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On his way to 300 electoral college votes, the US president-elect aimed to “bind up the wounds of division” and serve “all Americans.” The prospect of “a united people” was not so exotic for a man raised in the bipartisan midpoint of the twentieth century.
Perhaps Donald Trump suppressed a smile when he offered that olive branch four November ago. But then Barack Obama, George W Bush, and Bill Clinton made the same noises in their own promotions to the White House. Whether we blame them or the ruthlessness of their opponents, they all failed. No doubt Joe Biden, who “sees no red states and blue states”, will be lucky for the fifth time.
This is a crude moment, I know, to downplay the change of president. Washington and other liberal cities rejoiced when news of Biden’s projected victory spread Saturday. The Killjoys must – hideous demotic is fitting for once – read the room.
It’s just that a blast of cold water on the face is clearly in view. Whatever Biden’s accomplishments as president, such as a vaccine launched or a resurgent NATO, national unity will not be among them. Once sworn in, Republicans can rediscover the fiscal conservatism that they inexplicably misplace among Democratic presidencies. His new members of Congress, elected under Trump, will bring freshness to the partisan fray. A President Biden will be hampered at all times.
Milk and water
His two Democratic predecessors were so stubbornly resisted that their legitimacy was challenged. Each lost Congress in its first midterm elections to insurgent movements that drifted to the wildest edges of rhetoric. The hope that Biden will escape his fate seems to depend on his personal emollience and his harmless centrism, like milk and water. But Clinton had more of both, and Obama was not entirely without either. It made little difference. Partisanship is in the fabric and culture of Washington. It is not about this or that president.
This is still a country where a large minority of Democrats would be unhappy if their son married a Republican; Republicans are only slightly more cheerful about the opposite. It’s one in which victorious running mate Kamala Harris can equate her party’s victory with nothing less than that of “science.”
There is self-talk and bad history in the recent pose of the global left as the Enlightenment Party. It used to be they, inspired by the French academy, who saw the truth as relative or “constructed.” However, whatever the presumption, Harris is lucid enough to see that Americans now inhabit different mental worlds. What counts as fact is in dispute.
In his sadness, he is more realistic than his boss. Last week, Trump showed that a president can do almost anything and win close to half the vote, while his enablers can make progress in Congress. Along with group loyalty on this scale, Biden’s promise to “heal” and “unify” may seem, jarring as it may be in a 77-year-old man, childish in his innocence.
Natural order
Because he arose in bipartisan Washington, where Republicans voted to impeach their own Richard Nixon, Biden tends to view it as the natural order of things. And the conflict is aberrant, easily transcended with good will and lip service at the negotiating table. The problem is that the Washington of the 1970s was never natural or typical. It was the product of contingent circumstances that no longer hold. Among them was the tremendously disciplining presence of a foreign enemy.
In hindsight, the end of the cold war stirs up the civic life of the winning nation, not just the losing nation. While the United States faced an external threat, there were prudent limits to its internal disputes. During my life, it was normal to see a unanimous confirmation from a supreme court judge and a score of 400 votes in the electoral college for a presidential candidate. There have been none since 1988. An undisputed nation has felt free to pick at its own seams. In theory, the Chinese threat will usurp the Soviet as the great American adhesive. He is taking his time.
To say that the United States will remain unhealed is not axiomatically bleak about it. The bipartisanship of yesteryear was often bought at a heavy price: dividing up differences on big issues, avoiding them altogether. The core of the postwar inter-party truce was a tacit agreement to postpone the issue of civil rights, for example. Biden’s best chance in four harmonious years is not trying anything remarkable. If only an affected US economy, or the global one it helps to boost, could afford benign neglect. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020
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