Excessive enthusiasm for Sleepy Joe: a divided party and a radical left ready to collect the bill
Already in the convention that led to Joe Biden's official candidacy for president it was noted that, after all, the only real glue of the US Democratic Party was anti-Trumpism. This was certainly not new. All the exponents who attended that virtual meeting agreed on the need for the incumbent president to remove himself from the White House. On what to do after the eventual Dem victory, however, there was not as much clarity.
With the bowls stopped we can say that, in the meantime, nothing has changed. The party still appears very jagged and divided between currents and personalities very distant from each other. And the radical left, which had found its champion in Bernie Sanders during the primary, is also divided.
Elder Sanders, who calls himself a “socialist”, has an agenda in which we find the need for a national health system, the issue of unemployment that risks spilling over due to the consequences of the pandemic and other classic themes of the traditional European left.
However, there is also a far more radical left, which instead considers ecology and questions of identity and gender to be a priority. Even more than Elizabeth Warren, the real leader of this varied component appears the young Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flanked by some equally young MPs, all intent on radically changing the traditional American political scenario.
No one has yet figured out whether the various factions of the internal left reach a majority in the party. The victory of a centrist and long-time member of the establishment like Joe Biden would lead one to believe the opposite, but the answer is much less obvious than one might suppose.
In reality, Obama's former deputy only managed to prevail by moving to the left and when Sanders officially gave way to him, unlike what he had previously done with Hillary Clinton.
But the more or less radical left-wing mortgage on the party is really strong and Biden, as an old fox in US politics, understood this very well. And, as might be expected, another "fox" even more skilled than him, the former President Barack Obama, has come to understand this with determination to support him. It is obvious, however, that Biden had to promise right and left to get an investiture that many opposed.
It is therefore legitimate to ask whether the enthusiasm shown by most of the US and European media for the narrow democratic victory is really justified. Joe Biden's main talent is his mediation skills, exercised in his very long experience as a senator first, and then as a vice president. At nearly 78, however, he will have to face an exceptional situation. In fact, he will find himself managing a deeply divided country as the leader of an equally divided party.
Being notoriously a moderate, he will have to take a stand against the rampant phenomena of politically correct , cancel culture and ideological intolerance spread like wildfire in universities and newspapers. Certainly not having a charismatic personality, it is reasonable to expect that he will encounter enormous obstacles. Also because he will always have the breath of the radical left on his neck, to which he has made several promises, and which will now undoubtedly go to the box office.
Without forgetting that he chose a deputy, Kamala Harris, much younger than him and certainly with greater charisma. There are already those who foresee a sort of diarchy in which Harris will assume an increasingly dominant position, unlike the US tradition that sees the vice presidents as mere shoulders of the head of the executive.
For now, we only know that Biden intends to bring the US back into the Paris climate agreement, and that he wants to create a task force to fight the pandemic. At least in this we Italians have made school but, given the results achieved by the countless local task forces , it is doubtful that this is a happy choice.
In conclusion, it does not seem to me that all these enthusiasm for the victory (always narrow, let us remember) of Joe Biden have solid foundations. And another big question looms. Would Donald Trump have lost the election if the epidemic brought by the Chinese virus had not broken out? Even in this case the doubts, as big as a house, are more than legitimate.
The post Excessive enthusiasm for Sleepy Joe: divided party and radical left ready to collect the bill appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/eccessivo-entusiasmo-per-sleepy-joe-partito-diviso-e-sinistra-radicale-pronta-allincasso-della-cambiale/ on Tue, 10 Nov 2020 03:44:00 +0000.