Democratic ‘Frogs” Continue Loving Republican “Scorpions” and the Bipartisan Ideal, with a Self-Defeating Passion
By: Michael Hoexter
Tags: Political Psychology, Bipartisanship, 2020 Presidential Race, Joe Biden, Sadomasochism

We are living in fraught times in the US, with American democracy hanging by a few threads, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have defeated President Trump and Vice-President Pence at the ballot box but not decisively enough to completely repudiate Trump’s four years of misrule and the Trumpist GOP as a whole. That now neofascism-tending GOP, the enabler of Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses has in some ways been strengthened by the electoral result, especially at the state level, and also has picked up some seats in the House of Representatives, though remain a minority there. The Senate, thought to be in play for the Democrats, was not successfully taken from the Republicans and now control of that body hangs upon two run-off elections in Georgia in January. Due, it seems, to Democrats’ deficiencies in campaigning, unpopular Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins won their re-election campaigns. All-in-all, facing the monstrous and incompetent wannabe-autocrat Trump, Democrats underperformed their expectations and the polling.

Democrats and the nation as a whole face a very tense and potentially catastrophic next few months as the megalomaniac and psychopath, Donald Trump, who is crafty, anti-moral but also not very bright, has tried and now just failed to pull of a political coup that would nullify the electoral result of the November election. As of today, enough government institutions seem to be holding fast to their commitments to the Constitution and not to an aspiring authoritarian leader that the coup appears unlikely to succeed. Still, Trump and many Republicans continue to deny that Biden and Harris have won publicly even though they privately seem to be signaling that Trump’s electoral loss is real. Continuing to question the electoral outcome without evidence, the Republican denial of popular sovereignty is tantamount to sedition, as it undermines the American constitutional order at its core and foreshadows a full legitimation crisis in American democracy.

Trump received a discouragingly high 74 million votes which is around 6 million less than Biden by current counts. The relative success of Trump despite his toxic personality and catastrophic failures in office is a tribute to some combination of how well he and his media ecosystem have whitewashed Trump and his Administration, how little Americans now expect from any government, and how poorly the Democrats have campaigned for their generally somewhat better policy and political outlook.

Trump has been at the center of a massive cult of personality that includes many armed, mentally ill, and extremist right-wing cultist followers who may create chaos as their leader is at least for now defeated by democracy in its very approximate and somewhat aged American form. As mentioned above, a large majority of Republican party officials and office-holders at the federal and state levels appear to be paralyzed by Trump’s popularity and are also denying the obvious electoral result, potentially further undermining faith in fairly well functioning US institutions. There now appears to be a schism in the media infrastructure that built up the Trump cult, with most portions of Fox News now opting to face the reality of Trump’s loss, having in many ways created him as “their monster”, while incensed Trump cult members turn to the still more purely propagandistic outlets like Newsmax and OANN for their fix of Trump worship.

We can only hope, citizen-activists, Democrats, perhaps reality-embracing Republicans and non-partisan government officials will be able to navigate the next few months in such a way as to minimize the damage of Trump’s and a large portion of the GOP’s assault on democracy. One factor in the months and years ahead, will be the role of Democratic leadership’s longstanding habit of idolizing both unconditional bipartisanship as well as, more specifically idealizing Republicans as somehow a party of demi-gods or born-to-rule officials than Democrats.

The Beltway Cult of Bipartisanship

The current Democratic leadership are some of the most pious worshipers at the cult of bipartisanship, a mostly mindless and fundamentally anti-democratic secular religion. The cult of bipartisanship states that government leaders should strive first for bipartisan comity and compromise before any other value is expressed or served by politicking, legislating and government administration. The cult of bipartisanship in media and among political strategists stifles change and meaningful debate and therefore prevents more clearly focused, clearly defined, more useful public policy. Media pundits act as cheerleaders and hall-monitors for the cult of bipartisanship as a transcendental value. Despite its name and its status as Beltway-insider holy writ, the cult of bipartisanship is deployed almost exclusively to pre-emptively temper any moves of the Democrats to the left. Republicans are largely exempted from censure by media pundits and by their Democratic opponents, so therefore are allowed to be as partisan as they would like to be. The cult of bipartisanship could be stylized by the following phrase: “Democrats, be nice to (vicious, far right, pro-ignorance, authoritarian) Republicans!”

