Giving way takes courage

‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it’. That’s a Shakespeare line that always amazes me by how many situations it applies to. Today, I’d say of Joe Biden that nothing in his career became him like his withdrawal from it. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good president – he had some notable achievements – but he was no longer a good candidate, at a time when his defeat would return to the White House a man determined to undermine the most fundamental values of the US constitution.

It’s obvious that standing down was immensely painful to him. That makes his action particularly courageous and admirable. It puts him into the tradition of a man like George Washington. He received a commission from the Continental Congress, the body that headed the thirteen colonies that rose against Britain, to head its armies. When he emerged victorious from the war, many feared that he would use his popularity to make himself dictator or king of the newly independent nation. Instead, he went to Congress and handed back his Commission.

Biden has shown himself a worthy heir of Washington

As I’ve said before, what he didn’t do (he didn’t seize power) is right up there in importance with what he did (he won the war). What Biden hasn't done (he’s not clinging on to the nomination) is a fine way of crowning a career including some pretty great things he did do (like post-Covid measures and initiatives to aid economic recovery).

But what happens next? 

A friend commented to me recently that Biden clinging on to the nomination would leave the Democrats with no chance of beating Trump. Replacing Biden would certainly not guarantee them victory. But it would at least give them a chance.

It was quite clear, and I got that message powerfully even from individual Americans that I know here in Spain, that many of those who dreaded the return to power of Trump couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, once his state of health showed him to be unfit to hold the office of President for another term. 

The frontrunner to replace him is the present Vice President, Kamala Harris. If she wins the White House, it’ll be historic: the first woman to hold the post and the second person of colour, after Barrack Obama.

However, front runner or not, she’s not even sure of the Democratic nomination yet. There are other possible candidates. They all have one advantage over Biden, which is their age. Had Biden stayed in the race, he would have been the oldest candidate ever for the presidency. Now that mantle falls on Trump’s shoulders. I hope the Democrats will be as ruthless against him as he was in using age as a weapon against Biden. That would be especially appropriate as Trump too is suffering from the effects of his advancing age, shown in speeches that are frequently incoherent and confused.

If it is Kamala Harris that faces off to him, it’s likely that he’ll attack her for being allegedly soft on drug offenders during her time as Attorney General of California. I hope he does. But I only hope that because it’ll give her the opportunity to respond by asking just how tough a sentence the law should impose on a felon convicted of fraudulently using company funds to cover up, for his own electoral purposes, an affair with a porn star.

Harris has also built herself a good reputation as a defender of abortion rights. Trump has surrounded himself with anti-abortion characters, like his running mate JD Vance. I’d love to see her suggesting that it’s not at all surprising that he refuses women rights over their own bodies, seeing how little respect he’s shown for those bodies in his behaviour and, indeed, his boasts about what he likes to do to them.

I’d love to watch Trump squirming under that kind of pressure.

The trump, trump, trump of repressive boots

Nothing excuses the German election of a ranting, bigoted demagogue in the 1930s. But at least one can understand the trauma of a nation that had been beaten in a ruinous war, only to stumble into an unprecedented financial crisis in which the cost of living rose fifteen-fold in just six months of 1922; barely had they stabilised their currency than they were hit by the great depression and watched unemployment climb to 30%. One can understand the despair and therefore the blind groping that drove a large enough minority (the Nazis never won a majority) to choose an inexcusable, and false, solution to their problems.

But what explains the Americans? One of the wealthiest nations on Earth, the United States has 4.9% unemployment and inflation inching towards 1.6%. So why choose another hate-filled merchant of fear? The worst problem economically in the US is that wealth is so badly distributed, so that a small percentage of enormously rich individuals can hire or fire at will, forcing others to live precariously and on inadequate incomes – but the Americans have just chosen one of those individuals to occupy the White House.

Indeed, he has promised to do away with the one significant achievement of Obama’s White House, the one measure designed to alleviate the inequity of wealth, the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’).

They have chosen a man who has promised the impossible: to bring industries back to the rust belt, to build a wall against illegal immigration, to prevent terrorists gaining entry to the US. He can only disappoint but he’ll wreak terrible suffering along the way: arrests, deportations, denial of basic rights.

Along that road, women will lose essential rights over their own bodies, and the major social progress of the last half century, towards toleration of minorities, most notably of LGBT communities, will be at least partially rolled back. And yet many women voted for Trump in preference to Clinton, though they know he holds them in contempt. Indeed, the only white demographic in which she won a majority was among educated white women – and even then, she only took 51%.

One of the more telling images of this most divisive election

The key word in that last paragraph is “white”. Something ugly has happened in the US. I can’t help feeling that what’s going on is the re-emergence of a white supremacist temptation that many feel, and most had learned to suppress in recent decades. Obama had seized the White House and, though he pulled off the feat of re-election in 2012, I suspect there is a widespread feeling among many whites that his success showed blacks getting altogether too uppity. With a candidate who openly expressed these feelings and therefore seemed to legitimise them, far too many were prepared to turn to him.

They did so despite the clear warnings he’d given of the damage he would do with the power they were handing him.

Trump’s is the victory of fear and hatred over reason and tolerance. Sadly, that’s by no means a purely US phenomenon. It emerged strongly in Britain too, in June, when the country voted to leave the European Union. At the time, there was much talk of the need to protect sovereignty and put an end to the erosion of supposed British rights. The reality was clear before and has been confirmed since, that the true concern was with keeping minorities at arms’ length.

