Holiness by any means necessary: Biden's party and why I stand with it
DRAFT. August 20, 2020.
I just sat through a 2 1/2 hour religious service that I had thought was the culminating night of a political convention. I don’t believe a major national nominating convention has ever given itself over as much as this one to both explicit religious references and a larger mood that can only be called religious. This was about goodness, faith in our nation and its people (and prospective leaders, presented as true ones), sacrifice (that of soldiers and workers, who make up the middle class through their sacrifices, a longstanding Democratic Party convention theme, here as often also evoked through nostalgic historical references), working together (and a call to do so, addressed to all Americans), family and nation allegorized as family, and before ending with an “After-party,” finally, a closing speech by the candidate himself defining him in this (supposedly, and undoubtedly) critical national moment as a deliberate deliverer of a message of grim determination on the part of a patriarch who is determined to meet the challenges and defend America. He concluded his speech not with the common “and God bless America” but “God bless our troops.”
My impression is that Biden and Harris, whom I do expect will win in November (though the similar expectation of Democratic victory in 2016 certainly gives pause in favor of the recognition that nothing is certain, and we do all need to vote and/or do our part to make sure this victory happens), — my impression is that this will be a government by consensus, as likely to be at war, literally (abroad) as the nation’s government has been pretty much continually, in one country after another, since the start of the Cold War in 1945-56, when it, for the first and still only time, used nuclear weapons to win its objective by mass destruction of civilian populations, in a war that like many modern wars was both fought on ideological premises and heavily waged against civilians, some infamously marked for slaughter, and others conveniently in the way.
Community is perhaps the greatest political religious idea in “Western” culture and history. Sacrifice, discipline, loyalty, honor, respect, love, faith, hope, purpose. In a word: Values. And preferably, ones that we all share, and in a way that is obvious. Common sense is a great ideological mediator of the political idea of community, which is that everyone here has in common the essence of who and what we are and are committed to.
I don’t believe that the new administration will preside over a nation that becomes more socially and culturally democratic rather than less so (as has certainly been the trend not only spectacularly under Trump, but steadily and for decades). In this respect, I expect it will be about the same. The imperial presidency, rule by state of exception, massive governance of the people by medical authorities and other administrative personnel, including police forces, may be here to stay, though one recent national social movement has suggested the think ability and thus possibility of something other than this, even if we don’t yet know precisely what that might be or look like. A national ethos of consensus, such as is more usually associated with defensive wars, will contribute to this totalizing and homogenizing social order, if this convention, clearly very much in Biden’s personal mold, is any guide to that. Fortunately, advertising and marketing do not determine how people think about things generally, even when it comes to supermarket products; those on the Marxist left who think otherwise may be underestimating the intelligence of most people, who as Lincoln famous said, will not be fooled both in terms of all of them and all of the time.
Politics itself is surely defined as an ethos in part by the bipolarity of consensus and conflict. Politics is social conflict, mediated by legislative, judicial, and other “civilized” means, the domestic alternative to civil war. Government (or administration, or management; these are synonyms, as is, surprisingly perhaps, “economy,” which comes from the Greek word meaning “household management”) is done by reference to an idea of consensus. The political party is in a way what unites the two, though it does so in a space of division that normally defines parties, except in one-party states, socialist and otherwise, or in dictatorships or political (as opposed to parliamentary-ceremonial) monarchies. Democracy is not just “rule of the people” (the term’s literal meaning); nor is it rule by majority; democracy is the political rule of division, it is the willfully maintained division of political space that must be kept open, despite the tendency of administration or management to close it. Much work has been done on this recently in political philosophy. Politics, it is now widely understood, is dissensual; it is about disagreement.
And what do people, in political spaces and times, and when being-political or acting politically, disagree about? They disagree less about identity, which is supposed to be constituted by natural facts about us that group us into social categories of internal sameness, and then to determine how we are able to think, rather than our thinking about who we are, and what we are affined or similar to, being what determines who or what or what kind of persons we think we are. We disagree, even among like persons, about what we think is true, or should want, or what matters to us, or what we care about and are committed to. This can include our notions of “community” as identity in common, an identity that holds a thing in common, fears its division (perhaps), that is defined, as republics are, by the things in common, the res publicae, or public affairs. These are usually what we call policy. Policy is at least two things: It is statements about what the people uttering or listening to them believe in and want to have done, and it is those things as objects of possible or prospective action. It would be hot air and called false if it was only the former; but in the absence of statements and declarations of policy, it would degenerate into a mere correlation between things that are to be done and whatever is said merely to legitimate them. Ideology.
