Trump v Biden, or the impotence of the white man
I’ll begin this diagnostic of the american electoral battle with a description of my dad’s car. My dad’s car is almost 30 year old and it’s mostly broken. The car has had minor fixes that work to extend its lifespan from one breakdown to the next. These breaks are both synchronic and diachronic: synchronic as they prevent car from working in an specific way at a given time, and diachronic in so far they’re a product of progressive negligence that prompts its wear and tear.
The same is true for american politics. Trump, the actual driver of the car, doesn’t have any interest whatsoever to fix it. In rethoric he used to signal structural failures, some of them true (neoliberalism) and other not so much (migration), that corrode american society. Yet the president has forgotten the populist issues that brought him to power to become just another puppet in the White House orthodoxy. Trump doesn’t care about the car: if it’s drivable that’s fine, if not, off to the junkyard. His complete inability to govern during the pandemic shows that win or lose the election he already has very sweet deals and publicity for his business future.
Biden, on the other hand, has so much love for the car he is in complete denial about it being broken. Even worse: he’s in denial on how he was the architect of the damages. For every problem affecting the US we have Biden sniffing around: mass incarceration? 94 Crime bill designer. Unpayable debt? Stalwart of predatory credit card companies. Endless wars? Democratic leader in support of the Iraq war. Job loss due to outsourcing? Staunch defender of NAFTA and TPP. As Marcetic [1] says, if there’s a politician that’s always been on the wrong side of history, that’s Joe Biden.
And what a wrong side of history it has been. 40 years of neoliberalism have eroded america’s social fabric, creating a population cynic to its leaders and on eternal struggle against its neighbors. Dismantling of the welfare state, loss of dignified jobs and racial wounds have made the american dream become a dystopian nightmare in the eyes of many. This “many” are the ones left behind by civil society, who have been denied human rights such as housing, food, health and education. They have now become “the rabble”: those marginalized by civil society “product of poverty, combined with the sentiment of exclusion and shame” [2]. That’s how, says Hegel, liberal society births its own destruction.
The term “rabble”, however, undermines the profound nature of this event. There’s no one big lump of “rabble”, but thymotic units: political assembles of people driven by rage, guided by their “innate sense for the dignity of justice” [3]. These units are articulated through the axis of class, race and gender. The rage of the thymotic units can be seen in the demands for worker’s rights, the destruction of cities because of police brutality against black people, and the resentment for dying care workers, whose treatment resembles that of disposable peasants more than actual human beings.
The rage of these thymotic units its more than both Trump and Biden can handle. Trump is a daddy’s boy to whom everything was inherited, his only achievement being able to transition his media personality to a political persona. Biden, even with his complete lack of intelligence, has been able to reach the heights of Washington politics without paying any political price for the atrocities he’s supported over the years. They’re both paradigmatic examples of white privilege, where stupidity is rewarded with power and injustices are left unanswered.
The similarities between the candidates allow us to see that the relevance of the Trump-Biden elections is not on who wins, but on how it shows the failures of the system. A democracy that doesn’t allow true alternatives is not a democracy. Corporate oligopoly? Technocratic neo-feudal society? Call it what you will, the only thing left of american democracy is the impotence of those who dispute it. We can see this on Biden’s complete lack of will to propose meaningful change on the problems he created for more than 30 years, and on Trump’s acceleration of this fascistic tendencies. The leaders’ only answer to the raging demands of the thymotic units is either stubborn denial or brute strength.
What’s next for the gringos? Their political future is not in their institutions. At the writing of this essay the democratic candidate has a clear advantage, yet only someone as pathetic as him could lose against the worst handling of a crisis in decades. His platform is an absolute resignation towards the market-centric and austerity policies that created the conditions for Trump’s populistic nationalism. The neoliberal school lead by Obama and others stopped Bernie Sanders in a way they’ve never actually tried against the fascists, showing how american politics is supposed to work: without options for the working class.
On the 2017 french election Zizek [4] said that the only options were the symptom, fascism, or the sickness, neoliberalism. This dilemma is now upon the americans. The rise of thymotic units, with their raging hunger for change, sheds light amongst the shadows: just like France saw historic protests against Macron’s politics, the american imaginary is not a stranger to destructives demands for justice. Making structural failures visible to the naked eye and demanding a new world are the only way to open a path for the political possibility of the future. American electoralism is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.
[1] Marcetic, B. (2020). Yesterday’s man. The case against Joe Biden. Verso.
[2] Mann, G. (2017). In the long run we are all dead: Keynesianism, political economy, and revolution. London: Verso.
[3] Sloterdijk, P. (2010). Rage and time: a psychopolitical investigation. New York: Columbia University Press.
[4] Zizek, S. (2017, mayo 3). Don’t believe the liberals — there is no real choice between Le Pen and Macron. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/french-elections-marine-le-pen-emmanuel-macron-no-real-choice-a7714911.html