Subterms
Joe Biden was born on 20 November 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of four children in a Catholic family; his mother, Jean, had Irish roots. The family’s economic fortunes were up and down, with Biden’s father, Joseph, later becoming a successful car-tyre salesman. At school Biden was class president, although his grades were unremarkable.
Childhood, stutter and early career More
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress – a four-woman group known as “the squad” who all won reelection last week – toed the party line while calling on grassroots activists to boost Biden and Democrats down-ticket.
The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.
“If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”
Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.
The Ocasio-Cortez interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. Asked what her “macro takeaway” was from the election, she said: “Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a freefall to hell anymore.” Asked whether there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realising what work we have to do.”
While there were concerns about the reliability of exit polls this year with so much voting happening over mail and the failure of polls generally, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 by about as much as he did in 2016 – 15 points.
The coming period of presidential transition and the Biden administration’s early days will be crucial to determining whether the Democratic party will incorporate in a permanent way its grassroots progressive engine – or veer off down a path toward defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
Appearing on CNN later in the day, Ocasio-Cortez said: “Progressives have assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into… Every single swing seat member that co-sponsored Medicare for All won their re-election, and so the conversation is a little bit deeper than saying anything progressive is toxic.” More
When it became increasingly clear that a handful of battleground states would decide the winner in 2020’s US presidential election, many were struck by the razor-thin margins that emerged.
The results also revealed a striking data point: Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen’s share of the vote in some of these states was higher than margins between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Before Biden became president-elect, this breakdown of ballots prompted questions whether Jorgensen – a third-party candidate who did not have a serious chance of winning in 2020 – drew votes away from Trump.
In the Republican stronghold of Georgia, which will award 16 electoral college votes, Biden presently bests Trump by fewer than 8,000 ballots. The percentage-based breakdown puts this into sharp relief: Biden has won 49.5% of the votes compared to Trump’s 49.3%.
Jorgensen has won the remaining 1.2% – which now totals 61,792 votes. That number is more than seven times the Trump-Biden split there. The Associated Press has not yet called Georgia’s results. On Friday, state officials announced a recount.
Numbers from Arizona, which the AP has already called in favor of Biden, are also noteworthy. With 90% of the vote counted, Biden holds 1,626,943 votes to Trump’s 1,606,370 – a 49.6 to 48.9% divide. Jorgensen has landed 49,182 votes, or 1.5%. Arizona awards 11 electoral college votes.
In Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,748 votes in 2016, Biden has been called as the winner, with 1,630,570 votes compared to his opponent’s 1,610,030. Jorgensen got 38,415 votes, which is more than the difference between these candidates. Wisconsin has 10 electoral college votes.
That said, a vote for Jorgensen is not by any means necessarily a vote that Trump would have otherwise won.
Jorgensen herself doesn’t believe she is responsible for Republicans’ losses, and that the party’s candidates are to blame.
“They should be mad at those candidates for not following through on their campaign promises,” Jorgensen told the Greenville News, which is in her home state of South Carolina, earlier this week. She reportedly said that many of her supporters were “recovering Democrats” who want US troops brought home from abroad, as well as Republicans tired with federal spending.
“If I can get Republicans to start acting like Republicans and cutting the deficit. And if I can get the Democrats to go back to being the party of peace, bringing our troops home, and giving the average individual their rights? Then yes, I would be very pleased,” she told the newspaper.
“In the personal conversations I had [on the campaign trail] a lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, in 2016 I voted for Trump. I was so excited and then he didn’t follow through on his promises.’”
Several experts do not believe Jorgensen was a Trump “spoiler” in 2020.
The Cato Institute’s David Boaz, who has penned books on Libertarianism, told Reuters earlier this week: “We just don’t know what would have happened if the Libertarians had not run a candidate.”
He added: “Libertarians also get votes of people who just would not bother voting if they didn’t have another choice.”
Moreover, it’s unclear which party is more heavily affected by Libertarian votes.
Kenneth Mayer, American politics professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Reuters earlier this week: “It’s possible she played a role, but there is no way to know, and it doesn’t matter. The results of the election are the results of the election.”
