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      Schumer promises quick but fair trial as Trump impeachment heads to Senate

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      Ex-president forms legal team before February hearingsBiden focuses on nominations and legislative prioritiesTrump plots revenge on Republicans who betrayed himThe single article of impeachment against Donald Trump will on Monday evening be delivered to the Senate, where Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer is promising a quick but fair trial. Related: Trump’s second impeachment trial: the key players Continue reading… More

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      'Racism is in the bones of our nation': Will Joe Biden answer the 'cry' for racial justice?

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      Activists are hopeful but cautious as president acknowledges ground shifted in the US after the police killing of George FloydIn his first few minutes as America’s new president, Joe Biden made a promise so sweeping that it almost seemed to deny history. “We can deliver racial justice,” Biden pledged to his factious nation. It wasn’t a commitment presented in any detail as he moved on to asserting that America would again be the leading force for good in the world, a claim that draws its own scrutiny.But Biden acknowledged that the ground has shifted over demands for racial justice in the US following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May and the violent white nationalism of Donald Trump.“A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” said Biden. “And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.” Continue reading… More

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      Biden wants unity and democracy. But in the US these have always been in conflict | David Runciman

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      The three words that stood out in Joe Biden’s powerful inaugural address, if only for the number of times he used them, were “democracy”, “unity” and “truth”. But it was democracy that took centre stage. “This is democracy’s day,” he said, in his first statement after taking the oath of office. “The will of the people has been heard … Democracy has prevailed.”Is this apparent vindication of democracy enough for unity and truth to prevail as well? The founding fathers of the American republic, whose history and institutions Biden also repeatedly invoked, might have been surprised to hear him run the three together. They believed they were founding a state that was designed to keep democracy at arm’s length. James Madison, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers and a future president, stated that the American constitution he helped to write would mean “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share [in the government]”.The founders were as keen on unity and truth as Biden. But they thought too much democracy would put them at risk. They viewed the voting public as notoriously fractious and prone to believe all sorts of nonsense. The point of establishing a republic rather than a democracy was to ensure there were safeguards against populism in all its forms.Biden clearly meant something different by democracy than the people gone wild. He was invoking a different, and much later tradition, that sees democracy as defined by the peaceful transfer of power. In academic circles this is sometimes called the minimalist theory of democracy. It says that it is sufficient for democracy if incumbents, who control the armed forces, hand over that control to the people who defeat them at the ballot box. The guns change hands when the voters change sides.The trouble with this view is that it is so minimal, unity and truth are optional extras. There are many places around the world where democracy has failed even this test and defeated incumbents have refused to leave, leading to dictatorship or civil war. But when the test is passed it leaves unresolved most of the questions about how to do politics better.Coming just two weeks after an attempt to storm the Capitol and prevent the certification of the election result, Biden’s inauguration took place in the shadow of the most serious threat to this minimal definition of democracy in recent American history. The country had come dangerously close to failing the test. What Biden could also have said, but didn’t, was that the founders were in part to blame.The anger of Trump’s supporters was stoked by the institutions designed to keep the people away from the most important decisions. In strict majoritarian terms Biden won the election comfortably, by a national margin of more than 7 million votes. But the electoral college made it seem much closer, and allowed the defeated president to look for a few thousand votes here or there that might have made the difference. Millions of voters are much harder to conjure out of thin air.Trump’s resistance to democratic realities also rested its hopes on the other institutions of the republic that were meant to keep the people out. He believed that the supreme court, with three of his appointees on it, should save him. He looked to the Senate, which gives a disproportionate influence to sparsely populated rural states, to have his back. The fact that these hopes were misplaced – and the Senate may yet convict him in an impeachment trial – doesn’t mean that democracy was vindicated. The institutions that quelled popular resistance to the election result were the same ones that inflamed it.This suggests it is not enough for Biden to fall back on the long history of American democracy in making his case for what should come next. The peaceful transfer of power obscures the ways in which American democracy is at odds with the institutions that achieved it.There is a choice to be made here. Democracy could be enhanced – and institutions such as the electoral college and the Senate reformed to reflect current demography rather than ancient history. But that is likely to come at the cost of unity. Republicans would resist fiercely. Truth would probably suffer too, if only because we have learned that these days resistance tends to come as an assault on the facts. Any attempt to change the constitution would be challenged not just as unpatriotic, but probably as a foreign plot.The alternative is to stick with the status quo and hope it is enough to paper over the cracks. In that case, unity will have been prioritised over democracy. It is probably the easier path, and Biden may think he has better things to do than pick a fight on democratic institutional reform. Any bipartisan consensus is unlikely to survive changes that leave one party worse off in electoral terms. Enacting the people’s will can be a deeply divisive enterprise.One temptation – and Biden would hardly be the first president to succumb to it – is to use the word democracy as a catch-all while avoiding these difficult choices. In the short term, it might enable him to concentrate on tackling the immediate challenges the country faces, from the pandemic to the economy. But it also means that frustration with political elites will continue to build.Invoking the will of the people while relying on institutions that are designed to stifle it is not a recipe for long-term stability. Yet doing anything about it risks the unity for which Biden stands. He is treating democracy as though it were a panacea, when in truth it is always a fight.On the day of Biden’s inauguration the people were indeed excluded, but not in the way the founders had intended. Instead, because of the threat from extremists, the crowds were kept away and replaced by military personnel around the podium and flags down the Mall. It was in keeping with an occasion that paid lip service to an idea whose reality is much more contentious.The peaceful transfer of power, particularly achieved at such a high price, is only the bare minimum of what needs to be done for democracy to prevail. The rest is much less certain and comes with many risks.It was the riskiness of democracy that made the founders nervous, but that is its point: the dynamism of people’s politics has always gone with a dangerous unpredictability. But there are other risks too. Keeping democracy at bay for the sake of unity does not guarantee a peaceful life. The danger is that it comes to seem less like democracy fulfilled, and more like democracy endlessly deferred.• David Runciman is professor of politics at Cambridge University More