A political party’s convention could devote itself heavily to stating policies that are demarcated from those of the adversary party’s (or parties, in systems where these are more than two in number), and that are advertised to potential supporters (voting, and also contributing in other ways, including both voting, the superficially and legally defining, but obviously essential, even if its existence reduces rational action in politics to a hypothetical object in a process of merely statistical correlation, which is the voter’s equivalent of the prisoner’s dilemma, in which the most rational action is only such contrary to what would be rational if the person acting were to consider only the direct effects possible or likely of his own solitary action; the other things that people do that are in a way more important (more influential, if voting remains key at the base) are of course donating time to helping get out votes, or influence voters, and donating money, since the American political system in particular runs largely by way of lobbies, corporate, labor, and public interest group, which lobbies give money to candidates for their campaigns in return for support for their issues; politicians content to rely on this may then gerrymander districts so that they can maximize their own re-electability in terms of the siting of voters and donors).
This last may indeed be one reason for keeping political discussion as un-ideological as possible, as does our two-party system and the very fact that congressional and other legislative support is organized by geography (district) rather than ideological groupings and perhaps the social or class ones at their basis.
But I have to admit I was surprised this time. I wonder what a Sanders convention might have been like. The two major Democratic candidates until Sanders dropped out were very different in style. Not only did Sanders represent the party’s left-wing, which this like every other Democratic Party convention in my memory has taken for granted, and often made as much of a show as possible (or as necessary) to make sure that the left, such as it exists (that is, if it does; Sanders deserves much credit for having resuscitated it, as it had not existed at all really since the two Jesse Jackson campaigns in the 1980s, or the McGovern campaign in 1972, or perhaps even the Eugene McCarthy and/or Robert Kennedy campaigns in 1968). The candidates differed in style in that Sanders ran on policy ideas, while Biden clearly is a traditional American political candidate, and certainly traditional for the Democratic Party, in relying instead on personality and values.
American politics have a strong tendency to be like that. I recall high school student politics, and even in college, while at Berkeley there were two student government political parties, one centrist and one claiming to be on the left (though this typically amounted to little more than making declarations about issues affecting either third world countries or the almost nonexistent black student minority on our campus, which was slightly hispanic and mostly white, Jewish, or Asian, in the 80s).
I wish to open here a parenthesis, whose sense will I hope become clear in the process. Student government was so unpolitical in the sense of believing in the importance of social conflict, and the use of government to both divide and unify, depending on the need, or to ensure a voice of representation of any kind to people in minorities, including those defined not by ethnicity or other population grouping but by ideology. Conservatives have been complaining about this, and the point is well-taken. Our liberal and sometimes radical student government so little believed in such principles that if you were accused by the administration of anything, they would be very ill-inclined to defend you. The reason for this goes little remarked on college campuses, I suspect because most students at elite universities like mine are eager to join the professional class and its corporate and bureaucratic jobs of upper (if you are at Harvard or Yale) or middle-level (if you are at Berkeley and not destined as only a few are for a top law school). They don’t have much impetus to question the authority of administrators; rather, they profoundly identify with them. And that is because government by administration is non-political; it is not even, as our legal system supposedly is but largely has ceased to be (most people who go to prison are sent there by prosecutorial plea bargains, and never get a defense, since the prosecutor threatens them with absurd liabilities of over-prosecution if they have the chutzpah to go to trial, which they cannot afford to hope to win if they are not very wealthy individuals). The authorities cannot likely be wrong, and the student advocate and other personnel who represent, via the student government, any person or faction that the corporate administration (universities are big corporations, and even public universities are run as such, with bloated administrations that solicit alumni donations for prestige buildings, pay huge salaries to their highest level executives, and increasingly rely on the precarious temporary labor of adjuncts who are not paid to do the research they were trained to do but only to teach), — any such person is very likely, in this system, just out of luck. In effect, our elite universities train our professional class of relatively well-paid (if overworked) workers in a system that has government by administration alone, with judicial and legislative functions made as rare as the adversarial procedures that law in our system and politics are supposed to both be defined by. I end this parenthesis by noting that the student housing cooperative that I belonged to had its own politics, which consisted of elected boards and committees, and I found nothing more puzzling about them, because their politics were non-existent. Apparently, there were no major issues that anyone both cared and disagreed about. That wasn’t entirely true, but when running for office, it always was, as it seemed to be understood that, just as in high school, where the student government people are not activists but collectors of varsity letters for future college applications, and “leadership” experience. Well, corporate and non-profit boards of directors are like that too, and if a cooperative is a group of capitalists pretending to be socialists, proud of their collective ownership rights and in no disposition to show much consideration to outsiders, they certainly are similar in being non-political. People running for office were taken aback when I would ask them, What is it you care about or stand for that only some of us will agree with? Well, that’s how I would put it now. The closest anyone ever got to having a reason for their candidacy besides (direct) appeal to experience and implied appeal to likable personality, was to call attention to their race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender. I asked one young woman if her view of the role of gender in politics was similar to that of England’s Margaret Thatcher (this was before Hilary), and she honestly seemed uncomprehending.