Why the cult of bipartisanship is wrong-headed maybe requires a little explanation, especially to the besotted centrist and right-leaning Democrats that believe in it so intensely. Of course, politicians, unless they form a durable super-majority in a given area, eventually need to work together on a case by case basis across party lines to pass policies that might benefit the governed, i.e. the people who they are supposed to represent. [In heavily Democratic New York State, the centrist-right leaning Democratic Governor, Andrew Cuomo, helped invent a “bipartisan” IDC caucus/Trojan horse, now exposed as such and disbanded, in the state legislature in order to help him push through his pro-plutocratic, pro-corruption agenda.] Yet the cult of bipartisanship starts out with the notion that any “good” policy must at the beginning be “bipartisan”, as a sign of its fundamental goodness. Ruling from a majoritarian position be it partisan political or reflecting the opinions of a majority of voters is looked down upon in the temples of bipartisan worship; what is thought to be the epitome of public policy is the seeking out of twisted compromises that are satisfying to almost no one and are of limited use to the population as a whole. There is an echo chamber of fulsome praise for exactly these compromises. The flawed and cumbersome design of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obama-care, would be unthinkable were it not for the fervor for the cult of bipartisanship, as simpler alternatives were eschewed in favor of complexity and from-the-ground-up compromise. To thus front-load “bipartisanship” in the policy formulation process, shifts the audience and beneficiaries of public policy to be a circle of elite politicians and not the governed. Bills and policies should start out based on the real issues that Americans are facing in terms of social and human ecological reality and then, and only then, politicians should find or fight for a coalition to support that particular policy.

The cult of bipartisanship reinforces membership in an elite but informal inside-the-Beltway club as witnessed very recently by a series of incidents in and around Washington. While Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham, seem to be undermining the electoral process by denying that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the Presidential election, scenes of bipartisan camaraderie were witnessed between Harris and Graham on the Senate floor. Harris in one video offers Graham a fist-bump seemingly enthusiastically, even as on that day it was revealed that Graham has been illegally attempting to get votes thrown out in Georgia (not his state) to deny the election to Harris and Biden. As commentator Cenk Uygur points out, what is most disturbing in this scene is the participation of Harris greeting her opponent so warmly, a tip-off to the unseriousness of the US political class and their professed commitments to policy and the American people. Uygur sees it as just another behavioral reinforcement of and visual evidence for the “the Club” of Washington insiders that serves corporate and elite interests rather than those of the voters.

Furthermore, as mentioned above, the bipartisanship shibboleth is mobilized largely as a cudgel against any suggestion that the Democrats might suggest a policy that is progressive, which often means in line with the interests of a large sector of the American public. Elite denial of the interests of the political base of both parties is then papered over. Each Party elite’s interests is then made via the elite cult of bipartisanship, dishonestly, to stand in for the interests of their base but with a special focus on keeping Democrats from ever focusing on the needs of the American people.

The increasingly sociopathic and neofascist Republican Party has until very recently been cloaked by the media and by the opposition Democrats in a veil of respectability that is in part supported by the bipartisanship cult. Republicans have largely become saboteurs of any meaningful public policy and the use of government as an instrument of popular will, other than tax cuts for the wealthy or overspending on the military and military aid. They have violated democratic norms and increasingly laws to get their way which represents certain aspects of the interests of the donor class, their own narrow political interests in “defying the Democrats” and the previous Democratic Administration, and their own accumulation of political power for it’s own sake. The Democrats and the press have repeatedly cloaked the GOP’s parasitic existence in the garments of “collegiality” and respectability, ennobling the Republicans when they should be condemned and exposed to at least severe political consequences as the voters discover who they really are and what they really do. Republicans have paradoxically benefited from supporting ideas and policies that are unbelievably cruel and selfish, so unbelievable that the public discounts them as untrue.

The bipartisanship fetish is closely aligned with the notion that the political center of Washington DC discourse, which is far to the right on an international or national scale, is where the American people supposedly are and also less obviously, the idea that change, in particular progressive change, is something to be feared. The idea that “the people” and wisdom are located at a point somewhere between the center-right (for the most part) Democrats and the far right Republicans means that public policy is run in a way that strengthens existing power dynamics and inequality in the society as a whole, including massive wealth inequality. For instance, Medicare for All polls at close to 70% approval by the American people yet never comes up for a vote on the House or Senate floors and is treated as a “far-left” concern in the mainstream media discourse, even on the supposedly “left-leaning” channels. The bipartisan fetish is a key support to the emerging billionaire oligarchy.

