Is It Biden 2020 vs Trump 2016 Now?
Tags: Trump, 2020 Presidential Race, Biden, Joe Biden, Politics

Is It Biden 2020 vs Trump 2016 Now? TaraElla Follow Aug 22 · 4 min read

Today, I want to reflect on the recent Democratic National Convention, where many speeches were given, and Joe Biden received his nomination.

My take is, I really liked it. I mean, I didn’t like every single speech, nor did I actually watch every single speech, but overall, I liked the vibe. In 2016, many people were talking about the Democrats skewing heavily into culture war territory, and they had become at least as culture war-orientated and divisive as the Trump Republicans. Meanwhile, polls were suggesting that many people were no longer seeing the Democrats as the working people’s party. That was actually historically unique, because the culture wars had always favored the Right, and as such it was always Republicans playing up the culture wars while the Democrats avoided them. This was certainly the case back in 2004, when John Kerry ran on bread and butter issues and Bush 43 played up the culture wars a bit. I was certainly happy to be on the side of not playing the divisive culture wars back then. I don’t know what exactly happened in 2016, but it was clearly a bad move, and it is especially clear in hindsight.

A bitter defeat and four years later, the Democrats appear to have gone back to basics, back to what made them strong in the first place. From Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders, from Andrew Yang to Cory Booker, most people were talking about the bread and butter issues that a party catered to working families would be expected to focus on. And then, there was the overall theme of unity, stated again and again by the majority of the speeches across the four days, and further reinforced by the lineup of the speakers, featuring everyone from socialists to conservatives. It’s really unusually positivity and light and all that. I still remember, just two years or so ago, Jordan Peterson and other right-leaning commentators urged the Democratic party to learn the lessons of the 2016 defeat, and I said in response, I believed they were already well on the way to doing so. I believe this conference has shown us that the Democratic party has truly learned its 2016 lessons, and it has built itself up better, to borrow a phrase from the Biden campaign. The Democrats of 2016 and its ‘basket of deplorables’ attitude are no more, and from now on, the focus will be on building the social fabric, looking after working families, providing a strong economic safety net, and so on.

On the other hand, President Trump and his supporters seem to be refusing to see this change. During the same week as the Democratic conference, in a speech Trump painted a picture of a Biden presidency with rioting, chaos and disorder everywhere. While Biden is treating everyone with good faith, Trump is trying to paint Biden as beholden to extremist elements that he is clearly not even on friendly terms with. In other words, while Biden wants unity, Trump wants another culture war based on the propagation of fear and misunderstanding. And he’s doing this because he thinks it will work to his advantage. I’ve heard many Trump supporters say that they still support Trump just because they think he will stop the extreme elements causing social destabilization. What I say in response is that, firstly, there’s no evidence that Biden and the Democrats won’t do a better job to put a stop to all this, especially since they are so focused on helping working families, and Biden has always been a pro-order guy; secondly, Trump is trying to turn this into a culture war, which history tells us can only make things worse. You know, it’s not 2016 anymore, and the Democrats are clearly not as guilty of running a culture war campaign anymore. So if Trump runs a campaign heavily based around culture war themes, he would be the only one doing so this time, and I don’t think most people would like that at all. Being a unity guy, Biden also isn’t very vulnerable to the culture war style attacks; Trump is already finding it much harder to get his base to hate Biden the way they hated Hillary.

If everything continues to stay on the current track, then I guess a likely outcome in November, when they do the post-mortems and soul searching, would be that team Unity scored a sound victory against team Culture War. This would effectively undo much of the post-2016 shift in views, and consign the 2016 election, during which both parties ran heavily on the culture wars, to being a historical anomaly. Instead, going forward, all sides of politics are likely to abandon the culture wars for the foreseeable future, in America as well as many other Western countries. And we will be the better for it.