This piece is part of a series on the gaps between the left and the far-left, why they exist, and why it might be important they don’t close.
Joe Biden is a moderate. He’s not especially radical, but he’s also not particularly racist. He’s a committed fan of centrist politics, busying himself by trying to please everyone, a typical old man, a relic of a bygone era... Or so, at least, goes the theory. Except, this isn’t quite true - or perhaps it was once; but it doesn’t appear to be now.
That distinction matters. And the truth is that, particularly because the American electoral systems are so broken, he performs a role that might be exactly what America needs right now - and he might be doing it a bit better than people think he is. And moreover, he might also be a representation of a left that’s a lot more functional than people realise.
Biden The Inoffensive
If I ask you to close your eyes and picture Biden, you’ll probably picture him smiling. That isn’t a coincidence; it’s branding. He’s known as America’s friendly uncle, unthreatening and happy, who loves a debate, but never seeks an argument. Whoever you are, he likes you, and he really, really wants you to know that.
If it weren’t for America’s dubious electoral college system, the election would never have been in any doubt - not for a moment. Even Hillary won the popular vote, but at the moment it’s not enough for Democrats to just ‘win’ to win. To win, they have to WIN, in all caps, and probably bold too, for good measure. But WIN Joe Biden did, and the secret is pretty simple - he’s the Democratic party’s most-liked politician: Only 31% of voters who describe themselves neither as Democrats nor as Republicans have ‘very unfavourable’ views of Biden. Not a low number by any means - until you compare it to the 51% who said the same about Hilary in 2016. In an era where political leaders really struggle to get favourability ratings (the % who view you ‘favourably’, minus the % who don’t) higher than -10, Biden manages to be above water, sitting merrily at +6. This is Biden’s greatest weapon, and what he does with that weapon is nothing short of a magic trick.
“The magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable,” explained Andrew Yang back in August. Biden has decades and decades of evidence to show he’s just a simple moderate, never unreasonable, never too animated, never too angry. That image is so fixed and rigid that it’s been burned into the public retina until they can see little else. So when he comes along and says he thinks there should be a $15 minimum wage, anyone against that blinks and wonders if maybe it is time the working class caught a break.
It’s worth remembering that in 2008 Biden was Obama’s strategic pick to pacify White Midwestern working class voters who weren’t so sure about this Black guy whose middle name was ‘Hussein’. Obama knew the Midwest, knew the game, and knew exactly what he was doing: America knows Joe Biden, and it trusts him. What he’s able to do with that is the real story here - but first, a reality check.
Erratic Polls
Polls showed Biden with a steady and healthy lead ever since March, but if you accept that the polling was simply wrong all year (it was), it becomes clear that Joe Biden is a lucky boy indeed. The landslide the polls tentatively projected was never real; it never existed. In reality, the race for the electoral college was probably neck and neck all year, and ultimately just 45,000 votes across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona cost Trump his Four More Years. Given that being more left doesn’t necessarily seem to win more elections, whether another (or indeed any other) candidate would have performed better than Joe Biden is entirely unclear.
In fact, the current best theory to explain the pollsters’ error is that across the Pandemic, Democrats were more likely to stay home and therefore be around to answer the phone; Republicans meanwhile (who were more skeptical of the virus) went about their business as usual, missing or ignoring the calls. Democrats were over-weighted; Republicans under. The error was about 4%; tiny. But it produced a mirage: a surge of voters towards Biden, away from Trump, in what appeared to be a response to his handling of the pandemic. It wasn’t real. Polls from a year ago were not only very accurate to the eventual result, but show Biden faring significantly better than Warren or Sanders against Trump.
Polarisation was too strong for anything to make a real difference: everyone had more or less formed their opinions on Trump and Biden. Before and after this polling error was introduced, the collective power of World War 3, a pandemic, George Floyd, Jacob Blake and Californian wildfires couldn’t even make a dent in the rock solid polling numbers. The campaigns were just for show. Minds would not be changed.
