Harris, Biden, and our three pandemics
We are living through three simultaneous pandemics, dreadful times, but today I have new hope and the name of that hope is Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris brings a lot of assets to Joe Biden, but perhaps just as important is what it says about Joe Biden and the contrast his choice sets up between his character and that of the man in the White House today.
Joe Biden is not afraid to choose a political partner willing to land hard punches on the former vice president during the primary. This tells us that he is not looking for incompetent ass lickers, but for the talented, and the bold, and the brave, those willing to punch up instead of kick down.
Joe Biden is not a vicious, vindictive, small man bent on punishing anyone who disagrees with him. These include everybody who resists his illegitimate demands — from a Ukrainian president and his whole country, to a right-wing Republican attorney general from Alabama.
Joe Biden may be older than Donald Trump, but his choice shows he is not stuck in a mythical past when America was great for anyone male, “free, white and twenty-one.” Joe Biden may be an older white man but he knows the American future looks more like Kamala Harris—woman of color, daughter of immigrants—than the monochromatic, culturally monolithic country that Donald Trump and his most rabid supporters see through the tiny screen of a 1950 black and white television.
Joe Biden is a Catholic but he knows miracles don’t solve pandemics or other practical problems so he chose someone who as a successful professional prosecutor had to rely on evidence, on what can be proved, and not on wishful thinking, sheer lies, or delusions. Someone who knows you don’t convince juries with baloney, you need facts, testimony from real scientists, forensic evidence rendered by actual pathologists and not quacks with a medical degree.
This country needs leaders like Biden and Harris now more than ever. We are living through three pandemics, the epidemiological one that already has killed 165,000 Americans, most of whom would be alive if policy would have been set through different priorities and players. We are enduring a pandemic of racial hatred, racism being an ever-present undercurrent in American history which this president has tapped and channeled to sweep away decades of insufficient but real racial progress. And we are living through a pandemic of economic inequality, global but with a clear epicenter in the United States, and as a result we are moving ever farther from democracy and ever closer to plutocracy.
Pandemics are global. We are the country best positioned to deal with these global scourges, yet almost no country has done worse or less. COVID-19 hit all of Europe, but in the democratic nations where the government has to answer for unnecessary deaths among the people, governments called on the people’s solidarity with their fellow citizens, made tough rules and enforced them, and virtually squashed the virus.
In the United States President Donald Trump acts as if following the thesis that each man and woman, each state, each business, is an island, entire of itself, not a piece of the continent, not a part of the main. Donald Trump doesn’t send to ask for whom the bell tolls because he doesn’t care for he knows it sounds for the heroic healers, the disposable minority “essential” workers, the warehoused old, and he is not any of those.
Germany is perhaps one of the few countries in the world that has a worse history of racial hatred than the United States and equally alarming current right-wing extremist movement. But the country’s leader, the conservative chancellor Angela Merkel, unlike ours, doesn’t stoke the fire but tries to douse it—at a political cost especially for a conservative. I don’t share Merkel’s ideological views, but I recognize a profile in decency and courage when I see it as well as when I see its inverse.
Inequality is inherent in capitalism, but it becomes a pandemic when it reaches an extreme and where every policy enacted only increases it. That has been the case in the United States more than in any of our peer countries (even Britain, who suffered Thatcher, still has its National Health Service) since the early 1980s. The only way to counter the natural lean of capitalism toward greater inequality is to push against it. We have been doing the exact opposite for four decades and it shows on every indicator of the general well-being of a people.
Biden will push back against the inequality pandemic and the others too, not as hard as I would like, but harder than he would if he were not being carried along by a constellation of forces stronger and more progressive than he is. Biden doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing, as the choice of Harris demonstrates, and he won’t tilt at windmills by bucking his strongest supporters.
Beyond plutocracy, Biden, for one, has no interest in doing racism or xenophobia or he would not have picked Harris. Nor could he, were he inclined to reprise his mistakes on school desegregation of a generation ago. Kamala Harris delivered him a knock-down punch for that in the debates. He got back up, lost the round but not the match, and learned. Joe Biden is resilient, has a fairly thick skin but lacks a grotesquely inflated but paper-thin ego, unlike you know who.
Some progressives, including myself, don’t see in Biden-Harris the ticket of our dreams. But, so what? Politics is not about personal fantasies. The question, the only urgent question, for progressive and for all Americans, is what is to be done.
The answer is to support Biden-Harris wholeheartedly. It’s the best choice. It’s the only choice. It’s a good choice. It’s a better choice than the alternative, by at least a metric mile, maybe even a league.
Kamala Harris. Tonight, after I hear on the news and mourn for the obscene number of people who died today, I will spare some of my heart and soul for celebrating. Kamala Harris. We got lucky. Now we need to be good.
