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      Dr Jill Biden won't be a 'traditional' US first lady. Some men are threatened by that | Keli Goff

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      Last week the writer Joseph Epstein embarrassed himself by publishing a Wall Street Journal column denigrating incoming First Lady Jill Biden for using the “Dr” title she earned with her doctorate. He wrote: “Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.”The backlash was swift. The president-elect’s communications director, Kate Bedingfield, tweeted: “What patronizing, sexist, elitist drivel”. The daughter of Martin Luther King Jr tweeted in support of Jill Biden, reminding people that her father used the title Dr, despite not being a medical doctor. She added “And his work benefited humanity greatly, yours does, too.” And the first lady to be replied herself in a tweet on Sunday, saying: “Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished.”Epstein’s article exposed the cultural powder-keg Dr Biden was always destined to ignite. She maintained her professional career teaching community college while serving as second lady and intends to continue working as first lady. While some of us are thrilled with that, others, like Epstein are threatened.First ladies have often been expected to sacrifice their careers to perform ceremonial tasks. I can’t imagine what it was like for Michelle Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer like her spouse, to be expected to oversee a White House garden and Christmas decorations while her husband ran the free world.Of course, Michelle Obama had much less flexibility in defining the first lady role than her predecessors. Because of the unfair stereotypes that caricature African American women, the bar for her to succeed was set incredibly high. Unfortunately, that meant mimicking the least threatening first ladies who preceded her. At the time plenty of Americans would have been unlikely to describe a nearly 6ft-tall, Ivy league-educated, brown-skinned black woman as non-threatening. So instead Michelle transformed into a pearls-and-sweater set hugger-in chief. No one is threatened by a hugger-in-chief.For Melania, the transformation was far less pronounced. With her modeling days behind her, prior to her husband’s election she had settled comfortably into the role of trophy wife turned socialite. Essentially her full-time job was being the charming spouse of her powerful husband, which is ultimately what the role of first lady has been. While audio tapes recorded by her former friend and aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff denote a darker, less charming side of Trump, she fundamentally did what most first ladies do. She hosted state dinners, did some volunteering, and remodeled various parts of the White House grounds. Again, she leaves a fairly non-threatening legacy, like the First Ladies who most recently preceded her.But Dr Biden announced from the get-go that she would continue her career as a community college professor, regardless of whether her husband was elected president. She had already broken the mold by maintaining her career while he was vice-president. Though this is not particularly unusual in some of our allied countries (Cherie Blair, for example, maintained a career in academia while her husband Tony was British prime minister), it is highly unusual for America.Dr Biden will soon become the least traditional first lady in recent history. The last time an American first lady charted a nontraditional path it didn’t go so well. Remember when Hillary Clinton was leading the charge on healthcare reform back in 1993? She probably wishes that you didn’t. Years later Clinton is looked back on as a pioneer – yet the blowback she received at the time was brutal. Some of it was driven by the legitimate gripe that when you elect a president you are not electing his spouse to do policy. Fair enough. But some of the opposition and vitriol was clearly driven by something more disturbing and enduring: the idea that many Americans want a traditional and non-threatening first lady – a first wife, first mother, first hostess, first cookie-baker, first-hugger, but not a first career woman and certainly not an ambitious woman.The fact that Dr Jill Biden is a woman whose professional ambitions are important enough to her to continue them despite being married to the country’s most powerful man is what really troubles Epstein. He makes that clear in his column’s conclusion, in which he writes, “Forget the small thrill of being Dr Jill, and settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Jill Biden.” He is oblivious to the fact that marrying a powerful man may not be what Dr Biden, or any modern woman, would consider her greatest thrill today.Thanks to the example set by vice-president-elect Kamala Harris, and her husband Doug, perhaps soon more men will become comfortable seeking out the thrill of marrying a powerful woman. More

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      Who Rigs the Ship of State?

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      Northeastern University’s website offers this account of US President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results in the runup to the Electoral College’s declaring Joe Biden the next president of the United States: “While no proof of tampering has emerged so far, the president has repeatedly claimed that his election was rigged or stolen, fired members of his administration who didn’t go along with the allegations, and pressured state officials to overturn results.”

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      Last week Trump was in Florida campaigning for the two Republican Senate candidates in next month’s special election. He also warned Georgians to expect more rigging: “They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, and they’re gonna try to rig this election too.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Rigged:

      Fitted out with the ropes, sails, pulleys and other equipment needed for a ship to sail, a traditional maritime labor that politicians long ago realized could be adapted to the needs of the democracies they felt predestined to control.