Full disclosure: I make my living editing scholarly manuscripts and consulting on how to write a good argumentative essay, and I often tell my clients that an argument in defense of a thesis, or claim, is only worth reading or writing if that claim is controversial enough that readers will generally resist crediting the author with having spoken truly and rightly. “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:15); but where there is no controversy, the people will be bored and the matter itself will vanish. No one will be offended, for the same reason that no one will care: they could not possibly be offended, since you are not really saying anything. Logic requires controversy because logic is binary: a statement “should” be true but might not be. So there are always exactly two possibilities, both exclusive of the other, with any claim that presumes that what it says is true or right. A statement is controversial if and only if it may be true or false, we cannot be certain whether it is true or false, and it matters to us greatly, because of some concerns or commitments we have, which of these it is. A punk rock slogan I remember is “Would you rather be wrong or boring?” Political life has far too many moralists and not enough aesthetes; for the life of the mind adheres above all to the command to be interesting. The Matthew gospel is right to have Christ saying that he brings a sword of division. Politics is that curious space of thought and action where a priori there must be divisions, though we may have to discover what they are. A consensus that must be managed will decide on what are the objects of controversy, and may decide falsely. Tensions will cease in death, and in life no form covers perfectly the territory it maps. Maybe the democratic ethos of the modern age is the reason for its emphasis on finitude. An interesting statement is one upon which something we care about depends, and that may be true or false. And if statements can offend people who feel uncomfortable with disagreement or negation, then not just democracy and liberty but truth itself, and the very possibility of the sentences we utter having any meaning, are in danger. If I cannot be offended by what you say, why would you possibly want to say it, in any context where the point is not to seduce me or sell me something, but to understand something better, to think about something important to all or both of us more clearly?
My question for the Democratic Party, which actually historically is more unified, has fewer factions and divisions, than the Republican Party (though Trump seemed to step over them, implicitly invoking both of the party’s two right wings—it also has a center, or at least did: the evangelicals and the libertarians), — my question is, is this what you, or “we,” are supposed to be like?
America is not a corporation. That means, we are not a society defined by the military and work relationships modeled upon it (authoritarian, and precluding disagreements). It means we are not just one big one happy family. Some of our divisions matter. And not just with the other party. Sure, presenting Black Lives Matter as the cause of decency—while ignoring the fact that that movement has placed on the table, tenuously to be sure since it is a utopian demand, abolishing policing, at least as we know it. Business is about getting things done; indeed, that is a good definition of business, broad enough to include non-profit, cooperative, syndicalist, state socialist, and other forms of business organization. Politics is not just about getting things done. That would be precisely the problem with an exclusively consensualist politics. Indeed, government is about getting the right things done, and politics is about deciding what is to be done. The classical ways of deciding that are rational argument and procedures of counting. Voting is a count, and democracy by majority rule is a decision on whose opinions count based on a counting among those persons who count. (In the first democracy, that of ancient Athens, only property-owning men counted in public life. Today, everyone’s vote counts, and this is considered so important that there will be predictable battles about ballot access, with some people remembering a time when blacks in the South were disqualified from using their legal right to vote. The liberal Democrats worry a great deal about who counts, and many among them seem quite certain and insistent that only those count (not politically but on “political” grounds) who do not count (on the grounds of a, true or false, theory or narrative of social marginality or exclusion). To anyone who cares about democracy’s vitality, few things should be more frightening than excess consensus and inadequate politicization. But maybe a hyper-politicization of some things goes with a hypo- (under-) politicization of others. Maybe this hyper-politicization will be part of the depoliticization because it is moralizing, and so converts the political into the ethical if not the religious. And then you get the celebration of values. In fact, what you get what some political theorists have called hegemony or hegemonization: a part is taken for the