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      Biden's cabinet could do a lot – if he resists the urge to fill it with 'consensus' picks | Max Moran and Miranda Litwak

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      If this election was the beginning of the end of “the Trump Show,” the writers didn’t pick a very satisfying conclusion. True, despite a deadly pandemic and organized Republican voter suppression, more people turned out than ever before to vote for Joe Biden. But, unless Democrats are successful in Georgia, the Senate will likely still be controlled by Mitch McConnell – a man whose life’s work has been to stifle government action – come 2021. McConnell’s continued power seems to temper any hopes of the bold action we need in this moment.At least, that’s the narrative being pushed by the one group delighted by this outcome: big corporations and Wall Street, who were hoping for a divided government from day one of the 2020 campaign. Bankers celebrated the electoral outcome, telling Vanity Fair: “Wall Street will love it. Are you kidding me? A growth agenda without overburdensome regulation or tax reform? C’mon. Are you kidding me? [T]hey live for fucking gridlock.”For corporate America, divided government is a blessing. A dysfunctional legislature will struggle to pass laws raising corporate taxes or cracking down on corporate malfeasance. But just as importantly, by pushing the narrative that no progressives could ever get anything through a Republican-controlled Senate, corporate executives can position themselves as bipartisan “consensus” picks for powerful cabinet posts and regulatory jobs. In fact, they’re already jockeying for them. Before election results were clear, former Lehman Brothers executive and failed Republican presidential candidate John Kasich immediately chastised the left, claiming progressives nearly cost Biden the election. Kasich, who himself hasn’t won an election in six years and utterly failed to deliver Ohio to Biden, has been angling for a cabinet post for weeks.In reality, corporate executives and lobbyists are only “consensus” cabinet picks among their fellow CEOs and corporate lawyers: by a staggering 2 to 1 margin, voters of all stripes – including Republicans – say that Biden should not hire big business executives to run his government. If democracy means anything in this country – and the 2020 election’s jaw-dropping turnout means the people still believe in democracy – Biden cannot pick a corporate cabinet. It’s perhaps the one issue on which Americans are united.And so long as Biden resists the pressure to sell his executive branch out to the highest bidder, there’s still plenty he can do to improve average people’s lives without trying to appease McConnell.Biden’s Plan B for filling out a cabinet involves the Vacancies Act, which lets the president temporarily make a senior staffer at a given agency the secretary, or bring a different Senate-confirmed individual (like the many Democratic commissioners at independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission) into the cabinet job temporarily. He can also make appointments while the Senate is in recess, as presidents of both parties do all the time. Biden could even force the Senate into recess by playing a bit of constitutional hardball – the kind of hardball McConnell plays constantly.Likewise, corporate America might want you to think that a Republican Senate means that any hope of tackling big business’s abuses – and thus improving working conditions, cleaning air and drinking water, and granting Americans a life of economic dignity – is now gone. These fatalists ask how exactly Biden is supposed to get these policies past McConnell, failing to mention that Biden doesn’t need to.Biden’s treasury department can implement financial regulations to impede investments in the fossil fuel industry and reallocate funds to tackle Covid-19 and provide support to the most harmed Americans. Biden’s justice department can prosecute Big Oil companies or seek breakups of corporate monopolies. Biden’s labor department can enforce OSHA rules and crack down on wage theft like never before, making sure people’s hard-earned wages actually make it into their pockets. His IRS can focus on ensuring the rich pay their fair share, instead of auditing poor Americans making mistakes on their taxes. He can even, with one directive to his acting education secretary, cancel 95% of student loan debt. There are at least 277 actions broadly popular within both wings of the Democratic party which Biden could take on day one of his administration. And he needn’t even walk near a McConnell-controlled Senate to do them.Yet all of these actions depend on Biden appointing committed soldiers for the public good – not corporate allies. A treasury secretary Gina Raimondo would prioritize slashing aid to struggling cities in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as she has in her home state. If ex-Googlers like Roger Ferguson or Eric Schmidt pepper the executive branch, it will undercut the authority of the most important antitrust suit in a generation. Appointing Seth Harris to labor secretary will give the intellectual architect of California’s Prop 22 an insider’s angle to spread pain for gig-economy workers.Stopping these people must be a priority for the Democratic base. Activists can and should make clear to Biden that their repayment for hard work should be a highly-motivated and public interest-minded executive branch.Executive actions represent the best hope for aggressively tackling our many interlinked crises – not to mention the best hope for Biden’s party to stand any chance in the 2022 and 2024 elections. The Democrats must have something to show for the trust the American people has placed in them. Failure in the coming years could mean a second Trump term, or worse: a new far-right nationalist who is better organized and more serious than Trump.Biden and the Democrats can only defeat such a threat by showing the American people that, yes, their government is still capable of improving their lives in tangible, substantive ways. Executive authority provides Biden with no shortage of ways to do that – but only if he resists the false “bipartisanship” that corporate lobbyists are furiously pushing across Washington. Such individuals cannot populate a Biden cabinet. More

