervention may be more due to blundering than to any well-though-out strategy. But Trump does have a demagogue's instinct, even though he may have actually lost his mind in the last few days. And with Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer all accepting the bill and praising it as a great breakthrough, Trump's complaining about it when he did is consistent with the strategy that Republicans ran against Obama in his first year in office on economic recovery: insist on watering down his legislative proposals with deals they don't honor, and then blame him for not only the inadequate results of the programs but also for unpopular aspects of the program that look like crony capitalism.
The relief bill is the warm-up round for this strategy against the Biden-Harris Administration. In this case, Biden stepped right into the messaging trap the Republicans laid for him. Even if Trump's kinda-sorta veto threat was not something coordinated with Mitch McConnell.
In the question period of his appearance, Biden did give Bernie Sanders credit for getting direct aid back into the relief bill. But he also mentioned the bipartisanship trope even there. But good on him for recognizing publicly recognizing Bernie's role.
The Back-to-Brunch Liberals can legitimately be relieved to see a presentation from the President-elect that actually sounded Presidential. But no amount of repeating "bipartisan" will deal with the political nihilism of today's Republican Party. On the other hand, mainstream pundits loo-oove this kind of thing. Here's columnist Doyle McManus gushing about it: "the bill had one important virtue: It was a genuine compromise, a species rarely seen in Washington. Even more intriguing, it was based partly on the work of a bipartisan cabal of centrist senators who bolted from their parties’ dug-in positions and took matters into their own hands to get something done." (After COVID deal, Biden’s quest for bipartisanship looks a little less naiveLos Angeles Times 12/23/2020. my emphasis)
But Biden's line about ending up "with two million people standing on our border" was nails-on-the-blackboard centrist Mugmump triangulating. He's got to fix the immigration process, beginning with getting the kids out of cages and reunited with their parents.
I was glad to see that President-elect Biden yesterday came out to emphasize how anti-democratic the Trump clown coup really has been, and didn't try to present that message in the form of some saccharine “bipartisan” pablum. (And only a small amount of corniness.)
Instead he called it "unconscionable," "stunning," an "abuse of power" that relied on "baseless claims," and named it a direct threat to democracy in the US. Specifically, "an unprecedented assault on our democracy". Biden makes a straightforward defense here of democracy and the rule of law. And he called out the seditious Texas-led attempt to throw out 20 million votes in other states in order to "hand the Presidency to a candidate who lost the Electoral College, lost the popular vote, and lost each and every one of the states whose votes they were trying to reverse. It's a position so extreme, we've never seen it before, a position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution."
For literal accuracy, he maybe should have said "so extreme that we haven't seen it since 1861". But Abraham Lincoln's winning vote total in 1860 was 1.7 million - the total number of votes he won, not the margin of victory - so the Confederate secessionists were trying to wipe out 18 million or so fewer votes than the Texas lawsuit this year attempted.
I'm also happy to see that Biden emphasized what a LOSER Donald Trump is.
So for future reference, it's clear that as of now, the incoming President recognizes that the real existing Republican Party of 2020 is not a party that respects democracy and the rule of law, much less one that respects precedents set over decades or centuries that they decide are inconvenient at any given moment. That doesn't mean he can't get some Republicans in Congress to support some of his bills. It *does* mean that as of mid-December 2020, he recognizes that the Republican Party and its main leaders are operating in deeply bad faith, rather than seeing themselves as some kind of "loyal opposition." They see themselves as a Confederate opposition.
The most distinguishing feature of the American political scene right now is not "division" or "partisanship". It's asymmetric partisan polarization. And there no reason to believe that will suddenly change in the next four years.
I'm under no illusion that anything so petty as "facts" make any difference inside the QAnon/Newsmax/OANN bubble, where even FOX News is now considered part of the "deep state". But facts do matter in the real world.
When anyone in such a prominent position describes an event like the Trump clown coup in blunt terms like this, it's worth noticing. Because we don't see things like this nearly often enough.
