Joe Biden is the 46th president of the United States. The Trump Era is over. All would seem good and right with the political world.
And yet, as I watched Biden give his workman-like speech, as I listened to the soaring rhetoric offered by Amanda Gorman, I could not shake my unease.
It was a time for celebration. Bruce Springsteen captured the moment with a somber yet hopeful “Land of Hopes and Dreams.” Justin Timberlake and Ant Clemons sang of “Better Days,” and John Legend performed a stirring rendition of “Feeling Good,” a song made famous by Nina Simone. There even was literal poetry — Lin Manuel Miranda read an except of Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy.”
Hopeful. Celebratory. A necessary cleansing of a national soul poisoned by four years in which art and the humanities were absent from the White House, by a brutishness, a selfishness, an ugly self-centeredness that gutted the nation of its humanity.
Still, I felt an unease. It had been just two weeks since the assault on the Capitol Building by a raging mob of Trump supporters intent on overturning an election. It was a mob egged on by a self-centered narcissist to whom democracy means little, a mob that apparently had help from elements within the law enforcement community, from members of Congress, and that had no more concern for democracy than their cowardly buffoon who had occupied the presidency until yesterday.
The mob was relatively small, but it was representative of a good portion of those who backed and continued to back Trump. We cannot ignore the 73 million who voted for Trump despite four years of Trumpism. Some did so out of a commitment to the Republican Party, but many, maybe most did so because of what he represented. It is that large minority of the American electorate that worries me, that keeps me feeling on edge.
Ezra Klein writes today in The New York Times that Democrats need to be careful about how they proceed. He is not endorsing the kind of careful centrism we heard from Joe Biden during the primaries, however. Klein argues that the Democrats need to be careful not to fall back on this centrism, on their love of process, and that they cannot just preach comity and unity and assume all will be well and right with the nation. They have to govern. They have to think big. They have to make the lives of Americans demonstrably better.
And they have just “two years to govern,” he says. Two years before their narrow majorities in the House and Senate will be judged at the polls. They have “Two years to prove that the American political system can work. Two years to show Trumpism was an experiment that need not be repeated.”
Klein is correct. Democrats have to go big or be sent home, and if Biden loses the Senate, his agenda will die and, if that happens, we could be back where we were on Jan. 20, 2016.
Go big or get tossed.
“This is the responsibility the Democratic majority must bear,” Klein writes. “If they fail or falter, they will open the door for Trumpism or something like it to return, and there is every reason to believe it will be far worse next time. To stop it, Democrats need to reimagine their role. They cannot merely defend the political system. They must rebuild it.”
He quotes Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and Biden’s chief rival during the primaries: “This is a fight not just for the future of the Democratic Party or good policy. It is literally a fight to restore faith in small-d democratic government.”
Klein’s argument touched a nerve for me. I was thinking all day yesterday that we are faced with this reality: Joe Biden has to be a great president or he will be nothing more than a forgettable interregnum between a failed fascist and potentially a real one. Biden, whom I didn’t support in the primary, has a history of centrism — but, more importantly, of riding the prevailing political waves. He hit the right notes yesterday and moved quickly on numerous executive orders reversing some of the more malodorous of Trump’s program. But that will not be enough. Nor is the $1.9 trillion rescue plan he has proposed, which may struggle to get through a U.S. Senate that is evenly split and features at least one Democrat — Joe Manchin of West Virginia — who opposes significant elements.
Democrats have to act to improve American lives, which will require the kind of fortitude in the face of political backlash they have not shown since the Johnson’s efforts on civil rights and poverty. The old narratives — that America is a centrist nation, that it will not accept big ideas — cannot be impediments to action.
Racial disparities continue to plague us, affecting our economy, our policing, our educational system. We are nearly as segregated as we were in the early 1960s, thanks to a long list of policies and rules that reinforce existing housing patterns. These patterns lock inequality into our schooling, into our healthcare system, into our policing. The so-called ghettos, “bad neighborhoods,” “poor areas,” these were not created by accident, are not the product of choices made by those who live in these areas. They were created by deliberate action — by zoning rules, banking policies, insurance requirements. The days of segregation by law are over, but these allegedly colorblind policies still create segregated outcomes and they inform the ways in which the crises of our moment intertwine. Educational achievement gaps, racial and economic disparities in environmental impacts, the function of police all stem in part from these systemic ills.
We can see it most clearly in the coronavirus crisis, which has hit people of color — Blacks, Latinos, Asians — hardest, because they are the ones most likely to be working at the front lines of the health crisis, to be the emergency room doctors, nurses, orderlies, delivery people, police, police and EMTs. They are exposed at a higher rate and are infected at a higher rate, which in turn leads them to die from COVID-19 at a higher rate.
Running in parallel is the crisis of our health infrastructure, which is cracked and faltering. Large portions of the American public lacking access to quality care. Trump’s failures to aggressively combat COVID-19 only exacerbated existing flaws. The continued reliance on for-profit insurance companies and a for-profit, fee-for-service model for our entire healthcare system left us chasing short-term goals and meant we already were vulnerable when the coronavirus made the species jump last year.
Short-term thinking doomed efforts at creating an anti-pandemic infrastructure and is one of the main reasons we are dealing with the shortage of vaccines that followed the shortage of personal protective equipment, ventilators, and test kits that plagued us early in the crisis. These shortages should have been foreseen — were foreseen as early as 2006 by then-President George W. Bush. He called for annual spending to maintain stores of what would be needed, but the focus by both parties on cutting government spending left the storehouse of supplies nearly bare.
We are long past the time for half-measures. Bold action is needed. Joe Biden needs to channel Franklin Delano Roosevelt and not Bill Clinton. Not even Barack Obama. He cannot do it alone. FDR (perhaps apocryphally) told union leaders who were asking for progressive policies and bolder action to force his hand. Make him do it, he allegedly said.
Biden can be the moderate he ran as in the primary or he can be bolder, more aggressive, go big. In this case, bigger is much better. It is up to us, rank-and-file workers, Americans of all stripes, to force his hand. Make him do it.