Hapless Democratic “Frogs” and GOP “Scorpions”

One fable that has been used to describe the relationship of Democrats and Republicans is that of the frog and the scorpion. In this fable a scorpion asks a frog to take him across a river because he can’t swim. The frog asks “but you won’t sting me?”. The scorpion says “No”. So the frog has the scorpion get on his back and in the middle of the river, the scorpion stings him. As the frog is being poisoned and they are both drowning in the river, the frog asks “Why did you sting me?”. The scorpion answers “I couldn’t help it, it’s in my nature.”

While this simple story doesn’t capture all of the detail, the essentials of the U.S. inter-party relationship are well-captured by this fable. The frog is a cartoon cut-out of an overly trusting, naïve helper, literally a masochist, while the scorpion is an instinctual sadist, a reflex-driven creature that only delivers pain and venom to others. While the fable uses “natural” animals as its sock-puppets, this is clearly a relationship dynamic that only could exist between humans in a human-constructed society. The use of the term sado-masochism doesn’t refer here to the self-conscious forms of sadomasochistic sex play, now it’s own subculture, but to a more common and generalized type of everyday relationship between two parties, sometimes two individuals, a couple, and sometimes larger groups of people as here described in politics. As with all sado-masochistic relationships (again in vast majority not the “kinky” kind), the two American parties, like the frog and the scorpion, are together locked in a self-destructive and self-focused dance that is driven largely by unconscious psychological forces and/or a cloaking device for common financial interests to jointly serve the donor class and the lucrative-to-the-donors status quo. The reason why I believe it is instructive to apply the concepts of sadism and masochism is that the repetitive nature of these behaviors seem to indicate that they are driven by some forms of pleasure and/or the relief of inner pain, albeit in highly dysfunctional and largely uncontrolled ways. People are compelled to engage in them and repeat the behaviors because of the drives and internal rewards associated with those actions.

Whether the two-party sadomasochistic drama is conscious Kabuki theater for public consumption to distract and engage the masses or sincere psychological actions compelled by unconscious drives, the fundamental tasks that are required of government in serving the people and the future viability of American society are often ignored in that sadomasochistic struggle or only attended to as an afterthought. In the US political system, political debate of any import occurs then largely at the margins because so much of the attention of society and the major political actors is focused on the sadomasochistic “next moves” that ignore the fundamental real concerns of the governed. In a sadomasochistic relationship, the bond between people revolves around cycles of lashing out to hurt the other person and that other person claiming victimhood. The role of aggressor and victim can rapidly or periodically fluctuate between the parties in the relationship or operate in a strict role division between masochist and sadist. Both the sadist and the masochist are power-driven but the sadist seeks power from open displays of superiority and open aggression and performance of outward dominance behaviors, while the masochist thinks that power operates indirectly via claiming victimhood and control of others passive-aggressively.

Sadomasochistic relationships between individuals can be endless rounds of “tit-for-tat” actions with neither party to the relationship able to verbalize and express ideas and emotions directly but in a mature, adult form, to the other person and to have those ideas and emotions responded to with some understanding, as would happen in a relationship between adults. In the political domain, this is not so much about mature adult relating as above but about a political discourse focused on reality, rather than on the twisted back and forth between self-interested political actors or those actors as representatives of fractional interests of the ultrawealthy donor class and big corporations. In sadomasochistic relating, the responses that each party is looking for are either wounding the other or being wounded and being celebrated (often in their own minds only) for carrying the wounds of the relationship or of humanity more generallly, as a martyr. On the level of emotions, sadomasochistic relationships revolve around cycles of rage, shame and humiliation, and feelings of worthlessness and boundless grandiosity, an addictive mixture of feelings that keep people with the proclivity to form these relationships engaged with each other to live out the drama repeatedly. A sadomasochistic relationship pattern is often a repetition of childhood experiences or an attempt to resolve something about some unsatisfactory or troubling experiences from the past. Sadomasochism as a style of relating is often associated with narcissistic personalities or narcissistic issues within varied personalities, as can be observed in the now public case of the extreme narcissist Donald Trump, who is also a sadist, and his masochistic followers. The Trumpist followers live out their narcissism vicariously via pumping up Trump as a massively overinflated larger-than-life self and fetish object.

While not as extreme as the self-sacrificing Trump followers and GOP politicians, now throwing themselves on the pyre of possible COVID-19 death, Democrats appear to be always trying to help, seeking comity with and wanting to “save” the Republicans yet also simultaneously are sacrificing their own political viability, i.e. being masochistic. They are always ignoring the Republican scorpion’s stinger, in a way that is maddening for the Democratic base. By contrast the Republicans are the party of reflexive sadism vis-à-vis Democrats both at the base and in the leadership, yet also highlight the role-based aspect of sadomasochism.

