The Biden Dilemma: De-Trumpification or Domestic Tranquility

Joe Biden faces a dilemma.

The white suburban professional class and global corporations who will hand him the election want a return to a pre-Trump status quo.

The progressive urbanites who comprise the core of the party however, view their support as a mandate for generational systemic change.

The current Democratic party coalition is the result of party realignment instantiated by Trump. Effectively, Trump traded corporate interest and America’s suburban professional class for working class whites.

As a result, Biden’s Democratic party is now home to a circular firing squad of Sanders’s socialists, mega-corporations, Blacks, immigrants, progressive urbanites and suburban Karens. The 2020 Democratic party looks more like the cast of a bawdy reality TV show than a coherent partisan coalition.

The coalition is so broken, it’s unlikely landmark legislation on civil rights, tax reform, trust-busting or new social program creation is possible. The new corporate and suburban professionals simply aren’t interested in big changes.

The coalition, however, is currently united in opposition to Trump, but without Trump the party could easily sink into brutal intra-party tribal warfare. Were that to happen, Democrats would lose badly in the midterms and the Biden legacy would be in shambles.

Biden has four options to address his unstable party coalition once in office:

1. Talk woke and vote establishment.
2. Push Godzilla legislation.
3. De-Trumpify.
4. Die in Office/Resign

Talk Woke and Vote Establishment

Biden can acknowledge the woke warrior wing of the party using their language while over-celebrating basic achievements like rolling back Trump administration executive orders on anti-racism training, immigration, police reform and border security. The administration may even accept early on that it will lose seats in the midterm no matter what and a few lost seats is worth it to keep the promised peace.

Americans will be grateful for a reprieve from constant scandal and reward the new administration with high approval ratings.

This strategy could work for a honeymoon period that could even be extended by the need to “combat COVID” but ultimately idealistic members of Congress and the base will want tangibles. The agitation from within the party would also incite the wiley Republicans to start thinking up wedge issues to keep Democratic drama on full tilt.

Even if Biden decides to bite the bullet to keep the peace, the unholy union of woke activism and corporate power may not.

In the absence of satisfactory government action, the “networked tribes” of the left are likely to have the terms of service for major tech companies re-written to exclude political rivals from social networks, online finance, text messaging, email services, job sites, web hosting, dating apps, media publication and the like. The emerging social AI that police these networks would lock in a corporatized regime of censorship rivaling that found in China.

For Biden, it may even be wise to softly support the censorship as it will keep his base occupied and tie Republicans in knots.

The old Clinton strategy of “triangulation” which the Clinton holdovers will definitely recommend is doomed to fail spectacularly owing to the internet. Each democratic bloc is capable of producing a withering blizzard of bad press and political pressure that snatches away the message from the White House.

After another winter and spring of COVID, the first triggering video of the summer is likely to send protestors back into the streets without a Trump to blame. As those voting blocs make it clear that “no justice means no peace” the Biden White House would have to begin framing a real policy agenda or risk losing the White House the next cycle.

As a side note, it’s possible large donors could pay off left leaning organizations to keep the crazy turned to simmer, or the media may not cover the activities of the Twitter mobs to help Biden. The problem is that both of these solutions alienate critical Democratic constituencies and lead to big losses in midterms.

Push Godzilla Legislation

A major legislative package of Green New Deal style programs and funding could work. A Godzilla bill (massive, green and economically destructive) like this could be combined with a penultimate COVID-relief plan to create something that makes the New Deal and Great Society look downright conservative in comparison.

The plan would dissipate opposition by throwing piles of cash at nearly every interest group in the country including financially drained state governments. Every dollar, however, would come with progressive or woke strings tied to ensure favored policies are implemented by public and private sector recipients and engineered to fundamentally alter American society.

The Godzilla bill is a strong plan but likely to be disrupted by Senate Republicans filibustering the bill and intra-party conflicts among Democratic groups looking for a better deal. Worse, key provisions could be overturned by the conservative Supreme Court.

De-Trumpify

Should the Godzilla bill fail to materialize, Biden and congressional Democrats will have to turn back to Trump through de-Trumpification efforts to keep party unity.

The left and their aligned institutions against Trump views Trumpism as literally analogous to Nazism and believes actions must be taken to ensure a leader like Trump can never be elected again. Even moderate left-leaning voters would find arguments that “we need to do something different” compelling.

De-Trumpification could take any of three forms. The process could mean extended criminal investigations (Kamala Harris would make a strong prosecution czar) and prosecutions of Trump or Trump associates, significantly altering our system of government or broader socially-based actions through a formal reconciliation process.

Move to end the filibuster? Try to pack the Supreme Court? Press the interstate electoral compact? Admit new Democratic states? Hold public criminal investigation hearings into Trump and his administration? Form a Cancel Crusade to purge Trump “enablers” from public and private sector jobs? Create a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to catalog grievances against Trump and Trump supporters and suggest means of collective restitution?

An attempt at any one of these “systematic” reforms would get nasty. Republicans would see the actions as the Democrats changing the legal and electoral system so they could never again lose. States would threaten to nullify rulings and laws passed after the restructuring. Right wing activists would gear up for an existential battle likely to include “direct democratic actions” against progressive cities.