Third-party candidates rarely impact overall election results. The 2000 Presidential election – where Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida, and George W Bush won this state by 537 votes – is a rare exception, Mayer rsaid.
Neither Jorgensen nor the Libertarian party immediately responded to requests for comment. More
Patterns of voting in the presidential election have once again revealed the deep divides that cut across America. As the social makeup of different parts of the country is shifting, so too is the balance of power in electoral politics. As the Democrats have seen their support grow in urban, more racially diverse, educated and younger places, the Republicans have strengthened their political hold on rural and small-town America, in places that are older and home to higher numbers of white, non-college graduates – a group that swung decisively behind Donald Trump in 2016, delivering him victory.
While both Trump and Joe Biden made gains on their party’s vote share in 2016, as fringe candidates were pushed to the sidelines, it was the Democrat who made the largest gains.
Analysis of voting in more than 3,000 counties across the United States sheds considerable light on the parts of the country that are moving in the direction of the Democrats, and those places that are shifting towards the Republicans – even against the national tide in this election.
Education
Education has become a defining faultline of US electoral politics. Counties with populations made up of more than 20% college graduates saw Biden make an average gain of 3.4 percentage points on Hillary Clinton’s vote compared with just 0.5 points elsewhere. In Forsyth county in Georgia, where 52% of the electorate holds a degree, the vote for the Democratic party increased by nine points.
In contrast, Trump secured gains of 2.5 points in counties where more than 70% of the population were white, non-college graduates. Willacy county in Texas, for example, where 86% of voters are whites who did not graduate from college, saw a 13-point increase in support for Trump. This trend is not just to do with Trump. Since 2000, the Republican party has seen its support increase most in those counties with more white, non-college voters.
Race
The picture in terms of race is rather more complicated. In about 300 counties where more than 30% of the electorate is African American, Biden made smaller gains (an additional 0.8 points) than in other areas – where he made 3.2 points on average. More broadly, Democrat gains differed little in areas with more or fewer black voters.
However, Biden did marginally better in counties where more than 90% of the population was white. This hints at how he was able to peel off support in the key north-eastern and midwest states in the electoral college – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – all of which Trump won in 2016.
Another striking feature of the 2020 presidential election was the Republican gains among Latino voters. Trump on average gained 3.8 points support in places where more than 20% of the eligible electorate was of Hispanic origin. Republican gains of 12 points in Florida’s largest county, Miami-Dade, where 64% of the population are Latino, proved pivotal in Trump winning the state, because the margin of victory was so narrow.
Urban-rural
The election further sharpened the urban-rural divide in American politics. The concentration of economic growth in urban centres has seen an influx of younger, educated professionals – shifting the politics of those places in a liberal direction, against the more socially conservative outlook of older voters in small-town and rural America.
Biden on average gained 3.2 points in places that are more than 50% urban. In Maricopa county in Arizona, where nearly 2 million votes were cast, the Democratic party increased its vote share by 6 points.
Trump, in contrast, averaged a nearly two-point gain in majority rural areas.
The direction of travel in 2020 reflects a longer-term trend that has seen different parts of the country moving apart in terms of their outlooks and voting behaviour. Looking at change in the Democratic party vote in presidential elections since 2000, its gains have predominantly been concentrated in large urban centres, while falling back in less densely populated small towns and rural areas.
Continuing divisions
The fallout from the 2020 election promises to be acrimonious and divisive. America’s divisions go far deeper, however, driven by divergent trajectories of growth and decline in different places, and partisan distrust is the order of the day.
While Biden has campaigned on the promise of a more united America, the demographic trends underlying this polarisation – combined with partisan antipathy – suggest that these divisions will not be healed soon.