Trump is one of the most open examples of Republican sadism and his popularity and power within the Party has a lot to do with Trump’s ability to act out the sadistic fantasies of the Republican base. Many Republicans play masochist to Trump’s sadist, cowering in fear of him and being routinely abused by him, alternating rapidly between their masochism and their sadism vis-à-vis Democrats or non-whites or “socialists”. This illustrates well that sadomasochism is a crude reflex-like form of relating to other people in an assumed status hierarchy with the “leader”-sadist as the top of the pyramid. Structured like a criminal gang, in today’s Republican Party, the most ruthless and sadistic is considered the “kingpin” and others grovel in fear in front of him, yet also “pass on” the sadism to those “beneath” them in the hierarchy or “outside” the charmed circle of the gang.

The “scorpion”-like sadism of the Republican base has been stirred and sustained by decades of right-wing media that tells the fearful, conventionally-minded base of the Party as well as its very ample and influential paranoid fringes that there are evil “liberals” in the Democratic Party out there that are both enviable and diabolical, both rich and allied with the, in their minds, undeserving poor and non-white peoples. In the view of the Republican base, distorted but with shreds of truth, these liberals have insidious (masochistic) ways of controlling others via, among other things “politically correct” rituals and laws. The chimera of these liberals and their wannabe-helping government inspires paranoia in the GOP base. The now radicalized base of the party is convinced that their primary satisfaction in politics is to inspire “liberal tears”, with the now youngest member of Congress tweeting out that his victory will inspire more liberal tears on the night of his (expected) victory. Republican rancor and distorted vision of the Democrats has been turned up to “11” with the emergence of the paranoid delusional Q-Anon cult, that teaches that Democrats are pedophile sex offenders and devil worshipers. Alternatively as with Q-Anon’s delusions, no means might be barred from fighting and possibly killing the demonic Democrats and liberals: this goes even beyond sadism to annihilatory delusions, what I have recently described as “apocalyptic nihilism” directed at an external “enemy”. Q-Anon also introduces barely concealed anti-Semitic tropes and narratives into the mainstream of American politics.

Elite Democrats’ Blind, Dumb Love of Republicans

While in their personal lives, Democrats tend to enjoy the company of other Democrats, politically and ideologically Democrats have been carrying on a one-sided love-affair with Republicans since Ronald Reagan. The courtship started with the neo-liberal turn within the Democratic Party in the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, which came to accept “the Reagan Revolution” as political and economic gospel. Fascinated by the political success of Reagan and Thatcher, Democratic neoliberals would dispute only the demands of social conservative radical evangelicals and also, on occasion, the covert and open racism and sexism in the Republicans as those became more manifest. Bill Clinton adopted and promoted in the 1990’s the deregulatory push of the Reagan Presidency and also gave up on New Deal and Great Society commitments that sustained the winning Democratic coalition of the mid-20th Century. While the Clintons (Bill and his wife Hillary) were and are vilified by the right-wing and the couple talked of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against them, they remained enamored of the neoliberal ideas that originated on the right-wing. Political debate became confined to a dispute between “left” and right-wing neoliberalism, with the primary disputes revolving in politics between issues of cultural identity, the legacy of the “new social movements” of the 1960’s and 70’s, and the status of social conservatism and wannabe theocrats.

With Barack Obama’s Presidency, the love affair again became painfully and tragically apparent, leading in 2009–2016 to a massive hemorrhaging of support for the down-ballot Democratic Party and a largely failed Presidency, inadequate to the historic moment afforded Obama in the 2008 economic crash. Despite the Rooseveltian tasks to which Obama should have applied himself, Obama focused on gradualist reforms and cut the legs out from under the movement which brought him into office in 2008. A gifted orator, Obama almost never used the bully pulpit to help shape the politics of the day and seemed to rather comfortably conform to the right-leaning political landscape of Washington DC.

Obama’s signature healthcare reform was an importation to Washington of the Republican Mitt Romney’s plan for Massachusetts, Romneycare. Obama seemed all too eager to pare down government’s role, claiming at a number of points that government was running out of money, parroting the Wall Street-friendly deficit hawk line. Obama bailed out the Wall Street banks but not homeowners in the post-crash foreclosure crisis, seeding resentment that would later become the base for the Trump Presidency. Obama toyed with a “Grand Bargain” with a Republican Congress to cut the enormously popular Social Security and Medicare programs. Obama’s failure to be a Rooseveltian “man of the people” in high office at exactly the wrong time in history, was in part a function of his love for an increasingly non-existent moderate Republican and the ideas they supposedly once espoused.