Trucker blockades of major highways, port workers calling out sick on the same day, utility lineman “accidently” knocking out power and militias staging Bundy-esque takeovers of federal lands each helped along by sympathetic law enforcement.

All this and the spectre of state governments refusing to implement federal law and possibly floating secession as leverage against losing power to a domineering federal government.

Die in Office/Resign

The last option is dreary.

Biden could die in office, thus handing the presidency to the first female and person of color. President Harris would use the “Joe’s final wish” line to justify one unifying push at legislation on race in the same way Kennedy’s death allowed Johnson to press the Civil Rights Act.

The new Civil Rights Act, however, would likely result in countless Constitutional challenges that would be taken up by a conservative Supreme Court. In effect, landing Harris right back with the same dilemma faced by Biden.

Like any Democratic president under the new party arrangement, Harris can let her agenda die and lose her party or pursue systematic changes that threaten the future of the Republic.

Afterward: Learning All The Wrong Lessons

Biden’s victory will be heralded as a victory for American institutions who ensured four years of assault from a maniac. Pundits will say our institutions showed their resilience to challenges and deserve more trust.

The problem for our institutions is that they suffer from two problems.

First, most major institutions are corrupt, costly and ineffective. Institutional corruption does not mean the leaders take bribes but, in our case, that the stated goals of those institutions have fallen far out of alignment with the incentives of those institutions.

The media claim their goal is to inform, but they are incentivized to do whatever it takes to get attention, regardless of truth or facts.

Universities claim to educate students, but they are incentivized to increase tuition by leveraging federally-guaranteed student loans and focus more on attracting and retaining students than educating them.

National security institutions claim their goal is to protect Americans, but their incentives are aligned around growing and maintaining vast security programs executed by private contractors.

American corporations need access to Chinese markets to meet growth obligations and will undermine any popular action that restrains access to China.

The list can go on but Americans have seen our institutions fail at every challenge since the end of the Cold War. The security apparatus had 9/11 and two never-ending wars; the financial system had the housing bubble; the public health space has opioids and COVID; the conservative political establishment and corporations sold America to China; the liberal political establishment and media degraded cultural norms of decency through entertainment; Hollywood can’t produce anything but sequels; outside of IT, technology has remained stagnant since 1970; most scientific research studies can’t be replicated, and universities grifted us massive debt and wokeism.

Second, the leaders of every American institution (including now corporations), outside of state government and churches, are part of the progressive monoculture and are hostile to conservatives.

If there is one reason to be more concerned about progressivism than Trumpism, it is that the left actually controls almost everything.

Looping back to where we started, American institutions didn’t see the election of Trump as a reckoning for cultural and economic failures that require change. No, the institutions used Trump as a reason to double down on their corruption.

Conservatives were physically chased off campuses, Corporations purged employees (and customers) for wrong think, the national security apparatus attempted low key coups, the national media lost any shred of credibility in pursuit of outrage, and on and on.

The problem going forward is that the leaders of these institutions don’t ever want a Trump-like character in office again because it threatens the credibility and power of those institutions.

The solution for them will be to protect the system from any future Trump. Further, the left leaning institutional leaders have absolute confidence in their moral rightness and have fundamentally different definitions of justice from the populace. As a result of their “right side of history” moralism, there exists a pervasive “ends justify the means” mentality.

These institutions led by the tech corporations will support the legal changes listed above, but are also going to get active on the soft power side. “Cancel culture” and actions to disconnect, discredit, deplatform, demonetize and dehumanize Trump enablers will continue under the “de-trumpification” or “anti-racism” banner.

Meanwhile, the terms of service for each platform will get tighter and be aided by increasingly effective social censorship AIs. The institutions won’t be flanked again by an internet uprising because they’ll get the internet under control.

Terms like “white supremacist” and “white terroist” will start flying at people and activities mainstream just a year ago. The term “white supremist” dehumanizes while the label “terrorist” opens up extra legal powers.

This kind of social pressure creates isolation and radicalization. Eventually, a right-wing group will succeed at a kidnapping, assassination, riot, mass shooting or bombing. Worse, a 21st century Ruby Ridge or Waco (the FBI has a recent history of infiltration and entrapment of right-wing groups) could take place while being live-streamed to the world, resulting in a right-wing version of the BLM protests.

In return, the federal government would unleash a massive domestic counter-terrorism operation aimed at the right. Billions in funding, activation of new sweeping powers of surveillance, extremely aggressive alignment across all platforms aimed at disconnecting any sympathizers.

The whole trillion dollar apparatus built over two decades to fight terror abroad would be turned inward. The result would be something like a China-lite surveillance state, justified because it keeps America safe from extremists.

Of course, the danger is most of these factors are present already and it actually may not matter who wins the election. The waiting power of left-aligned institutions and a massive security state may unite regardless of who holds the Oval Office. In which case, it truly does not matter who holds public office because the power of tech or the deep state so thoroughly exceeds that of term limited and legally restrained leaders.