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      End the odes to political 'civility'. Do you really think Republicans will reciprocate? | Jan-Werner Mueller

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      For four years, Donald Trump and the Republican party have been riding roughshod over long-established norms of American democracy. They have pushed to the legal limits of what they can do (and sometimes beyond). They have not so much ignored any opposition as declared it illegitimate. In response, and in the face of intense national polarization, politicians and pundits have appealed to moderation, civility and the common good. One of the biggest proponents of that attitude is President-elect Joe Biden, who, in his victory speech, said, “We must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” Now that Trump has lost, the political survivors of the Republican party may rush to join that chorus.Biden, committed to re-establishing “normalcy”, will probably rejoice at the prospect of returning to the good old days of chummy bipartisanship. Dianne Feinstein already gave a preview, when she thanked Lindsey Graham for his “leadership” in the plainly illegitimate Amy Coney Barrett confirmation process and literally embraced one of Trump’s worst lackeys. In the coming two to four years, political moderation might be a particularly alluring siren call to a weak Democratic president who may not control the Senate or have a strong majority in the House of Representatives.Here’s the problem, however: “working across the aisle” is not an ideal in itself. If we expect politics to look like an impartial pursuit of the common good or think that there will be consensus if we all follow the rules, as the neoconservative writer Anne Applebaum has suggested, then we are bound to be disappointed over and over. Rather, we must learn to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic forms of political conflict – and properly sanction those engaged in the latter.Polarization is not a given. Culture does not automatically determine politics; we are not fated to debate all issues in terms of cliched contrasts between “flyover country” and “liberal coasts”. Some social scientists like to reduce politics to psychology; they claim that humans are hardwired for “tribalism” or, put less politely, for groups hating each other. That isn’t true. In fact, such accounts are curiously apolitical, as well as ahistorical. They cannot explain why, if tribalism is our universal fate, some democracies miraculously appear to escape it, and why some get by without endless culture wars, even if their internal differences are no smaller than in the US.Polarization isn’t an objectively given reality; it’s a rightwing political project and, not least, it’s big business – just look at the talk radio millionaires. Rightwing populists deepen divisions and reduce all policy questions to questions of cultural belonging. What makes them distinctive is not their criticism of elites, but the invidious suggestion that not every citizen is part of what such politicians often call “the real people”. Trump told four congresswomen to go home to their shitholish countries; his sycophant Jim Jordan tweeted that “Americans love America. They don’t want their neighborhoods turning into San Francisco.”This strategy has worked well enough for a Republican party whose economic policies are utterly out of line with what large majorities of Americans actually want. For a counter-majoritarian party of plutocratic populism, riling people up with apocalyptic visions of “real America” being destroyed by black and brown people is not an add-on, but the core mechanism of an electoral outrage-and-grievances machine oiled with resources from the 0.01%. The noise of that machine effectively keeps people distracted from the plutocratic policies most Americans find unappealing.Fierce partisanship is not in itself a symptom of politics gone wrong. On the contrary: we would not need democracy if we did not have deep disagreements and divisions – which are inevitable, as long as we live in a free society. The problem arises when disagreement translates into disrespect. Disrespect doesn’t mean just being impolite; it means denying the standing of particular citizens – and, as a logical next step, actively trying to disenfranchise people. Republicans have been working towards a situation in which a combination of voter suppression and what the philosopher Kate Manne has called “trickle-down aggression” – acts of private political intimidation tacitly endorsed by Trump – shrinks the political power and relevance of many Americans in a way favorable to the interests of the Republican party.None of this is to say that culture is off-limits for democratic conflict. Of course, it’s not always clear how abortion, for instance, is really about “culture”. But even deep moral disagreements can be accommodated in a democracy – provided that both winners and losers have another chance to fight the fight. Contrary to Mitch McConnell’s gloating, losers don’t just “go home”, but get to hold winners accountable and develop systematic policy alternatives. Democracy always allows for second thoughts; it’s only when the stakes become absolutely existential, or religious, that society gets locked in a scorched-earth, zero-sum battle.What if rough play in politics – not pretty, but not illegitimate – becomes truly unfair play? Some theorists think the losing side should sacrifice for the sake of keeping the greater democratic whole together. But democracy cannot mean dividing politics between suckers and scoundrels, as the political scientist Andreas Schedler puts it. Game theorists tell us that we can re-establish proper rule-following by answering every tat with a tit. But responding to unfairness with unfairness might lead to a downward spiral of norms violations; fighting fire with fire could burn down the house as a whole.It is crucial to realize that not all norm violations in political conflict are the same. Not every invention of an insulting nickname on Twitter must be answered with the same childishness (of which even Trumpists must be tired by now). The best answer to suppression of our voters is not somehow keeping out partisans of the other side. Mechanical tit-for-tat retaliation – even if sometimes emotionally satisfying – should be resisted in favor of could be called democracy-preserving or even democracy-enhancing reciprocity: measures the other side won’t like, but which can be justified with genuine democratic principles: such as giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, or abolishing the electoral college.Of course, McConnell sees these proposals as merely a power grab; yet a party that tries to construct new majorities, as opposed to just capturing counter-majoritarian institutions like the supreme court and relying on the votes of what Lindsey Graham once called “angry white guys”, would welcome the contest for new voters. Fair partisan fights can restore democracy, not kitschy appeals to unity and bipartisanship. More