Given the margins of the election, if Democrats had one chance to re-roll the election with a completely different candidate or strategy, I don’t think many would want to risk doing anything other than exactly what Biden did: he ran a careful campaign, staying out of the limelight in the hope that Trump would turn people off all on his own. He spent a lot of time in the Midwest, giving his ‘No Malarkey’ spiel, charming White non-college voters and collecting endorsements from unions for all he was worth. Despite the left’s preference to see this election as a disaster (in part because polls misled them all year), it worked.
Winning Without Winning
Joe Biden’s moderateness is not an act. He’s not a far-left candidate, and has no desire to be - and yet he’s a beaming example of how the left can win even without winning.
In the various universes where President Sanders or President Warren live, and also won the Senate, they might have implemented sweeping and much-needed reform into the American electoral system, housing system, tax system, policing system, energy system, and so on. But in this universe, they weren’t the nominee - and yet that wasn’t the end of their story. By the end of the primary, to compete with them, while still fending off the true centrists like Klobuchar and (at the end) Buttigieg, Biden had had to assemble a pretty progressive platform that still kept the coalition together. Thanks largely to four years of loud, vocal, proud anti-fascist activism in all of its colourful forms, a message had been sent and received: You need us. Our voices matter. We matter.
One sensible feature of Biden is that, although he’s a moderate, and looks to both his left and right for inspiration, he is not so stupid as to draw his circle of inclusion around the Republican party. He’ll talk to them, schmooze them, cut deals with them - but he has no interest in borrowing their policies. None at all. Biden is not a moderate of American Politics writ large - he is a careful and thoughtful moderate within the window of the Democratic Party. And due largely to the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Stacey Abrams and a few million activists, the Democratic party has taken a very real step to the left since 2016. Biden had to break into a light jog to keep up, but jog he did.
Bernie’s steadfastness is upheld as his greatest trait - if he’s saying something now, there’s probably some fuzzy footage of him saying it in a shopping mall in the 80s too. Biden is less interested in having and maintaining an ideology, happy to follow the crowd and see where it takes him. This sounds like grift, but it has its benefits. When he was attacked by the Sunrise Movement for lacking ambition in his climate plan, he invited them into the fold to ask them what he should do. They became part of his platform, and now his climate plan is more progressive than Bernie’s was in 2016. Maybe, you could argue, he should have just had a good platform in the first place - but the fact he got there in the end is hopeful in itself. Sanders himself admitted that he had a much better relationship with Biden than he did with Hillary, and their ‘Biden-Sanders Unity Task Forces’ that came together when Biden won the primary were key in solidifying Biden’s platform for his election run.
The surprising result of this is that in moving along with the party, Biden in 2020 is now far to the left of Obama, to the left of Clinton 2016, and not entirely to the right of Bernie 2016. Across the past four years, Clinton, Warren and Sanders (twice) all lost, but in Biden 2020 they’ve somehow won, and they did so by insisting their supporters be represented, and showing Biden that he can represent them.
The sleight of hand Biden has been able to accomplish in this election cycle is undeniable. Trump, for once with some actual insight, repeatedly called Biden a trojan horse for left policy, noticing that Biden’s platform does not really line up with what the average person thinks of him. The attacks never stuck: Biden seems too charming, too old, too normal to ever look like a representative of whatever the right thinks Antifa and socialism are. A generous view is that Biden and his team know this, and exploited it all they could. Or perhaps they just stumbled onto a winning formula. But if just 22,500 of their voters had changed their minds, we’d all be reading memes and tweets about ‘Orange Man BAD’ til 2024, and America would have missed its chance to avert its slow, faltering nosedive into fascism.
