Identity and Catastrophe: The Democrats in 2020
Joe Biden’s relatively pain-free victory in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries — notwithstanding a historically large and diverse field of candidates, some of whom had ardent followings and vast resources — prompted conspicuously little self-evaluation among Democratic Party elites. For most of the election cycle, he was far from the favored candidate of activists and journalists aligned with the party. In certain quarters the very notion of him running was considered offensive. Even operatives who worked directly with Biden in the Obama Administration and two winning presidential campaigns expressed reluctance to support him. There were several reasons for this widespread apprehension, but the principal one was his race and gender characteristics. “I’m over white men running the country,” LaTosha Brown, a “philanthropic consultant” founder of the group “Black Voters Matter,” inveighed in April 2019 when asked about the prospect of a Biden presidency. Affluent liberal whites, reflecting the fast-shifting cultural attitudes of the party’s professional class, resoundingly agreed with such sentiment.
But as the actual primary election results showed, ordinary voters generally don’t think in these reductionist terms. Biden’s swift ascendance to the nomination, never a foregone conclusion, ought to have been seen as a decisive repudiation of what was ultimately revealed to be an elite-driven ideology — namely, the ideology which presupposes that voters place huge priority on the identity traits of elected officials. Journalists and commentators spent months warning that his being an “old white guy” presented enormous challenges for Biden heading into the 2020 cycle, with the Democratic Party apparently more devoted than ever to equitable racial, gender, and sexuality representation. Data gurus like Nate Silver produced complicated infographics purporting to show that it was instead Kamala Harris who was the true “front-runner,” in part based on the evidence-devoid assumption that her skin color assured an intrinsic connection with black voters in the Deep South. So it came as a traumatic shock to many pundits when Harris’s mega-hyped campaign imploded before any voting took place, having failed to garner significant black voter support. Not long after, Biden’s landslide victory in the majority-black South Carolina primary effectively secured him the nomination.
If you watched the Democrats’ quasi-convention last week, however, it was almost as though this very recent history had been evaporated. Issues of identity were emphasized unrelentingly, and perhaps constituted the paramount issue of the entire convention — on par with or even exceeding the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. This was partly a function of the ongoing elite-endorsed protest movement, which for the entire summer has enveloped the national political agenda. But it was also a function of the party’s professional class getting their way, regardless of whatever verdict rank-and-file voters had rendered. The operatives and “influencers” who have inevitably converged around nominee Biden — including those who initially objected to him on identity grounds — are the ones now tasked with doing things like running conventions. And so the programming inevitably reflected their affluent, liberal sensibilities. Biden, running more as a coalition-manager than a candidate with an especially individualized agenda, is happy to outsource these image-making duties.
Even the very selection of Harris as Vice Presidential nominee should be seen as an attempt to mollify restless party-aligned elites. Though the pick was initially depicted as a triumph for “Black women” — who could have just as easily backed Harris during the primaries, but opted against it — the real triumph was instead for professional class operators who’d long been queasy with the concept of another old white guy representing the Democratic Party, especially in the “Trump Era.” As it turns out, launching a pre-planned ambush against the eventual nominee on a national debate stage with racism accusations, as Harris did just over a year ago to Biden, was exactly the right strategy for getting vaulted to the party’s top echelons in the current climate. “That little girl was me,” Harris infamously proclaimed in her denunciation of Biden, based on the claimed offense she took to policy positions of Biden’s from the 1970s. (T-shirts capturing the “moment” were available for purchase in a matter of minutes.) Though Harris later admitted the attack was wholly manufactured — only the most gullible pundits thought she was sincerely aggrieved about Biden’s decades-old opposition to mandatory de-segregation bussing — the maneuver paid big dividends as an entreaty to party elites. Coming full circle, the introduction to Harris’s acceptance speech at the convention featured a gauzy montage with unnamed citizens exclaiming their appreciation that “someone who looks like us” is finally on a presidential ticket. The identity-ideologists had prevailed.
In watching the Democrats’ quasi-convention spectacle, one couldn’t help but conclude that the mainstream of the party has undergone a major rhetorical shift in the domain of racial awareness. Even Biden himself repeated in his acceptance speech an exhortation for the country to finally get around to completing what he called the “hard work” of “rooting out our systemic racism.” Twelve years ago, when Barack Obama delivered his first acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, the words “race” and “racism” did not appear even once — nevermind the more recent “systemic” coinage. Even the word “black” was absent from Obama’s 2008 remarks. Today such an omission would be unthinkable, and perhaps even denounced as racist unto itself.
Layered on top of this advanced racial terminology was the recurrent theme that Donald Trump represents a profound, existential threat to the very fabric of American democracy — unlike anything before in history. If this sounds familiar, it’s because similarly dire warnings were sounded in 2016, and throughout the entire duration of the presidency. Over and over and over again. Mysteriously though, American democracy appears to still exist. At least in the sense that the country is preparing to vote en masse relatively soon. But apparently this time, the entire edifice is destined to crumble in a matter of months should Trump win again. Sure, OK. There are any number of reasonable cases to be made against the re-election of Trump: the most simple being an argument from mere administrative competence, with the pandemic death toll providing all the evidence needed. This never suffices for Democrats, though, who constantly resort to “catastrophizing” — which also appears, perhaps not coincidentally, to be an increasingly prevalent mental pathology in the general public.