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      What led to Trump and what will follow Biden | Letters

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      George Monbiot (The US was lucky to get Trump – Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat, 11 November) is probably right about Barack Obama paving the way for Donald Trump, because the former failed to tackle big business. I would go even further and say that Tony Blair, another “breath of fresh air” at the time with his Tory-lite policies, more or less paved the way for our Trump – in the form of Brexit.Both politicians had a clear electoral mandate to bring about fundamental changes to their societies: in Blair’s case, to change our parliamentary institutions, as, when it came to corralling business, the UK was very much, and still is, a bit-part player. In the end, his successor handed over a poisoned chalice to the Tory/Lib Dem coalition to attempt to clean up the mess and, after its failure, to face the consequences. Joe Biden, besides confronting neoliberalism, needs to do to his country’s political system what Blair failed to do to his. John MarriottNorth Hykeham, Lincolnshire• George Monbiot paints a bleak prospect for the US and, by implication, the rest of the free world. He writes at length about the failure of Barack Obama to change the basic course of social and economic conditions during his eight years in office. He also comments on how important it is that Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia to avoid a Republican-led upper house. Surely it was exactly this that stopped Obama at every turn – the fact that during his presidency he was cursed with a hostile and belligerent Senate.The 2008 global financial crisis was one of his darkest moments, and I believe it was Gordon Brown who took charge of the initial recovery worldwide. Most politicians realised that it was senior bank staff who were responsible for the disaster. But as the old adage says, “If you owe the bank £100 then you have a problem, but if you owe the bank £10,000,000 then the bank has a problem.” They were just too big and important to be allowed to fail. What didn’t happen, but should have, was that no bankers were exposed and prosecuted. Both Obama and Brown must bear some of the criticism. Richard YoellBromham, Bedfordshire• I am appalled by the advocation of “tub-thumping left populism” as a way forward for the US. We have seen enough of tub-thumping populism (whether of the left or right) in the world during the last 100 years to know where it leads – to mass civil unrest, police brutality, military intervention, civil war, governments shutting down parliaments and locking up (or kidnapping and murdering) political opponents. In short, to unbridled anarchy, tyranny and mayhem. So thanks, but no thanks! For all its faults and weaknesses, I’ll stick with democracy based on free and fair elections, even if it doesn’t always lead us to the ideal society that we may yearn to see realised.Philip StenningEccleshall, Staffordshire• George Monbiot overlooks the way in which the neoliberal doctrine of “making wealth before welfare” has been massively overturned by the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the primacy of health over economics has been forced on even the most ardent neoliberal regimes, not least in the UK. This will certainly leave an indelible mark on the post-pandemic era. Unlike the disastrous neoliberal response to the 2008 crash, this time we are seeing the start of a possible end of its dominance as the prevailing ideology of our times, for the first time since the Thatcher-Reagan years.Adam HartGorran Haven, Cornwall More