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      Joe Biden's talk of 'healing' is pointless, and will be seen as weakness by the right | Nesrine Malik

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      Normal. The United States is returning to normal. During Joe Biden’s inauguration, the commentary was overwhelmingly about a country slowly regaining consciousness, blinking away the bad dream that was Donald Trump. That state of normal was one of not just reinstating all the protocols and rituals of high office, but of the pastoral hand of the president. Biden will now “heal” the nation and rebuild America’s standing in the world. “Civility” will cleanse the US of the previous administration’s toxicity.But against the backdrop of the past four years in general and the previous two weeks in particular, the ceremonials all felt a bit flat, like trying to burn incense to banish the smell of a rotting corpse. Trump may be gone as president, but the morbidities he exposed remain. They hang heavily in the air: the 74 million people who voted for him despite four years of lies and carnage; the proportion of voters who still think the election was stolen; the ongoing round-up of those who stormed the Capitol; the hundreds of thousands of lives claimed by coronavirus.None of this was wrought by Trump’s hand alone. None of this could have happened without a pre-existing political culture, the “normal” to which the country now yearns to return. But every significant historical moment needs a narrative, and this was it: Trump had wounded a previously healthy America, divided it and lowered its tone, and Biden would now lay his healing hands on it with the help of a diverse coalition of grownups.In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson likens the US to an old house, flawed in foundation, wrecked by age, weakened by cosmetic changes that never address the structural flaws. “You may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought,” she writes. “Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”The speed with which Trump’s presidency sent the US into a vortex of racial and social discord is the first clue that the old house was built on shaky foundations. These forces cannot be summoned overnight. They were gnawing away at the core of the country long before Trump became president. They are, in fact, why Trump became president. In describing the effects of Covid-19 on those with even mild pre-existing conditions, a doctor told me that the virus is a “mortality accelerant”. It takes the thing that might have claimed you in 20 or 30 years, and weakens your body so that it claims you today.So let us look at the “normal” that Trump disrupted. Before he took office, the US was a country in which, since 9/11, far-right extremists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks as Islamic terrorists. The year 2019 ended up being the deadliest on record for domestic terrorism in the US since then. Before Trump, while the country’s first African American president was in power, the Black Lives Matter movement was founded in protest at the impunity of those who kill black Americans. And despite the widely accepted fiction that Trump’s popularity was a white working-class revolt, he won against Hillary Clinton among high-income white voters, who went on to benefit from a tax-cut windfall.In a country already riven by economic and class inequality, Trump proved how easily such divisions could be exploited to benefit rightwingers promising economic prosperity for some at the cost of the rest. It may seem that, after four long years of disruption, what is needed is a quiet spell of stability. But what this moment signifies is not a retreat by the forces that Trump has brought to the surface, but a temporary scattering before they regroup (in “some form”, as Trump himself said).To talk about normality, civility, reaching across the divide and healing at a time like this, when millions have rejected that offering at the polls and hundreds marched on the Capitol, is pointless. For the duly elected Democratic party to feel it needs to reassure voters that it comes in peace is an act of weakness – as if it has no radical plans to take on foundational issues and reorder economic and racial relations in the country. This conciliation is a win for the American right – not only for its Capitol-insurrectionist wing, but for its longer-term scaremongering about the “radical left”. This is already evident in the backlash against Biden’s first executive orders that, in merely undoing what Trump established, are seen as “culture war aggression”. Biden should be leading a government ready to take on the twin challenges of rooting out white supremacy and rebalancing the economy, yet it risks being one that aims only to fix the leaks of the past four years. This should be a government that stops papering over the cracks, and finally confronts the causes of divisions and embeds permanent reform. Otherwise, though Trump may be gone, the nightmare will be ongoing. More