Will Jennings is professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southampton and Elections Analyst, Sky News More
Only Americans have a vote in their presidential election, but the whole world has a stake. Never more so has that been the case than in 2020. The planet has been mesmerised by the compelling theatre of American democracy and nowhere more so than the UK. Some here – all right, me – have become as transfixed as any American psephological nerd by voting patterns in Clayton County, Georgia.Not only does the winner occupy one of the most potent seats on the planet, America’s choice of president can set, confirm or reverse global ideological trends. Because of a common language, historical ties and political classes that interact a lot, the cross-currents across the Atlantic can be highly influential.America turned decisively to the right when it chose Ronald Reagan in 1980, doing so 18 months after Britain had executed a similar shift by electing Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher, so unpopular at the time that there was talk among Tories about removing her, was fortified and emboldened by the arrival of an ideological soulmate in the Oval Office. By taking the White House for the “New Democrats” in 1992, Bill Clinton provided ideas and inspiration for Tony Blair’s New Labour. During that decade, and to the consternation of rivals to both left and right, their “Third Way” style of politics swept through progressive parties from Brazil to Germany.The Brexit vote here in June 2016, our stark break with postwar history, was a harbinger of another great rupture, Donald Trump’s victory that November. This, in turn, energised nationalist populists around the planet and encouraged them to think that the future belonged to them. It contributed to the febrile climate in which the Tory party decided that a punt on another reckless gambler with startling blond hair and a record of mendacity was not as outlandish as it had previously seemed.There is already much rune-reading of the long-term reverberations of this US election. A clutch of conservative commentators and politicians gleefully notes that the Democrats failed to sweep all before them and conclude that leftwing “identity politics” has been quashed. Yet the larger failure is that of rightwing “culture war” politics whose ultra-bellicose and previously most successful champion has lost the US presidency by the thumping margin of more than 4m votes. A set of leftwing commentators and politicians has a converse explanation for why a “blue wave” did not materialise in sufficient strength to achieve control of both houses of Congress for the Democrats. On an account that glides over the fact that Joe Biden has actually won the presidency, they argue that the Democrats ought to have put up a more radically leftish candidate. Conveniently for proponents of this thesis, it compares an election that did happen with one that did not. What we do have experience of, and very recently, is what happened when a leftwing populist was pitted against a rightwing populist in another English-speaking democracy. You may recall that Labour was crushed by a landslide.The Trump presidency so despoiled the office that smirking authoritarians pointed to its hideous dysfunctionality to justify their dictatorshipIn a country that rarely denies a second term to the incumbent, Mr Trump’s defeat is a feat as extraordinary as it is welcome. Mr Biden’s victory contradicts the notion that we live in an era where it is fatal to be “the establishment” candidate, disabling to be a seasoned, thoughtful and temperate person and hopeless to be a consensus-seeking moderate. This was Mr Biden’s third run at the presidency, having been at the heart of Washington for decades. He will be 78 when he moves in to the White House. He vanquished Mr Trump not by offering himself as the leftwing mirror image of the incumbent, but by personifying a contrasting kind of political character. By both reputation and demeanour, he is a pragmatist and a unifier. “We always do better as one America,” was one of the signature lines of his campaign. No presidential candidate in American history has won with as many votes as the man his rival ridiculed as “Sleepy Joe”. He represents a revival of a kind of politics that many told us was deceased in the opening decades of the 21st century. It is a triumph for the centrist grandad.The first and most important consequence of President Biden is that he means the eviction of President Trump. Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency “a bully pulpit”, a description that has taken on a much more sinister meaning over the four years when the presidency was occupied by a thug. The imperative to defeat him was underlined by the manner of his losing. His televised rants attempted to subvert American democracy itself by spraying baseless claims that the presidency was being “stolen”. Mr Trump will still be around after January, a bad loser raving conspiracy theories, but he will no longer have that White House pulpit to bully from. This matters to much more than America. The Trump presidency so despoiled the office and undermined his country’s claim to the world’s respect that smirking authoritarians pointed to its hideous dysfunctionality to justify their dictatorships while liberal democracies lost their faith in American leadership. Where Mr Trump stoked polarisation at home and division abroad, Mr Biden will seek to build bridges, not walls.Barack Obama commended his vice-president to the American people on the grounds that they would no longer have to worry that their president would say or do something “crazy”. That is not a small point and it has relevance beyond America. The planet will no longer have to twitch over the US president’s Twitter feed.Mr Biden will seek to restore his country’s reputation as a trustworthy and predictable ally and recommit to international agreements that have been shredded by his predecessor. Most importantly, the US will re-engage with tackling a climate crisis that Mr Trump dismissed as a “hoax”. This reversion to an internationalist presidency will be broadly in our country’s interests. As a liberal democracy and an upper-middling power, the UK is best served by a rules-based global order rather than living in a rogue world where smaller countries are trampled underfoot by competing authoritarians.British officials predict that it will be much easier to work with Mr Biden, but the vanquishing of Mr Trump is unnerving for Boris Johnson. As I remarked a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of this result, it renders him more marginalised on the world stage. A president who yelled for Brexit will be replaced by a president who regards Mr Johnson’s defining policy as a feckless act of British self-harm that jeopardises the Good Friday agreement. The Tory leader, who has never met the next American president, has a lot of skilful diplomacy to perform if he is to convince the new administration that he is not a mini-Trump. Even if he can manage that, he will struggle to make the UK seem particularly relevant to a US administration that will prioritise reviving America’s relationships with the EU.Another peril for Mr Johnson is that he looks like the vendor of an ideological style that has been rejected in its largest market. Mr Trump will no longer be the most famous example of what some took to be an irresistible global trend of nationalist populism. It will become more common to see him as a shaming aberration in America’s modern history. John Quincy Adams, the sixth man to hold the office, observed: “There is nothing more pathetic than a former president.” Except – Mr Johnson might take note – the imitator of a rejected president.The Republican party is already beginning to debate how Trumpian its future should be and that argument will be reflected this side of the Atlantic. For more traditional Tories, the US election result demonstrates that entrusting their future to rightwing populism not only debases institutions and values that conservatives ought to hold precious, but also leads to an electoral dead end. Others on the right can be heard contending that, while Trump may have been defeated, Trumpism is far from exhausted as a force and a technique. While they start wrestling with what will be a long contention, some liberals are already fretting over whether Mr Biden will be able to achieve all that much when America is so deeply polarised and hyper-partisan.There will be time enough for angst. Today doesn’t have to be over-complicated. A complex election has delivered an unequivocal cause for pure and simple celebration. On 20 January next year, the current resident will be evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, under armed escort if he insists on that kind of exit, and we will no longer have to put Donald Trump in the same sentence as White House.• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer More
Scott Morrison has signalled he would invite Joe Biden to visit Australia for the 70th anniversary of the Anzus treaty in 2021 as he congratulated the Democrat for winning the US presidential election.
Morrison told reporters that Canberra would continue to deal with the Trump administration during the transition period but looked forward to working with Biden from January.
The Australian prime minister described the former vice-president in the Obama administration as possessing a “deep understanding” of national security issues, including the importance of the post-war alliance to ensuring peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. The Anzus treaty between Australia, New Zealand and the United States was signed in September 1951.
“I look forward to inviting the president-elect to join us next year … and for us to be able to celebrate 70 years of peace and stability and security that has been established by this incredible relationship,” Morrison told reporters on Sunday.
“This is a profound time, not just for the United States, but for our partnership and the world more broadly and I look forward to forging a great partnership in the spirit of the relationships that has always existed between prime ministers of Australia and presidents of the United States.”
Biden’s election will increase diplomatic pressure on Australia to step up its commitments on climate change.
The incoming president has promised that America will rejoin the Paris agreement and will reach net zero emissions by 2050. Biden has also signalled he will take steps to reinvigorate global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Morrison has been emphasising that Australia will take a technological approach to emissions reduction, and the Coalition is thus far resisting pressure to sign up to a net zero commitment by mid-century despite being a signatory to the Paris agreement.
While some in the Liberal party feel the Coalition needs to turn the page on the climate wars the National party will resist moves to increase ambition around abatement.
Asked about Biden’s commitment to net zero, Morrison said Australia was a signatory to the Paris agreement “and that is something we hold fast to”.
“We have a strong story to tell about our achievement when it comes to commitments on the global stage,” he told reporters.
