Wrong Man, Wrong Metaphors, Wrong Ideas, Wrong Policy, Wrong Time
Moran Point, Grand Canyon
The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. ~~~ Antonio Gramsci
Joe Biden is completely out of touch with the political moment and the momentum of history and the urgency of the climate emergency, domestically as well as internationally.
Weimar reprise.
Internationally, Biden thinks the American people and the world are ready for the US to resume “leadership” of the world and that the US is “back at the head of the table”.
This is rank “American Exceptionalism” and a perverse echo of “Make America Great Again”. Nostalgia for what never was.
The US was never exceptional (except for building an exceptional global military and economic empire and the Neoliberal framework to legitimize and sustain it).
There is no “table” – and if there were, it would be round and a space for partners to dialogue democratically as equals, not rectangular and a forum of hierarchy and domination – and certainly no place for an individual or a country to sit at the “head of the table”. (Joe sounds like Grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner).
Domestically, there is no “aisle” to reach across, there’s a Canyon.
Like the Grand Canyon, the only way across is down and through and up again (rim to rim).
Politically, that means policy choices that Biden is simply incapable of making.
No doubt, Biden will “look forward, not backward” instead of prosecuting Trump administration crimes, just like Obama let war criminals and Wall Street looters off the hook.
We’ll again see Neoliberal policy back in the saddle, with a bipartisan unity slogan backing more “public-private partnerships” on infrastructure and “incentives” (both slogans for more corporate subsidies, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation, and failed market based tools like carbon taxes and pollution trading schemes).
It’s going to get a lot worse, before it gets better (if it gets better).