Bidenism's frustrating failures
Technocracy and its limits
It’s really happening. I went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and DC is rolling out the red carpet for Donald Trump. There are forklifts driving around, erecting stands and barricades and tons of flags are waving in the air. In a week, he’ll once again be the President of the United States.
I didn’t write about the fourth anniversary of Jan. 6 last week because of the weather (we had two snow days in DCPS, and count ourselves lucky because the Montgomery County folks had Wednesday off too), and then because of the other weather — the fires in LA that are likely to be the most financially ruinous fire event in American history (even the Great Chicago fire only destroyed around 17,000 structures).
But physically seeing the Trump paraphernalia and manifestation of his return puts into stark contrast how different things were four years ago, and how much my optimism about where post-pandemic politics could take us.
The deep memory of Jan. 6 is this: I was editing in a google doc while simultaneously on a zoom call with my co-author (Michael Neblo) who was also in the google doc. We were working on a piece that could come out over the summer in 2021: A Plague on Politics? The COVID Crisis, Expertise, and the Future of Legitimation. Probably from another browser tab, probably Twitter, we saw word of what was happening at the Capitol. And we decided that we probably needed to attend to that, that what was happening would probably reshape our politics more than whatever minor tweaks we would make to the essay that day.
We were right. The insurrection was unsuccessful, rebuffed and defused. So, the first possibility of how it would remake our politics was closed off. But then, rather than what might be expected to happen in one of those places that Mark Copelovitch posts about — “Other, more serious countries” — there was no united front to remove Trump from American politics. Don Moynihan wrote eloquently on this in his post on Jan. 6 and the path not taken.
As he summarized:
The blame largely lies with Republican political leaders. Mitch McConnell punted on ending the career of a guy he detests. Kevin McCarthy decided to resurrect Trump out of pure self-interest. John Roberts and other Republicans on the Supreme Court extended a measure of retroactive legitimacy for Trump’s actions leading up to Jan. 6.
McConnell could have ended Trump by voting for the second impeachment. McCarthy could have let the guy burn, as could the Republican politicians on the Supreme Court. Instead largely because of global supply issues and the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Joe Biden’s obstinance, we had inflation and an unpopular president running for re-election until his abrupt removal and replacement by Kamala Harris who was unable/unwilling to draw a sharp contrast between herself and her boss, and instead of rotting in jail, the insurrectionists are lauded as heroes.
As part of the Trump train, we have RFK Jr, and this returns me to that piece that Neblo and I were noodling over back four years ago and, largely, the faded hopes of that moment. Jerusalem Demsas, who has done interesting and I think important writing on the problems of local government in thinking about building housing and renewable energy needed to decarbonize, did an interview about how liberals should think about RFK Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services that isn’t really about RFK but about health communication and vaccine mandates and the US health system and drug approvals and trust. The general reaction on my timelines to that interview has been frustration, to put it mildly.
And I think there’s good reason to be frustrated with the idea that a vaccine cynic — someone who questions things not out of true skepticism but knowing their own preferences (hating vaccines) and cynically pushing lies or ‘asking questions’ — could be in charge of America’s vast health ministry.
The interview instead is messy, getting into how doctor’s communicate with patients, whether “don’t worry about that” is useful or patronizing (usually patronizing) from someone about to insert something — usually involving sharp metal implements — into our bodies, and lots of other things. But this is the part that captures what people are objecting to:
Bedard: So I’m a little bit different, I think, than lots of doctors because of my background and my practice experience. One thing is about being a palliative-care doctor. The other thing is that I have always worked with marginalized populations where there’s a high prevalence of substance-use issues. And because of that, I’m very sort of seeped in the harm-reduction approach to problems.
And I don’t think that advocacy from the public-health community or doctors is going to be what prevents RFK from getting through the Senate and being approved to become an HHS secretary. I think he’s gonna end up getting the job. And I also think—because of the sort of way that he is ensconced in Trump World and the fact that he comes with his own constituency that Trump sort of needs—in the outcome where, like, a couple brave senators stand up and decide that they’re not going to vote for him, I think he gets made health czar or something like that. Like, I don’t think he just goes away.
So part of the harm-reduction ethos is just about being real about what the challenges are. And to me, the fact that I don’t want RFK to be anywhere near in charge of the federal government’s health apparatus, it doesn’t make it not so. And my sort of principled opposition to that doesn’t feel like an intervention that has a lot of juice.
That’s really different, I will say, than I felt in 2016 with the first Trump administration, where I sort of felt like there was lots of reason to believe that resistance was the path. I don’t feel that way, and I don’t think we’re seeing that, generally, now, right? Like, we’re seeing a lot less sort of resistance stuff and a lot more trying to figure out how to make the reality of this situation less harmful.
I don’t think it’s sane-washing him to say, Look—if this guy’s gonna be in charge, what does it look like for us to recognize who he is and where he’s coming from, recognize that he has a growing movement of people behind him, who aren’t just going to go away because we yell at them? What does it look like to try to achieve something that doesn’t even have to be consensus but is understanding between us so that the entire sort of public-health apparatus doesn’t just get dismantled?