Now that Joe Biden has been elected President, even a thoroughly Both-Sides-Do-It guy like Chuck Todd is now willing to call Trump and at least some Republicans anti-democratic, as he showed on Meet the Press yesterday. But he still brought on loyal Trumpist ally Tennessee Confederate Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander to defend Trump with, you got it, Both Sides Do It. Sen. Alexander seems to think that Georgia's Stacey Abrahms was also a Presidential candidate.
But in the Bruch Liberalism daydream that now that Trump is leaving the White House, we're back to our Exceptional American normality with a Democratic President and a Republican Party with stodgy ideas and bad manners that is nevertheless willing to be a loyal opposition and respect the results of elections. Unfortunately, anyone holding on to that idea has probably been taking the commentary from people like Chuck Todd the last way to seriously in the last 20 years or so.
Because the Both Sides Do It world that mainstream pundits report on is a convenient fantasy to protect their access to shameless partisans who will give them anonymous partisan quotes to use: the world of the End of History in which taking political contests more seriously than sports matches. But that world, to the extent it ever actually corresponded to reality, is not the one we live in now.
At the latest, that world became a zombie haunting corporate media newsrooms sometime between the New York Times' first Whitewater story in 1992 and Bush v. Gore in 2000. Trying to make sense of today's US politics against a backdrop of that fantasy land is about as helpful as trying to learn how parents should approach distance learning for 10-year-old during a COVID lockdown by watching episodes of Leave It to Beaver.
But there is of course another deep worry pervasive in this country. It is about America's heretofore unbroken peaceful transfer of power between presidents. It is the notion that all of us, regardless of party, play by and revere the same democratic ideal that we the people have the power to fire our leaders in free and fair elections. This election has revealed a president who doesn't believe any of that, and a party and base that is eager to go along with him. This is not fringe; it is a movement that encompassess [sic] tens of millions of Americans. And to defeat it and preserve American democracy will require resolve, patience, ingenuity, and grit. [my emphasis]
The problem of Trumpism is a particular, symptomatic moment in the Republican Party whose Presidential candidate he was and which has followed him remarkably loyally in his anti-democracy program. The Republican Party is now the Confederate Party, the John Calhoun Party, the Trump Party.
For Democrats and anyone who considers themselves "left" in current, reality-based terms (i.e., not QAnon/One America News/FOX News/Republican Party terms), part of understanding the present is understanding how that, however "classy" and intelligent and compassionate President Obama may come off as a media figure, the combination of his political program during his Presidency and his strategy for the Democratic Party not only failed to achieve the Bipartisanship which he really seemed to value as a good thing in itself. It also left the Democratic Party unable to defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and left their leaders largely dazed and confused on how to politically combat him during the last four years.
Lili Loofbourow's article Barack Obama Sat Out the Past Four Years and It Shows (Slate 12/11/2020) is a timely reminder of this. Obama is not only a popular speaker and media star in his own right. He's also still very influential in the Democratic Party, and very much on the side of Establishment (i.e., conservative) policies and political messaging. She calls attention to one of the most important and persistent characteristics of his political rhetoric:
Barack Obama is ready to come back into the spotlight. After four years spent mostly out of the public eye, right on the heels of Donald Trump’s defeat, the ex-president is suddenly everywhere. ...
But in these recent appearances, the most surprising thing might be that his political remarks about this moment feel stale. Maybe his absence from the fray over these past four years has cost him. Maybe he’s using a different timescale to measure progress (as he sometimes explicitly says he is). But even his harshest remarks about the right don’t capture the hysterical party we’re watching try to steal an election. His recent criticisms of “snappy” leftist political slogans like “defund the police” reflect an abiding faith in a theory of politics that seems passé—as several Black intellectuals and activists have pointed out. Boiled down to its essentials, Obama’s argument is that one shouldn’t “alienate” people who might be converted to your cause if you say things in just the right way. In practice, that means tucking the political self into a package that a “reasonable person”—that usefully unmeasurable political fiction—cannot help but find acceptable and persuasive. [my emphasis]
David Bromwich wrote some useful analyses of Obama's rhetoric and messaging while he was President, although it was sometimes marred by what seemed to be a distinct dislike of the man. But this comment from Bromwich that I quoted in 2012 post is an important observation:
[Obama] has often echoed Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama's many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. [my emphasis]
That post of mine was David Bromwich looks again at Obama's words and speculates about his personality 07/12/2012, in which I also looked at how Obama rhetoric fit so well with the neoliberal policy preferences. As I noted there, Obama distrusted progressives because he's not one, though in 2004-2008 when he first emerged as a national figure, he cultivated the notion that he was. He even regarded progressives with contempt, and I noted there that it was surely in major part because of his identification with the wealthy. I quoted a contemporary speech of his on his tax policies in which he made a point to refer to "the wealthiest Americans -- folks like myself".
