America’s liberal elites are sighing with accomplished relief at the departure of Joe Biden. The increasingly scathing calls for the President to give up his re-election bid have ended in a ruthless victory. Now, in the ash of his political implosion, hubris builds. After a brief, pitying pause to take in the full operatic scale of Biden’s agonies, momentum is building behind a Kamala Harris coronation, the “young” and “transcendent” leader with the “X-factor” to stop Donald Trump in his tracks.
The vice-president may be no Obamaesque prodigy in metropolitan eyes. Still, the story arc in which she puts her “rocky” stint as VP behind her and prevails in becoming America’s first black female president is gaining shape.
They couldn’t be more wrong, of course. Far from being on the cusp of a titanic victory, the Democratic movement is tanking. The elephant in the room, overlooked by the new generation of the Left – which long ago gave up on Marxist history in favour of intersectionalist indy bookshop pulp – is that Biden was their Leonid Brezhnev. As with the Soviet leader, the President’s fall is unlikely to be followed by a glorious revival. Instead, the Democrats’ internal contradictions are set to become too glaring to ignore.
Until now, the old vozhd had just about managed to keep a lost and divided political party together. Indeed, with Biden’s distinguished career ending in a puddle rather than a sunset, it’s easy to overlook his crucial function. As an Irish Catholic boy done good, he had a genuinely broad appeal. As a statesman on the scene since Nixon, he was a familiar if mundane household name, the political equivalent of Campbell’s tinned soup.
His style of politics – affably persuasive – was also cleverly adapted to the vanities that define internal Democratic politics. Brezhnev was the same, the consummate middle-rank Homo Sovieticus, as reassuring to an exhausted people as he was skilled at navigating communist politics’ nasty and complex underbelly.
Still, the problem with linchpins is that they wear out. The metallurgical engineer Brezhnev – his skin puffed by medication, his words slurred – came to epitomise the rusting of the Soviet machine. Similarly Biden became a symbol of American entropy. Brezhnev barely held together a Soviet empire seething with rival strains of socialism. When he died, it all steadily unravelled. A noble but delusional bid at reinvention through glasnost only catalysed the USSR’s fall.
There may be an ominous lesson in all this for the American Left, which boasts more shades of blue than a pantone colour chart. Factions range from the super progressives, the very progressives and the progressive new guard, to the progressive old guard, the moderates and the conservatives. If doubts build about Harris – as they may well do, given her dreadful record in office – there is a distinct danger that they will spend the weeks running up to the convention in August clawing each other’s eyes out.
It is a civil war that is half a century in the making. And at its heart is a party that long ago stopped attempting to find coherent answers to any of the big questions underlying American decline. How does a superpower finance a welfare state that consumes a quarter of the federal budget given that it is no longer the world’s factory and its productivity growth rate has been declining since 1973? How can the tragic collapse of the Rust Belt be sustainably reversed? How to confront the sobering reality that just as Lyndon Johnson rode the tsunami of grief unleashed by JFK’s assassination to push through Medicare and Medicaid, America’s economy, for various reasons, tipped into a downward spiral from which it has never truly recovered?
Of course, what Democrats should’ve done over recent decades was to try to understand what killed the golden goose — the Cold War rise of “managerial governance”, an innovation-killing virus that was seeded in the ‘big science’ military-industrial-complex the Left so love to idolise; the fatal decoupling of basic research from product development, which saw the US lose its manufacturing supremacy to Japan and then China; the neoliberal order’s paradoxical ushering in of a new global order of patenting protectionism at the same time it waxed lyrical on free trade.
But the energy is overwhelmingly on the progressive Left which, fixated by identity, thinks its main role is to fight for a larger slice of a shrinking pie on behalf of different voter blocs. It is not just a strategy for ignoring America’s challenges. It creates an inherently unstable coalition that few politicians are talented enough to keep intact.
The moderates might have endorsed progressive pinup Harris in the hope that she can take the fight to Trump and hold the party together. But she is no Biden. She woefully lacks broad appeal. And the problem with playing the identity game is that, even once you have smashed the glass ceiling, you remain imprisoned in its rules.
Someone who crafts a political career “as a woman”, or “person of colour” – basing their brand on what sets them apart or what makes them a special envoy for particular groups – will struggle to be universally relatable. Nor can such politicians wipe from the internet every cringing video of them introducing their pronouns or praising BLM.
Harris does not seem well-placed to hold the party together. She sits awkwardly on the progressive end of the spectrum rather than in the middle. “Movement” identity politics is in her blood. The daughter of Berkeley academics, among her earliest memories was being taken to marches in her buggy.
Her career features a pattern of her recoiling at the magnitude of difficult, important issues – not least the border. It is telling that Harris has made abortion rights one of her defining stances, a barely concealed bid to neutralise female opponents. So, too, that Barack Obama – the spiritual leader of the progressive old guard – has so far failed to endorse her.
But she may be the best they’ve got. Taking in the alternatives, you realise that the Democratic New Left is a graveyard of talent deformed by the disease of progressivism. Efforts by Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, to present herself as “the right kind of white woman” in an anti-racist age have seen her witter about gallows humour while obsessing over progressive causes, all as her state continues to struggle economically.
Then there is Gavin Newsom – the California governor who has destroyed his credibility by indulging in silly virtue signalling in a desperate bid to appease liberals who revile him as a wealthy white snob. This is a man who took on several jobs to support his family before he ran his own firm. But in the new Left-wing America, white male success is downright offensive.
As the Democrats face up to an uncertain future, the Republican Party seems a paragon of unity. Not least since last week’s assassination attempt, The Donald’s irascible persona has acquired a patina of invincibility that a new Democratic candidate with no previous experience of debating him may well struggle to scrub away at. But that’s only the half of it. The Democrats took a wrong turn some time ago. And they are about to finally hit a brick wall.
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