The most powerful Democrat from 2018 until Biden’s win, Nancy Pelosi, has been a big fan of Republican thinking, often citing Ronald Reagan, and giving a number of encomia and a eulogy to Pete Peterson, the Republican operative and Wall Street billionaire who has helped over several decades to promote anti-social welfare discourse and austerity politics in Washington by warning of unsustainable public debt and deficits. While Pelosi sometimes is labeled as “progressive”, this seems to be only a function of her residence in the supposedly liberal but very rich city of San Francisco; she has a sparse legislative achievements to support the idea that she is progressive. The Peterson gang engineered the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction committee that Obama embraced. Alan Simpson was also a right-wing former Senator from Wyoming, so literally a Trojan Horse invited into the “citadel” of the Democratic Administration. In 2018/2019, true to Peterson’s influence, Pelosi volunteered that she would hamper any ambitious spending program via adherence to “pay-go” rules for passing legislation that involved any new spending. Biden is now proposing that the top staff member of the Bowles-Simpson commission, Bruce Reed, run his Office of Management and Budget, a crucial role.

While superficially playing out a Kabuki theater of moral outrage at Trump, the Pelosi-led House passed Trump’s budgets that included torture of children at the border and a major expansion of military funding with no military rationale. Oversight by the Pelosi-led House of the increasingly lawless Trump Administration was hampered by weak leadership, supposedly so the Democrats would avoid appearing as vengeful and petty as Republicans in their Benghazi hearings. In a move that might have lost the republic to Trumpian fascism, Pelosi decided to soft-pedal impeachment of the megalomaniac Trump, choosing an easily defeated, though criminal count that could easily be brushed off as an inter-partisan squabble rather than a serious threat to the Republic. Once impeachment was taken off the table and Trump realized that there would be no consequences to his misrule, he went on a rampage to purge the Executive Branch of any independence of his will, with only the coronavirus epidemic and subsequent depression putting a dent in his plans. If Trump had won the 2020 election, democracy in America might likely have ended, in part due to the persistent weakness of the Democrats and their tendency to hand Republicans victory on a silver platter.

Probably the signature moment that encapsulates the masochistic embrace by Democrats of Republicans came at the Amy Coney Barrett hearings when Diane Feinstein, “went off script” and praised the unqualified Coney Barrett and physically embraced the Republican chairman of the judicial committee Lindsey Graham without a mask on in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. In hearings where Barrett revealed herself to be a climate denier and revealed little about her true judicial philosophy or political commitments, Feinstein expressed at the end that the committee hearings were some of the best in which she had participated, praising Graham. While Feinstein was supposedly scolded by Chuck Schumer for her performance and Feinstein is to the right of almost all Senate Democrats, she revealed too plainly in her performance the general attitude of the Democratic Party vis-à-vis Republicans: they are friends first and are only opponents in name but not in substance. That Republicans seize on every advantage to gain power over Democrats and over the nation, is not countenanced by the lovestruck Democrats who provide validation “across the aisle” for the sociopathic authoritarians of the GOP. It is almost always a one-sided friendship, with the Democrats playing the role of enablers.

Joe Biden has a troubling history of similar embrace of Republican ideas, including a tough-on-crime stance, pro-corporate legislation, enthusiasm for foreign wars and also a general self-presentation as being a “nice guy” in Washington in relationship to peers but not to the people via policy. Biden is not known for being a man of deep convictions but seems instead to be very much influenced by his surroundings and the times. While Biden’s legislative record and his campaigning for the Presidency bespeak a center-right approach, there are a few signs in his approach that he might be more open than some of his center-right grouping to input from progressives, even as he disowned progressive ideas on the campaign trail. In the selection of his cabinet and in a recent interview, Biden seems to remain true to his right-leaning, Republican embracing past, typical of many in the Democratic Establishment.

At this point in time, if Biden and Harris were to default to the standard elite Democratic embrace of bipartisanship and of unrequited love-making directed at Republicans, they would represent perhaps the epitome of masochistic helpers/enablers, even greater than Feinstein’s follies at the Barrett hearings. Almost the entire Republican Party is denying Biden and Harris’s electoral victory and thereby engaging in what appears to be sedition against the American constitutional order. John Kasich who was generously invited into the embrace of the Democratic Party elite has told Democratic leaders that they shouldn’t listen to progressives, even as he and other never Trump Republicans were unable to deliver any more of the Republican electorate to Joe Biden than voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, in fact a lesser percentage. Kasich’s own district went for Trump. The “moderate” Republican Lincoln Project despite amusing ads, was likewise unable to make a dent in the current Republican electorate. So despite all of the typical overtures to Republicans, Biden and Harris owe almost none of their victory to anti-Trump Republican help and Republicans are now mostly actively working to undermine both their electoral victory and American democracy itself.