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      American politics is now a four-way struggle. Gridlock lies ahead | Daniel DiSalvo and Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

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      Everyone agrees that American political parties are deeply polarized. However, last week’s elections point to a new political dynamic. While there’s no doubt that the two main parties remain bitterly hostile to one another, new fault lines within them will take center-stage.
      Intra-party factions have a long history in American politics and have often been engines of change. Emerging now is a four-way struggle between ideologically distinct factions, which may render compromise difficult.
      The American political landscape increasingly resembles European multi-party systems, which rely on delicate and shifting coalitions that inevitably have a strong centrist bias. Looking under the hood of America’s two big parties, it is evident that the current factions have the potential to yield similar outcomes.
      The main fault-line within the Democratic Party is well-known. There’s a deep programmatic divide between a progressive faction, advancing bold but controversial policy proposals such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and a more centrist party establishment, focused on electability and bi-partisanship.
      Interestingly, both factions have claimed validation from the recent elections. Centrists point to Biden’s increased vote share among white males in the Rust Belt states as evidence that flipping swing-voters is the most reliable way to electoral success. Meanwhile, progressives underscore that their candidates did well in many congressional races, increased youth and minority turnout, and that the size of the so-called Squad almost doubled in the House.
      Division within the Democratic party is likely to intensify. Biden has already signaled that he intends to govern by seeking to find common ground with the Republicans willing to work with his administration. This will frustrate progressives, who argue that moving towards the center is a recipe for losing further congressional seats in 2022.
      Republicans are also divided. Despite losing the election, Trump has retained the loyalty of all but a rump of Never-Trump usual suspects who have been consistently critical of him. Clearly, Trump – or Trump-ism – aren’t going away. The President performed better than expected in these elections and is reportedly considering running again in 2024. So he will remain a powerful force within the party, savaging anyone willing to work with the Democrats.
      Yet the rest of the Republican party did well electorally, picking up seats in the House and in state legislatures. If they also manage to retain control of the Senate, the prospect of scoring some policy victories may embolden a more pragmatic faction of Republicans, willing to cooperate with the Democrats. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has already made clear that a Biden administration would have to compromise, on Republican terms, or expect systematic obstruction.
      The latent cleavage within the Republican Party mirrors the explicit one within the Democratic Party. In both parties, there is a radical wing ready to pour scorn on a more centrist one for opposite but ultimately symmetrical reasons: making too many concessions to the other side.
      The consequence will be a four-way struggle, with only two concrete possibilities for effective government, both of which appear improbable. One is cooperation between the two centrist factions across party lines, which would have to crystallize around a moderate, pro-business agenda. While this is likely to please Wall Street, it is also sure to inflame the two more radical factions in both parties.
      The other option – which depends on a Democratic capture of the Senate – is a leftward shift of the Democratic party. But that would surely alienate centrist Republicans, creating an unbridgeable gulf between the two parties.
      All the other alternatives point to institutional gridlock. In fact, political scientists argue that such gridlock can be strategic when intra-partisan conflicts run deep: extreme factions on both sides encourage obstruction as a set-up for the next election, when they hope their side will increase its power at the ballot box. Refusing to make compromises can be good electoral strategy – even if it is bad for governing.
      The paradox emerging from these elections is this: although ideological conflict is at a fever-pitch high, both between and within the parties, the most likely outcome remains a modest and incremental policy agenda.
      Daniel DiSalvo is Professor of American Politics at the City University of New York and the author of Engines of Change: Party Factions in American Politics
      Carlo Invernizzi Accetti is Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York and the author of Techno-Populism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics More

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      Joe Biden: Black Lives Matter activists helped you win Wisconsin. Don't forget us | Justin Blake