In her current piece, Loofbourow observes, "Obama’s commitment to not alienating people is fascinating to the precise extent that it becomes a principle in its own right." (my emphasis)
But that approach has proven to be spectacularly deficient in dealing with the Calhoun-ized, QAnon-ized Republican Party that we now have:
Obama’s personal self-packaging has long been extraordinary. He won two elections with it. But he also disproved his own theory. Despite his extraordinary efforts to perform an unoffending normalcy, he was spectacularly mischaracterized as a socialist, a Kenyan, a Muslim, a criminal, and more. He was demonized by an opposition party whose virulent determination to shove evidence aside has only grown since—they will read Biden as a communist pedophile and Trump as an athletic man of God. This is not an environment where self-editing or careful packaging matters. Nor is it one where bland political slogans gain purchase. [my emphasis]
I'll close by recalling that Obama's "principle in its own right" of non-offensiveness was applied during his Presidency with much more rigor when dealing with hostile Republicans than in dealing with progressives in his own party.
I'm quoting below a post I made on 04/30/2008, when Joe Biden was a Democratic Presidential candidate that year.
Biden was on Meet the Press Sunday for an hour with Tim Russert. ... He mentioned the need for better domestic precautions against terrorist attacks, which has been a standard Democratic talking point for years. But this disaster [a truck explosion in Oakland CA at the time] reminds me that it's a valid priority, even allowing for the inevitable hype and scamming around the still-hot topic of terrorism. This road collapse is likely to mess up the commute in a seriously bad way for months. All large cities and all states need to have workable plans in place that can be implemented quickly for dealing with these kinds of emergencies.
And if those preparations wind up being used for accidents and natural disasters more than for responses to terrorism, so what? The OxyContin crowd [Rush Limbaugh fans] won't like it. But bitching and moaning and slinging sleaze at the Democrats about everything is just what they do all the time anyway. ...
Biden talked a lot about the Iraq War and foreign policy issues. He had a couple of good things to say. But it was disappointing, on the whole. The best thing he said was a point I've been saying for a while that the Democrats should be making: that the October 2002 war resolution did not authorize the invasion of Iraq that Cheney and Bush launched in March of 2003. Chuck Hagel, the rightwing Nebraska Senator who passes for a "moderate" in today's authoritarian Republican Party, also makes the same point in an interview with Salon ("We cannot stay as an occupying force in the Middle East" 04/30/07):
I wasn't convinced [of WMD] or in any way connected Saddam Hussein with 9/11. Before we even had the vote I said that. Some get the resolution wrong. It wasn't a resolution to go to war ... Ultimately it was giving the president authority to use force if all the diplomatic efforts fail. If there was no other recourse it would allow the president to use force. I believed the president and others who said they would exhaust all diplomatic efforts. Which they did not. They told us they would and they did not. (my emphasis)
Neither Biden nor Hagel mentioned the other official goal of the war specified in that resolution besides dealing with the nonexistent WMDs, which was to deal with the nonexistent operational links between Saddam's regime and Al Qaida and as part of that to specifically to retaliate for Saddam's nonexistent role in the 9/11 attacks.
Biden did okay in terms of style responding to Russert's trademark gotcha questions asking about things he had said before that sound different than what he's saying now. But in terms of substance, Biden is still caught up in the fact that he foolishly took a hawkish position on the war up until last year, so he winds up dissembling to justify a dovish-sounding position now.
When I saw Tom Hayden speak in San Francisco last November, he stressed that politicians are especially good at double-talk, so the antiwar movement will have to keep the pressure on all of them to continue to pull the troops out. That is, once we start pulling troops out rather than sending more in. Biden's MTP interview Sunday reminded me of that.
