Sobriety Week on Biden-Harris

That felt good. Now it's post-Biden-Harris Sobriety Week. Over at the blog Lawyers Guns & Money, Elizabeth Nelson writes, "let’s not interpret a Biden administration as an opportunity to indulge in cultural and political comfort food. Let’s not feel reassured or validated. There is nothing validating about 70 million votes cast for Donald Trump....This is not the time for upbeat “I knew we’d prevail!” indie rock. ...The anger should feel more acute now than ever. Per the GOP’s proven system, Trump will hand Biden a terrible economy and quite possibly an exaggerated winter of  I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-How-Many-Die response to the pandemic. Biden will be pilloried, vilified and obstructed from the moment he takes power. Let’s push back harder than ever." Yes, exactly.

Writing in the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom defines the pushing back as "radical responsiveness" to real US conditions. This means above all extracting full accountability for the Trump Administration: legal forensics into the damage Trump and his people did to public systems from the Dept of Justice to the Environmental Protection Agency to the misuse of executive branch paramilitaries in policing demonstrations in a way that created the illusion of leftist violence that Republicans took with them to the voting booth. There must be a calling to account. The attack on systemic racism that Biden invoked in his victory speech, the rebuilding of public health infractructure (including the disgraced CDC), energy conversion to renewables . . .everything depends on a militant reassertion of expertise, reality-testing, interpretative skills, the whole quantitative and qualitative set of knowledge practices that Trumpism voids. Liz Chatterjee and I have pieces in a forthcoming book (coedited by Anna Alexandrova, to be published by Alan Thomas) arguing that experts truly did earn popular mistrust by supporting policies that did systemic damage to majorities in both the US and UK. That said, the Biden-Harris admin will need to assert, with full militancy, the value of knowledge practices for solving social problems. This will require *investigations* and *prosecutions* of Trumpian corruption, including their deliberate epistemic sabotage. There should be the theater of congressional hearings and legal proceedings, tied to specific lessons to expand the "reality-based community in post-truth America," in Ian Masters' tag-line for his excellent show. Nothing could be worse than forgive-and-forget.

Cottom can be read in conjunction with Larry Elliott's Guardian column about economic troubles. Biden doesn't have an analysis of finance capitalism that can dig the US or anyone else out of the current hole--to the contrary, as Elliott and others point out, Biden is part of the Clintonian Dem establishment that got us here. What kind of worked in the 1990s is failing now, and real budget policy ("fiscal") requires a Congress that Biden-Harris don't control. As Elliott writes, "Monetary policy [via the Federal Reserve] is no answer to America’s need to renew its infrastructure or to make its welfare system more generous. To the extent that it does make a difference, [Quantitative Easing] works by pushing up asset prices and creating a feel good factor so it tends to be better for Wall Street than for the struggling communities in the less well-off states." This has been the play since Alan Greenspan took over the Federal Reserve in 1987, with unaffordable housing and low productivity growth (via low investment) being just two of many negative symptoms. (See French economist Cédric Durand's "Fictitious Capital" for an important analysis of asset-price opium and its damage to the real economy.) So we're going to need a radical rethink of US/UK capitalism, and that work is going to have to be done on a huge scale outside the Biden Admin, which won't touch it unless it grows into a movement.