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We will soon know whether America will surmount its worst catastrophe since the Civil War. We have every reason to worry. Not only does Joe Biden need to win by a theftproof margin and bring along the Senate. If he does win, Biden needs to govern as a transformative president—not just restoring a badly impaired democracy but redeeming a deeply corrupted economy. Otherwise, Democrats could lose their narrow working majority in the 2022 midterms, and his presidency could be a four-year interregnum ushering in a more competent version of Trump.
Biden performed superbly at the convention, projecting all the values of decency that Trump mocks. But at 77, can Biden change fundamentally, as Franklin Roosevelt did when he became president at age 50? While we need another FDR, Biden seems set in his ways, ideologically akin to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, comfortable with the veterans of those eras.
Miracles do happen. Some Biden policy proposals have been startlingly progressive, reflecting the urgencies of the moment. At the same time, his senior appointees could be all too mainstream.
So fervent support for Biden-Harris should come without illusions. As progressives psych themselves up to go all out to defeat Trump, they can be forgiven for feeling a little like Charlie Brown and his football, with the American elite in the role of Lucy. We’ve seen this movie before.
I have taken my title from Philip Roth’s chillingly prescient 2004 novel The Plot Against America. In it, Roth imagines that the isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh wins the 1940 Republican election, goes on to defeat Franklin Roosevelt, and makes a separate peace with Hitler. Roth locates his story in Jewish Newark, where eight-year-old Philip encounters the rising menace to his family, his secure life, and the America he knows.
Reflecting on himself as a schoolboy, Roth writes: “Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
Events seem inevitable only after they happen, and are safely in the history books. But today, catastrophic events are unfolding before our eyes, and we have no idea how things will turn out when our grandchildren read them as history.
WE AMERICANS GROW up learning our history as a chronicle of near disasters that narrowly come out right. The British nearly defeat the inexperienced army of American patriots, but Washington rises to the occasion and Cornwallis surrenders. The young republic almost collapses from anarchy, but along come Madison, Hamilton, and the Federalists, and the Constitution of 1787 is the rock on which the country develops. Slavery is a stain on American ideals. It takes another four score and seven years, but Lincoln, after nearly losing the Civil War, emancipates the suffering Blacks.
Then comes the mother of all Perils of Pauline reverses: FDR’s magnificent use of the Great Depression to harness capitalism in the public interest. He then escapes the pull of isolationism just in time to fight and win World War II. Postwar America becomes the hegemonic power, and uses its global influence mostly for good, averting nuclear Armageddon, keeping the Soviet Union at bay, as George Kennan advised, until communism collapses of its own weight.
Meanwhile, democracy steadily is expanded to Blacks, women, and 18-year-olds. Trusts are broken up, trade unions empowered. Opportunity is enlarged.
Airbrush alert: You don’t need to be a radical to appreciate that the country was stolen from the natives; that Reconstruction failed; that racial progress briefly surged in the 1960s and has been resisted ever since; that America’s global role is blighted by the imperialism that began with McKinley and continued with appalling overreaches from Vietnam to Iraq. Even at home, things often did not come round right: rising inequality, aborted reforms, stolen elections, assassinations.
Now, we are at another inflection point where history could go disastrously wrong. Roth had to resort to a deus ex machina to get history back on its right track. Lindbergh’s plane disappears; his widow appeals to the vice president to restore democracy; a special election is called in 1942; FDR wins and benign history resumes its course.
Trump may yet catch the coronavirus, or choke on his hair. He may abdicate in exchange for a pardon. He may even accept an overwhelming election defeat. But we can’t count on any of that. So the terror of the unforeseen keeps unfolding, in real time, as we live it.
Things have already occurred that were inconceivable to most Americans. A president seeking to destroy the post office in service of a rigged election? An American leader working with the Russians to promote his election and re-election? A president declaring that he might not abide by the results?
Now, we are at another inflection point where history could go disastrously wrong.
How can Trump escape accountability for bungling the containment of a pandemic that will soon kill more Americans than died in World War II? How can the attorney general, as chief law enforcement official, relentlessly help his president break the law?
How do elected Republicans excuse conduct that goes against their most fundamental principles, such as a strong defense, small government, and fiscal responsibility—so long as the result is low taxation, weak regulation, control of the courts, and maintenance of political power?
America’s corporate and financial elite, given a corrupt, incompetent dictator who serves their economic interests, will choose the dictator over a democracy that might trim their billions. This is full-on fascism—the alliance of the business class with a tyrant who confuses the masses with appeals to jingoism and racism, while the plutocrats steal working people blind. Yet a hardcore 40 percent of the voters still support a comic-opera president who is certifiably nuts, and an instrument of the plutocracy that keeps trashing ordinary working people—who weirdly still view Trump as their champion.