I've written here before about how I'm concerned by the current Congressional pullout plan because it leaves a wide-open loophole to have troops to keep fighting "Al Qaida" in Iraq, which already seems to be leading the war fans to make Al Qaida sound like it has a huge role in the guerrilla war there. But during the current veto fight over the war, I'm content that the message most voters and people in other countries will get will be, "Bush is in favor of continuing the war, the Democrats want to end it."
But Biden on Sunday used the various qualifications in the Congressional plan to step on the general Democratic antiwar message. None of his comments on the Iraq War were particularly encouraging for war critics; he even managed to smother his observation that Bush's invasion in 2003 violated the Congressional war resolution with confusing talk about how it authorized Bush to go to war but not really stressing the conditional nature of that authorization.
He emphasized that the current Democratic position is not a deadline date for US withdrawal from Iraq, but a target that is "flexible". He is still justifying his vote for the war resolution in 2002. He's claiming that he was voting to give the President authority for war under certain conditions in order to avoid war. That is a disingenious argument. While I've said that it's important to recognize how Bush violated the war resolution, there was also no doubt at the time that the practical effect of passing that resolution was to give Bush effective permission to launch an invasion on his own say-so.
Biden also said that when the UN inspectors left in 1998, they were still saying Iraq had large quantities of material that could be weaponized as WMDs. Now, my entire staff of fact-checkers are still caught in the commute. [That was a joke, BTW!] But I'm pretty sure what they said was that there were certain amounts of materials not accounted for.
On a related whopper, I don't need the fact checkers to know he was repeating a falsehood when he said that Saddam kicked out the inspectors in 1998. The facts are worth remembering since this was one of several lies used to justify going to war and killing and wounding a lot of people including American soldiers for no good reason. Iraq blocked inspectors from their work in 1998 because they discovered that the UN team included members that were passing information to the CIA. The US government later admitted this was the case. Then Scott Ritter who was heading the inspection team at the time decided on his own to remove the inspectors. Yet here's Joe Biden the famous "realist" still repeating this false war-propaganda point.
The rest of Biden's interview also wasn't that encouraging. He sneered at "the French" for criticizing the effects of the economic sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s; in reality, a realistic look at those sanctions should be one of the most important "lessons of Iraq" to examine. He wants to send more American troops to Afghanistan and also to Darfur. I can't say I'm thrilled about either prospect - even if we could pretend that this current administration had the ability to manage either situation competently, which they certainly do not.
He said correctly that Medicare is more of a financial problem than Social Security. But he said more than once, clearly including Social Security, that he wants to "put it all on the table" in looking at solutions. "You have to," he said. No, we don't have to put Social Security "on the table". And the Republicans' phase-out schemes ("privitization") should be permanently off that famous metaphorical table.
Biden also supported the so-called "partial-birth abortion" ban. He said he was alarmed by the Supreme Court's apparent positioning in a case unsuccessfully challenging that law seems to be setting the stage to overturn Roe v. Wade. But defending the right to choose on abortions clearly does not seem to be the higest priority for Biden.
After Biden's gab-fest with Russert, I watched Chris Matthews' 30-minute Sunday show, where Matthews and various pundits kicked around fogettable comments about the Presidential candidates. Clarence Paige, generally one of the more sensible among the Big Pundits, made the remarkable observation that the 2008 election will be the "first big election since 9/11".
Say what? Let's see, there was the 2002 election that handed the Senate back to Republican control, insuring that virtually no Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch would occur during the next four years. There was that little Presidential election in 2004 that retained Dear Leader Bush as President. Last year the Congressional elections turned both Houses of Congress back to the Democrats in a striking protest against the disaster known as the Iraq War.
I can only wonder what counts as a "big election" in the world of our Wise Pundits.
The campaign from the Democratic side for giving Trump and his collaborators immunity for any and all crimes they may have committed during Trump's Presidency is now under way. The trial balloons for giving Trump and his co´-conspirators a free pass on crimes committed in office has begun:
The law applies to the President of the United States. He is subject to impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate in order to be removed from office. But the law still applies to the President and to all members of his Administration.