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      Undoing Trump's legacy: Biden wastes no time in first 100 hours as president

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      On Sunday afternoon, the US will reach the 100th hour of Joe Biden’s presidency. Already, there has been a blitz of executive actions and a bewildering pace of change. Four years after Donald Trump set about undoing Barack Obama’s legacy, Obama’s vice-president appears to be returning the gesture with interest.Here are the key developments:UnityBiden’s inaugural address was a soulful plea to come together after four years of division.“This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge and unity is the path forward,” he said, promising to be a president for all Americans.The pared-down ceremony at the US Capitol, stormed by a mob just two weeks earlier, was a bipartisan affair that included outgoing vice-president Mike Pence. Trump, who falsely claimed he won the election, was conspicuously absent.ClimateBiden lost no time in rejoining the Paris climate agreement, earning Republican criticism. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said the move indicated Biden was “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh”, contending it would destroy thousands of jobs.The president also revoked the Keystone XL oil pipeline permit and instructed the Environmental Protection Agency and transportation department to reestablish fuel efficiency mandates weakened by Trump.CoronavirusBiden pledged a “wartime undertaking” to combat a pandemic in which more than 400,000 have died. He released a 198-page Covid-19 strategy and signed 10 executive orders and other directives.These included a mandate requiring anyone visiting a federal building or land or traveling on a plane, train, ship or intercity bus to wear a mask. There are stricter protocols at the White House, to avoid any repeat of Trump’s “superspreader” events.Biden ordered agencies to speed up manufacturing and delivery of personal protective equipment, directed officials to provide guidance on the reopening of schools and reversed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization.Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, returned to the White House briefing room after months of near banishment. “The idea that you can get up here and talk about what the evidence, what the science is and let the science speak, it is somewhat of a liberating feeling,” he said.EconomyBefore taking office, Biden sent Congress a proposed $1.9tn stimulus package. That remains the priority but he has ordered actions including a 15% boost to a programme for families whose children miss meals due to school closures. Nearly 30 million last week said they did not have enough food, according to the White House.Biden is seeking to extend moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures. He also wants a longer pause on student loan payments and interest. In a preview of demands from the left, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “OK, now let’s cancel them.”ImmigrationBiden sent Congress a bill overhauling the system and offering an eight-year pathway to citizenship for nearly 11m people without legal status. The president told the homeland security secretary to preserve and strengthen Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), which prevents the deportation of undocumented young people brought to America as children.He reversed an order excluding undocumented people from the census and ended an immigration ban on several Muslim-majority countries, an infamous Trump policy that press secretary Jen Psaki said was “rooted in religious animus and xenophobia”.Biden halted funding or construction of Trump’s wall at the US-Mexico border and cancelled the so-called “national emergency use” to divert billions of dollars to the wall. Trump proposed the wall when he launched his campaign in June 2015 and it remained his signature issue.Racial justiceKamala Harris was the first woman of colour to be sworn in as vice-president. “Don’t tell me things can’t change,” Biden said in his inaugural address. The breakout star of the ceremony was Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old African American poet.[embedded content]Biden issued an executive order on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities, described by Psaki as a “whole-of-government effort to advance racial equity and root out systemic racism from federal programmes and institutions”. Notably, it rescinded a Trump order that blocked federal agencies from offering diversity and inclusion training involving critical race theory.Team BidenThe Senate confirmed Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, the first woman to lead the US intelligence community, and retired general Lloyd Austin as defense secretary, the first African American to run the Pentagon.Biden has leaned heavily on Obama alumni and his cabinet will not include progressive lions such as senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren – in part because their replacements in a 50-50 Senate would be nominated by Republican governors. But the Democrats have shifted left on economics, immigration and other issues. Biden’s pick for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, is Rohit Chopra, a Warren ally.Brian Deese, director of the national economic council, told reporters: “When you’re at a moment that is as precarious as the one we find ourselves in, the risk of doing too little, the risk of undershooting far outweighs the risk of doing too much.”Truth and transparencyIn four years, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims, according to the Washington Post. On Wednesday Biden promised to “always level with you”. Psaki underlined his commitment is to “bring transparency and truth back to government,” during a restored daily press briefing light years removed from the lies and insults of Trump.The west wingLike his predecessors, Biden gave the Oval Office a makeover.In: a deep blue rug last used by Bill Clinton, a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and busts including civil rights activists César Chávez and Rosa Parks and former attorney general Robert Kennedy.Out: a red button that Trump reportedly used to summon a butler when he wanted a Diet Coke; a portrait of President Andrew Jackson; and a bust of Winston Churchill, triggering a media kerfuffle. Asked about its removal, Psaki replied sarcastically: “Oh, such an important question.” More