whole, particular values or beliefs or desires are presumed universal and sold as such. Our political thinking may be prisoner of an ontology that supposes that what there are is individuals and totalities. Subsets can exist, but there remains a question of how the sets grouping individuals are constituted, and how totality and individuality go together, or fail to. When politicians talk about the “middle class,” for instance, they are hegemonizing belonging, mattering, or normality. They mean everyone, but to be precise, an “everyone that includes you, but could have excluded you” (were we not here to come to the rescue). That we all have the same religion deep down is both an interesting hypothesis about America (first put forth by the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1830 treatise “Democracy in America”), though of course it can only be true in some ways while not in others, since Americans don’t seem to themselves and each other to have the same religion exactly on Sunday morning, though they might think so on Monday if they are saluting the flag in a pledge that, since the Eisenhower administration, has included reference to God. And of course, there is just one God, and we are one nation. That in the end is the dilemma of politics as both consensus and contestation: it is the problem of the One and the Many; politics takes place within a political community, which as such is always a singular thing and something divisible and divided. What actually is contested and can morph at a formal level is the way the unity and diversity are interrelated. Our previous President famously said at the 2004 Democratic convention that there is not a black America and a white America but only a single United States of America. People will unite and divide. They will divide about how they are united. That’s a good thing. They may do so party by making claims about what is singular and shared much more than it is. That’s hegemonization.
The call to end police violence and prisons as we know them, on the grounds that black people are unequally and inequitably subject to them, is both the most potentially revolutionary idea in American politics today, and quite possibly the most important issue. It can and must be connected to a number of other things. It goes beyond race, well beyond it. I could be—and have been—a victim of over-policing, too. (No, sir, I am not a terrorist—unless Italian radical philosopher Giorgio Agamben is right that today our governments consider the political itself as “terrorist”). It is more important than racial equality. For one thing, after all, we could just have fully racially integrated police forces. That possibility marks a limit of the sense and prospects of identity politics.
Will we find on January 21, 2021, that the nation is facing “the moral equivalent of war,” as President Jimmy Carter called the energy crisis of the 1970s, in terms of the pandemic crisis? It does not in itself indicate the possibility of major social, economic, and political changes, unless it is via the discovery that the economy can work better with more people working at home instead of commuting. Or even—this is utopian, and for the same reason an essential demand—working less.
Working less or working more? The Democrats tend to love workers because they love work. Well, this is a bit less than obvious. It would make more sense to say that work matters because it is good for workers somehow, or even because they need it. “We are all in this together, so let’s get to work.” — And let’s bear down with grim determination to win a great battle for the defense of this country (and our freedoms, or well-being, or future—or even our lives, always at stake in a war, and indeed the virus pandemic not only is a situation readily analogized to war, this time against something appearing not in history but not society so much as nature, attacking us unprepared). Are not messages like this more potently communicated by consensual and celebratory conventions like this one than anything bearing on the candidates themselves and what they may do in office as politicians (who are also “leaders” but maybe not only that—not if anything they do is contestable or an object of legitimate and permitted debate—which might be different from mere war-like opposition, for in war one tries to win and not lose, and those are the alternatives, and one tries to win “by any means necessary” (if the revolutionary implication of Malcolm’s using that phrase was their association with a call to actual “revolution,” the broader meaning of the notion could well escape this unfortuitously, especially if the deciding link is from the need for change to legitimation by force of need or necessity—not only could we easily wind up instead with repression by any means necessary, but we have seen that on our streets, both often and recently, with soldiers confronting protestors basically to punish them from protesting).
“Work, family, nation”: Should that be the Democratic Party’s motto? Unfortunately, that idea, or phrase, has a dark association, with fascism: It was France’s Nazi-collaborationist Marshall Pétain who madd that his government’s slogan.
