America's Plastic Moment

It's now or never

And just like that, the Biden presidency is over. The great hope placed in pharmaceuticals has been dashed. It’s really hard to see how the Dems will not be forced to have a open convention now. The game is already on for Chicago. MSNBC had Gavin Newsom come immediately to deliver some reassuringly loyalist drivel.

There are moments in history when the course of history becomes plastic. This is one of them. Which candidate, and given our candidate-centric politics, which agenda, gains control of the power state is a matter of great historical importance. The very plasticity of the moment means that it could go any which way. We could end up with a generic centrist democrat from the Clinton world. That may very well be the baseline scenario because of risk aversion among Dems.

Another, not altogether unlikely possibility, is that the Democrat party evolves further away from the failed Clinton formula in response to the crisis. We know exactly what happened with the Biden presidency. Since it was a weekend at Bernie’s affair, power devolved to the principals below the president. They came to control their turf, and basically fought a turf war with each other. On the domestic agenda, they embraced the left, because the center had literally run our of ideas. But on foreign policy, which is owned by the White House, the hold of the hawkish centrists went practically unchallenged.

This then led to a situation where the ideas and energy of the left, particularly the climate left, were implemented at least in part, but were coupled to a New Cold War agenda. Once they had the fine print from the likes of Ted Fertik and Tim Sahay, the climate left was left out of all policymaking. And soon enough, the Biden climate agenda itself was for all practical purposes repealed: what the IRA gave, the tariffs took away, and then some. Basically, they used the left to gain some credibility on the domestic front and then summarily ignored it when it came to question of war and peace. No one was allowed to interfere with the bloodletting in Europe and the Middle East.

There is an opportunity in this plastic moment. But it requires intense and immediate mobilization by Democrats. Putting a generic democrat on the ballot may possibly win the presidency. But it will only lead deeper into the impasse, at home and abroad. We need to have a real fight about the vision of the Democratic Party.

Are we to be forever the party of warmongers? Are we capable of putting forward a vision of the world that is consistent with our values and is yet consistent with peaceful competition in the twenty-first century? Because those two things are not the same. Unabashed liberal-democratic supremacism is a recipe for a cold war, if indeed not a world war.

Are we going to tolerate our elected officials living in fear of a foreign power and its lobby on the Potomac? Or are we going to reclaim our sovereignty and conduct our foreign policy in accordance with how we see the world? This nut is especially difficult to crack because internal degrees of freedom have basically vanished on Israel policy. The result is to dramatically harm America’s world position, simply because a highly organized special interest group has not been countered by an equally organized counter group. Are we to simply tolerate this? We have already lost Indonesia and Malaysia. And they’re bang in the middle of the most strategic region of the twenty-first century.

Are we going to sell the Trump-lite agenda that the Biden idiots have embraced? Or are we going to articulate an alternate vision of free intercourse between nations, with guardrails for working people everywhere? One that accepts China’s and other developing nations’ right to development? If we hunker down behind a tariff wall, we can be certain that we will cede the center of the world economy to China. This process is already underway because of the New Washington Consensus on protectionist voodoo. Biden’s EV tariffs are a death sentence for American automakers, who will live forever as wards of the state and never be able to compete on the world market, not just with the Chinese, but also the Koreans and the Japanese who are integrating further with China.

The misdiagnosis that undergirds the current drift in US policy under Biden is the pushed by Trump and embraced by Biden, that our present troubles—deaths of despair, instability of the political order—is due to trade. Ie, China ate our lunch. This idea is fraudulent. The cause of our present instability is not the China Shock—the structural break in deaths of despair predates the China Shock by a decade—but our domestic institutions. In particular, the discipline imposed by private equity on industrial firms has done more to harm American productivity and the well-being of American workers than our entire intercourse with the rest of the world combined.

At this plastic moment, we have the burden and the opportunity to articulate an agenda that deals with the real issues—the hourglass economy, the polarization of economic fortunes along the diploma divide, the extraordinary policy errors of the warmongering US foreign policy elites—instead of embracing politically expedient narratives blaming foreigners that do not look like us.

If Trump is to be defeated and the American republic saved, we first need to reorient the Democratic party, not around Trump-lite bullshit as Biden has done, but an agenda that pays attention to the very real challenges we face and deals with them with integrity.

Let us not squander this plastic moment.