      Contextual Note

      The author of the article, Peter Ramjug, cites a survey conducted in November that reveals this astonishing fact: “More than half of Republican voters either believe President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 race or aren’t entirely sure who did win.” This should surprise no one. After all, when polled in 2006, a clear majority of Republicans believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, even though none were found in the end. As late as 2015, a majority of Republicans still believed that. This stands as a clear demonstration of the power of faith among Republicans, many of whom view Fox News as the Newer Testament.

      Another finding from the survey may seem more surprising, namely that 34% of independents polled apparently either believed Trump was the winner or “weren’t sure who was.” That’s an impressive number for people who have no apparent reasons to prove their loyalty to a political party.

      Ramjug alludes to the fact, often noted by pundits, that Americans have been showing a growing distrust not only of the nation’s institutions but of each other. The trend is toward solipsism and narcissism, the character traits Trump so perfectly exemplifies. A Pew survey published in July 2019 drew this troubling conclusion: “Many Americans see declining levels of trust in the country, whether it is their confidence in the federal government and elected officials or their trust of each other.” 

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      It’s worth noting that this 2019 survey dates from what we now look back on as the halcyon epoch when there was no pandemic to fear and only the vaguest stirrings of the quadrennial psychodrama known as presidential election campaigns that was about to unfold. The survey contained some good news. It found that 84% of those polled “think the decline in trust can be turned around.” It would be interesting to find out what that figure might be today. Our guess is that it would be below 50%.

      Ramjung cites the demographic breakdown that reveals “20 percent of white respondents overall believing Trump won, compared to 14 percent of Hispanic respondents, 9 percent of Asian respondents, and 7 percent of Black respondents.” The numbers for Hispanics, Asians and blacks correspond roughly to the percentage of each group that actually voted for Trump. This would appear to confirm the growing tendency of Americans to confuse their wishes with the truth or more simply to cast the notion of truth aside and cling to a belief in the “reality” of their wishes. And they aren’t wrong. Their wishes are real, even the ones that have no connection to reality.

      The Pew survey found that more than “two-thirds (69%) of Americans say the federal government intentionally withholds important information from the public that it could safely release, and 61% say the news media intentionally ignores stories that are important to the public.” In this case, their perception is correct on both counts. 

      Every citizen should be cognizant of the fact that all governments — even in democracies — manage the news and that corporate media have their own criteria, related to their obsessive quest for ratings, governing their selection of stories. The New York Times claims it reports “all the news that’s fit to print.” It fails to remind us of what everyone spontaneously understands, that commercial interests have the power to define what’s “fit.” The Times consistently ignores important stories and magnifies rumors and lies.

      One lesson everyone in the US should have learned — despite what the government and media choose to teach or suppress — is that everyone has the duty to market their own agenda. It’s a competitive world. If not quite dog eat dog, it has at least become dog tweet dog. You have to get your message across as frequently and volubly as possible. In such a system, who can distinguish truth from lies?

      Historical Note

      Joan Didion, an acute observer of US culture, captured one essential truth in an essay written 50 years ago. She was attempting to come to grips with the disaffection and alienation that had become evident through the disruptive events of the 1960s: “It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.” 

      Time has always been an important notion in US culture. Depriving people of their “time” or even of the feeling that their time might soon be coming is akin to an attack on their soul. We now know that Joe Biden wants to restore “the soul of the nation.” If he is serious, he should think about a way to give the nation the time for the soul. Amazon, the nation’s most successful company, and the contemporary symbol of American commercialism, literally steals the time of its employees as it holds them accountable for every minute of their presence, monitoring and measuring their time and punishing them for seconds wasted.

      At the end of the 1960s — the age of the hippies and Vietnam War protests — the underground culture Didion was describing existed in the form of a restricted but vociferous minority. Its members strove to define a mission to which they could dedicate their time. It might be ending the war, returning to nature in a commune or chanting “Om” on a street corner with the Hare Krishnas. Those who feel betrayed today may no longer be a minority. But they have no mission, and they increasingly feel there is no exit.

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      Many of them cling to their admiration for and identification with celebrities. They confide their hope in them and offer them their trust. Donald Trump was the first pure celebrity to profit politically from that trend. Ronald Reagan may have paved the way in the 1980s, but he was a mere figurehead, a stand-in for the abstract idea of celebrity. He provided a name, a face and a voice, but all three were associated with an absence of personality. He robotically acted out the script of standard US patriotism. If people thought of him as a celebrity, it was as a cardboard cutout of celebrity. Trump is the opposite.

