I woke up this morning to read a kind of predictable, thoughtless litany in America’s newspaper columns. It went like this. “Moderates” were responsible for Joe Biden’s victory — therefore he should govern like a moderate, so as not to risk alienating them.
There’s only one problem with that, which is all of it. It’s completely and totally wrong as a set of ideas — not just illogical, but worse, false. Yet this is what passes for thinking in America now — and if Biden follows it, his Presidency will surely fail.
Let me explain, though you probably have an inkling of what I mean.
Were “moderates” responsible for Joe Biden’s victory? Of course not. This election was decided by minorities. In dramatic shape. As absentee and mail-in ballots were counted, in the major cities of swing states, the margin swung sharply in Biden’s favor. What groups were those? Minorities. In places like Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Atlanta.
This point is super, super important — and it’s being white-washed away. This election was decided by minorities.
When pundits say “moderates,” what they really mean is American white people. Here’s a grim and bitter truth about American white people: they have never voted for a Democrat in their majority. Ever. They didn’t do so again in this election. They voted at their precise historical average, about 55% for the Republican, who was Trump.
JFK couldn’t win a majority of American whites. Barack Obama couldn’t. Nobody on the center-left has. Ever.
That is how pundits mean “white people” when they say “moderates.” What they really mean is: “White people in America vote Republican, come hell or high water, have for more than half a century — no matter what they endure, like say mass death from a pandemic, or rising fascism, white Americans will simply not back a Democrat for President.” This folly, this stupidity, is equated with “moderation.”
Why don’t American whites ever back Democrats? The reason is very simple, and it goes all the way back to slavery. As soon as segregation ended, the “Reagan Revolution” happened. American whites garbed their racism in barely veiled code words like “freedom of choice” and “individual responsibility.” What they really meant — and you didn’t have to look too far to hear them say it — was: “I won’t pay for those dirty people’s healthcare, education, retirement! Their grandparents used to be slaves!! Are they really human? Part of us? Real Americans?”
We know that this attitude is a poisonous residue of slavery for a very simple reason. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Nobody — and I mean nobody — is willing to sign the suicide pact white Americans have: to deny everyone healthcare and retirement and education, even if it means themselves and their loved ones, just to retain a position of power and supremacy.
Nobody. Not in Canada or Europe or South America or Asia or Africa do we see this bizarre, suicidally self-destructive attitude. Only in America, because America was the world’s originally constitutionally racist slave society, and until 1971, was the world’s largest apartheid state.
All that is what is called “moderation” by American pundits. Don’t you find that, well…offensively stupid? A little bit…disgusting? I do. It’s not moderate to believe the same things violent and foolish and ugly people did hundreds of years ago and disguise them in slightly more polite code words. It’s not moderate to believe that you’re willing to burn down society just to preserve your own supremacy. To believe that if you’re not on top, nobody else should have anything at all. What is it? Idiotic.
So when they say “Biden should act to please moderates,” therefore, what American pundits mean is: “to please white people.” And that’s idiotic — because American white people, frankly, at this juncture in history, are the world’s biggest idiots. Yes, really. Who else votes against their own healthcare, retirement, education, against ever having better lives? Nobody on planet earth, except American whites. And they do it for the same old reason: to preserve their position of supremacy above all, even if it means society collapses as a result. That’s not moderation. When pundits call that moderation, they are legitimizing and justifying racism, bigotry, hate, stupidity, suicidal self-destruction, fanaticism. Instead of educating all these foolish white Americans about how idiotic their choices are.
American whites aren’t “moderates” — they’re fanatics and extremists, as a social group, on a global scale. No, not all of them — enough of them. White people look the same everywhere, maybe — but America’s whites really are different from their European and Canadian cousins.
White Americans are the rich world’s most regressive, hostile, abusive, cruel, and violent social group, by such a very, very long way that they are in a class of entirely their own. They bear absolutely no resemblance to white majorities in Canada or Europe. Those groups support — predictably, consistently, reliably — things like healthcare and retirement and higher education for all. All. Only American whites will support things that white majorities who look like them find repellent and abhorrent, like arming teachers and carrying guns to Starbucks and denying everyone in society basic medicine and a tiny amount of money.
No other white majority in the entire rest of the world comes anywhere remotely close to believing in and supporting any of these things.
That isn’t moderation. American whites are so far off the global scale of politics they resemble majorities in nations like Iran or Russia than white majorities in any other rich country. They have diametrically opposed attitudes to their cousins in France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, or Canada. They are fanatics and extremists on a global scale. Maybe you don’t want to believe that, but that is a fact — again, no other white majority on earth even comes close to denying its society healthcare and education. American whites as a social group, have never supported the public goods which are the basis of a modern social contract — ever. They are not moderate. They are so extreme they are off the charts.
Now. We’ve shown two things so far, which debunk the poisonous, foolish illogic of “Moderates decided the election for Biden, so Biden should govern for moderates!!” One, moderates didn’t decide this election for Biden, and two, that white people’s lingering racism and bigotry isn’t moderation — it’s extremism.
So who should Biden cover for? Well…
Minorities decided this election for Biden — and they are not like white people in their voting patterns. At all. They couldn’t be more different. By a very, very large margin, minorities want America to be a functioning society. They want comprehensive and expansive public goods, like healthcare, education, retirement, and so forth. They want a society that resembles Canada or Europe. It’s white Americans who are holding America back.
But I don’t think that Biden should govern “for” anyone social group.
I think that he should (wait for it) govern the way America needs. That he should govern to solve America’s problems.
What does America need? It needs, in short, to become a modern society. A functioning one, as in, one in which life isn’t just a bitter, desperate struggle for survival, every person for themselves, forced to fight it out in what is increasingly and in the majority “low-wage service jobs”…just to have healthcare, food, medicine, water, a tiny amount of money. America is totally dysfunctional not just because its social contract is broken, but because it doesn’t have one. It has the absence of one, the law of the jungle, where the most aggressive, cruel, selfish, and predatory rise to the top of broken systems and exploitative institutions.
And all that is what fuelled Trumpism. What reignited the old spark of hatred, which never really goes out. All it takes — all it ever takes — is a nation falling into the poverty and despair that downward mobility breeds for the undying spark of hatred to become a raging fire.
If Biden wants his Presidency to succeed — for America — he has to govern like he has a mandate. If he wants his Presidency to please pundits, junior and senior league — like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and David Brooks — he only has to govern for “moderates,” meaning America’s off-the-charts extreme white majority.
Those are completely different goals, objectives, aspirations. Only one will actually fix America, because the sad truth is that white Americans still don’t seem to want to — as a social group — live in a modern, functioning society.
Will Biden just shrug, and act like one of them, another deliberately foolish American white person, happy to clench hands in a suicide pact of mutually assured destruction, pretending that a society without basics for all, thanks to yesterday’s racism, all isn’t going to implode into fascism again, four years from now, as life fails to get better for much of anyone?
Will Biden shrug, and act like an old white dude? Or will he actually be a leader?
That, my friends, is the question.
Umair
November 2020. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