“I also particularly welcome the comments that were made during the campaign by vice president Biden, at the time, when he showed a lot of similarity to Australia’s views on how technology can be used to address the lower emissions challenge.
“We want to see global emissions fall and it’s not enough for us to meet our commitments – we need to have the transformational technologies that are scalable and affordable for the developing world as well because that is where all the emissions increases are coming from in the decade ahead in the next 20 years.”
Trump, who was on the golf course when the news broke that he was to be a one-term president, has not yet conceded defeat and is continuing to make unsubstantiated claims casting doubt over the legitimacy of the process.
But world leaders have lined up to congratulate the president-elect and his running mate, Kamala Harris.
In a statement issued ahead of his remarks in Sydney, the Australian prime minister said: “Today, the world faces many challenges, including managing the Covid-19 pandemic, on both a health and economic front, ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific region, and peace and stability.”
“American leadership is indispensable to meeting these challenges and upholding the rules, norms and standards of our international community,” Morrison said.
“We also look forward to working with president-elect Biden and his administration to continue to fight the Covid-19 global pandemic and recession, to develop a vaccine, drive a global economic recovery, and develop new technologies to reduce global emissions as we practically confront the challenge of climate change.
“We welcome the president-elect’s commitment to multilateral institutions and strengthening democracies.”
Scott Morrison
(@ScottMorrisonMP)
Congratulations to @joebiden and @kamalaharris – Australia wishes you every success in office. The Australia-US Alliance is deep and enduring, and built on shared values. I look forward to working with you closely as we face the world’s many challenges together.
November 7, 2020
With Biden’s victory projected, Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister who famously tussled with Trump early in his presidency about the US refugee swap deal, kept his reaction on Twitter succinct.
Malcolm Turnbull
(@TurnbullMalcolm)
Congratulations Joe Biden and Kamala Harris! What a relief that you won. 🙏🙏🙏
November 7, 2020
He later told ABC TV that Biden’s win would mean a return to “normal transmission” with the US administration no longer making decisions by “wild tweets” in the early hours of the morning.
Morrison, who forged a constructive relationship with Trump, on Sunday morning noted Australia had enjoyed “a strong working relationship with the current administration, one that has seen the strength of our alliance continue to grow and deepen”.
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He said Australia would “continue to work closely with president Trump and his administration in the transition period between now and 20 January”.
The projected result overnight was also welcomed by the Labor opposition leader Anthony Albanese.
Anthony Albanese
(@AlboMP)
Congratulations to @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris on a victory delivered with record support with a progressive agenda based on decency, honest government, creating opportunity and dealing with the pandemic and the challenge of climate change
November 7, 2020
Albanese said: “The US alliance has been our most important partnership since WW2 and your commitment to leadership will see this strengthened into the future.”
The Labor leader later told reporters that Biden was “a friend of Australia” and he welcomed America’s imminent return to the Paris accord and multilateral institutions.
After Trump last week falsely claimed victory in the presidential election and flagged supreme court action to truncate the count, Labor declared American voters deserved to have their voices heard. The shadow foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said the democratic process needed to be respected “even when it takes time”.
On Sunday morning Australian time, Trump was still claiming without evidence that Republican observers were blocked from scrutineering in counting rooms. In a capitalised tweet he said: “I won the election”. Twitter flagged the statement with a note that: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
Albanese said on Sunday it was critical that the outgoing administration respected democratic principles. “The other thing that needs to happen – and this is the context here – is that Scott Morrison needs to dissociate himself … from government members who are questioning the democratic process and continue to do so.”
“The fact is that these conspiracy theories do nothing to advance our common interest of standing up for democratic values,” Albanese said. More
Normalcy and the restoration of a modicum of decorum to the White House: that is what many elite supporters of Joe Biden hope for now that he has won the election. But the rest of us are turned off by this meagre ambition. Voters who loathe Trump celebrate his loss, but the majority rue the return to what used to pass as normal or ethical.
