Surprise, Republicans: Joe ain’t that sleepy
Week one of the Joe Biden presidency is just over and I am feeling something close to elation. An unexpected feeling.
Don’t get me wrong, I fervently desired a victory by the Biden-Harris team. Even more, I wanted Donald Trump to be defeated in the most massive and humiliating way possible. And, in fact, something close to that happened. The fact that Trump would not accept it was unsurprising. He had warned us he wouldn’t at the same time priming his supporters for denial and rebellion.
Denial and insurrection culminated on the hideous assault on the Capitol on January 6. Sadly, five people lost their lives for nothing. The incident was wrong and ugly in every way. Also, predictable. I may be one of the only people in the country, however, that sees an upside to that awful incident. It showed the world—and that part of the nation still willing to trust their eyes more than the trumpist lies—exactly who Trump, the Republican Party, and the MAGA crowd really are. Anti-democratic bullies. Delusional or deliberately deceptive. An overwhelmingly white crowd mad at losing and afraid that, from now on, their place in the societal pecking order will be determined not by the color of their skin but by their ability and the content of their character. Upset the playing field is no longer tilted in their favor. And the best news is that they lost on every playing field, the political, the legal, and the field of combat.
Nothing could have demonstrated all those realities better than the January 6 coup attempt. Many in the country were still in denial at this late date, and the attack brought some out of their cult-induced delusions. We need to realize the reality that many will never come around and we must deal with them not by going easy but by continually beating them through law enforcement, prosecutions, good policies, good electoral strategy, and every legal means available. Donald Trump, with his delusional, deceptive discourse never accepted the result of the election and incited a double insurrection—an insurrection by the majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives to unconstitutionally override the Electoral College vote, and an assault on the Capitol to obtain the same result by illegal and violent means. They will never come around, the people attached to their racial and cultural predominance, people who value power and profit over fairness, who want their tax cuts more than they want to live in a country in which people don’t die because of poverty, lack of access to medical care, and all the other calamities the vulnerable are prone to.
Let’s give up on these people. It’s not impossible but very hard to teach an old dog new tricks so it’s not worth the effort. Let’s just fight them and beat them down hard within the limits of the law. In this election, the ‘real’ Americans, those who in their mind are the only real ones, implicitly decided they could not win fair and square. They adopted a fantastical worldview within which even the possibility that for the first time their votes would not be enough to impose their vision and the votes of the unreal Americans would decide the outcome. That was not acceptable and therefore they convinced themselves, not that it took much convincing, it could not be true. That was the psychological breeding ground for the white, right-wing, rebellion, which did not end on January 6, but has instead metastasized. We need to be on guard against an almost inevitable recurrence of insurrection.
So far Joe Biden has not wasted any time trying to win those people over or applying salve to their wounds. He has been busy ripping apart many of Trump’s policies adored by the people I just described. Family separation. The Muslim ban. The Wall. The ban on transgendered people in the military. The exit from the World Health Organization and the Paris global climate agreement. The end of the laissez faire/malignant neglect policy toward the Coronavirus pandemic.
Joe Biden turned out not to be sleepy at all, exposing one more Trump lie. What a change in tone, tenor, and action is a single week, most importantly in relation to Coronavirus policy.
There have been myriad explanations for the Covid-19 catastrophe that have illuminated much. But mostly they have missed the main point. Those countries and states that have virtually tamed Covid-19, like Australia, have used the tools of a strong state. The countries like the United States which have a phobia against government and a fatal addiction to laissez faire, and those like Sweden that inexplicably adopted an uncharacteristic laissez faire approach in the worst case, a pandemic, have failed.
What does failure versus success look like? Australia has had 3.64 deaths per 100,000 people in the population; Sweden has had 108.7; the United States 128.7; and Norway 10.31. The key difference has been strong state action versus a free-for-all policy.
One final point: The free-for-all policies of laissez faire capitalism are especially calamitous in a pandemic. But the pandemic is an extreme case of a more general principle. For the vast majority of people, even in normal times, free-for-all capitalist policies, unregulated capitalism, hyper-capitalism, savage capitalism, call it what you will, are bad. Every international comparison of the well-being of a country’s population confirms this.
The pandemic has been a stress test for the free-for all American-style capitalism—its ideology, its characteristic policies, the ultra-individualistic mentality it promotes—and the system failed catastrophically. It is a lesson the Biden and subsequent administrations should learn as they craft social, economic, and health policies.
