After The Donald, The Deluge?

French Revolution Series Ordered at Netflix - ComingSoon.net

           Joe Biden enjoys a double-digit lead over the incumbent president because he promises a return to normalcy—not the platonic ideal of objective normalcy in a country that doesn’t torture or spy on its citizens or let them starve because their coding chops are a few years out of date. Americans desperately want to resume “normal” political life as Americans knew it before the last four years of manic presidential tweetstorms, authoritarian strongman antics and pandemic pandemonium. As Michigan voter Katybeth Davis told The Guardian, “I just want it [the Trump presidency] to be over with. I really do.”

            Be careful what you wish for. Things could get even crazier under Biden.

            Even though it’s only a few weeks away, I am hesitant to call the election. Biden has a huge lead in the polls but Trump has an ace in the hole: an unprecedented volume of mail-in ballots due to the COVID pandemic, which will run predominantly Democratic and provide attractive targets for Republican attorneys to drag out state vote counts past the December 14th electoral college certification deadline, which would trigger the obscure 12th Amendment scenario in which 50 states each get one vote for president in the next House of Representatives, in which case Trump wins even if Biden wins the popular vote by a lot.

            But let’s assume Biden prevails. Let’s say it’s a blue wave election and the Democrats expand their majority in the House and take control of the Senate. What happens next? Revolution, maybe.

            Revolution would certainly be likelier under Biden than under Trump.

            One of history’s least-discussed ironies is a counterintuitive pattern: it is not the vicious tyrants who are overthrown by angry mobs, but well-meaning liberal reformers who promise to fix a broken system and fall short of expectations.

            A Biden Administration will face several daunting existential challenges. Unlike Obama, whose high approval rating at inauguration prolonged his political honeymoon into his second year, Biden will enjoy little to no support from Republican voters or elected representatives. Progressives will pressure him from the left. Worse, Biden will inherit problems that have been neglected or exacerbated for so long that no solution will be able to come fast enough.

A president who will have achieved victory by campaigning against his predecessor’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic will be expected to quickly turn around the ongoing medical and economic disasters with lightning quick results. Like Obama, Biden has promised to add a “public option” to the Affordable Care Act; he’ll need to do that right away. That’s only the beginning: the ACA will collapse unless Congress vastly increases premium subsidies to middle-class patients and orders Medicaid expansion nationally.

The $600-a-week supplemental unemployment benefits that both parties allowed to expire during the summer will have to be replaced in some form. There will need to be meaningful broad-based relief for distressed renters and homeowners facing eviction or foreclosure; without an infusion of cash millions of people who formerly belonged to the middle and working classes will become homeless, adding to social and political instability. Billions will have to be pumped into the economy in the form of direct stimulus checks to every man, woman and child. The alternative is economic collapse.

The presidency, of course, is about more than policy. Many Americans who believed in exceptionalism a few years ago are wondering aloud whether the U.S. is literally over and done. During times of crisis, leaders are called upon to reassure citizens that a wise and steady hand is at the helm and that a team of intelligent and innovative advisors is running the show behind the scenes.

Can Biden deliver? On most fronts, probably not.

The Democratic Party is too beholden to its corporate donors to enact the FDR-style stimulus and social programs that are required to dig out of an economic hole filled with tens of millions of newly unemployed workers and where one out of five businesses have gone broke. Biden comes out of the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Leadership Council austerity wing of his party. His instinct will be to spend as little as possible in order to try to balance the budget.

“When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” says Ted Kaufman, who will run the transition office that will select Biden’s top personnel. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit…forget about COVID-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.” Kaufman, a former Delaware senator, promises that Biden won’t significantly increase federal spending.

The streets are already seething. Austerity will bring things to a boil.

Political suicide by fiscal means.

The Soviet Union didn’t collapse under Josef Stalin. It couldn’t have. He would have ruthlessly crushed any meaningful opposition. Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev presided over graduated liberalization but it was under Mikhail Gorbachev, architect of perestroika, that the USSR went out of business. Gorbachev, arguably the best, brightest and most decent premier the Soviet system could allow to come to power and the best the Russian people could hope for, failed to deliver the improvements in living standards and personal freedoms people wanted and needed. It was precisely the fact that he was so excellent, yet couldn’t deliver, that exposed the corruption and incompetence inherent to the system.

Neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev nor Gorbachev were the problem. The system itself was. It had to go.

Similarly, the French Revolution couldn’t have succeeded under Louis XIV; the Sun King was too brutal and autocratic. Louis XVI attempted numerous reforms to make life better for the French, including the free distribution of grain, slashing the royal budget and the abolition of torture and servitude. He granted equal rights to Jews and Protestants, tried to tax the nobility (they refused) and began a transition toward parliamentary monarchy as in Great Britain. But the reforms were insufficient, internal forces were intransigent and resentments had built up for too long. The French were hungry and angry so Louis XVI lost his head to the guillotine.

