Tomorrow Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president at a Capitol which now resembles Iraq’s Green Zone. The FBI is vetting all 25,000 National Guard troops who are bivouacking there for the first time in centuries — just in case some of them want to turn American weaponry against the new president. In addition to the National Guard there will be almost 1,000 active-duty military providing medical and bomb disposal support services.
For the 74 million Americans who voted for the outgoing president it doesn’t look much like a democracy. For most, only continued white supremacy makes America a democracy. And for many of the 81 million Americans who voted for Biden, myself included, it won’t feel lik much of a democracy either. For all our wishful thinking, there’s no rolling back the clock on who we are and what we’ve become. Very few of the 155 million people who voted for either candidate in the last election truly believe in full democracy, that is, both at home and abroad.
For years Americans have recognized that democracy and white supremacy are incompatible. Current events now force us to recognize that white supremacy leads only to authoritarianism and mob rule. And if we have the courage to look back with clear eyes on our history, we see it has always been this way.
The Patriot Act, FISA courts, the surveillance state, and the demonization and criminilzation of refugees, have become permanent fixtures under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Conservatives defend fascists while Liberals have now thrown both fascists and intemperate people off social media, proposed extensions of the No Fly List, drafted new anti-terrorism laws, and are now considering relaxing limits to all sorts of surveillance. After 9/11 we have not heard a peep from Democrats about retiring any of the anti-democratic laws and security measures that followed, as they continue to abrogate foreign policy decisions to an increasingly imperial presidency.
For many of us on the Left, Democrats cannot be relied upon to be any better stewards of democracy than Republicans. They will continue to be unreliable allies in police and criminal justice reform, housing, and universal healthcare. Judging by Biden appointments to-date, the Democratic Party’s true constituency continues to be corporate America. It remains to be seen if Democrats will actually help students drowning in debt, families losing their homes, people crushed by medical costs, or if they are willing to give up our long addiction to American Exceptionalism. There is ample reason to doubt this last one.
It’s fair to say that tomorrow, as Joe Biden takes office at noon, progressives will have a new political opponent who, for the most part, does not share anywhere near the same vision of what this country could be. Progressives and Centrists may have both worked to rid the country of Donald J. Trump. But the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. And, so that this is clearer, our remaining enemy is neoliberalism not my well-meaning Democratic friends who haven’t really examined it very closely.
One unquestioned aspect of neoliberalism is maintaining a monstrous military to intervene at a moment’s notice to protect American interests, and to force neoliberalism (usually mis-labeled as “democracy”) down the throats of even nations who don’t want it — all in the name of nation-building. Over decades this has led to U.S.-supported coups all over the world, insurrections, assassinations, and regime change — in other countries, of course, never ours until now. But now the chickens have come home to roost.
Bipartisan war-mongering and constant regime change efforts revealthat America has no real commitment to democracy as a principle. Neoliberalism’s bipartisan sidekick is neoconservativism, another ideology based on American supremacy and the notion that we are obligated to project our “supremacy” or “exceptional” virtue using the biggest, most lethal arsenal in the world. If it sounds evil expressed this way, it’s because it is evil.
As we move from a Republican administration, which literally tried to build a wall around America to shut the world out, to a Democratic adminstration built from spare parts of the 2008 Obama presidency, we move from isolation to international engagement. Some of that engagement, such as restoring the Paris Climate Accords, is very welcome. Unfortunately much of the international engagement we can expect in the next four years will not be so good. We are about to witness the trimphant return of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. And what good is the biggest, baddest military in the world if you don’t use it liberally and keep it in practice?
Yesterday Joe Biden announced that Victoria Nuland will be his Under Secretary for Political Affairs. Nuland, who camped out at various think tanks after leaving her role as Dick Cheney’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and then Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, is married to Robert Kagan. Kagan was co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, an organization that relentlessly cheer-led the invasion of Iraq. People forget that when America’s president changed from Bush to Obama, American foreign policy didn’t change along with presidents.
Nuland’s disgraceful involvement in regime change efforts (and the wars they require) should have immediately disqualified her as Biden’s pick. In 2014 Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussed the U.S. removing Ukraine’s elected president Victor Yanukovych. The Ukraine had backed away from a U.S. trade deal in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia. At the same time, a EU trade agreement was about to create new EU customers in the Ukraine. When a phone call of Nuland and Pyatt’s support for a coup to get rid of Yanukovych was leaked, Europeans were incensed and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was livid. It hadn’t helped that Nuland expressed utter contempt for the European Union. “Fuck the EU!” Nuland was heard saying on the same leaked call. The rest of the sordid coup story involves Nuland’s backchannel talks with Oleh Tyahnybok, a Ukrainian fascist.
Besides her regime change efforts in Syria and Libya, this was nothing new for Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was involved in another coup in Honduras — in which the Honduran military supported by the U.S. goverment impounded ballot boxes and forced the likely winner into exile. Clinton regarded the exiled candidate, Manuel Zelaya, as another “troublemaker” like Hugo Chavez, and she quickly organized new elections with pro-American OAS “partners” once it was clear that Zelaya could not re-enter the country. No need to point out that this is precisely the same strategy for overturning the 2020 presidential election recommended by Michael Flynn and attempted by Ted Cruz and a host of other Republican plotters. But Clinton got a free pass from Democrats because her crimes were not directed against Americans, just brown people somewhere else.
Nuland’s choice signals that the Biden adminstration will renew American provocations of Russia — in addition to all the other nations we currently sanction and meddle with. Last year Nuland wrote in Foreign Affairs that “The coming U.S. presidential election offers the United States a chance to get off defense, restore the strength and confidence of the democratic world, and close the holes in its security after years of drift and division. Once that resolve is firmly on display, the United States can seize the moment of renewal at home and stagnation in Russia to stretch out a hand again.” But Victoria (“Fuck the EU”) Nuland is precisely the wrong person to stretch out her claws to Europeans who have a talent for remembering history.
With U.S. military installations in Eastern Europe already literally ringing Russia, it’s not clear what sort of “holes” Nuland really thinks need plugging. Nuland has proposed even greater militarization of Russia’s borders, stepped-up VOA and other propaganda efforts, and a return to the halcyon days of the Cold War. “Washington and its allies have forgotten the statecraft that won the Cold War and continued to yield results for many years after. That strategy required consistent U.S. leadership at the presidential level, unity with democratic allies and partners, and a shared resolve to deter and roll back dangerous behavior by the Kremlin.” Joe Biden has apparently swallowed this Kool-Aid.
Many Liberals recognize (even embrace) Biden’s explicit reset of the clock from Trumpworld of 2020 to Obamaworld of 2008. But if Biden succeeds in replacing Trump’s isolationism with the muscular American Exceptionalism that preceded it — as Nuland’s appointment clearly signals — expect more global war and no relief from our trillion dollar “defense” and spy agency budgets. And don’t expect Biden to stop provoking China either or repair lapsed or broken friendships with traditional allies. These relationships have been destroyed by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Forbes reports that Europe may have finally given up on a pro-Brexit America which continually insulted the EU project and thumbed its nose at former allies. Biden had asked the EU to delay a new trade deal with China, to not permit member nations to integrate with Chinese digital technology, and to not tax or regulate American Big Tech. An impatient, if not fed-up, Europe showed it wasn’t going to play along with a new U.S. reassertion of power, even if Biden was a familiar face.
The days of Americans barking orders and allies snapping to attention seem to be a thing of the past. Like their Republican cousins, Democrats just don’t realize it yet.
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