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      Netflix still several steps ahead in strategy for wooing subscribers

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      Only Frank Underwood could amass as much power in such a short space of time. Nearly eight years after Netflix used House of Cards as the launch of its global empire, the streaming service announced last week that it now had more than 200 million subscribers. The pandemic has hastened the company’s transformation from a debt-laden digital upstart into an essential part of the TV landscape in homes across the world.In 2013, when Netflix’s first original series made its debut, the company had 30 million (mostly US) subscribers. This was six years after it moved from being a DVD-by-post business to a streaming pioneer. Since then it has added 170 million subscribers in more than 190 countries and its pandemic-fuelled results last week sent Netflix’s market value to an all-time high of $259bn.Last year proved to be the best in the company’s history, even as a new wave of deep-pocketed rivals attempt to deprive it of its streaming crown. Accustomed to operating in battle mode, Netflix added a record 37 million new subscribers as lockdown prompted viewers to alleviate housebound cabin fever with fare including The Crown, Bridgerton and The Queen’s Gambit.Last week it reported that in 2020 the amount it earned from subscribers exceeded what it spent – to the tune of $1.9bnBut Netflix’s pioneering low-price, binge-watching approach to driving growth has come at a cost. Year after year the need to spend billions on ever-increasing numbers of films and TV shows in order to keep and attract subscribers has weighed on its balance sheet, if not its share price. With a Netflix subscription a fraction of the cost of a traditional pay-TV service, average revenue per user is low. This is great for growth but means the company has to keep on topping up its content budget to fulfil its binge-watching promise to fans. A few billion here and there has spiralled to $16bn in long-term debt and a further $19bn in “obligations” – essentially payments for content spread out over a number of years.Analysts have been split over Netflix’s grow-now-pay-for-it-later strategy, but the company finally appears to have proved the naysayers wrong. There was a symbolic announcement in its results last week: it reported that in 2020, free cashflow was positive – which means that the amount it earns from subscribers exceeds what it spends on content, marketing and other costs – to the tune of $1.9bn.Part of the reason for this was that Netflix’s content spend fell – from $14bn to $12bn – as a result of production stoppages caused by lockdowns, but it was a turning point nevertheless. It has taken 23 years since its humble beginnings as a DVD rental company in California for the Netflix machine to reach the point of sustainability.The firm’s decision in 2013 to invest heavily in original productions has proved critical – and prescient. It sensed, correctly, that its success would prompt the suppliers that it was licensing shows from to eventually keep them for their own services. In the past 18 months, HBO Max, Sky-owner Comcast’s Peacock and AppleTV+ have joined longer-term rival Amazon Prime Video in vying for subscribers.Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-chief executive, acknowledges this second wave in the streaming wars, particularly noting the “super-impressive” performance of Disney+, which has become the third global force in streaming behind Amazon. In just 14 months since its launch, the service, powered by franchises including Star Wars TV spin-off The Mandalorian, Marvel films and Frozen 2, has amassed 87 million subscribers four years sooner than forecast. Last month, Walt Disney+ announced a doubling of its content budget and tripled its forecast of subscriber numbers by 2024.However, new rivals have yet to dent the dominance of Netflix, which reported adding 8.