      The hyperreal world of democratic politics Trump exploited requires sophisticated constructions designed to funnel votes in an intended direction, just as the masts, sails and rigging of an imposing 19th-century clipper or frigate were designed to harness the power of the winds to maximum effect. In the end, whether it’s a massive sailing ship, a movie set on the scale of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” or James Cameron’s “Titanic,” the rigging is what holds everything together.

      The rigging of elections in the US starts long before people can even think about voting. Between passing laws that make voting difficult for specific categories of people (the art of voter suppression), gerrymandering and the lock-hold on politics of the two-party system itself, the political class has consistently demonstrated its resourcefulness in preventing democracy from expressing and implementing the will of the people. For Trump this year, the Republicans’ rigging simply couldn’t match the Democrats’. It isn’t about shenanigans like stuffing ballot boxes or getting the dead to vote. It’s about equipping a ship that can sail for the next four years.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Everything you need to know about the electoral college vote

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      I thought Biden had won the election – why is there another vote?Yes, Joe Biden has won and all US states have certified their election results. But the constitution demands that the electoral college formally cast its vote for president. The constitution requires “electors” to cast those votes – 538 such electors make up the electoral college.The vote happens on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, a wait after the election in early November designed to give states enough time to clarify and certify results.What is the electoral college?It is not a place – the term refers to the group of people who formally elect the president. Electors are chosen by political parties in each state ahead of the election. The party which wins a state has its electors formally vote for its candidate. Donald Trump tried to remove electors in some states ahead of today’s vote but the US supreme court rejected that attempt last week.Where does the electoral college vote happen?The electors gather in their own states and cast ballots on paper, usually in the state capitol or the office of the governor or the secretary of state.Do we know who these electors are?They are usually though not always significant figures in their state’s party establishment. Stacey Abrams is one of Georgia’s electors while Hillary Clinton is an elector in New York.Howe long will this take?Indiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Vermont were the first states to vote at 10am ET. Hawaii will be the last to vote, at 7pm. Some states at the heart of Trump’s baseless lawsuits – his campaign has lost 59 cases and won one, which affected a tiny number of votes – vote a little later, Wisconsin at 1pm and Michigan at 2pm.What happens next?The electoral college sends its votes to Washington, where they are counted in a joint session of Congress on 6 January. The president of the Senate – the vice-president, Mike Pence – then formally announces the winner.Can Trump do anything to frustrate that process?Republicans can object to the counting of the votes on 6 January. If objections are raised in the House and Senate, Congress has to adjourn to consider them. However, a successful objection would have to be upheld by both houses of Congress. As Democrats control the House, this will not happen.Will Trump finally accept the result at that point?Unlikely. The Latin motto on Trump’s Scottish coat of arms, which he gained after a lawsuit, can be translated as “Never Concede”. He has not shown any sign that he will. More

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      US to hold world climate summit early next year and seek to rejoin Paris accord