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      Three months ago, a Kenosha police officer shot my nephew, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back in front of his children. Jacob was rushed to the hospital, where for days he was shackled to his bed, only to find he’d been paralyzed from the waist down. The officer who shot him, Rusten Sheskey, has yet to be charged with a crime and is currently on paid administrative leave.Days after the shooting, Donald Trump came and went, showing little empathy for our family, and calling for a violent crackdown on protests for racial justice. The press, too, came and went, as the drama of uprising transitioned into the long, slow work of healing and change. But even after the cameras left, after the president ignored our pain and took off in his motorcade, Kenoshans kept organizing.In close concert with the Blake family, grassroots organizations in Kenosha began turning protest power into electoral power in one of the most competitive swing states in the country. From the start, our goal was to counteract voter suppression and make sure everyone in our community had their voice heard at the ballot box.On 20 October, our family joined hundreds of activists and community members in a peaceful march from Kenosha to Milwaukee, receiving support along the way from luminaries like the former Ohio state senator Nina Turner and the Rev Jesse Jackson. The march took over 14 hours, ending in Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park, where Dontre Hamilton was killed by a police officer in 2014. The message of the marchers was simple: south-eastern Wisconsin has seen too much violence at the hands of the police. It’s time for Wisconsinites to vote out the politicians who have allowed, and often encouraged, this violence in our communities.Make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reformFor many of the activists in Kenosha, including Jacob’s family, this meant voting Trump out of office. In the last two weeks before the election, we took this message door to door in a canvassing sprint across Kenosha, a city where the Joe Biden campaign itself had very little presence on the ground. But for the thousands of low-propensity voters we spoke to one-on-one in the city of Kenosha, Biden’s 20,000 statewide vote margin might have looked a lot smaller.Mainstream Democrats often invoke “loyalty” as the quality they hope to inspire in their voters. But “loyalty” is a two-way street: party leaders shouldn’t expect it if they can’t deliver for the voters who put them in office. And on this front, particularly with Black voters, Biden is far from perfect. He spearheaded the 1994 crime bill, for instance, which expanded mass incarceration and hurt Black communities across the country.Kenosha’s community leaders are taking a chance on Biden, believing that this turning point will push him to learn from past mistakes and take a moral stance in this moment of national division. And we are tired of Trump’s hateful racism and the increasingly explicit imprimatur he’s given to violent white supremacists. But make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reform.He must start with the most obvious steps: executive orders that address the immediate need for federal remedies to protect Black and Brown citizens from police brutality; appointing a special prosecutor to investigate both criminal and civil rights violations in the Floyd, Taylor, Blake, Cole and Anderson cases. More broadly, Biden must recognize that poverty and racism are pandemics in their own right, each of which has been exacerbated by Covid-19. Beginning to remedy them will require not just an emergency economic stabilization package, but a national moratorium on foreclosures and evictions for the next 12 months, and a prioritization of funding for the communities of color hit hardest by the virus.These demands are not coming from Kenosha alone, but from all across the country, where the Black Lives Matter movement – the largest social uprising in our nation’s history – has inspired a new generation of voters and activists. So while racial justice leaders may have helped Biden take back the White House, come January 2021, we’ll be reminding him exactly who got him there. More

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      We're being told Biden won't be able to achieve much. We must reject that idea | Astra Taylor

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      One thing we have learned from this election is just how crazy our democratic system is. Many crucial victories came down to slim margins in swing states and the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college.
      Moving forward, progressives need to rally around serious democracy reform. Every issue we care about, from heathcare to climate justice, flows from that. Without a major intervention – and even with radical candidates winning office here and there – our political system is becoming less and less representative and responsive.
      We need to start thinking about voting rights as operating on multiple levels. One is access to the ballot box: are you able to vote? Two: is your vote counted? Then there’s a third – does your vote have consequences? In other words, is your vote impactful politically? Does it lead to the ability for your chosen candidate to govern? That is where we are now. Even after our votes are counted and Joe Biden has sealed the deal to become president-elect, we’re being told that it will be impossible for him to accomplish anything given that the Republicans will likely control the Senate.
      We have to challenge that logic as much as we can. The fact that the Democrats didn’t sweep Congress – that Biden may be dealing with a divided government – is extremely disappointing. But there’s actually a lot that a president can do with a divided or weak Congress if they have a spine. For example, Biden can use the same tactics that Trump used to fill various high-power positions without having them confirmed, by using the Vacancies Act and making recess appointments. Biden can also use executive power in bold ways, including to cancel all federal student loan debt using a legal authority called “compromise and settlement”. We must remind the incoming administration of the power it possesses, even if the circumstances are less than ideal. More