Trump didn’t hijack the Republican party, he just took the wheel and drove them where they were already going — and they were happy to accept the ride. After four years, most of the country wants off the Trump Train, and his unhinged behavior is making it hard for Republicans to make the case that he should stay in power. But Trump is not the future of the Republican party — He’s an unhealthy 74 year old who is incredibly unpopular, currently infected with a deadly virus, and likely to lose the upcoming election. Mike Pence has tethered and submitted himself to Trump and was never going to do anything but defend him in the VP debate, but he also gave us a look at what the argument for Trump’s policies would look like if delivered calmly by a skilled politician. Kamala Harris may have done what was needed to win the debate for this election cycle, but her general inability to truly pick apart the right wing talking points presented by Pence was revealing as to the limits of liberalism in the long term fight against fascism.
Joe Biden talks a lot about healing the nation, and he’s not wrong that we have to find a way to come together and center our common humanity. Trump has tried to divide Americans against each other at every turn like no other President, taking us to a point where civil war feels imminent. A resounding win for Biden can pull us back from that cliff, but the man is a relic of the past who may be able to bring some measure of comfort to Americans who just want the Trump nightmare to end, but who is also fundamentally unable to address the underlying issues that made Trump’s rise to power possible. When this political moment passes, we will still have to deal with a Republican party that has committed itself to ending any notion of democracy and establishing an authoritarian white nationalist regime. If we are not careful, the post-Trump narrative will become a repudiation of Trump the man, but not the ideas and policies he championed. That could leave us in a scary place four years from now, when the GOP finds a new, more polished, less scandal-plagued standard bearer, who will blame Democrats for every crisis facing America, and argue for another round of reactionary policies.
Kamala Harris is clearly the candidate being groomed to face off against such an opponent, and while she issued a number of strong statements excoriating the Trump administration, it was her inability to refute Mike Pence’s right wing version of reality that proved troublesome. There are some legitimate criticisms to be made about Harris’ debate performance, namely her failure to stray away from her scripted talking points and focus on pointing out Pence’s lies as he told them, but the problem is less about the candidate than the political realities she was navigating. Harris was walking a tightrope during that debate. Due to the racism and sexism that pervades our political discourse, Harris would have been portrayed as an “angry black woman” if she had given Pence the tongue-lashing he deserved — a lesson she learned earlier this year when her Presidential campaign fell apart shortly after her takedown of Biden in a primary debate. The electoral college forces candidates to focus on appealing to a small subset of undecided swing-state voters, rather than on speaking powerfully to the issues that actually animate the majority of Americans. Because of the influence of big money in politics, there are certain truths that simply can’t be spoken because the donors won’t allow it. And on the whole, the American citizenry is still far too conservative, unable to break free from the worship of military, police, and capitalism. These realities set the terms of the debate in a way that is quite favorable for right wing politicians.
One exchange that jumped out at me was the way Pence put Harris on the defense by accusing her and Biden of having plans to ban fracking, abolish fossil fuels, and institute a Green New Deal, but was able to say multiple times that the science is unclear as to why the climate is changing without being harangued as a lunatic climate denier. This dynamic would play itself out several times throughout the debate. When the conversation turned to police misconduct, Pence took the position that there is no systemic racism in our police forces or criminal justice system. Rather than impaling him upon his outlandish statement, Harris once again found herself playing defense by citing her prosecutorial record to prove she was not soft on crime. Trying to distance herself from the defund the police movement, she would argue that the issue can be solved with inadequate measures like body cameras, chokehold bans, and anti-bias training. While there are polls that indicate they are wrong, the Biden-Harris campaign has clearly made the calculation that supporting ideas like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a ban on fracking, and defunding of the police are political suicide. While these ideas are simply pragmatic solutions to the problems in front of us, the Republican party has found it to be politically viable to label them as far left ideas, while they champion extreme right wing ideas themselves. Thus, the problem for the Democratic party lies both in the inadequate solutions they are presenting, and in their failure to challenge the legitimacy of conservatism. Many applauded the civility of the VP debate after Trump’s performance in the debate last week, but the notion that we should be having a civil debate about whether climate change and systemic racism are real in 2020 is a huge part of the problem. As long as this continues to be the norm, the tightrope Harris would be walking in 2024 won’t be any less narrow, and it will be all too easy for another fascist Republican who isn’t burdened by Trump’s failures to defeat her.
I say all this to say that even in the best case scenario — Biden wins decisively and Trump is removed from power without triggering a civil war — we have a hell of a lot of work to do. We have to do more than just prepare to beat the Republicans in the next election — we have to shift the ground beneath us. Biden is right that our nation has to heal, but the healing process can’t just deal with the surface level wounds inflicted by Trump, but must address the deeper traumas that so many Americans are uncomfortable confronting. We need to have hard conversations on the airwaves, in our living rooms, and in our workplaces. We must organize and mobilize political coalitions powerful enough to make many of the positions being taken by both the Trump and Biden campaigns disqualifying. We have to liberate ourselves from the racial and gender stereotypes that stifle the brilliance of so many people who could help lead the world to a better place. We have to shatter the current norms and open people’s eyes to the horrors of unrestrained capitalism, systemic racism, police terrorism, gender violence, and climate catastrophe. We need to change laws to realize the dream of American democracy for the first time. It’s a gargantuan task, but if we fail, we may look back and realize that the Biden era was only the eye of the storm, and the Trump era was only the pre-amble to a prolonged period of American fascism.
