Perfection rarely is
A casual friend introduced me to his buddy at a public concert last night. The usual. Tom works with the Democratic Party, etc. The buddy replied with the familiar “fed up with both parties” bit.
Rebecca Solnit wrote about that stance in 2016:
Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis.
[…]
If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. But expecting perfection is naïve; failing to perceive value by using an impossible standard of measure is even more so. Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards. They are uncomfortable with victories, because victories are almost always temporary, incomplete, and compromised — but also because the openness of hope is dangerous, and in war, self-defense comes first. Naïve cynicism is absolutist; its practitioners assume that anything you don’t deplore you wholeheartedly endorse. But denouncing anything less than perfection as morally compromising means pursuing aggrandizement of the self, not engagement with a place or system or community, as the highest priority.
Persistence accomplishes more than perfection:
One thing you can say for the [party] old boys, they are patient and persistent. (Okay, that’s two things.) Patience and persistence are not the first qualities liberal activists look for in their change agents, and qualities that not enough activists cultivate in themselves. Whenever an Obama flings the wheel hard over (or not hard enough) and the ship of state doesn’t turn like a speedboat, impatient activists abandon their posts and jump ship. Do that, and nothing changes. And the old boys get their club back.
One thing to be said for old and unexciting Joe Biden is he has been persistent. James Lardner writes in The New Yorker that a recent Times and Sienna College poll found that nearly seventy per cent of Americans thinks the system needs “either a major shakeup or (the preference of fourteen per cent) to be ‘torn down entirely.’ ” Donald Trump was just the sort of guy to do it, not Joe Biden.
The Times’ Nate Cohn found that, ironically, people saw the same appeal in Barack Obama, “another candidate who famously represented change, change we could believe in.” Only to be disappointed when the ship didn’t turn like a speedboat and that hnis response to the financial crisis was overly timid. “And I think that it’s not a coincidence that there are so many Obama/Trump voters out there.”
“The upshot was a fresh wave of outrage against the government and politicians, a growing perception of Democrats as the party of a self-absorbed élite, and an opening for the likes of Donald Trump,” Lardner writes.
So few of us saw Joe Biden, change agent, coming. Lardner provides an impressive list of first-term accomplishments. But Biden’s record recalls the title of Frank Zappa’s live album, “The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life.” Biden’s is another band no one’s heard:
In a forbidding political environment, the Biden Administration has racked up an impressive record of impactful achievement; and yet even a goodly number of Biden’s 2020 voters are “surprisingly unaware of anything he has done as President,” according to Rich Thau, a public-policy researcher who runs regular focus groups with swing voters. The perception of Biden as ineffective has been a source of much vexation in the President’s camp, and the subject of many an op-ed column and blog post. Some commentators reason that the Administration’s policies need more time to prove their worth: most of the infrastructure projects, for example, have yet to reach the ribbon-cutting stage. Others blame a politically fractured media that tends to reinforce people’s biases. Ageism has been at work here, too: Americans could count themselves lucky to have a President who, after a lifetime in government, has shown a capacity to reflect on past mistakes—his own and his party’s—and a resolve to make the most of the opportunity belatedly granted him. But the polls suggest that, even among Biden’s supporters, his age is viewed almost entirely as a source of concern.
In one way, though, Biden has contributed to his own predicament. In his determination to sound the alarm against another Trump Presidency, he has had a lot to say about what Americans stand to lose: access to abortion, honest elections, civility, the rule of law. If Biden is seen as a system defender, it’s partly because he has spent so much of his campaign time on defense. He should say more—far more—about what his Administration and his party have done, and mean to do in the future, to make the economy and democracy more just.
His attacks on Trump could be more expansive, too. Trump is in some ways a sui-generis figure: the only convicted felon to be a major-party nominee for President, and the only candidate who has ever promised to be a “dictator” on Day One or spoken of using his office to exact “retribution” against his enemies. In the realm of economic policy, however, Trump has proved to be a conventional Republican of the modern era. His Administration, like those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, was a fount of special favors for powerful industries and a trasher of regulations that cost corporations money; and its first and biggest achievement was an enormous tax-cut bill tilted in favor of the rich. What set Trump and his governing crowd apart, beyond their many crimes and indictments, was only the brazenness of their quid-pro-quo understandings with donors and their readiness to direct a stream of the benefits of their official actions to themselves. When it comes to the privileges of the wealthy and powerful, Trump has been the defender and Biden the threat. Biden and his team would do well to remind voters of that, again and again, from now to Election Day.
Democrats, Biden included, also need to demonstrate a commitment to change by showing they mean to fight for it. Visibly. Loudly. What doesn’t get attention might as well not exist.
I’m pretty sure the guy last night has no idea what Biden and his Democratic colleagues have accomplished because good-government types tend to do a poor job of advertising their accomplishments. They’re just doing what they’ve been hired to do, and shrug. Not being visible and loud about it in this “forbidding political environment” looks like lethargy. Biden shook things up with his Independence Hall speech in 2022. His debate performance next week is another chance to change the narrative.
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