The rise of Donald Trump was not the cause of US political dysfunction, but a mere symptom of it.
When Joe Biden gets a clear majority of the vote and Electoral College on Tuesday a side question will be whether Donald Trump goes willingly or has to be militarily crowbarred out of the White House before inauguration day. Either way he will go.
The real issue is whether Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, can reverse not only the excesses of Trump but replace the whole rotten dysfunction of the American polity that set in with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The Trump presidency was just the ugly narcissistic boil of a more fundamental pathology that began with Reagan and worsened under George W Bush. Biden has the monumental task of removing 40 years of the erosion of American decency.
Reagan put delusion and fabrication in place of truth 36 years before Trump invented “fake news”.
Bush II and his Vice President Dick Chaney put personalised profit from the public purse, via endless war, ahead of the public good a decade or more before Trump made it an art form.
There is a lot to unwind here. It will not, like Trump, get unelected on Tuesday. If Biden is to succeed, he will have to unpick it bit by bit.
Reagan pursued the folly of tax cuts for the rich; massive military spending; and privatisations that lined the pockets of lobbyist mates. Bush took it to another height.
It was all showmanship over substance whether it was Reagan calling it for “the Gipper” or invoking any number of movie lines as reality (the seeds of Trump’s “fake news”) or Bush standing on an aircraft carrier saying “Mission Accomplished”, when decades of war and death followed.
There’s 40 years of Republican jingoistic populism to overcome. And part of that is an undercurrent of racism. The Democrats used to win the southern states hands down for a century after Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, freed the slaves. But they were segregationist Democrats.
Then from 1964 Democrat Lyndon Johnson (who absent the Vietnam War would have been one of America’s greatest presidents) courageously pushed though the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
The white supremist Republicans seized the day. With southern Democrats no longer segregationist, the Republicans dog whistled until they began to capture Southern states in presidential elections and then legislatures and governors’ mansions which enabled them rig the electoral system.
They redrew boundaries and made voting more difficult for minorities and the poor with identification requirements and fewer polling places.
Federally, Republicans won the southern states comprehensively after the 1970s. In 1980 Reagan tapped the racist and white evangelical mood to sweep the south and remove Democrat Jimmy Carter from the White House.
It mattered not that Carter was a committed born-gain Christian and Reagan was a divorced non-churchgoer, just as Bush was a draft-dodger and Bush’s opponent John Kerry a Vietnam war hero.
Trump did not invent lying, shaping and controlling the agenda, and successfully duping voters into believing middle and working class voters that he was on their side, when all along he was helping his rich friends with tax cuts and laxer environmental and employment regulations.
The pussy-grabbing Trump did not invent the hypocritical pandering to the Christian right. The divorced, non-church-going Reagan beat him to it. Reagan hallelujiah-ed with Billy Graham to dupe voters.
This Christianity is not one of turn-the-other-cheek, vows of poverty or social justice. It is the white evangelical proclamation of individual salvation and prosperity Christianity.
To restore this societal pathology to good health will be Herculean.
A Biden Administration will have to unwind Bush’s War on Terror. Bush contrived the invasion of Iraq to immobilse the weapons of mass destruction that were never there. It spawned an insidious growth of anti-US terrorist groups, notably ISIS – precisely the opposite of the what the war of terror was supposed to end.
In its wake lies hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and thousands of dead, injured, post-traumatic-stress-syndrome-ravaged veterans who will cost the American taxpayers for generations.
Reagan’s philosophy (if you could call it that) of pushing of small-government, tax-cuts for the rich, “trickle-down” economics, and high military spending blew out the Federal Budget – exactly the opposite of what he was spruiking.
Biden has the legacy of three, not one, presidents to overcome and reverse. In some ways, the Trump legacy is less destructive than that of the other two. There was only one term of it and it was so incompetent and haphazard it did not have the same pervasive effect as the trickle-down economics of Reagan’s New Morning in America or Bush’s war on terror.
Well, on Tuesday the demographics and democratic decency will have caught up in the form of “We want Trump out”.
But the schoolboy brat may cling to power and launch Supreme Court challenges no matter how big the Biden margin. The eight weeks until Biden’s inauguration will be an eggshell-walking experience of wondering what the erratic egotist will do next.
When Biden takes the presidency and the Democrats take both house of Congress, Biden should, as he would, offer bipartisanship on the big issues, notably climate change.
But if the Republicans revert to form defending the privileges of the rich and white supremacy by whatever open or underhand weapons available, Democrats should, in the interests of returning the US to functioning democracy, give as good as they took.
Expanding the Supreme Court to 13 would be a start. But failing that, whenever the Supreme Court overturns some key reform like Obamacare or voting rights, they should redraft the legislation and pass it through the Congress again. Remember it takes at least two years to get a case to the Supreme Court to overturn it again.
As the Australian experience shows, after a time, voters untimately realise that universal health insurance is a pretty good idea and any party which who opposes it will do so at their political peril.
But these are practical suggestions. How a new president goes about restoring decency, ethical conduct and respect for the truth after the most recent and the Reagan and Bush residencies will be an extraordinary test of character. But old as he is, if the recently recycled video of his spontaneous reaction to the grief of the boy who lost his dad is a mass shooting is any guide, maybe Joe Biden is the person to do it.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 31 October 2020.
Crispin
Brilliant column
Captures it all perfectly
What makes you think Biden won’t “defend the privileges of the rich”? His track record says he will.
A good suggestion to simply re-pass legislation that the Supreme Court overturns. They’d need a strong majority in Congress to do that – something Obama never had. More likely, Biden will preside over more sucking up to Wall Street, and some mere window-dressing on climate change and social programs.
Your usual good article that digs below the immediate and superficial, but I think the rot starts much further back and infects much of the industrialised world including Australia. The establishment of schools of economics in the US around the time of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century lies at its root. These schools of economics were funded by the wealthy so as to impose an ‘academic’ economic model that favored themselves, the rich land owners. Specifically where classical economics had identified land, labour and capital as the bases of production the new schools very deliberately removed ‘land’ (read ‘resources’ more widely) leading to over exploitation of resources and a sharpening of the battle between labor and capital. Thus have the rich been able to ignore or more publicly denounce the importance of resources yet at the same time lay claim to more of them. Consider the statement by Solow from 1974:
‘The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources’.
Put this together with the push for continuous economic growth, one can see the erosion of democracy and equity.
Robert Merton Solow; born August 23, 1924) is an American
economist particularly known for his work on the theory of economic
growth that culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him. He
was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal (in 1961), Nobel Memorial Prize
in Economic Sciences (in 1987) and the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
John Bates Clark (1847-1938), one of the founders of neo-classical
economics was a ferocious opponent of Henry George. He held positions in
lesser universities until appointed to Columbia in 1895. The President
of Columbia at the time was Seth Low, a wealthy silk importer and land
owner who in 1985 was running against Henry George for mayor of New York.
Solow neglected the role of ‘land/resources’ in his growth model writing
in a 1974 as above.
Thank you Crispin for again getting it spot on. The US is now a sad remnant of past glory. I fear though that you might be just a tad overly confident about a Biden win. I certainly hope you are correct though.