Biden’s entirely checkered past - voting for bad wars, being against gay marriage, expressing his pride at his own willingness to work with segregationists in the 60s, various gaffes on race, not to mention a sexual harassment case - is relevant if you’re interested in discussing Biden the human, rather than Biden the chief enacter of policy and change for real people for the next four years. It would be wonderful to have a US President who upholds basic standards of decency, but the US does not have a history of electing people whom history is kind to (even Abraham Lincoln freed slaves only because of political pressure) and developing a cult of personality around a politician - or indeed literally anyone - is a bad idea at the best of times.
It will be a relief not to have a toxic television personality in the highest office of his country, but I personally have little interest in Joseph R. Biden the human - but he can make a material improvement in the lives of three hundred million people, and he is likely to do so. That alone is worth being excited about.
Working in the System
To speak of Biden the person, it is crucial to know that in his very first days in the Senate, aged just 29, Biden lost his wife and daughter to a car crash. And in this unimaginable tragedy, when he needed them most and perhaps expected them least, his brand new colleagues - from all sides - stepped in, supporting, encouraging, cradling him. Biden’s love for the Senate, in honour of that time, is unbreakable, and this makes him uniquely positioned for this moment. Only Biden could possibly love this broken and impossible institution enough to be truly willing to work with it, not against it.
The Senate is broken. Because seats are allocated two per state rather than by population, the 1.5 million inhabitants of the combined Dakotas get double the representation and voting power of 29 million Texans, or indeed 39 million Californians. On average Democrats have to beat Republicans across the country by 6 or 7 points - what should be a landslide - to win just half of the Senate seats. Meanwhile, the bizarre system of dividing up the will of 300 million people into fifty or so winner-takes-all races gives the White voters in places like Wisconsin the decisive vote in the election almost perennially, a system that’s handed Republicans 3 of the previous 5 elections, despite them winning the popular vote on just one occasion since the 80s. And because the Supreme Court is picked by the presidents, it is now stacked 6-3 in the Republicans’ favour. Legal abortion is now under genuine threat, despite having the support of 66% of Americans.
The system has gifted the GOP the luxury of minoritarian rule, and they know how to use it. Even when Obama won the Presidency, the House, and the Senate in the 2008 clean sweep, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said his party’s only goal was not to help Obama make America a better place, but to make Obama ‘a one-term president’. In characteristically psychotic fashion, his approach was not to strategise and appeal to voters, but to simply block literally anything Obama tried to do. By sheer force of obstruction, they won back the Senate in the mid-terms two years later and held on to it with a vice-like grip. Obama did become a two-term president, but was frustrated by McConnell for the rest of his Presidency, unable to convince any Republicans to help him get even his relatively centrist agenda across the line. Deal-making in the Senate in this modern era of polarisation is only a pipe dreamer’s pipe dream.
The centrists rule America. Unfortunately, they are persuadable - it would almost be simpler if they weren’t - and so persuaded they must be. In 2020, Biden assuaged just barely enough of them. But from here the path to progress, if it exists, is nearly invisible. Warren and Sanders are hardly flawless, but they undoubtedly represented the left’s best shot at an American revolution. But if either had won the Democratic nomination, the last good polling data we had suggests they would have lost the election, and that they would have been utterly helpless to do otherwise. But if they had somehow won, they would be locked out of the Senate just as much as Biden is, and in that scenario, would they have the nouse to get things done, to get deals done, to work with the other side?
They’ve built their reputations on integrity, on being outsiders, free-thinkers, intolerant to intolerance. Even if they had the stomach to work with the Republicans, the Republicans wouldn’t be caught dead doing favours for those two (Joe Biden however? Well, everyone makes deals with Joe Biden). No, while Republicans might be able to stomach some Biden deals, Sanders and Warren would inevitably spend their Presidential careers as frustrated as Obama, tasked with fundamentally changing America with one hand tied behind their back, against a ticking clock, while eating shit, having to smile about it, and then go on TV to tell some turkey jokes every Thanksgiving.