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter, and revealed that 500 TV titles were in the works and a record 71 films would premiere this year. Some doubters had raised concerns that Netflix’s debt-fuelled growth was a financial house of cards. But its foundations look solid now.Nissan’s ‘edge’ over rivals is no vote for BrexitLeaving the EU without a deal would have been an act of economic self-sabotage nearly unrivalled by a developed economy. Carmakers’ relief that a deal was reached on Christmas Eve was palpable. Nissan’s glee became clear last week, with chief operating officer Ashwani Gupta repeatedly declaring that the Brexit deal had given the Japanese carmaker a “competitive advantage”.Nissan had looked through the complex new rules of origin governing trade between the UK and the EU. Parts and finished cars that cross the Channel will not attract tariffs if a certain proportion of their components are from either the UK or the EU. Nissan’s cars already comply with the rules.Crucially, this applies to high-value batteries, which a partner company builds in Sunderland, in a factory next door to Nissan’s. Other companies are not so well-placed and must rely instead on imports from east Asia. For them the Brexit deal has started a scramble to secure batteries from Europe – if they want to sell into the UK – or hope that untested UK companies can build gigafactories to supply them.However, the Japanese carmaker’s statement should not be mistaken for a “vote of confidence”, as Boris Johnson managed to do. Gupta acknowledged that the UK’s departure from the EU had brought new costs, though these were “peanuts” for a company of Nissan’s scale. They may not be so negligible for exporting entrepreneurs, a breed that will probably become rarer as non-tariff barriers increase for would-be traders with the EU.Furthermore, “competitive advantage” is a double-edged compliment. Nissan will gain on UK and EU rivals which do not source batteries locally. Even if it is less of a burden than those carried by competitors, a handicap – in this case increased trade friction with the UK’s biggest market – is still a handicap.A new president is not a panaceaIt would be a mistake to allow the relief that has accompanied Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election to become something close to euphoria and, consequently, freight the new US president with expectations that are unachievable.The next decade is looking troubled and fractious even now that Donald Trump’s hand is no longer on the tiller of the world’s largest and most powerful economy. From a global perspective, there is the assessment of climate economist Lord Stern that the next 10 years will be crucial if we are to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.China, for 30 years a convenient supplier of low-cost goods to the global economy, is becoming more authoritarian and looking to use its spheres of influence in Asia and Africa to quell complaints by international bodies about the way it treats Uighur Muslims and Hong Kong protesters. To make matters worse, populations in the west and in China are ageing and struggling to provide a decent standard of living for younger members of society.In the UK, Brexit reintroduces a welter of red tape into the trading arrangements this country has with its biggest commercial partner, the EU, and will depress average household incomes over a long period. So despite the relief in many corners of the globe that greeted Biden’s inauguration, there is reason to worry.But there are grounds for hope too. The pressure to address the climate emergency is growing rapidly and politicians all over the world are at last taking notice. The 26th UN climate change conference in Glasgow, scheduled for November, could mark a seismic shift in action. And Biden showed how inclusive he plans to be with his roster of inauguration acts, from the stalwart Republican country singer Garth Brooks to 22-year-old African American poet Amanda Gorman.It was telling that Biden said he wanted to build bridges. It will be difficult, but on the issue of climate change, if on nothing else, that must include China. More

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      Hurrah for triumph of the ‘centrist dad’ but don’t discount Joe Biden’s radicalism | Will Hutton

