[Prefatory Note: With trivial variations, this essay was published in CounterPunchon July 9, 2024. It expresses my dissatisfaction with Biden’s stubborn resolve to challenge Trump despite his impaired capabilities (and I would add his woeful foreign policy toward the Ukraine War and Gaza Genocide) and wooly-headed optimism about the future of America and his ill-conceived optimism about its ability to lead the world. The Democratic Party is faulted for its head-in-the-sand approach to foreign policy, limiting its electoral campaign strategy to the deserved demonization of Trump and Trumpism, but despite these two controversial ‘wars,’ refusing to defend or distance their campaign from these central features of the Biden presidency.]
Critiquing Biden’s Worldview, Democratic Party Tactics, and America’s Destiny
The Democratic Party is waging its 2024 electoral campaign by focusing on two
themes: first, a denunciation of all that Trump proposes to bring to the presidency centering on the destruction of American democracy, if elected, and secondly, a celebratory spin on the domestic record of the Biden years with several notable benefits for the American people including jobs and wages, climate, energy policy, social protection, gun control, and a stock market at record highs. What is missing from this rosy picture of America and even more so from Democratic Party feckless advocacy is neither claims nor explanations of foreign policy, only a deafening silence. It is as if the leadership of the Democratic Party wants the voting public to forget that there is a world out there, beyond national boundaries. While it has pragmatic reasons to adopt this evasive approach, especially in an election year, it is irresponsible about its partial description of America’s role in the world at a critical historical juncture.
Embracing this national posture seems strange as the US has so heavily invested in military capabilities to secure its global dominance in the decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. And as a consequence, finds itself currently engaged controversially in these wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza. It appears that even Biden is reluctant to claim political credit when addressing national audience for US support of Israel and Ukraine, and prefers to speak in generalities about the greatness of America as a country whose future is bright except to the extent dimmed by the threatened advent of Trump and Trumpism. This tendency to ignore the world should be more troubling to American voters than even Biden’s refusal to leave the presidential stage in light of his thinly deniable disabilities of age and mental health that have put his 2024 candidacy in such public peril as to make more likely a Trump victory in November. Such an evasive pattern gives seems to lend itself in Biden’s campaign rhetoric to absurdly boastful, yet distorting and unconvincing, assessments of the present broad political outlook for the country and the world.
Biden’s speech on the 3rd Anniversary of the January 6th Insurrectionary attack on Congress is a typical example. After a lengthy, persuasive recital of warnings about the Trump menace, Biden offers some unhinged general remarks, starting with his oft repeated startling expression of personal confidence in the glorious future of America: “I have never been more optimistic about the future of our country.” No explanation is given for why this is so, and there could not be one even if Orwellian tropes were relied upon. Biden makes no mention of the dubious wars, of massive homelessness, of dangerously large economic inequalities, of an epidemic of mass shootings, of growing migrant tensions, of backsliding on carbon emissions and the related rise of extreme weather events, of numerous signs of rising risks of future major wars with China and Russia, quite possibly prompting the use of nuclear weapons, of deeply disturbing erosions of academic freedom recently accompanied by punitive encroachments on dissent and freedom of expression, as well as the emergence bitterest and most divisive societal polarization since the American Civil War. I confess that I have never in my life felt more pessimistic about the future of the country. At least the citizenry was entitled expected a self-professed liberal such as Biden to be forthright about addressing the unmet illiberal challenges that have been rampant during his years in the White House, and a program to do so in the increasingly unlikely event that Democrats are given the mandate to govern in November.
Biden also was immaturely boastful on the same occasion. “We’re the greatest nation on the face of the earth.” And possibly betraying his uncertainty about the outlandish claim immediately added reassuring words but no specifics, “We really are.’ Then he proceeded to display the kind of hubris long associated with the twilight of past declining empires. Counter-historically Biden observed that “We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism.’ It underpins the broader claim that evokes doubt and opposition outside the West: “there’s no country in the world better positioned to lead the world than America..Just remember who we are..We are the United States of America, for God’s sake.’ Remembering who we are, or have become, is the ideological leader of the (il)liberal democracies of the West who mostly lent a helping hand to Israel while in recent months it carried out a genocidal assault on the helplessly vulnerable 2.3 million civilian population of the tiny Gaza Strip. This American led complicity in what much of the world’s peoples perceived as a transparent genocide, even proclaimed as such in the rationales articulated and policies pursued by Israel’s political leaders and put into deadly practice by its armed forces. While claiming to be “defending the sacred cause of democracy” Biden doesn’t respect his own citizenry sufficiently to acknowledge Israel’s policies face unprecedented challenges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), offering neither an explanation nor an apology. We must ask ourselves whether such a failure to include the citizenry in evaluating foreign policy that much of the public dissents from is in keeping with an existential commitment to democratic styles of governance. Or for that matter, whether cooperative security arrangements and friendly relations touted by Biden with the governments of India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others can be reconciled with his personal commitment to the promotion of a democratizing world as the only acceptable alternative to its autocratic adversaries.
US democracy from the founding of the republic almost 250 years ago has been associated with a constitutional arrangement that stresses the division of and balance between the three principal branches of government as supplemented by the guiding idea that even the acts of the president are not above the restraints and accountability procedures of law. Currently, both pf these vital pillars of a functioning democracy are crumbling, and near collapse. The US Supreme Court has never been so out of touch with the values of American traditions and the defense of its democratic character, not only by its denial of women’s reproductive rights but in relation to upholding the rule of law in relation to the behavior of the president and the regulation of corporate wrongdoing. Congress, in many vital sectors of public policy, has become captive to well-funded lobbying pressures and the interests of the wealthiest American leading commentators to argue that plutocracy has become a more accurate description of the form of government than democracy, To be optimistic in the face of such developments has all the appearances of playing the role of the fool.
For me an unmistakable indicator of the alienation of the governing process from the citizenry is the extension of a bipartisan invitation to the embattled Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress later in July. This bestowal of such a signal honor on a foreign leader for whom ‘arrest warrants’ has been recommended by the habitually cautious ICC, will be further enhanced by a meeting with the President at the White House undoubtedly accompanied by a TV moment exhibiting harmony between these two leaders that includes unconditional support and a profession of shared values. Such an inappropriate gesture of approval is a slap in the faces of those many American opponents of Israel’s policies in Gaza over the course of recent months, especially a show of disrespect toward young Americans who protested on university campuses across the country, and for their expressions of belief and conscience experienced police brutality and professionally harmful punishments imposed educational administrators, themselves under pressure from donors and politicians. The Netanyahu invitation is an edifying metaphor that helps justify the dark foreboding of skeptics critical of the US global role since the end of the Cold War and deeply pessimistic about the future of the country. From such an angle, Biden’s off-the-wall optimism and the tactics of the Democratic Party establishment are the opposite of reassuring. Rather I find these patterns as strong evidence of dangerous forms of escapism from the uncomfortable realities of national and global circumstances and a stubborn display of a failing leader’s resilient vanity.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 