“Because that’s what’s at stake right now. Our democracy,” said Obama in 2020. “Democracy itself is on the ballot,” said Obama in 2016. Democratic elites appear to be under the impression that if they are rejected by the electorate, there has to be something intrinsically wrong with democracy. They can’t just…lose. Everything has to be a five-alarm-fire, existential crisis. This rhetoric is partly a function of how “left” and “liberal” rhetoric have almost wholly converged vis-a-vis Trump. Liberals and leftists often posture as being at one another’s throats, but they’ve long agreed on the basic analysis that Trump represents some spectacularly urgent fascist menace, against which extraordinary measures are justified. For liberals and their NatSec friends, it was engineering Russiagate — a soft coup. For leftists, it’s fomenting anarchist insurrection. And you can find both liberals and leftists supporting both initiatives in some fashion. The repetition of the 2017-vintage slogan “This is not normal” by Bernie Sanders during his own convention address — coupled with an obligatory joke about Trump’s time spent on the golf course — epitomized this strange confluence.
Aside from being tedious and probably not electorally advantageous, the catastrophist case against Trump is often self-refuting and incoherent. One of their previous catastrophist gambits, impeachment — at the time justified on the ground that Trump’s conduct constituted a national emergency and the fate of the constitutional order hung in the balance — didn’t warrant a single mention over four days at the Democratic convention. That entire saga now seems like a distant, fading memory; most Democrats would likely struggle to even recall exactly what conduct Trump was even impeached for in the first place. (Lev Parnas? Javelin missiles? What? Might need a crisp Vox explainer to refresh my memory.) Republicans, conversely, saw fit to boast several times about impeachment during their just-concluded convention, which is certainly not what Democrats impeachment advocates prophesied would happen in terms of the political ramifications. But as usual, all this gets memory-holed, because there’s always further histrionic outrages to latch onto. (Adam Schiff didn’t even get a convention speaking slot! Sad!)
Setting racial issues aside, it’s worth taking note of the rhetorical domains in which Democratic rhetoric has not materially changed, and perhaps even regressed. And the big whammy in that respect is definitely foreign policy. To the extent that foreign policy issues were even discussed at the 2020 convention, it was a continuation of the central theme of Democrats’ criticism of Trump throughout his tenure, which is that he is a discreditable steward of American imperial hegemony. Corrupted by a combination of seedy transactionalism, insufficient reverence for “institutions,” and still-vaguely-defined Russian subterfuge, Trump in the popular Democratic telling has disgraced America on the world stage. While he might be a few degrees less unrepentantly hawkish than the previous Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, Biden is still deeply wedded to liberal interventionist foreign policy consensus — it’s all he’s ever known. Conveniently for him, then, there is no “reckoning” being demanded by any corporate-backed mass movement in this subject area.
And so it was that Colin Powell, who hasn’t held any government position since he departed the George W. Bush Administration in 2005, after playing a starring role in selling the country on the invasion of Iraq — which, lest we forget, Biden voted to authorize — was trotted out by Democrats to express his desire that “this time next year I hope and pray that America will have restored democracy to the world.” The means by which Powell longs for America to “restore democracy to the world” were not specified, but presumably it would have to involve some military component. Likewise, the 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry declared of democracy, “You can’t spread it around the world if you don’t practice at home,” leaving to the imagination of viewers what exactly it would mean for America to “spread [democracy] around the world,” or why this would be desirable. (Reminder: Kerry also voted for the Iraq War.) The alleged crumbling of American democratic institutions under Trump is always framed primarily as an impediment for America to regain its rightful role as the guarantor of global values and “norms,” another favored theme of the catastrophists.
“Donald Trump has had a love-fest with dictators. Including China and Russia. He hasn’t been standing up to them at all,” charged former top NATO official Rose Gottemoeller in yet another gauzy video montage. And so that’s the basic Democratic critique of Trump’s foreign policy: that he’s not “stood up” to dictators, i.e. been sufficiently belligerent, and what we need instead is someone who will be “tough.” Jon Meacham, the mass-market historian who spoke at the convention after having forged a friendship of some sort with Biden — and who also spoke at the funeral of George H. W. Bush — entered into the partisan fray for the first time to rise to the defense of America’s “values,” which are thought to be being progressively undermined by Trump. He decried Trump’s alleged “isolationism,” which would certainly come as news to the record number of civilians killed in Afghanistan under Trump. Perhaps the bombs dropped on those individuals were actually “isolationist” in a manner only Meacham could elucidate.
No doubt, the Republican quasi-convention also indulged in its fair share of catastrophizing. That requires a separate Medium post. But for starters: Biden, we were told by a weeping Cuban expatriate, is of comparable political provenance to Fidel Castro. The supposed logic for this accusation is that even if Biden himself may be the embodiment of a generic old-fashioned machine Democrat, he is hostage to the radicals laying siege to his party. While it’s true that leftist radicals have achieved some degree of leverage in recent weeks/months, to cast them as interchangeable with Biden is self-evidently absurd. Similarly absurd, in fact, to the attempts by Hillary Clinton in 2016 to depict Donald as the fearsome avatar of the allegedly-ascendant “alt-right” — which at the time were thought to consist primarily of Twitter trolls and Breitbart commenters. Trump’s subsequent governance has confirmed that if he’s in hock to anyone, it’s the typical cast of lobbyists, defense contractors, business interests, “pro-Israel” donors, think tank operatives, and other such usual-suspect careerists who form the core of the Republican Party’s semi-permanent governing infrastructure. The same would almost certainly be true of Biden, vis-a-vis the Democratic Party’s semi-permanent government infrastructure, flush with Obama alum ready to restore themselves to power. Albeit with a bit more racially-sensitive genuflecting. Not an especially exciting way to frame an election contrast, sure. But more accurate than the kind of hair-on-fire catastrophizing that’s liable to send the entire electorate straight into the nuthouse.
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