Trump is the logical extreme of a long downward spiral. We suffered eight years of a far-right president whose political genius was rooted in his skills as an entertainer, and who screwed the Reagan Democrats just as Trump screws his base. There were times when Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson seemed as self-absorbed and clinically insane as Trump. Trump’s abuse of executive power was prefigured by Dick Cheney. Plenty of high officials got rich via the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street even under the most personally unblemished of recent presidents, Barack Obama; and under the not-so-squeaky-clean Bill Clinton. In the meantime, money relentlessly crowded out citizenship, while economic concentration and political concentration fed on each other.
The other part of the spiral is the descent into outright racism, beginning with Goldwater, then Nixon’s Southern strategy, and the Republican Party taking on the old role of the Dixiecrats as the party of white supremacy and Black suppression. Once again, Trump merely makes flagrant what was tacit.
IT WILL BE a long road back, if at all. The usual script calls for a near miss and a happy ending. America escapes its brush with fascism, and democracy is restored. But take a hard look at what that will require.
Taking back our democracy only begins with reversing the overt damage to our institutions and putting government back on the side of expanding the franchise rather than undermining it. It will necessitate a massive assault on economic concentration, so that democracy has economic space to breathe. That means a refurbishment of the rusty tools of antitrust. It means reversal of the deregulation of Wall Street. It means government empowering the trade union movement in a manner not seen since Franklin Roosevelt, and the use of other federal powers to raise wages and restore job security.
This is all of a piece—the interaction of the economic with the political. But there are two serious obstacles to accomplishing any of this, much less all of it. One is the capture of the courts. Trump’s voter-suppression maneuvers and those of his red-state allies rely heavily on the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. Congress can pass an enhanced act, but far-right courts will still side with the forces of voter suppression.
Reclaiming democracy will require reclaiming an honest judiciary. The impolite word for this is court-packing. Republicans have been so relentless in their blockage of Obama appointees and their ramming through of far-right judges that the very legitimacy of the judicial system is in question. Expanding the courts is a lesser evil that we should embrace as a positive good.
The federal judiciary has not been enlarged since the Carter administration, though the nation’s population has grown by 110 million since Carter took office. We need an expansion of district and appellate, as well as Supreme Court judges. As the Prospect has pointed out, some policies can be reversed by statute because they do not involve constitutional issues. But many others will run into roadblocks by far-right courts using newly invented doctrines.
Secondly, in a Biden-Harris administration, there will be an undertow of immense influence by corporate power brokers and the conventional wisdom of Biden’s long-term intimates. During the convention, Ted Kaufman, the most progressive of Biden’s inner circle, blurted out that there would be no large-scale public spending in 2021 because “the pantry is bare.” That totally contradicted the eloquent calls in Biden’s acceptance speech for massive public investment in everything from infrastructure to climate, industrial policy and health care to relief of student debt. Which Biden will prevail?
There are talented progressive candidates for the Biden Cabinet. Will Biden appoint them? We will surely get some, in posts like Labor and HHS. But Biden’s corporate allies will press to keep the real power positions such as Treasury secretary, OMB director, and U.S. trade representative in safe hands so that the administration does not fundamentally challenge the current financial structure.
Absent massive citizen pressure, the overwhelming likelihood is for yet another Democratic administration whose default setting is center-left: liberalish on social issues, but not serious about challenging the economic concentration from Wall Street to Silicon Valley that has led to depressed life chances and massive disaffection among working people. Another center-left administration that does not fundamentally alter the structure of power in America is simply not good enough to halt deep economic discontent and the slide into neofascism.
The next administration will face a host of other imperatives that require breaking the constraints of conventional wisdom. The trillions of dollars created by the Fed to bail out investors and traders need to be shifted to climate, infrastructure, and reparations. Public institutions that have been hollowed out, from the CDC to NOAA, EPA, and OSHA, need to be rebuilt. The secret government that has been created by presidents of both parties since 9/11 needs to be dismantled. Massive recovery spending must start on day one, so that there are palpable gains well before the 2022 midterms. And all of it must be done at a time when expectations have been raised for making unprecedented and overdue gains on race.
This is an epochal shift. It is not a reversion to normal. If “harmless history” is restored to a benign trajectory, and the U.S. begins living up to its promise, it will be the narrowest of great escapes ever.