So it went in Russia. Although Czar Nicholas II was a bit of a clueless dolt, he recognized the crisis and desperately tried to save a collapsing system. He introduced civil liberties, worked to increase literacy, granted representation to local districts throughout the country and modernized the empire’s infrastructure. Again, it wasn’t enough. He destroyed the economy by squandering the treasury on wars of choice, refused to consider democratization and ultimately succumbed to the resistance of shortsighted Russian aristocrats. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had long argued that the Russian government was corrupt and unwilling to provide for the needs of the people. Only when Nicholas II’s reforms proved to be too little too late did they agree and rise up.

Like Gorbachev, Louis XVI and Nicholas II, President Biden will disappoint at the worst possible time.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

 

12 Comments.

  • Great column, Ted.

    I like your analysis, but I think if Biden showed pre-revolution weaknesses, the forces of the oligarchy would preempt the people.

    I don’t think a win by Biden will diminish the threat from Trumpers (even in the absence of Trump) with the duopoly-ruling oligarchs standing by in the wings.

    People overthrowing Biden, maybe.

    But the powers behind the throne would fill the vacuum in the name of the “people’s revolution”.

    Likely they would let Biden be tossed by the people, celebrate a popular revolution and then insert themselves into the seats of power like Stalin (the anti-communist Communist in name) did.

    Even the French Revolution was followed by Napoleon, Emperor for Life.

    • If Stalin was a communist in name only, why the war on peasant smallholders? How did it benefit him if he had no ideological interest in exterminating anything akin to private property?

    • “State capitalism” might describe the Soviet economic system (I’d call it socialism, as I can see no difference between the two; certainly no other form of socialism is remotely viable on the national scale). However, the communist ideology never presupposed an immediate transition to a communist society. It’s a two-stage rocket.

      • “[N]o other form of socialism is remotely viable on the national scale”

        Correct, in a perverse way.

        Capitalist governments like to snuff out any socialist leaning parties and governments to “prove” that socialism always fails.

        The capitalist test of government viability is not the living standard it provides but the ability to withstand economic and military assaults by warmonger capitalist governments.

        I hate to get into discussions where terms are not defined because the conflicting meanings of words deflects attention from the actual lived realities that should be the issue discussed.

  • alex_the_tired
    October 13, 2020 1:05 PM

    If Trump loses (I doubt it), um, Biden will have, at most, two years to fix everything. He’ll fail, of course, because you can’t put out a house fire by blowing on it. The progressives have already left (some will perform a final pointless vote against Trump but that’s the end of their participation in the party). Without Trump as a goad, no one will come to the polls in 2022 to vote blue.
    I wonder if it’s possible for the Republicans to hold 67 seats in the Senate after the midterms. If they can, Pres. Harris will be out on her backside in about 20 minutes.

  • Biden isn’t a reformer. Now he has to pretend to be one at the end of his career. The pretending will barely last past the election. If he is elected, I fully expect to see superficial pandering, so they can claim change.. Cabinet nominees selected for their diversity. Presidential tweets that sound like a standard corporate tweet (“Its MLK day. MLK had a dream. rt Your dreams for the future”). Otherwise It will be: new boss same as the old boss.

    • Pretty much. Whether it means he’s safer or more dangerous, revolution-wise, is a curious academical question. Academical because America isn’t anywhere near ready for a revolution yet.

      • alex_the_tired
        October 13, 2020 6:14 PM

        I think that, um, Biden is worse that Trump. A lot of people think Biden will actually, you know, DO something. None of Biden’s policies (and those are the I-promise-I-won’t-come-in-your-mouth policies that politicians always tell the voters in the back seat of the Buick Skylark, not the real-world policies that were going to happen all along) is going to solve anything.

  • Joseph Robinette Biden as Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov – not bad, Ted ! A day late and a dollar (рубль) short…. 😉

    Henri

  • Reagan destroyed Grenada. Bush, Sr. Panama and Iraq, Clinton, Yugoslavia, Bush, Jr, Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama, Ukraine, Libya and Syria. All were decent hypocrites, saying they wanted a fair shake for African-Americans and Hispanics, while doing far more to incarcerate African-Americans for nothing and rid the US of Hispanics as best they could. And also, strong support for fossil fuels while preaching that we must fight climate change. They knew what they were doing.
    Trump did not, he hadn’t a clue how a government works and what a president must do to get things done. And he was lazy. Net, he did far less damage than his predecessors (not for lack of trying).
    Biden never met a war he didn’t love. He keeps saying the ACA is perfect, and Americans must vote for him because Trump wants to change it, and any change would be for the worse. And he’ll have the full force of the US government behind him, and that’s too much for any revolution to get off the ground.
    Net: nothing good will come of a Biden presidency, and more bad things than with Trump.
    (I refuse to vote for either of them.)

    • Trump is just the excrescence of the undemocratic duopoly.

      In their desperation almost anything, including Trump, looked better to his supporters.

      If Biden comes after Trump what comes after Biden likely will be worse than Trump, that is, if this juggernaut hasn’t already bottomed out .

      Democrat voters will be cheering Biden’s next wars as vigorously as Trump’s fan base did for him.

      And somehow the Democrat voters will not be able to see how they mirror the Trump base’s insanity.

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