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      The US will hold a climate summit of the world’s major economies early next year, within 100 days of Joe Biden taking office, and seek to rejoin the Paris agreement on the first day of his presidency, in a boost to international climate action.Leaders from 75 countries met without the US in a virtual Climate Ambition Summit co-hosted by the UN, the UK and France at the weekend, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord. The absence of the US underlined the need for more countries, including other major economies such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, to make fresh commitments on tackling the climate crisis.Biden said in a statement: “I’ll immediately start working with my counterparts around the world to do all that we possibly can, including by convening the leaders of major economies for a climate summit within my first 100 days in office … We’ll elevate the incredible work cities, states and businesses have been doing to help reduce emissions and build a cleaner future. We’ll listen to and engage closely with the activists, including young people, who have continued to sound the alarm and demand change from those in power.”He reiterated his pledge to put the US on a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and said the move would be good for the US economy and workers. “We’ll do all of this knowing that we have before us an enormous economic opportunity to create jobs and prosperity at home and export clean American-made products around the world.”António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said: “It is a very important signal. We look forward to a very active US leadership in climate action from now on as US leadership is absolutely essential. The US is the largest economy in the world, it’s absolutely essential for our goals to be reached.”Donald Trump, whose withdrawal of the US from the Paris agreement took effect on the day after the US election in November, shunned the Climate Ambition Summit. Countries including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico were excluded as they had failed to commit to climate targets in line with the Paris accord. Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, had sought to join the summit but his commitments were judged inadequate, and an announcement from Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, of a net zero target just before the summit was derided as lacking credibility.The Climate Ambition Summit failed to produce a major breakthrough, but more than 70 countries gave further details of plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement goal of limiting temperature rises to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspirational 1.5C limit.Many observers had hoped India might set a net zero emissions target, but its prime minister, Narendra Modi, promised only to “exceed expectations” by the centenary of India’s independence in 2047. China gave some details to its plan to cause emissions to peak before the end of this decade but stopped short of agreeing to curb its planned expansion of coal-fired power.The UK pledged to stop funding fossil fuel development overseas, and the EU set out its plan to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.Alok Sharma, the UK’s business secretary, who will preside over UN climate talks called Cop26 next year, said much more action was needed. “[People] will ask: have we done enough to put the world on track to limit warming to 1.5C and protect people and nature from the effects of climate change? We must be honest with ourselves – the answer to that is currently no,” he said.When Biden’s pledge to bring the US to net zero emissions by 2050 is included, countries accounting for more than two-thirds of global emissions are subject to net zero targets around mid-century, including the EU, the UK, Japan and South Korea. China has pledged to meet net zero by 2060, and a large number of smaller developing countries have also embraced the goal.The task for the next year, before the Cop26 conference in Glasgow next November, will be to encourage all the world’s remaining countries – including oil-dependent economies such as Russia and Saudi Arabia – to sign up to long-term net zero targets, and to ensure that all countries also have detailed plans for cutting emissions within the next decade.Those detailed national plans, called nationally determined contributions (NDCs), are the bedrock of the Paris agreement, setting out emissions curbs by 2030. Current NDCs, submitted in 2015, would lead to more than 3C of warming, so all countries must submit fresh plans in line with a long-term goal of net zero emissions. The US will be closely watched for its plans.Nathaniel Keohane, a senior vice-president at the Environmental Defense Fund, said: “The [Climate Ambition] Summit captured and reflected the momentum of recent months, but didn’t push much beyond it. The world is waiting for Biden to bring the US back into the Paris agreement, and will be looking for how ambitious the US is willing to be in its NDC.” More

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      Wall Street Journal denounced after ‘sexist’ article calls Jill Biden ‘kiddo’

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      The Wall Street Journal has come under a torrent of denunciation for publishing a “sexist” opinion article that calls Jill Biden, the first lady-in-waiting, “kiddo”, and questions her right to use “Dr” in front of her name.Biden’s director of communications Elizabeth Alexander denounced the piece as “sexist and shameful”. Michael LaRosa, Biden’s spokesperson in the transition team, went further and demanded an apology, saying the newspaper should be embarrassed by the “sexist attack”.The article, written by a former adjunct professor at Northwestern University, purports to offer Biden “a bit of advice”. Opening on the provocative note of calling her “Madame (sic) First Lady – Mrs Biden – Jill – kiddo”, the author goes on to recommend that she drop the honorific of “Dr” before her name.“‘Dr Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic,” Epstein writes. He justifies his condescension towards her title on grounds that it referred to an “Ed D – a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware”.Over the weekend, a groundswell of criticism built into a tidal wave over the haughtiness of the piece and its sexism and racism, such as where the author suggests as a simile for rarity the phrase: “Rarer than a contemporary university honorary-degree list not containing an African-American woman”.Hillary Clinton put her reaction most pithily: “Her name is Dr Jill Biden. Get used to it.”Other prominent public figures also waded in. Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, tweeted at Biden saying: “My father was a non-medical doctor. And his work benefited humanity greatly. Yours does, too.”Doug Emhoff, who is destined to become “second gentleman” as the spouse of the vice president-elect Kamala Harris, said that Biden had earned her degrees through “hard work and pure grit… This story would never have been written about a man.”Perhaps the harshest criticism came from Epstein’s old employer, Northwestern University, which tartly noted that he hasn’t taught there in almost 20 years. In a statement, the English department said it rejected his opinion on Biden “as well as the diminishment of anyone’s duly-earned degrees in any field, from any university”.Epstein’s profile on the Northwestern website, where he had been listed as an “emeritus lecturer”, was apparently later taken down, the journalist David Gura reported on Twitter. More

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      Electoral college vote may be knockout blow to Trump's ploy to subvert election