This looks like acquiescence and obeying in advance. It isn’t registering objections and then losing in a democratic process and then working things out. It’s giving up on that democratic process beforehand assuming that you will lose and thinking down the game tree that, well, I’m going to end up having to work with this person who will have a lot of power, and so why object when my little objection won’t matter. And, to be frank, there is a logic there. A depressing, collaborationist logic, but a logic nonetheless. Like a lot of discourse in the United States, it treats Democrats alone as having agency with Republicans just pursuing their own interests without possibility of movement. Republicans are not a pathogen or a cancer. They are humans to, and this is, still, a democracy, with institutions where debates are had and discussions and votes. Telling other people to give up beforehand is a choice. You don’t have to march yourself, you don’t have to write an op-ed against someone that you have a “sort of principled opposition” to. I’m not arguing that there’s a requirement to be an active resister to things, but why chase clout arguing the opposite? Why actively stand up and argue against resistance?
There were logics to Biden and Bidenism. He was a known quantity, a competent legislator with a looong record, a CIS white man with an incredible weathervane for the democratic coalition and sticking himself smack dab in the middle of it. And following the circus of Trump, the idea that quiet governance and the secret congress and such could push good policy which would be good politics seemed reasonable. Surely in 2021, much of it was a relief.
Early in the pandemic, the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas had an absolutely fascinating conversation with journalists at Le Monde. Here’s Neblo’s translation of a key passage:
“We must act in the explicit knowledge of our lack of knowledge. [During the pandemic] all citizens are learning how their governments must make decisions, with a clear awareness of the limits of the knowledge of the [experts] who advise them. The scene, in which political action is plunged into uncertainty, has rarely been so brightly lit. Perhaps this very unusual experience will leave its mark on public consciousness.”
We thought this had more than a grain of truth to it. The abstract of the paper lays it out as succinctly as possible:
Governments rely more and more on experts to manage the increasingly complex problems posed by a growing, diversifying, globalizing world. Surplus technocracy, however, usually comes with deficits of democracy. While especially true in liberal regimes, authoritarian states often face parallel dynamics. Recent trends illustrate how technocratic encroachment on civil society’s prerogatives can provoke populist backlash. Such cycles can build toward crises by eroding the legitimacy citizens invest in regimes. Surprisingly, by throwing both the need for and limits of expertise into sharp relief, the politics of COVID-19 create a novel opportunity to disrupt these trends. We assess how this opportunity may be unfolding in two crucial cases, the United States and China, and, more briefly, South Korea. We conclude by sketching some theoretical considerations to guide a geographically expanded and temporally extended research agenda on this important opportunity to slow or reverse a trend plaguing modern governance.
In 2020 and early 2021, we did not know a lot about the pandemic. No one did. The health workers in Wuhan in 2019 were particularly ill-informed. What was this thing that was happening to people’s bodies? How could we help them? How could we avoid becoming them ourselves? Dali Yang’s Wuhan is an incredible portrait of the pandemic’s first days, the utter uncertainty of everything is pervasive and foreboding. We came to learn a lot about the novel coronavirus, very quickly, but maybe less about how to deal with it in our societies. Habermas had long ago written about the idea of the “legitimation crisis,” as one where a society loses confidence in core political institutions, leaders, experts, and capacities that questions arise about whether this can continue on at all. While it might seem like there were only two options for governments in dealing with the pandemic: perform well and be rewarded or fail and be held to account, Habermas suggests a third path. As Neblo and I wrote, that the very uncertainty of the pandemic — “so brightly lit” — both “highlights modern governance’s ineliminable dependence on expertise and upends the idea that experts deserve deference about the value trade-offs implicated in policy choices.” How does America in 2020 or 2021 balance safety and freedom? How should we treat frontline workers and those needed to keep the rest of us alive? How should we govern ourselves? What does life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness really mean and how should we trade off between these values?
This vivid, “shared” experience could have triggered a reinvestment in small-d democratic politics. Even in China, as the article argues, the early successes (which followed the initial failures) of dealing with the pandemic could have been invested in deepening “consultative socialist democracy,” but instead were spent in “a Hobbesian investment of legitimacy in its protective leviathan.” Such a change perhaps would have led to better policy making and politics when China’s program of pandemic response proved inadequate to the omicron variant’s transmissibility.
Obviously, this is not what happened, really anywhere. And we acknowledge as much in our article raising the possibility in the first place. It doesn’t happen in China despite some important wins giving the house money to bet with and it doesn’t happen in the United States despite … losses leading to a change in government. It doesn’t even happen in South Korea, where we thought things looked a little promising. Best not to check on the stable, transparent politics of that country at this time. But I do think it could have happened.
Instead we have collective trauma from the direct impacts of the virus’ explosive propagation through the human population. It killed millions. It sickened billions, with untold millions of those having suffered from not a frustrating but forgettable viral infection but instead becoming Long COVID, a lingering disaster in their bodies and harming their lives and opportunities going forward. It continues to spread, to sicken, to disable, and to kill.