Gerald Ford set a terrible precedent when he issued a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon when Nixon resigned and Ford became President, giving Nixon immunity from prosecution for bad acts committed in office. Bad acts for which numerous senior Nixon officials were convicted and even did prison time. Old Man Bush - George H.W. Bush, the "moderate" Republican - pardoned a variety of defendants in the Iran-Contra crimes, thus ending the Independent Prosecutor's pursuit of charges against them. And, not incidentally, blocking legal inquiries that could have been directly embarrassing for him personally. The Cheney-Bush Administration authorized criminal torture and crassly flouted the law in other ways: Obama became President and declared he wanted to "look forward, not backward," so even those crimes by senior officials were not prosecuted.
These are seriously bad precedents. They flout the rule of law. It's just plain wrong to give government officials impunity for serious crimes.
It's also a real sign of weakness on the part of the Biden team and the Democratic Party that the Biden team is floating this idea while the Republicans led by Trump are trying to nullify the results of the Presidential election. The Republicans can only take this as a sign of weakness on the part of Biden and the Democrats, because it really is a gesture of weakness.
I want to parse the two NBC stories linked above a bit more. Michael Conway - not to be confused with NeverTrumper George Conway, husband of Kellyanne Conway - is not part of the Biden campaign or transition team, so far as I know.
He argues that Biden should pardon Trump, although he notes, "Biden's initial instinct was to oppose granting Trump a pardon. He actually foreclosed this option by pledging last May that, if elected, he would not pardon Trump." (my emphasis) Whether that "instinct" was simply political positioning to keep Democratic base voters who may not have been enthusiastic for him on board, the position he took was the right one. It's actually a clear statement of how the Justice Department is supposed to work in making independently decisions on investigations and prosecutions based on evidence and without political inference.
The pledge from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee came during a virtual town hall on MSNBC, when Biden was asked by a voter whether he would be willing to commit “to not pulling a President Ford” and pardoning Trump “under the pretense of healing the nation.”
“Absolutely, yes. I commit,” Biden responded, adding: “It’s hands-off completely. Look, the attorney general of the United States is not the president’s lawyer. It’s the people’s lawyer.”
A possible pardon of Trump by Biden would represent the second such exoneration of a former president by his successor in modern American history. President Gerald Ford famously pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974 after Nixon resigned from the presidency amid the Watergate scandal, facing the imminent threat of impeachment and removal from office. ...
Biden [lamented] how “we never saw anything like the prostitution of [the presidency] like we see it today,” and arguing that “what’s going on is an absolute travesty. A travesty of justice.”
“It is not something the president is entitled to do, to direct either a prosecution and/or decide to drop a case,” he said. “That is not the president’s role, responsibility. And it’s a dereliction of his duty.”
Michael Conway: a pardon of Trump would be a "healing" gesture with the added political advantage (to Republicans) that the Democratic base would hate it
Conway's argument basically comes down to saying Biden should pardon Trump because Conway just thinks that would be a nice thing to do. He makes the argument that the President should act like a national pastor, who presumably shouldn't do anything about evidence he might have of serious crimes by a previous pastor:
It may seem fair and emotionally fulfilling to treat Trump as he so often threatened to treat his own political opponents. But Biden made the case that he, and the country, ought to be better than that. As unsatisfying as a pardon would sit with many of us, this tough decision would be one good way to begin the healing Biden offered.
Healing? It would mainly be a signal to the Democratic base that Biden and the Democratic establishment weren't at all serious when they talked about Trump being a deadly danger to democracy. And it would be a sign to Congressional Republicans like Mitch McConnell that Biden has no intention of fighting seriously for his own positions. And a signal to the QAnon-ized Republican based that they can demonize Biden in the way they will do regardless of a pardon or not, but emboldened by the knowledge that Biden is weak in opposing rabid Republican foes.
And Conway even says explicitly, citing the example of Jerry Ford's pardon of Nixon, that it would hurt Biden politically with his own base. "Biden’s pardon of Trump would be even more courageous than Ford’s action — though, like Ford, pardoning his predecessor will subject Biden to intense, scathing criticism."
But the NeverTrump Republican pundits on MSNBC' Morning Joe would praise him for it, so there's that...