Biden has talked about a desire to bring Republicans into his cabinet which is the standard and, expectable from Biden, an epitome of “frog”-like Democratic love for Republican “scorpions”. Furthermore Biden seems to be vetting Democrats with an eye to their acceptability to Republicans, including Mitch McConnell the possible still-Majority-leader of the Senate early next year. Biden has, in a centrist-Democratic tradition, also given progressives the “short end of the stick” again, even as progressives helped him win the Presidency. So far there are no serious progressive top level cabinet choices, despite Bernie Sanders, supposedly his personal friend, helping pave the way for Biden’s nomination.

The rote repetition of Biden’s and the Democrats’ typical paeans to bipartisanship and courtship of Republicans is however a formula for disaster for his upcoming Administration and not the “safe” option that Biden and his team seem to believe it is. Allowing Republicans into the “citadel” invites among other possibilities, a repetition of a James Comey-like “move” that probably gave Trump the 2016 election, when Obama-appointed Republican Comey at the FBI, announced that he was re-opening the investigation into Clinton’s emails a month before the November 2016 election. It is as if the Trojans (the Democrats) went looking for a Greek Trojan Horse outside the wall of Troy because it was their desire to pierce their own defenses and have their own city laid to waste.

More likely and more dangerous is the mistake of taking the policy and political consensus of Washington elites and media as representing the desires and interests of the American people as a whole. Such a mistake opens up the dangers of right-wing authoritarians outflanking both parts of the political Establishment “on the left” to win popular support by appearing to be “populist”, while enabled Trump to win in 2016. That is not part of the pre-2015 political world from which Joe Biden issues, but is now clearly written into the playbook of the far right in North America and elsewhere.

The Challenge of Unity and Diversity

Biden will be arriving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a time of unparalleled challenges for a President-elect and for the newly reconstituted Senate and House, with the final composition of the Senate still up for grabs in two runoff elections in Georgia in early January. We are at or near a constitutional crisis in terms of the Trump campaign’s and now Republican efforts to usurp the will of voters as counted in elections. So far institutions outside the Republican Party have generally held up but only barely to the political and legal putsch attempts by Trump but Trump and his Republican allies are continuing to probe the defenses of American democracy.

It is from the point of view of past performance, somewhat expectable that Biden would immediately turn to the Democratic reflex of submission to Republicans or at least Democrats’ idealized picture of Republicans to try to find allies “across the aisle” and attempt to, in the terms that he has understood, unify the political class. Donald Trump and his Presidency have been uncommonly divisive and Biden’s promise to be the “President of all Americans” is not a bad place to start his dialogue with the American people. It is a feature of the current American political system that that political class is significantly “to the right” of the American people. Joe Biden has lived in that reality for the past four-plus decades: it’s what he knows as his “work environment”.

However where Biden may be making a huge mistake, is to take the institutional Republican Party and Trump as the embodiments and true representatives of the 73.5 million Americans who voted against Biden and for Trump. Trump and the operatives within the Republican Party are trying to actively undermine Biden and for him to embrace them naively is, rightly, seen as a sign of weakness rather than strength by those who value combativeness over pacification. Many in the current Republican leadership are unreliable sociopaths, whose ambition and will-to-power will make them saboteurs of Biden and of American democracy. They will only use Biden and the Democrats as long as they are useful to their narrow interests.

But the manipulative, scheming Republican leaders are not entirely representative of or identical to their base. Biden needs to reach out to all Americans at the base of both Parties more via very specific policy proposals that unite Americans, including policies that address the economic crisis and the pandemic. He needs to ask Republicans to come to him and to the Democrats rather than make the overtures unrequited and unconditionally to Republican leaders, as has been the self-defeating Democratic reflex for several decades.

Biden, despite his political history and reflexes towards blind reaching out to Republicans, needs to assert a secure Democratic identity, partially via rhetoric but more importantly by decisive policy proposals and when in office policy decisions. Without that new and re-asserted identity, Democrats will be at sea in the new, very hostile political world. Biden must actually lead without using Republicans as a crutch, in what for him personally, may be uncharted territories.