April 27, 2019
After weeks of vacillating, Joe Biden finally entered the presidential race early Thursday morning. No doubt he was tempted by the spate of polls consistently showing him to be the front runner among twenty Democratic candidates. Biden’s announcement video was a gauzy montage of American exceptionalism’s greatest hits, featuring footage of the Statue of Liberty, Martin Luther King giving his “I Have A Dream” speech, and women marching for the right to vote. The video then cut to footage of the torch wielding Nazis in Charlottesville, before Biden solemnly intoned that we were in a battle for the soul of this nation. Biden’s emotionally manipulative and oversimplified pitch cast the election as a Manichean struggle between good and evil.
The truth is decidedly more complex, as Biden proved within 24 hours of his entry into the race. We learned that he had telephoned Anita Hill to seek absolution for his role during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Biden called Hill a few weeks before his announcement to express “regret for what she had endured,” a curiously passive construction considering that Biden was the Chair of the Senate Judiciary at the time, (Source: “Joe Biden Expresses Regret to Anita Hill, but She Says ‘I’m Sorry’ Is Not Enough,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse, The New York Times, 4/25/19). The next day on “The View,” Biden was no better,despite Joy Behar’s prompting that he needed to offer her “a straightforward apology.”
The political press would have us believe that we don’t have the luxury of choosing a smart, capable, impressive, woman candidate, like Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren, because we must focus on electability. Biden’s refusal to accept responsibility for his issues with Anita Hill reveals the problem with this framing. “Electability” is code for forcing us to make a binary choice: either the benevolent paternalism of “Uncle Joe” or the malevolent patriarchy of Donald Trump. The other “B-boys” running are simply different flavors of the same thing. We are being told to choose whether we want our paternalism cranky (Bernie), cool (Beto) or out and erudite (Buttigieg).
The truth is that all of the white male front runners are selling a fantasy. They are telling America that Trump is an aberration and that a vote for them will enable us to return to “normal.” If the last two years have taught us anything, it has taught us that our “normal” had to be pretty broken for Trump to ascend in the first place. It had to be pretty broken for him to be able to rip children from their parents and put them in cages and retain the enthusiastic support of 35-45% of the country.
For proof of just how broken our “normal” is, one need only read The New York Times’ devastating examination of the rapid pace of gentrification throughout this country, enabled by the deliberate federal policy of redlining that starved Black neighborhoods of capital, along with ensuing decades of malignant neglect that allowed infrastructure to decay, draining the value from Black owned property and further exacerbating the already astronomical racial wealth gap.
For proof of the structural impediments facing women in our “normal” society, read Claire Cain Miller’s heartbreaking portrait of the price of patriarchy being paid by our most accomplished and highly educated women, whose ambitions are thwarted, thanks to the punishing demands of the modern professional workplace, (Source: “Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got Greedy,” by Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times, 4/26/19).
With or without Trump, we need to recognize that our “normal” society has long been distorted by greed, racism and sexism. It is a combination of greed and racism that allows gentrification to spread unchecked, heedless of the culture and communities displaced. It is greed and sexism that creates workplaces so extreme that they reify antediluvian sex roles. “Normal” is what got us here. We can’t afford to go back to it.