Because the Beltway Pod Pundits think that The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said is the way that things should be: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; (Gibbs on the LeftFrumForum 08/10/2010)
Conway also invokes this argument, which I'm sure we'll hear a lot in the immediate future:
Democrats already know what the mirror image of that looks like. When Trump called for the jailing of his political opponents, he was justly condemned as promoting a vendetta characteristic of a banana republic. Despite the efforts of Trump’s Justice Department, no basis was found to prosecute his political rivals. Trump tried anyway; Biden can, and perhaps should, be better than that.
The answer to this is the one given by Biden himself in May. We have a Justice Department set up with rules, laws, and procedures as internal safeguards to pursue prosecutions on a legal and non-partisan basis. According to Biden's own correct statement on the matter, it would be a dereliction of duty by the President to interfere with that process. Even a Presidential pardon should come only after that process has run its course.
Looking Forward, Not Backward - by letting Republican officials get away with serious crimes in office
The NBC story on the trial-balloon leaks from the Biden campaign does include a restatement, of sorts, of Biden's May position. The story reflects different viewpoints because, well, it's a trial-balloon story to test public and press reaction. The lede is this:
President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn't want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.
Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations.
They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he "just wants to move on."
Another Biden adviser said, "He's going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them."
Politics is politics. And if Biden allows this statement to stand without his publicly rejecting it in some way, he will be sending a signal to his new Attorney General that he doesn't want crimes committed by the Trump Administration prosecuted. And that's a bad and wrong signal to send for both rule-of-law and political reasons. Maybe not a technical dereliction of duty, but uncomfortably close.
Still, we need to keep our eyes on the ball, which is the independence of the Justice Department investigation and prosecution process from partisan political influence.
After the introductory paragraphs signaling that we want to give the scoundrels and crooks a free pass from prosecution, later paragraphs qualify the message:
"His overarching view is that we need to move the country forward," an adviser said. "But the most important thing on this is that he will not interfere with his Justice Department and not politicize his Justice Department." ...
Biden wants his Justice Department to function independently from the White House, aides said, and Biden isn't going to tell federal law enforcement officials whom or what to investigate or not to investigate. ...
Biden's team is also reluctant to send any signal to Trump administration officials that the Justice Department wouldn't look into their actions, given that there are still nine weeks until the inauguration, another person briefed about the discussions said.
"While they're not looking for broad criminal indictments, they do want to make sure that people don't think there are no ramifications for any of their actions between now and the new presidency," this person said. [my emphasis]
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the equal rule of law. But it's right, as far as it goes.
That report also explains the uncomfortable complication that, you know, the law is the law:
But it will be difficult for Biden to avoid the issue altogether, given the expected calls for investigations into an array of issues involving Trump — from his administration's child separation policy to his taxes, possible conflicts of interest and potential violations of campaign finance law. The issue could set Biden on a collision course with some of his own supporters, who are eager for a wholesale examination of the Trump presidency.
"There's also a strong school of thought that believes the law's the law," a Biden adviser said, describing the internal debate.
"A strong school of thought." (?!?) By the way, "child separation policy" is a euphemism designed to make a systematic and sadistic policy of kidnapping refugee children from their parents, including literally taking newborn babies from their mothers.
But by presenting this as some kind of fifty-fifty option, Biden's team is definitely reminding us that establishment Democrats have a strong preference to give Republican officials impunity for crimes committed in office, an attitude that is radically different for the Republican Party's strong and loudly expressed preference for "lock her up"-type arbitrary, partisan use of criminal law and their contempt for the equal rule of law:
Still, multiple aides said, Biden is generally not inclined to see his Justice Department investigate Trump.
One of the reasons he has given aides is that he believes investigations would alienate the more than 73 million Americans who voted for Trump, the people familiar with the discussions said. Some Democrats, however, have said Biden should be prioritizing the concerns of his supporters, not those of his detractors.
This is a really sad example of the lazy and often irresponsible way the corporate press treats important matters of public policy as "horse-race" partisan narratives in a Both Sides Do It framing. Biden should be prioritizing fair and honest enforcement of the law. Whether his opponents or supporters support it is really secondary to his duty as President to see that the Justice Department enforces the law fairly.