When Trump contracted Covid-19, his opponents feared he might benefit from a sympathy vote. But Trump is not a normal president seeking voters’ sympathy. He doesn’t do sympathy. He neither needs nor banks on it. Trump trades on anger, weaponises hatred and meticulously cultivates the dread with which the majority of Americans have been living after the financial bubble burst in 2008. Obscenities and contempt for the rules of polite society were his means of connecting with a large section of American society.
The reason 2008 was a momentous year wasn’t just because of the magnitude of the crisis, but because it was the year when normality was shattered once-and-for-all. The original postwar social contract broke in the early 1970s, yielding permanent real median earnings stagnation. It was replaced by a promise to America’s working class of another route to prosperity: rising house prices and financialised pension schemes. When Wall Street’s house of cards collapsed in 2008, so did this postwar social contract between America’s working class and its rulers.
After the crash of 2008, big business deployed the central bank money that refloated Wall Street to buy back their own shares, sending share prices (and, naturally, their directors’ bonuses) through the stratosphere while starving Main Street of serious investment in good-quality jobs. A majority of Americans were thus treated, in quick succession, to negative equity, home repossessions, collapsing pension kitties and casualised work – all that against the spectacle of watching wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few.
By 2016, the majority of Americans were deeply frustrated. On the one hand, they lived with the private anguish caused by the permanent austerity to which their communities had been immersed since 2008. And, on the other, they could see a ruling class whose losses were socialised by the government, which defined the response to the crash.
Donald Trump simply took advantage of that frustration. And he did so with tactics that, to this day, keep his liberal opponents in disarray. Democrats protested that Trump was a nobody, and thus unfit to be president. That did not work in a society shaped by media which for years elevated inconsequential celebrities.
Even worse for Trump’s opponents, portraying him as incompetent is an own goal: Donald J Trump is not merely incompetent. George W Bush was incompetent. No, Trump is much worse than that. Trump combines gross incompetence with rare competence. On the one hand, he cannot string two decent sentences together to make a point, and has failed spectacularly to protect millions of Americans from Covid-19. But, on the other hand, he tore up Nafta, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement that took decades to put together. Remarkably, he replaced it swiftly with one that is certainly not worse – at least from the perspective of American blue-collar workers or, even, Mexican factory workers who now enjoy an hourly wage considerably greater than before.
Moreover, despite his belligerent posturing, Trump not only kept his promise to not start new wars but, additionally, he withdrew American troops from a variety of theatres where their presence had caused considerable misery with no tangible benefits for peace or, indeed, American influence.
Trump’s opponents also frequently called him a liar. But Trump is not simply a liar. Bill Clinton lied. Again, Trump is far worse. He has an ability to spew the most incredible untruths, while, at the very same time, telling crucial truths that no president would ever admit to. For example, when accused that he was de-funding the post office for electoral gain, he destabilised his accusers by admitting that, yes, he was restricting funding to USPS to make it harder for Democrats to vote.
Trump’s rudeness to his opponents, however disagreeable, might have even brought some relief to the forgotten Americans who associate Biden’s politeness with the gentle mercies that the former vice-president reserves for Wall Street and the super-rich who bankrolled his campaign. Not unreasonably, they see Biden as a polite emissary of the bankers who repossessed their homes and, at once, a member of an administration that bailed out – with public money – those same bankers.
They hear Biden’s sleek, well-mannered speeches about unity, respect, tolerance and bringing citizens together and they think “no, thanks, I don’t want to be united with, or tolerant of, those who got rich by shoving me in a hole”. To them, Trump’s behaviour is an ugly but welcome manifestation of solidarity with ordinary folks who feel empowered by the combination of the president’s vulgarity and his evocations of America’s irrepressible greatness – even if, deep down, they never expected their prospects to improve significantly when America becomes “great again”.
The tragedy of progressives is that Trump’s supporters are not entirely wrong. The Democratic party has demonstrated time and again its determination to prevent any challenge to the powerful that are responsible for the pain, anger and humiliation that propelled Trump to the White House. Democrats can talk until the cows come home about racial justice, the need for more women in positions of power, the rights of the LGBT community etc. But, the moment politicians like Bernie Sanders threaten to challenge the power structures that keep black Americans, women, minorities and the poor in society’s margins, they go all out to stop them.