Yes, the values I heard endlessly invoked tonight are noble ones. No, it’s not a parodic and evil nomination like “Arbeit macht Frei” over the gates over the Auschwitz, falsely declaring the camp both a mere work house (like our ordinary prisons) and a place of liberation. Though that certainly is one testament by extreme to how a discourse can get away from you. But of course it was also a lousy idea, even if it were taken on the level: putting people to work does not make them free. It might give them a wage, it might enable their children to join the competitive ranks of the “middle class” that all Americans are, as a matter of broad political creed and quasi-religious devotion. But let’s be honest: the future of America and any other society is not as a workhouse, that is the past.
Of course, the Democratic Party today may not need or even benefit from appeals to utopian or messianic ideas of freedom or anything else. It can afford to, and maybe its leaders think it needs to, appeal solidly to the center and the past, to what we already know and are familiar and comfortable with. The reason is obvious; it is the unstated claim being refuted by much of what was said and performed in this convention, especially tonight: this is the (true enough) proposition that Donald Trump’s administration is, and largely because of the venal indecency and narcissistic sociopathy of the man himself, no less than his own peculiar perversion of the performative use of language, which largely separates it from actually existing representable referents of the discourse. Simply, he’s a liar and not a decent man. Sanders himself pointed out that this is the main reason why we must for Biden, and even why, perhaps, as he claimed, this is the most important election in many years, or decades. The decision that clearly underlay the marketing decisions of the party’s leadership was based on the thought that: Since Trump is indecent and his presidency (we may as well say it: evil—for that alone explains why the Democrats spent so much time and energy appealing simply to ideas of: good. In America these ideas are religious and patriotic, including a few common notions about family, work, and other things—religious notions about community including family and nation (and their virtual identity with each other, serving as metaphors for each other), we simply and mainly should present our party as the defenders of normality.
The factual and moral truth and perfect good sense of this does not change the fact that this is about as conservative a strategy as you could get. No, it doesn’t link to specifically right-wing political policy proposals; the Republicans can be counted on to do that, and to the credit of the Democrats, all of these normal values belong, as one would suspect, to the solid center. The left wing of the party is a set of ideas if, as in the last two primary campaigns, there is a candidate willing and able to articulate them. Otherwise, it is a tone. It is a style. It is a rhetoric. And it is an ethos. An ethos is a form of life or way of living, as ethics is the discipline of thinking about the good life, what it is and how it can be lived. And it is, or includes, a set of “values.” By that I mean concepts that are highly metaphorical, charged with meanings, and that indicate lifestyle choices, social norms and principles, etc., usually that seem crucially important or essential, to something like—“our form of life.”
If that is at stake for the Democrats, that is certainly not, based on the evidence of tonight, because this form of life is in question as to what it should in fact be or be like. That can happen, and usually happens in art, sometimes in philosophy or in, philosophically or otherwise, art criticism. There is a politics in that, and it is a big affair and also a big business in its own right. I like to think participation in that game is what enables people like me to range a bit more freely and call things into question that could not practically be so called in any process driven by rule of the people or their majority, whether speaking or silent. No, the form of life, must of course, this is marketing, be something “we” already know and have, and fear is endangered. This is not the conservativism.. of opposition to gender variability and personal sexual and otherwise life invention, nor to abortion, mentioned obliquely once tonight by the Catholic among the three men of God speaking at the very end before the gavel, driving home again, in case you missed it, somehow, that this convention belonged to a people who simply belong to God. But it is a conservative style of thinking.
Social welfare needs did get mentioned. Biden promised aggressive action on some things, in his short speech with its sustained note of grim and protectively patriarchal and militarist determination. He is, bless him, a man of the people who feels your pain and will kiss your baby or comfort you when you mourn, and is not much of a man of ideas. He thinks politics is putting the right ideas into action, and that takes above all being the right kind of person and knowing how to work with people, including doing what Obama did so well when Biden was his Vice-President, which is working both sides of the isle, to get bills passed and get things done. What those things are is secondary to him. He is an administrator. That Sanders is right that he is a decent man, and that that matters—and Americans did not just discover this: JFK was elected because he was a figure of heroic charisma who “has high hopes”; Reagan governed by giving sincere speeches that clearly attested his moral values, even when yoked to blatantly false claims (like that the death squads his administration supported in Central America, the fruits of which are in the storm of immigrants wanting to come here from there now, mostly in the perhaps vain hope of staying alive and keeping their kids alive, - that these were fighting “Communism,” the subtle details of left-of-center and anti-dictatorial politics in Latin America not being a specialty seen as important in capturing the attention of a phrase-mongering president; Bush 2 and Bill Clinton would do similar things in regard to later wars; and don’t forget, there was Richard Nixon, whom God and history punished for attacking the political opposition to the Vietnam War and doing so in underhanded and illegal ways, by declaring that we were all victims of dishonesty and lack of fair play, which would be an understatement of some proportion if applied to the 2 million Vietnamese, mostly peasants, seeking mainly to stay alive, who balanced out the 55,000 deaths of American soldiers that was such a legitimate object of grief…). In America politics, decency sells. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of the campaign and administration both, and may Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris abide in the house of the lordship of our country for 4, 8, or 16 years. Amen.