The two main sides in this argument, which are not at all symmetric in their approach, look like this. One side is composed of Republicans and their corporate Democratic enablers who want Republican officials to be able to act in disregard of the law and suffer no legal consequences for doing so. The other is the side of Democrats, with maybe a few straggling NeverTrump Republicans joining in, who say just what Biden himself clearly said in May: "It is not something the president is entitled to do, to direct either a prosecution and/or decide to drop a case. That is not the president’s role, responsibility. And it’s a dereliction of his duty.”
Here are a couple of European left perspectives on the immediate political situation in the US, a video and an audio interview from former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, and one from Sahra Wagenknecht, who has been a leading figure in the German Left Party for decades. I doubt that anyone would dispute that they are both figures of "the left".
Both touch on the perennial point of dispute within the US Democratic Party, class vs. social identity. It seems that everyone has their own take on how those divisions actually break down and their own preferred descriptions for them. Felix Schilk in a recent essay refers to the terms "economic cleavage" and "cultural cleavage" to refer to those differences, noting that they are common terms in academic research on populism. ("Die soziale Frage als Ordnungsproblem," Das faschistische Jahrhundert, 2020)
The use of "cleavage" to talk about party affiliations is identified in political science with a concept elaborated in 1967 by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. Without folding in the particular structural analysis they made, these could be useful terms in discussed the "intersectionality" issue involved in understanding the current political distinctions among the center-left, the populist left, and the populist right in European and American politics.
Varoufakis gives a statement on the current US poltiical situation on behalf of the small DiEM25, for which in the serves as a Member of Parliament in Greece for the national party affiliate. Yanis Varoufakis on the 2020 US electionDiEM25 11/10/2020:
Varoufakis thinks that Democratic progressives in the US are generally on the correct path. He suggests that it's key for Democratic progressives to remember, "It was Obama's failures that gve rise to Trump." And that he uses to stress the need for adequate economic and social policies to give a wider circle of voters and emotional stake in progressive Democratic policies.
In the notes to the video, she includes this message, which is not a transcript of the video. I've included it below, with my paragraph breaks added, and my translation into English below.
Joe Biden hat die US-Wahl gewonnen. Aber wird jetzt wirklich alles besser? Dafür lohnt ein Blick in die Biographie des neuen Präsidenten: Wer ist Joe Biden? Wofür steht er? Was hat er in der Vergangenheit gemacht?
Die Antworten sind ernüchternd. Um das tief gespaltene Land zu einen, helfen ein paar schöne Reden und symbolische Akte nicht. Das für viele Medien erneut überraschende Ergebnis von Trump ist Ausdruck davon, wie viele Menschen sich vom politischen »Establishement«, für das Biden steht wie kaum ein anderer, nicht vertreten fühlen.
In den deindustrialisierten Regionen der USA herrschen Armut, Kriminalität, Perspektivlosigkeit – und Politiker, von beiden Parteien, schauen seit Jahrzehnten weg. Die mangelhaften sozialen Sicherungssysteme, in denen Menschen nach 5 Jahren Bezug von Sozialleistung für den Rest ihres Lebens nichts (!) mehr bekommen außer Essensmarken, die schlechte medizinische Versorgung für weite Teile der Bevölkerung, lebenslange Schulden für einen Hochschulabschluss, explodierende Mieten und Immobilienpreise, Obdachlosigkeit, die Drogenkrise, Millionen Menschen in Gefängnissen, steigende Suizidraten, sinkende Lebenserwartung – diese und andere Probleme mögen sich unter Trump weiter verschärft haben, doch die Ursachen für die extreme soziale und kulturelle Spaltung des Landes liegen viel tiefer.
Ich hoffe sehr, dass jetzt besser Zeiten anbrechen. Bidens Bilanz aus fast 50 Jahren politischer Tätigkeit lässt anderes befürchten.
[Joe Biden won the US election. But is everything really getting better now? It's worth a look at the new president's biography: Who is Joe Biden? What does it stand for? What has he done in the past?
The answers are sobering. To unite the deeply divided country, a few fine speeches and symbolic acts do not help. The surprising result of Trump for many in the media is an expression of how many people feel unrepresented by the political "establishment" that Biden stands for like no other.