Even Theresa May has been openly proclaiming that what the electorate voted for was tighter control of immigration. In other words, just like the white American voters fearful of people who look different from them, or have sex differently, or worship differently, Britain voted to throw up the walls and keep the foreigners out. I know a number of long-term foreign residents in Britain, and there have been media reports of many others, who were asked within hours of the referendum vote when they’d be leaving.

Xenophobes and white supremacists felt legitimised in Britain by the Brexit vote, as they did by the Trump campaign in the States.

On both sides of the Atlantic, a small majority of closed-minded individuals, driven by basic – and base – feelings of hatred and fear have taken control of the destinies of us all. There are grim times ahead. There will undoubtedly be regression, on many fronts. Hard though it is, we have to keep up our spirits and continue pressing as effectively as we can for a return to progressive, tolerant, open-minded attitudes. We have to maintain our hope that in time those better values will prevail.

With, I’m afraid, absolutely no guarantee that they will. Though if we don’t keep up the pressure, we can guarantee they won’t.

Beware the man of providence, for he’s a danger to us all

It’s bad news when people start looking for the Providential Man (the capital letters are, naturally, mandatory).

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Napoleon in France, or Franco in Spain, or Pinochet in Chile. When you get to the point that salvation seems to depend on a single man, you’re on the edge of deep chasm. That's because a providential man always comes with a refusal of dissent – after all, the darling of Providence can’t be wrong, so why should one tolerate disagreement with him?

At the Republican National Convention, when Donald Trump accepted the party’s nomination for US President, he listed many of the problems that beset American society. And then he announced:

I am your voice. I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.

He alone can rise to the challenge of his times. He alone can speak for his followers. He alone has the answers.

It’s no surprise, then, that he wants to build a wall. The only difference between him and other providential men dabbled with totalitarianism, is that he wants to build a wall to keep others out. But walls are walls, and once you’ve got into the way of building them, you’re likely to build a lot more. And some of them will be to keep people in.

Just as revealing has been his reaction to the Democratic Party’s Convention. There, Khizr Khan paid tribute to his son Humayun, a Muslim who also happened to be a Captain in the US army, killed in Iraq in 2004. He had told his men to step back from a suspect car but went forward himself to check it, only to have it blow up and kill him. Trump’s proposal to prevent Muslims entering the US would catch a man like the dead Captain, if he travelled outside the country and wanted to return.

Khizr Khan rightly criticised Trump for trampling on the rights of fellow Americans, including those who are prepared to put their lives on the line like his son. With his wife Gazala standing sad and silent by his sid he brandished a copy of the US Constitution and offered to lend it to Trump so that he actually read it.

Khizr Khan offers Trump a copy of the Constitution to read
with Gazala by his side

And Trump’s response? He was ‘viciously attacked’ by Khan. Worse still, he asked why Gazala had remained silent: had she been forbidden to speak?

She’s explained since that she found the sight of the photo of her son, projected behind the stage when her husband was speaking, simply too moving.

So Trump, far from moderating his proposals against Muslims, has attacked the father of a dead soldier and extended the attack to the bereaved mother too. That may sound callous, but don’t forget that he’s the only man who can save the United States. To question his thoughts, therefore, is to question a providential man – and who can arrogate to himself the right to speak against Providence?

At the moment, Trump’s behaviour seems to have hurt his standing in the polls, leaving Hillary Clinton with a good lead over him. But that means that over 43% of US voters still back him. I’d like to say it’s despite the kind of bigotry he expresses but, sadly, it may be because they share that bigotry.

They’re dangerous, those providential men. Providential man Trump poses a great danger to the US, as Khizr Khan pointed out so powerfully. And, don’t forget, as the world’s only superpower, a dangerous US is a danger to us all.

Polarisation of opinion: boldness or recklessness?

Looks like we’re once more being cursed to live in interesting times.

Divisions, on both sides of the Atlantic, are becoming starker, more polarised. We’re rejecting the dull middle, the conformist and customary, and opting for the edgy, the bold, the different. Trouble is, the bold is exciting but can also be dangerous.

Charles the Bold, for instance, is often thought of as Charles the Reckless. It’s easy for one to slip into the other. Charles himself (briefly) made that discovery, as he lost his life at the Battle of Nancy in 1477.

Charles.
Could have been the bold. Turned out to have been the reckless.

In Britain, we in the Labour have elected ourselves as leader a man, Jeremy Corbyn, who identifies himself as a socialist. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, another man who makes the same identification, Bernie Sanders, has won the primary in the race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

“Together we have sent a message that will resonate from Wall Street to Washington, from Maine to California,” he announced after his victory, “and that is that the government of our great country belongs to all of the people and not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors, and their Super PACs.”

Refreshing stuff. His is a nation, as Lincoln pointed out, founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and its government today is in hock to the men (and a scattering of women) with the deepest pockets.

Sadly, as Sanders won his primary, comprehensively beating the candidate of the middle and the establishment, Hillary Clinton, one of those deep-pocketed men was wrapping up the primary for the other party.

“We are going to start winning again,” Donald Trump made it clear, referring no doubt to his surprise defeat in Iowa, “we are going to make America so great again.”

Trouble is his view of making the US great isn’t to reassert the founding principle of equality of creation, it’s to chuck a lot of people out and build a bloody great wall to keep them out. The notion is ludicrous, of course, if only because it massively underestimates the ingenuity of man in getting around walls, and the sheer scale of the task of guarding any barrier 2000 miles long. All his idea would achieve, if it were ever put into practice, is to improve business for people-traffickers, who would be able to charge more to defeat the wall and trump Donald.

All the same, the idea’s gaining traction among a certain and far too large section of the US electorate.

And that’s the trouble with polarisation. It’s great if things go one way. Catastrophic if they go the other.

As happened to Charles the Reckless.