There is, however, one other thing, easily overlooked. Maybe two things. First, Biden’s administration will pursue different policies than Trumps’s, and whatever our disagreements, everyone I know is certain about that. Not all will be that different, but when they are, the difference will have justified voting, and voting Democratic. Secondly, the party does have a left wing. I am part of it, like, now it seems, a great much of the Democratic Party. I am disappointed that “we” did not get more of a voice in consequential policy-related statements and gestures at the convention. But conventions are about unity, and since Biden clinched the nomination, his opposition is not to his left but his right. He will take his left for granted. At least to the extent that he can. This is actually my second reason: These men and women are politicians, and they do have some need, not only for lobbyists and contributors, and campaign workers (whom I am considering joining if I can, perhaps to make phone calls, maybe to people in New York where I live whose political leanings are a bit closer to mine—I am sure many others in the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a loyal member both nationally and at the chapter level), but also for people to vote. And Trump and any other Republican candidate has little chance of getting my vote and so doesn’t need me very much. I’m ok with that; the feeling’s mutual. The Democratic Party may have weak claims on it made by its left, but if it, or “we,” make any claims, want anything, clamor for it, or march for it, we have with them some slight chance. The Marxist in me says they are a less bad bourgeois or capitalist party. The realist in me says that is just their limitation. “Liberal" (in the American sense, that is, social democratic) parties and factions are generally unable to very effectively oppose forces of neoliberalism, runaway financial and real estate-based capitalism, the police state, the medical state, the gutting of education, and other things. They are not the revolution. It would be too cheap and easy to say “we are.” But if generally I find cogent the argument against argument by double negation or negation of the negation and reduction of the absurd, in relationship to intuitionism, which in logic is the position that nothing can be considered true unless a positive concrete exemplar of it can be exhibited, in this case, sadly, and because the other party has with Trump so much abandoned the terrain of normal parliamentary and legal/constitutional, or “democratic” and “liberal” government, that at this point in time, the election really does matter because the reasons to be against the right and the reasons to be for this particular center (and I would certainly call it that: the party has a left-wing, or center-left in more global terms, it just tends to be weakly voiced at consensual moments like tonight’s), these do not conflict. Actually, I must say that the recent spectacular growth, on the heels of the two Sanders campaigns, of the left-wing group calling itself “democratic socialist,” the DSA, gives me some cause for hope for a reason that is simply structural, in the way it is organized: it is a political party defined by ideology and class (the class of people who form part of “labor power” rather than capital, a class that is broader than the mere “working class” as usually defined as a sociological category), but at the same time has an electoral strategy, both within the larger Democratic Party of which we are also a part, and in supporting its broad candidates and policy. That fact is not unconditional, to be sure; but we are neither a third party nor a mere set of candidates. That is because we are not in essence quite (only) an electoral party. So we do things that involve organizing (not just in support of candidates) and are quite different indeed from donating money. Biden owes little in his thinking as a man and a politician to the left, but his administration will not be able to quite silence or exclude us. The left has been reborn. Real (and international) social conditions are behind that. It is partly, but not only, the consequence of both Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. I do not believe that Joe Biden is the answer to America’s problems. He is maybe little more—did the convention tonight claim this by implication?— than a, and the, answer to the problem of Donald Trump. Sadly, Trump is not America’s biggest problem; but he is certainly part of most of our problems, and Sanders is right: He is a decent and good man who wants to lead this country by doing the good and right things, and the choice is so clear and stark that this really might be the most important election of my 60 years. Biden is at worst a man mediocre intelligence and great personal worth who will champion middling solutions to problems small and big, and he’s not a monster. He is a man of good values and judgment. He may want to be commander-in-chief even more than domestic leader in oppositional contexts. He also represents the center to Trump’s extreme right. There are worse things than a president with predictably bland policies and good values and judgment. Bloomberg put it well: would you hire a man like Trump, who will destroy your company? This country has been facing destructive forces, and with no real leadership at all. Once every so often a leftist will endorse a centrist. I’m well to the left of Bernie Sanders, who does, and this is one of those every so often moments. If anyone with a power to decide thinks someone like me can help by talking to people, writing anything, whatever, they know where to find me. I know they will not find me alone.
