Americans go to the polls today — those, that is, who have not already voted. It has been the most violent campaign of the 21st century. If the fears of either side were to be realised, we may have seen nothing yet. The claim that Donald Trump would not go quietly, fuelled by the studied ambiguity of his own gnomic pronouncements, will soon be tested. The notion that any President of the United States, including this one, would refuse to accept the democratic verdict is preposterous. Many people, however, will believe anything at all about Trump. And that is, at least in part, his own fault.
Yet the real threat to law and order comes from the other side. It is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris who have consistently refused to condemn outright the mayhem visited upon numerous cities across the Union by extremists of the Left. Their ambiguity, too, is calculated. Kamala Harris was known as a tough District Attorney in San Francisco and a notably punitive Californian Attorney General. But she is also a ruthless politician whose ambition is to occupy the White House one day. Turning a blind eye to murder, looting and arson committed by anti-Trump fanatics is a price she is willing to pay to be the first woman of colour to become Vice President.
What, though, of Biden himself? There is a real question mark about how far he will be in control of his own presidency. This is less a matter of age than of character. Nothing that “Sleepy Joe” has done in a career that is remarkable mainly for being so long suggests that he has the stomach to stand up to the radicals who will assuredly attempt to hijack his administration.
Many of us who observe from afar the theatre of the absurd that America sometimes resembles long for a return to a time when bipartisan sentiment was stronger. Such nostalgia is indeed part of Biden’s appeal. He was born when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still in office. He has lived through every event and known many of the individuals that have shaped modern politics in the United States, from Vietnam to 9/11, from Martin Luther King to Obama, from Nixon to Trump. For many people, Biden is America.
This rose-tinted view of the former Vice President masks a dangerous misapprehension, however. Electing Biden will not turn the clock back to a happier time when Americans were more dominant in the world and less divided among themselves. Today’s election won’t mark a return to the past but, rather, the beginning of a brave new world. It is a mistake to assume that the grown-ups will be back in charge of Biden’s America. On the contrary: the lunatics will still be taking over the asylum. Only they will be Leftist lunatics. We may even miss the generals, mediocrities and cronies who have passed through the revolving door of the Trump administration.
After the last presidential TV debate, I argued here that “the coming Democratic administration will be a radical one — more revolution than restoration”. That judgement still stands. If anyone but Trump had been in office, the record of the last four years would be unremarkable. The economy had, until recently, proved resilient — and Biden may yet reap the benefits of that resilience. What has changed America has been the pandemic, not anything that the federal government has done or failed to do. The Obama administration, in which Biden served without much distinction, was no more competent in handling the swine flu epidemic than its successor has been this year. It is just that the Covid-19 coronavirus has proved to be far more lethal and harder to control.
The coming Democratic revolution, on the other hand, will change the United States far more profoundly. It is true that the Republicans have worked hard to make the judiciary more conservative, most obviously in the Supreme Court. But they have worked within the existing framework. Everything Trump has done is, in principle, reversible. But a Democratic landslide, with a clean sweep of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House, would enable the radicals to transform the United States. Even the New Deal of the 1930s or the civil rights and Great Society of the 1960s were reformist rather than revolutionary. Neither FDR and Truman nor JFK and Johnson were radicals. The Reagan revolution of the 1980s was conservative in spirit, though transformative in effect. The Bushes, the Clintons, even Obama all polarised the nation, but left its institutions intact.
The past four years have witnessed an attempted restoration, as Trump has tried to “make America great again”. He has failed in that attempt, but a lot of people still have some sympathy for the intention, of not the execution.
Biden, by contrast, sees nothing worth preserving in that project. Driven by the urgency of an old man in a hurry, the new President will try to enact in a hundred days all that he has failed to accomplish in forty years. The Biden revolution will surprise some of those who will vote for him today. The rest of the world may look on in astonishment. Sleepy Joe is wide awake now — and America is on the brink of a Great Awokening.