And we’re mad. We’re mad about the dead uncles and missed proms and closed daycares and unmasked-guy-on-the-plane-in-the-seat-behind-who-keeps-hacking and a thousand other things. Understandably. And even though successful vaccines appeared as if arriving from the future at warp speed, and even though they were effective far beyond what many hoped, and were produced in dizzying numbers based on strong public support (though initially distributed inequitably by nation-states), we avoid focusing on this to an amazing extent and if things turn in this direction, the vibe tends to be of failure rather than pride at avoiding what could have been.
Why return to this topic then? Why point out a paper that clearly didn’t predict the future?
First, I think that falling down on bended and praying to our Republican overlords for mercy guarantees failure. Democracy demands debate and deliberation. Giving up beforehand is unlikely to make good policy nor good politics. As Steve Saideman put it about the ridiculous imperial overtures about Greenland, Panama, and Canada: Enough with this Trump Bullshit.
Second, the same kind of cynics that have taken up space in the world of public health are increasingly prominent in the climate space. Misinformation about the LA fires is everywhere. As Jael Holzman of Heatmap has documented there are lots of examples of it literally being the same people who are pushing against vaccines that are pushing against new transmission lines or renewable energy siting. And the difference is that there’s money in fighting the energy transition. Tuberculosis and polio aren’t out there offering lucrative jobs to people worrying about a jab, but oil and gas companies and their industry associations are absolutely in the business of funding people that think they just might hear a wind turbine whirr and aren’t happy about it.
I’m on the record as arguing the democracy can help solve the climate crisis. It’s what I just wrote about in the last post.
Resisting the Climate Emergency Sirens
Happy new year, which is to say that I am grateful that you and I both completed another trip around the sun on this ocean planet of ours as delineated in the traditional manner (assuming one treats papal bulls from the late 16th century as traditional at this point).
The premise of that argument is that decarbonizing is big and hard. We’re deeply enmeshed in the energy system, and needing to extricate ourselves from it — or, alternatively, to change the way that it is powered to processes that do not emit carbon — is going to take work that is deeply political. Should Californians subsidize rebuilding in Pacific Palisades? What about Americans in New Orleans or Asheville or a hundred other places? What about in Pakistan and Afghanistan following their flooding or in Spain? If not, where should those people live? Should we build solar panels and transmission lines on federal land? What rates should they pay and how should they distribute the profits? If the distribution grid sparked the fires, how should those costs be dealt with? What about the heat pump you’d like to install, should that be subsidized? What about this fancy induction cooktop? Should we just close all the coal power plants now? And what happens when there isn’t enough electricity to meet demand?
In the end, I think my frustration with Bidenism was its reluctance to engage in debate and discussion. To listen broadly and deliberate publicly. Biden prided himself on getting things done, almost certainly. Leaks are bad; coherence is good. But what if what democracy needs gossip, not gossip really but opportunities for debate and detailed discussions and arguments about why something is happening rather than some other alternative. What if you need a few low-level staffers to talk with reporters about internal debates so that there’s something to write about other than just today’s press release? To argue for or against, to talk through the tradeoffs of things, rather than defer to the political expertise of the Biden team, which operated as if some kind of democratic centralism was at play. As if things were completely settled internally, that the Senate is the only thing that mattered and the public (and allies and companies and so on) could be ignored other than to be asked to vote at the appropriate time and maybe to clap from time to time.
The public sphere that we are faced/cursed with in 2025 is not in a great place. Platform companies have sucked the blood dry from local newspapers that relied on revenue from ads of nearby businesses. The largest platforms are run by a shadow President fondly pining for fascism globally and an opportunist saying that Californians are biased and his 2/3 male company is lacking machismo. It’s bleak. We’re in an increasingly low trust society where the internet lets anyone access immense amount of information without doing a lot to share wisdom about how to think about such information, and don’t get me started on the next-word-predictors about to fill the internet’s oceans with lossy-jpegs-of-lossy-jpegs.
But let me end with this. I began this piece reflecting on what it meant to see the Trump inaugural being set up as I went to the Natural History museum. While in that museum, I spent most of my time in the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils - Deep Time. And for all of the problematic imagery and weird centering of fossil fuels in an exhibit about the history of life on this planet, I was left with the feeling that it is something to be celebrated that we are here at all. That specs of organic molecules have, over billions of years, coalesced and competed and evolved to produce the world we live in today including each and every one of us and the trillions of other living things on this rock orbiting its modest star. Our earth has been a Hadean sphere of fire, a frozen iceball. Life almost extinguished itself when inventing photosynthesis in the Great Oxidation Event. And the dinosaurs long reign was ended with a mountain-sized asteroid colliding with the planet at a mere 30 km / second releasing the energy of more than a billion Hiroshima’s.
Life finds a way. Here’s to hoping that we can too.