A Functional Left Wing
Sometimes the left gets its big victory. To some extent, Canada and New Zealand represent those. But for reasons mostly beyond the left’s control, that future is not yet America’s. Its structure traffics too much power towards the White voters of the Midwest, too much towards the rural states, and yes, a little too much towards Florida. Republicans can and will play dirty, and Democrats will have to win elections playing the GOP’s game before they can win fairly.
But I argue that Joe Biden: 2020 edition is a sign of a healthy left wing. When the activist left fails to win power, its sole job becomes to activate, ideate, energise, and protest, to persuade those who won power on the most important issues of that time; and it’s the job of those who can get power to listen, borrow, adjust - and yes, dilute - rebrand, repackage and implement, and to assuage everyone else while they do so.
For those fighting battles of racial injustice, of feminism, of gender and queer identity, this has never happened before. Obama’s years in office were spent trying to reform the criminal justice system, yes, but they were also spent offering Black Lives Matter little more than platitudes, belittling Flint’s water problem, and later complaining about ‘woke cancel culture’, in effect assuaging the centre of the country, without ever truly listening to the left.
Biden, in this presidential run, has shown he’s above that. Armed with a smile and an abundance of credibility as a moderate, he ran on the most progressive platform he could, that he thought he could still sell to the rest of America. It was a delicate balancing act, but his calculations look pretty clever in retrospect. Being friendly with Bernie while still being able to brush off ‘trojan horse’ attacks are proof that Joe Biden’s team have managed to run something close to an optimum strategy in 2020, making the best of a pretty dire situation.
The left does not need to ‘unify’ - this is actually how a healthy left wing looks when it faces an uphill battle. One hand radicalises and mobilises, while the other cuts the necessary deals with the enemy. This is a delicate balance, and relies on two things: A left that has the stomach not to splinter from the moderates; and a moderate branch that can be persuaded to listen. To ‘unify’, the Democratic party would have to erase either its progressiveness or its competitiveness: in carefully weighing the two, Biden has snuck across the finish line with an agenda that actually inspires hope for the country’s future, rather than fear.
This isn’t to argue this is an entirely strategic and calculated plan by the Democrats as a collective, or even that they couldn’t be doing things better. It’s more to say that this in particular is an inadvertent state of affairs that’s working quite well for them, and that they’d do well to keep it that way: keep disagreeing with each other, even publicly, as long as it doesn’t stop them from cooperating when it’s necessary.
The particular situation in America is that the electorate really is somewhat progressive, but the system is stacked against them - the real truth is that this is a model for left politics anywhere, in any year where plan A (‘elect a progressive’) has failed: don’t enforce unity. Pick a bland, likeable candidate who will listen to anyone who isn’t morally corrupt, and who has some kind of nose for what they can and can’t make happen. Get them elected, and help them do what they can.
2021
This particular set of challenges calls for someone who is progressive. And not only progressive, but moderate enough to keep those all-important centrists happy. Not only moderate, but patient enough to talk to GOP sycophants every single day. Not only patient, but good at making deals with people who hate you. Not only good at deal making, but good at keeping the public happy about the deals you make. Not only good at keeping the public happy, but progressive.
Should you be excited about Joe Biden? That depends. If you want your head of state to be a leader of people and an example to children - I know I do - then this was a horrible year, with a horrible choice. But if you also want someone who will fight for green energy, for cutting emissions, for higher taxes on the rich, for better healthcare, for structural reform of America as a democracy, and for equality and equity for the people America has kicked to the kerb time and time again, then if nothing else, Joe Biden will be that person. And if you can settle for that from a politician, it doesn’t matter if he’s ‘faking it’ or not.
Joe Biden isn’t many people’s idea of a national hero, or even a great man. To some, like me, he’s not even their idea of a good one. But 2020 America has a very particular set of problems; and Joe Biden has a very particular set of skills. He really wants to fix your problems, and he might actually be able to do it. Facing the probability of a Republican Senate majority, the next year onwards is a tough challenge for Democrats - but this is what Joe Biden exists for, and his recipe could offer a lesson for the left across the world facing similar uphill battles.