In the de-industrialized regions of the US, poverty, crime, lack of prospects – and politicians, from both parties, have been looking away for decades. The flawed social security systems in which people get nothing (!) for the rest of their lives after 5 years of receiving benefits except food stamps, poor medical care for large parts of the population, lifetime debt for a college degree, skyrocketing rents and property prices, homelessness, the drug crisis, millions of people in prisons, rising suicide rates, falling life expectancy – these and other problems may have worsened under Trump, but the causes of the extreme social and cultural division of the country lie much deeper.
Biden won the US election. But is everything really getting better now? It's worth a look at the new president's biography: Who is Joe Biden? What does it stand for? What did he do in the past?] (my emphasis)
Both Varoufaks and Wagenknecht articulate the idea that working-class voters were attracted to Trump in signficant part because they felt that politicians were not listening to them. This is okay as a throwaway campaign line. But in American politics, "I don't feel listened to" has become a stock complaint, essentially meaningless without more specific context. Especially for voters whose "cultural cleavage" includes a particular disdain for black people and Latinos, for instance, "I don't feel listened to" is a socially safe of saying they support extremely conservative Republicans without copping to more explicit prejudices.
And of course, here's where the "cultural cleavage" overlaps with the "economic cleavage." On the one hand, for many people the cultural cleavage actually is subjectively more important than any feelings of the now-proverbial "economic anxiety" in their voting decisions. Race and gender and nationalist sentiments count. But at the same time, the material conditions produced by extreme economic inequality, declining incomes, and increased economic security have a huge though not entirely predictable effects on how people experience the cultural cleavage. As Varoufakis notes, extreme economic problems have fueled left as well as rightwing movements in the past.
Varoufakis and Wagenknecht both also stress that Trump didn't start any new wars. This is true. Trump didn't go try to occupy any additional countries with US troops. Obviously, you can't say much about four years of US foreign policy in a sentence or two. But as a polemical point to argue against future unnecessary wars under the Biden-Harris Administration, it makes sense. E.g.: Even Donald Trump didn't do anything as drastic as invading Country X!
But it's important to remember that Trump's "America First" foreign policy was never a peace policy, any more than the Republican isolationism of the pre-World War II America First movement or its immediate postwar "isolationist" successors were. It is a narrowly nationalistic, militaristic view of foreign policy.
I am confident that the level of incompetence that has always characterized the Trump-Pence Administration has been a significant reason that his foreign policy hasn't been even worse. Speaking of invasion, the Administration's exceptionally clownish regime-change operation against Venezuela also included an even more fumbling attempt at an invasion of "freedom fighters" than the Pay of Pigs invasion of 1961 against Cuba. And Trump almost blundered into war with Iran early this year with his targeted assassination strike on a senior Iranian general. (Qasem Soleimani: US kills top Iranian general in Baghdad air strikeBBC News 01/03/2020)
The Trump-Pence Administration also fueled the war in Yemen, an ongoing horror show. (War in YemenCouncil on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker; accessed 11/11/2020).
The last four years have been yet another serious setback for nuclear nonproliferation, with Trump's sad farce of negotiations with North Korea and his pulling out of the nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump was operating on a genuinely primitive view of foreign policy and international trade and self-enrichment for the Trump family business. A constructive peace policy is something very different.
In terms of EU-European relations, Biden won't be as obnoxious as Trump. But Varoufakis discusses how the expectation of a much better relationship with the US the next four years may remove some of the subjective urgency of strengthening the European Union. Britain has left the EU, weakening both Britain and the EU as actors capable of influencing international events. Trump is openly hostile to the EU. But the US policy under Clinton, Bush II and Obama was to favor a broad expansion of the EU but keep the EU as a relative loose organization with limited ability to challenge US foreign policy. The Cheney-Bush national security policy was very explicit about preventing the emergence of any "peer competitor" in global power. They wanted a weaker rather than stronger EU.
But I don't think anyone on the left or center-left should be complacent about a Biden Presidency. He's facing giant public health and economic crises and a very recalcitrant QAnon-ified Republican Party that will bitterly oppose him on every front.