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      Donald Trump on Monday could suffer a withering blow to his increasingly hopeless effort to overturn the results of the US presidential election when 538 members of the electoral college will cast their ballots and formally send Joe Biden to the White House.Under the arcane formula which America has followed since the first election in 1789, Monday’s electoral college vote will mark the official moment when Biden becomes the 46th president-in-waiting. Electors, including political celebrities such as both Bill and Hillary Clinton, will gather in state capitols across the country to cement the outcome of this momentous race.Normally, the process is figurative and barely noted. This year, given Trump’s volatile display of tilting at windmills in an attempt to negate the will of the American people, it will carry real political significance.Trump continued those quixotic efforts over the weekend, sparking political unrest in several cities including the nation’s capital. On Sunday morning he tweeted in all caps that this was the “most corrupt election in US history!”.In an interview with Fox & Friends that aired on Sunday, he insisted that his anti-democratic mission was not over. “We keep going and we’re going to continue to go forward,” he said, before repeating a slew of lies about the election having been rigged.Trump’s barefaced untruths about having won key states including Pennsylvania and Georgia went entirely unchallenged by the Fox News interviewer, Brian Kilmeade.Any faltering hopes Trump might still harbor of hanging on to power were shattered on Friday when the US supreme court unanimously and bluntly dismissed a lawsuit led by Texas to block Biden’s victory in four other states. In a different case, a Wisconsin supreme court judge decried Trump’s lawsuit aiming to nullify the votes of 200,000 Americans, saying it “smacked of racism”.Despite the categoric rebuff that Trump has suffered in dozens of cases, including before the nation’s highest court, his unprecedented ploy to tear up democratic norms continues to inflict untold damage on the country with potential long-term consequences. The Texas-led push to overturn the election result was backed by 126 Republicans in the House of Representatives – almost two-thirds of the party’s conference – as well as Republican state attorneys general from 18 states.Among the wider electorate, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 77% of Republicans believe – mistakenly – that there was widespread voter fraud in the 3 November election.Another manifestation of the harm that is being done was the violence that erupted on Saturday night across several cities. In Washington DC, four people were stabbed and required hospital treatment, and 23 were arrested, when far-right groups clashed with counter-protesters following a so-called “Stop the Steal” march enthusiastically endorsed by Trump.Far-right militia groups mingled among the Trump supporters and engaged in the violence, including the white nationalist Proud Boys who call themselves “western chauvinists”. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI, addressed a crowd, exclaiming: “We decide the election. We’re waging a battle across America.”Violence also broke out in Olympia, the state capital of Washington state. One person was shot in clashes between heavily armed factions, with Trump supporters and Proud Boys facing off against counter-protesters, and three people were arrested.Video footage appeared to show that the shot was fired by a member of the Proud Boy and that the victim was a counter-protester, although details remained sketchy.In Georgia, a separate militia group, Georgia Security Force III%, were in attendance at a far-right rally at the statehouse on Saturday. The armed group has helped to organise recent caravans that have intimidated local election officials at their homes claiming falsely that Biden’s victory in Georgia was fraudulent.Biden’s transition team has watched with growing alarm the spate of violent incidents that has cropped up around Trump’s spurious claims of a rigged election. Cedric Richmond, a Democratic representative from Louisiana who Biden has tapped as the incoming director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, said they were anxious about what lay ahead in the holiday season.“We are concerned about violence,” he told Face the Nation on CBS News. “Where there’s violence it is not protest, that is breaking the law, so we are worried about it.”Asked about the majority of House Republicans who backed Trump’s frivolous lawsuit to block election results being certified, Richmond implied their resistance was more theatrical than real. “They recognize Joe Biden’s victory. This is just a small proportion of the Republican conference that is appeasing the president on his way out because they are scared of his Twitter” feed.The outlier nature of Trump’s stubborn refusal to concede was underlined on Sunday by Al Gore in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union. Exactly 20 years ago to the day, he conceded the bitterly-fought 2000 presidential race to George W Bush, saying: “This is America, we put country before party – we will stand together behind our new president.”Gore told CNN that he hoped Monday’s electoral college vote would be the beginning of healing. He called the lawsuit dismissed by the supreme court “ridiculous and unintelligible”, and castigated those Republicans who continued to stick with Trump in his “lost cause”.“With the electoral college votes tomorrow in all 50 states, I hope that will be the point at which some of those who have hung on will give up the ghost,” Gore said. “There are things more important than bowing to the fear of a demagogue.” More

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      Joe Biden’s bid to rally the ‘free world’ could spawn another axis of evil