——
Addendum (in response to a comment)::
More should be said about the rhetoric of religion (values, moral greatness, the war of good and against evil or equivalently and in a manner I find eerie in its evocation of Manichaeanism), light against darkness) in relation to the broad communitarianism I was trying to call attention to.
Nostalgia is a feeling, one defined by attachment to a better past imagined as a lost paradise. It is another aspect of the emotional quality of "religious" politics centered around evocations of wonderful shared values and purpose. It is also a question of temporality, a mode of experiencing time; nostalgia simplifies the past to make images recollecting it salvific in a troubled present. But there are ambiguities and contradictions or conflicts in every state of affairs knowable to us, present or past. It is, as you aver, partly a question of ambivalence vs. ambiguity. The former calls us only to act on our convictions (partly to make them seem definite and certain); the latter calls on us first to think about them. Mourning sorts out the past so that it is not object of love/hate ambivalence or a field of chaotic impressions and memories. A turn to religion in politics might be a way of trying to mourn. We are perhaps being asked to mourn our abandonment as a nation or people by a bad father figure, partly by welcoming a good one.
Yes, Sanders seems more purely political--concerned about policy and willing to stake himself on contentious ideas--than he is eager to present himself as a man of character and greatness, or as committed to grand ideals that are designed to appeal to everyone and so must be uncontroversial. I read the convention as selling the politicians to us by telling us Americans what we are supposed to be like and want and love.
I don't think the Democratic Party is sick and need of healing, though they have just now presented the nation as such, a metaphor that is of course partly, in the pandemic, more than one, and otherwise quite tenable as a way to figure crisis.
Does the Party or the nation need better spiritual values than the ones it has? I think they did a pretty good job of articulating mainstream ethical (pertaining to form of life) and religious ideas. The DP leaders and Biden wanted to imagine the party in this historical moment as representing absolute centrism and consensus. It was a Convention devoted to conventionality.
The tension in American political life between evocations of personality and virtue on the one hand and of policy and the social conflicts that go with every possible policy that could inaugurate a meaningful change, just seems to be part of our national moral constitution. To their credit, these politicians have both values and ideas. But they seem right now to want to be elected on values, and that is clearly being framed in part as necessitated by the evil to be combatted, which is at present highly personalized in the figure of Trump.
If I sign up for a phone bank duty, I suspect that some of the people called will want to talk about issues. The opposition may have legitimated ultra moderation, but the Dems have a few ideas and plans, too…
Americans like to think the two are identified, just as we make ad hominem arguments dismissing misbehaving artworks and philosophical theories, because we not only know the Hegelian truth that people identify with their beliefs, claims, and statements (and ways of legitimating and thinking about them), but we also tend to think the two are simplify identical, just as it is sometimes thought that people who commit sins are sinners because of their sinful character rather than actual deeds. Elsewhere, it can be shown that our almost unique political focus on personality is related not only to a political system that tends towards representation of (collections or sets of particular) identities, but also to “state of exception” or emergency rule governance; that is, the very authoritarian politics that liberals decry in Trump, who is not the author of this tendency but only its figurehead.
Alas, Americans, whose heroes typically are celebrity film and music performers, not intellectuals, are disinclined to elect a candidate unless his or her right policy ideas are sold as expressing greatness of character. Fortunately, Biden seems to pass that test; curiously, our current president seems to have been popular with his faction not because but in spite of his moral character. Maybe, as with the liberty/authority opposition (the two often go together even when clearly opposed and conceptually distinct), that of virtue and vice is less a criterion in our politics than a marker of what things we think important enough to enforce or transgress, affirm or negate. As always, politics in a representative democracy is an affair of leaders choosing a people, and telling them how to behave so as to be represented rightly. The convention of conventionality did a great job, it seems to me, of marketing and selling to us what we are supposed to think of ourselves, the American people, as being or being like. You can feel the ache where that consensus has been pinpointed; out of power for four years, liberal and lefty Democrats alike thirst for it as if in a desert, and eat it up like manna.