David Doel closes out this marvelous commentary (about Biden's rant at African-American civil rights leaders) by saying, "Nothing short of a general strike is going to change who Joe Biden is." My take is only slightly different, which is nothing will change in the Democratic Party unless there is a development of The People's Party and movement politics, which would include a general strike.
"We know Joe," the corrupt jerk, Jim Clyburn (D-SC), intoned. Yeah, we do.
Also, let's repeat something else David Doel noticed, too, which was my own reaction when I heard the tape: Biden sounded like Trump on that tape, saying he, Biden, was the only one to speak about what happened in Charlottesville, and that somehow "restoring the soul of the nation" was some sort of profound policy platform. In fact, it is the neo-liberal version of "Make America Great Again," except this time, it is about falling back asleep.
This should not be a news flash to careful readers of mine, but it is definitely something any progressive or Democratic Party voters, who trust MSNBC and CNN, should understand. For decades, going back to 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, aesthetic politics has been the defining politics of American Cold War liberals, and later, neo-liberals in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. This type of politics has also become the hallmark of all of the European "liberal" parties and Blairites in the British Labour Party. Please note I am using the term "neo-liberal" to denote the American ideological discourse that crystalized in the 1990s with the shared assumptions of Bill/Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich, to the shared assumptions of Obama/Biden and Trump/Kasich. Those shared assumptions are what have created this corporatized form of economic globalization for the past 35-40 years.
Aesthetic politics are form of politics long on symbolic gestures, which then simultaneously tells the masses of people that government cannot, and often should not, provide us with any nice things. It is a politics that preens about cultural issues, while enabling wealthy economic interests to make the actual substantive economic decisions. As Yanis Varoufakis recognizes (and something I was less sure of in the first day after the election), with Biden winning, while Republicans held or gained in every other area, Biden can now, apart from some executive orders--simply say, as he essentially did in his phone call with civil rights leaders, "Well, folks, there's nothing we can do. Once most of the nation gets the vaccine from COVID-19, you can all go back to work--and listen to your bosses." David Doel was correct again in saying Biden only knows how to punch left, as do the corporate owned media. In this continuing environment, sans outright fascistic moves from a Trump, we can see how the well-off white ladies, along with their newfound friend, Whoppi Goldberg, are chomping at the bit to get back to brunch.*
Right now, I am making my way through a long, but outstandingly informative and thorough essay from Perry Anderson at the London Review of Books. The essay deals with the politics of the European Common Market and now European Union, and reaches back to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche, to Mises, (Milton) Friedman, Huntington, Kristol, and a host of Dutch and other political theorists and politicians. Anderson provides a penetrating analysis of the intellectual development and success of a guy I had barely heard of over the years--I vaguely recall the name, and never read any of his work--Luuk van Middelaar. I had thought of Middelaar as a European Francis Fukuyama, which means I had no interest in reading muddling Panglossian nonsense from a set of naive assumptions about capitalism and cultural hegemonies. What I did not know, until I have been reading through Anderson's long essay, is how much worse Middelaar was on multiple levels.
Anderson, however, is after bigger game than Middelaar's reputation. He has written a tour de force regarding Europe since 1951, and how Europe is part of the larger corporate globalization project that looked as if it would become dominant for decades--but is now beginning to unravel, as white nationalism in the West is reasserting itself with new forms of fascism. Anderson is sufficiently astute to recognize how the business community is readying itself to adapt to these developments to ensure their continued hegemony. It is about what Christopher Lasch recognized, in his The Agony of the Left (1970), which is the pusillanimity of anything truly left that would militantly challenge corporate globalist hegemony. Lasch recognized the success of the Red Scare in the period of 1917 through 1928 more than marginalized the ability of the forces against economic privilege to get any further than the New Deal reforms--and after World War II, the second Red Scare, which lasted from 1946-1963, more than finished the job. Even my novel about RFK as a what-if contained a final plot line of a right-wing backlash, though my ending may now be seen as more hopeful (sentimental?) than merely apocalyptic. The cultural left is nearly always at the ready to tone police. Those same identitarians, on the other hand, are the ones rejoicing over Biden's historic racial, ethnic, and gender Cabinet choices--which sadly speak as a monolith of the neo-liberal and neo-conservative world views. There remains the sense that too many white Americans in suburban communities, at best, would support substantive and economic-based policy changes that would help urban and rural America only to the extent they may find it convenient to their lifestyles. Despite declining fortunes, and bottoms-falling-out in rural, white America, the white suburban people continue to think they have too much to lose to break the chains of aesthetic politics.
This is why I am saying more and more: We live in a moral moment, and continue to utterly fail in that moment.
*What is it with fashion type magazines, whether it is Teen Vogue, Vogue, or Cosmo, with such incisive commentary that goes well beyond corporate broadcast media? Personally, I can't figure it out. Nevertheless, I heartily welcome young, fashion-conscious women to the policy and intellectual battle. Now, if only they would begin to buy into my formulation of how fashion and Fascism sound alike as words, and both are oppressive with respect to women's autonomy. :)