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      Joe Biden’s big idea – a US-led global alliance of liberal democracies ranged against authoritarian regimes and “strongman” leaders – sits at the heart of his American restoration project. His proposed “united front” of the great and the good is primarily intended to counter China and Russia. Yet it could also antagonise valued western allies such as India, Turkey and Poland. For this and other reasons, it seems destined to fail.Biden pledged during this year’s election campaign to hold a “summit for democracy” in 2021 “to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the free world”. It would aim “to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda”, he said. It was needed because, partly due to Donald Trump, “the international system that the US so carefully constructed is coming apart at the seams”.It’s a laudable aspiration. Recent years have seen a marked growth in oppressive, mostly rightwing regimes that ignore international law and abuse UN-defined universal rights, including democratic rights. But how will Biden decide who qualifies for his alliance? Totalitarian North Korea and Syria’s criminal regime are plainly unwelcome. Yet illiberal Thailand, Venezuela and Iran all maintain supposedly democratic systems. Will they get a summit invite?Diplomats are already predicting Biden’s grand coalition will end up as a rehash of the G7 group of leading western economies – the US, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Japan. One wheeze is to add India, Australia and South Korea – a notional “D-10”. But that simply creates another elite club from which many actual or aspiring democracies are excluded.Part of the difficulty is Biden himself. Terms such as the “free world”, recalling his formative years during the cold war, sound outdated. His blithe assertion of American moral superiority jars with recent experience. “We have to prove … that the US is prepared to lead again, not just with the example of our power but also with the power of our example,” he says. It’s an old refrain. Yet the songsheet has changed, and so have the singers.China does not threaten global security in the existential way the Soviet Union once did. The fundamental challenge it poses is subtler, amoral and multi-dimensional – technological, ideological, commercial, anti-democratic. The idea that a cowed world is counting on the US to ride to the rescue is old-think. The age of solo superpower is over; the unipolar moment was squandered. Power balances were already shifting before Trump destroyed trust.Weak, divided Europe may prove to be the exception in welcoming Biden’s initiative. “We need to step up our action to defend democracy,” says Josep Borrell, EU foreign affairs chief, amid alarm over recent trends highlighted in the V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2020. It asserts that for the first time since 2001, autocracy is the world’s leading form of governance – in 92 countries in total, home to 54% of the global population.Britain’s international position is now so enfeebled that it will back almost anything Biden suggests. Germany will support his initiative too, as long as he does not endanger its lucrative China exports. Hungary and Poland are problematic. The Polish government’s disregard for judicial independence and abortion rights sits badly with a campaign promoting liberal values. According to V-Dem, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is no longer a democracy at all but an “electoral authoritarian regime”.Looking further afield, Biden’s democracy drive could be like trying to herd cats, with much clawing and spitting. India is a case in point. It calls itself the world’s biggest democracy. Yet under prime minister Narendra Modi, it has become one of the biggest rights abusers, oppressing political opponents, independent media, NGOs such as Amnesty International, and millions of Muslims. Modi has nothing to say about democracy, except how to subvert it.Strictly speaking, Biden should add Taiwan, a model east-Asian democracy, to his guest list. To do so would utterly enrage China, so perhaps he won’t. Including Sudan and Afghanistan, both striving for democracy, might constitute wishful thinking. Conversely, snubbing Turkey, Peru, the Philippines, Uganda and a host of other flawed or pretend democracies would greatly offend otherwise friendly governments.The point here is that Biden, like all his predecessors, will in the end be obliged to deal with the world as it is, not as he would like it to be. As Barack Obama demonstrated in 2009, making a fine speech in Cairo about new beginnings in the Arab world feels good but ultimately signifies little. When the Arab spring faltered, the US backed the bad guys – in Egypt’s case, the dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – because it suited its selfish geopolitical interests.China and Russia, and other undemocratic outcasts such as Saudi Arabia, will count on rediscovered realism to temper Biden’s plan in practice, even if he persists with old-school American rhetoric about values and rights. Only if he and his allies attempt something meaningful, such as actively defending Hong Kong’s shattered freedoms, will Beijing feel the need to push back.Unlike Eritrea or, say, Belarus, there is much China can do if Washington’s pro-democracy tub-thumping grows unbearable. On issues such as the pandemic and the climate crisis, Beijing’s involvement is indispensable, and Biden knows it. All manner of economic, diplomatic and political leverage could be used to deflect US pressure. Most provocative is the suggestion, recently recycled by Vladimir Putin, that Russia and China may forge an anti-western military alliance, potentially drawing in lesser powers such as North Korea.This probably won’t happen. But it’s just possible that Biden’s well-meant but polarising “alliance of democracies” will deepen divisions and unintentionally spawn a new “axis of evil”. Unlike the much-hyped original, this one would be truly formidable. More