Trump’s supporters are unlikely to articulate this in so many words. However, their contempt for the liberal establishment is rooted in the realisation that the rich Democrats behind the Biden-Harris ticket won’t ever truly change conditions for the poor. Any redistribution of wealth and power that threatens their kids’ trust fund, or soaring asset prices on Wall Street, are off-limits – and those voters know that.
Against this background, however hard Biden tries to speak the language of some Green New Deal, no one can imagine him uttering a phrase like Franklin Roosevelt’s, who referring to bankers once said: “They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” Without a readiness to confront the greatest concentration of corporate power in the history of the United States, even the most amiable of presidents will fail to deliver either social justice or serious climate change mitigation. At least Trump wasn’t hypocritical, his supporters might say.
So yes, Joe Biden has won. And thank goodness for that. But let’s understand that he did so despite, not because of, his social graces or promise to restore normality to the White House. The confluence of discontent that powered Trump to power in 2016 has not gone away. To pretend like it has is only to invite future disaster – for America and the rest of the world.
Yanis Varoufakis is the co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement), former finance minister of Greece and author of And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future More
Joe Biden secured a historic presidential victory on Saturday yet some Democrats have spent the tense days since the election engulfed in recriminations, finger-pointing and infighting as they sift through the aftermath of expectations of a “blue wave” that never crested.
Long-simmering tensions between moderate Democrats who represent conservative districts and progressives who have massive online followings erupted into public view, after a series of unexpected losses in parts of the country where the president proved surprisingly resilient.
Once united behind the shared priority of removing Donald Trump from office, swaths of Democrats are now racked with anxiety and uncertainty over a path forward.
Moderates accused liberals of embracing “socialism” and supporting leftwing proposals to “defund the police”, which Republicans weaponized against vulnerable Democrats. Progressives argue that the base powered many of the party’s biggest victories and that it was the lack of an inspiring message – and not their politics – that hurt members. Meanwhile, Democrats were alarmed by Trump’s apparent success with Hispanic voters in some battleground states.
In the weeks before the election, Democrats had begun to imagine the legislative agenda their party could deliver with an undivided Congress and a new Biden administration. House Democrats anticipated expanding their majority by a significant margin – potentially even double digits. In the Senate, Democratic challengers, fueled by a historic wave of donations, appeared poised to knock off enough Republican incumbents to take the gavel from Mitch McConnell, even in states such as Iowa and South Carolina where Democrats rarely win statewide.
As Democrats engage in what has become a ritualistic practice of soul-searching, there are unlikely to be any easy answers. The election delivered a mix of successes and disappointments for both parties, raising complex questions about their coalition and their message.
For now, Democratic leaders are trying to keep the focus on their victories – Biden defeated Donald Trump, they will retain their majority in the House and control of the Senate will be decided by a pair of runoff elections in Georgia in January.
“This has been a life‑or‑death fight for the fate of our democracy,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, told reporters on Friday, with tens of thousands of votes still uncounted. “We did not win every battle in the House, but we did win the war.”
Tensions came to a head during a private conference call with House Democrats on Thursday, part of which was made public by the Washington Post, when the congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a freshman who narrowly held on to her seat in a conservative-leading Virginia district, accused her liberal colleagues of costing the party seats by referring to themselves as “socialists”.
“If we are classifying Tuesday as a success,” she added, using an expletive, the party will get “torn apart in 2022”.
Republicans struggled to portray Biden, whose reputation as centrist, bipartisan dealmaker was forged over the course of his decades-long political career, as a captive of the radical left. But there was evidence the attacks were more effective on Senate and House candidates, particularly those running in a forbidding environment.
Moderates have pointed to Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, which Biden flipped but where Democratic candidate Kara Eastman, a progressive who supported Medicare for All, lost.
“The whole ‘progressivism is bad’ argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence that I’ve seen,” the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who identifies as a democratic socialist, wrote on Twitter. She added that such attacks by Republicans are about “racial resentment” and “you’re not gonna make that go away.” More
