Joe Biden Can’t Bring Normalcy to America
In a recent appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher, actor Robert De Niro excoriated Donald Trump as “a total monster” and a “mean, nasty, hateful person” about whom there was “nothing redeemable.” He made his case for a second Joe Biden term, saying, “Vote for Trump, you’ll get the nightmare. Vote for Biden, and we’ll be back to normalcy.”
Everything De Niro said about Trump is true enough. There’s a problem with what he said about Biden and “normalcy,” though. Biden is a pretty conventional, status quo American politician, and this is what De Niro presumably means by “normalcy.” But Biden cannot return us to normalcy because our system is already so completely abnormal.
Hardly anything about the way this country operates makes sense. We live under a system that rewards psychopathy, breeds staggering levels of wealth inequality, and spends more money on the military than the next 10 countries combined. All the while, our infrastructure is crumbling and Americans are afflicted with hunger, disease, poverty, gun violence, overworking, and drug abuse. Almost anyone, if given the chance to design a society from scratch, could do better.
Such a profoundly abnormal system will always produce charlatans like Donald Trump who appeal to the desperation of an abused population. If Biden wins in November, it may be the final nail in Trump’s political career, but it won’t be the last time a lying, racist fascist rises to political prominence. The Republican Party essentially only produces such candidates, and the longer the Democratic Party insists on upholding this dysfunctional status quo, the more likely it is another Trump-like figure will ascend all the way to the White House.
Not only is Biden incapable of tackling the significant problems that might bring about a healthy, new normal, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in it, nor will his status quo politics keep fascism at bay.
Despite neither side really posing a challenge to America’s fundamental rot, each side is hysterically paranoid about the other. Liberals speak about Trump the way FOX News has spoken about every Democrat for the last 20 years — as an existential threat to their way of life. When De Niro tells Maher that Trump will come after both of them if he’s elected and take Maher off the air, he sounds not unlike Ted Nugent in 2012 claiming, “If Barack Obama becomes the president… I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”
There’s a key difference, of course, in that Trump openly promises to use his second term to settle scores. He’s unique in that regard, and uniquely awful — and is likely to be far more unhinged if he regains power. But it’s not clear how far he’d be able to carry his naked totalitarian ambitions. One thing Trump’s first term demonstrated is that the public, media, and institutions can be resilient and hold powerful people to some accountability when they really want to.
Liberals are rightly fearful that Trump and his extremist judges pose a serious and long-lasting threat to women’s reproductive rights, trans rights, gay rights, voting rights, and all kinds of social progress made over the last fifty years. But this danger is not unique to Trump. Stone Age views on education, healthcare, and equal rights are the Republican Party platform, including the “normal” ones like Nikki Haley, who Maher wishes would join Biden on a 2024 unity ticket. In some regards Trump may actually be less extreme on some of these issues than “respectable Republicans” like Haley or Ron DeSantis.
If status quo liberals like Maher truly cared about defending these values, they’d be vowing to fight Trump tooth and nail every step of the way if he wins rather than caving into defeatist paranoia. They’d pledge to defend the weak and the vulnerable with their bodies, if necessary, and fight Biden when he’s off-base, too.
While the GOP is actively hostile to these issues, Democrats often only meekly defend them. Biden seems to be holding some of these rights hostage, or perhaps playing chicken with voters and Republicans. He has promised to protect abortion access if reelected, but some activists say he isn’t doing nearly enough to protect it now, while he’s already in office and wields power.
Still, whatever his many shortfalls, Biden is undeniably the lesser evil on these and other critical issues. But it’s difficult to be persuaded by liberal fretfulness over Donald Trump when their standard-bearer is neck-deep in the perpetuation of a genocide.
Gaza is where Biden has truly gone beyond the pale. Despite some occasional finger-wagging, his support for Israel’s brutal assault has been unwavering, sending them weapons and money that have been used to slaughter at least 31,000 people and starve, dismember, displace, and terrorize all the rest. The vast majority of the victims — perhaps 92% of them — have been civilians, women, and children. Israel has killed more than 12,000 children, more than in all other wars globally over the last four years combined.
Trump is no better on Palestine, and possibly quite a bit worse. He supports Israel’s right to “finish the problem” — which sounds an awful lot like a final solution. But it’s truly a grim country that presents voters a choice between one candidate who’s 98% in on a genocide and another who’s 99% in on it, and it’s hard to take seriously those who insist that the future of all goodness in the universe rests with any genocide enabler, regardless of how progressive he is on domestic voting rights.
If genocide is not a red line for voters, what is? What kind of message are voters sending if they are unwilling to punish a party for facilitating an ethnic cleansing? For a certain breed of status quo liberal, Trump violating the niceties of our society is a greater crime than Biden’s enabling of genocide — and that’s a travesty that shows just how deeply abnormal we are.
Plenty of leftists and people of conscience will rationalize Biden as the lesser evil and vote for him. But plenty of others won’t be able to bring themselves to vote for a man who’s willfully supporting so much suffering, famine, and death. If current polling numbers hold, Trump will likely trounce Biden in November — and leftists who opposed the genocide in Gaza will be blamed.
The times we live in are anything but normal, and a “normal” candidate is ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that are already here and the ones still to come. A lesser-of-two-evils electoral system was always destined to be a race to the bottom, and now we’re finally there — a rematch nobody wanted between two deeply unpopular, geriatric genocide-supporters.
Our “normal” is an extremist, militarist dystopia where profit is the only motivation of every institution and people are “human capital.” With such a dismal status quo, there will always be an audience for con men and revolutionaries alike. In a way, Trump is both. His revolution would transform America into a coast-to-coast corporate gulag. Biden’s election might be a vote for “normalcy” — but our normal is already, in De Niro’s words, a nightmare.