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      Last Wednesday in Washington was magnificent – the alchemy of a great republic’s democratic rituals, inspiring sentiments that did not fall into schmaltz, and the best of pop culture. Then there was the small matter of getting rid of the perpetrator of the Big Lie and welcoming a president who promised a new dawn, personified in Joe Biden’s dignity and decency.“Democracy has prevailed,” he declared. “There is truth and there are lies told for power and profit… each of us has a duty and responsibility to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.” It was the more extraordinary because it was all happening in the place threatened only a fortnight earlier by the ex-president’s menacing mob. America has shown us its best and worst and reminded us why it is such a compelling place.Absent from the celebrations was a large part of the Republican party, which, far from coming to terms with the extent of the deceit and deranged narcissism of their ex-president, was still holding on to his lie that the election was stolen. Amazingly, more than two-thirds of Republicans in the outgoing House of Representatives bowed to that view, voting not to certify the result only hours after the mob had been dispersed.The consensus is that this bodes ill for Biden and the US: the country needs the Republican party to break with Trump and recognise his lies. Until they do, America is a land divided. That is true, but it needs enough of the party’s base to believe the truth before enough Republican leaders will rupture their relationship with the master of Twitter invective and his mesmerising hold on his cult following. The liberal consensus on this prospect, however, is too pessimistic. Note that not one leading Republican turned up at Andrews Air Force Base to wave Trump’s plane goodbye. Republican leaders will openly turn on Trump if Biden and his team can drive inroads into the less cultish element of their support, so confronting them with a potential political death spiral. Here, the combination of beating the pandemic, the New Deal scale of Biden’s economic plans, along with the breadth of his support, including from donors fleeing the Republicans, offers him potential winning cards.Witness his surefooted moves in the first two days. The breathtaking scale and speed with which the US doubled economic production to support the war effort after Pearl Harbor was 80 years ago, but the cluster of Biden’s executive orders on Covid is an eerie reminder that when the US is minded it can mobilise like no other nation.It is now so minded. Biden is directing a “full-scale, wartime” Covid strategy, for example, to use the Defense Production Act to co-opt and direct the private sector to produce whatever is needed on the scale it is needed, from vaccine to PPE equipment. Masks are to be worn in federal buildings and on interstate public transport; incoming travellers will be required to quarantine; 100m vaccinations are to be rolled out by April.His Covid taskforce consists of can-do talents. Science is to rule: the top geneticist Eric Lander is to become his chief scientific adviser with cabinet rank. And to cap it all, rejecting Trump’s vaccine nationalism and recognising that to defeat the pandemic means good public health in Manaus or Mumbai as much as at home, the US is to rejoin the World Health Organization. The same reasoning informs Biden’s rejoining the Paris climate change accords; there is no point developing a national strategy for aggressive decarbonisation without the rest of the world acting in parallel.The US is rebuilding its multilateral bridges – expect the EU to be a crucial ally. Brexit Britain and its trade deal are second-order irrelevancies. Biden’s promise to deliver 2bn vaccinations internationally is an astonishing stroke; the 2 billion recipients will be the west’s best ally against the failing soft power ambitions of China – a foreign policy coup in 24 hours. Equally good moves were to freeze building the wall on the Mexican border and to rescind Trump’s “Muslim” travel ban as racist and discriminatory.The same change in values underpins domestic economic policy. A national emergency requires an emergency response, argues Biden, hence there are already discussions with Congress over a $1.9tn package to boost the incomes of the less well-off so hard hit by Covid. Beyond that, there are ambitious targets for a makeover of the US’s decaying infrastructure and to build a stakeholder economy – qualifying the privileged interest of shareholders, promoting the pursuit of purpose over profit and strengthening trade unions. Biden is a self-avowed “union man”.This is radical centrism. Biden’s values are there for all to see: he has already warned White House insiders he will have no truck with anybody who treats colleagues with disrespect; his cabinet’s diversity is in plain sight; his America is the majority and it is willing him on.Thus his success is likely, if beset by risk, and it could transform British politics. For Brexit is our Trump. Instead of the opposition conniving in the belief that the best that can be done is to improve the terms of the “deal” over many years ahead, the political task is to assemble a similarly broad coalition to Biden’s and oppose Brexit in the same terms. It is founded in the same Trumpite lies and disrespect for truth, it poses the same threat to decent values, the same isolation, the same rightwing dead end – and offers economic stagnation to boot.Leading Labour politicians, shattered by electoral defeat, have lost all self-confidence, their world narrowing to winning back former “red wall” seats. Biden demands a step change in ambition. Don’t resile from your beliefs – fight for them. What was done against Trump can be done against Brexit. Labour should heed Biden’s success: the US and its radical centrist show the way.• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist More