How the Left should view the Biden Presidency
In the immediate aftermath of the traumatic 2016 election, I wrote a long letter to all of my family and friends, drawing a historical parallel between Donald Trump and another maddeningly bad leader from Western history, although not likely one that you’re thinking of: namely, it was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, later to call himself Emperor Napoleon III, who ascended to the Presidency of the fledgling Second French Republic in the winter of 1849. I found, and still find, the parallels striking. In a nutshell: Bonparate, the nephew of “the” Napoleon Bonaparte, had been considered a longshot for the Presidency, and was dismissed out-of-hand by the myriad factions that dominated the Parisian political landscape of the time. He was widely considered a buffoon, a sideshow; all he had going for him were, basically, his wealth and his name recognition, sharing a first name both with the lineage of French Kings (Louis) and with his famous, and still beloved, uncle. Yet, to the shock of the well-educated men on both the left and the right who had led the Second French Revolution of 1848, Louis-Napoleon, who received almost no votes in Paris or in any other urban center, swept the vote of the rural, provincial France, promising the ignorant peasants a return to the glorious days of Monarchy and Empire, and capitalizing on their disdain for the Godless moderns who preached of republican democracy without having any connection to the rural French populace.
Louis-Napoleon served his 2 years as President, to the united horror of both left and right wings, but in 1851, he was term-limited. Breathing a sigh of relief, the democratic republicans in Paris were again blindsided when Bonaparte staged a successful military coup, declared himself Emperor, and ruled France for 20 more years, during which time French troops bloodily invaded Vietnam, Algeria, and Mexico, before leading his country to a humiliating defeat at the hands of the newly-created nation of Germany, in a war which was at the time the deadliest in European history, and a conflict which set the stage for two horrific World Wars over the ensuing century. In short, it was an unmitigated disaster.
I warned my friends and family that this was Trump’s closest historical match: not the high-minded evil of Hitler or Mussolini, but the buffoonery, incompetence, and meaningless lust for power that captivated an uneducated populace and fooled a complacent elite. And now that Trump’s attempted coup has, it seems, failed, we can see the parallel to have played out quite well, right up until that central difference: Napoleon III was successful in his coup, whereas Trump was not. I think it is worth it to ask, why? Why were we so lucky when those French were not?
None other than Karl Marx produced the seminal piece of reportage on the events of 1848–1851, in what I believe is his most important work, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which opens with his famous quip that, while it is known that history repeats itself, it should be added that “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In this document, Marx essentially blames the fall of the Second French Republic on a breakdown between the left and right wings of the democratic Revolution. Most historians agree with Marx on this, tracing the breakdown of the 1848 Revolution to the so-called “June Days,” in which, to simplify, an organized protest of the working-class was put down violently by the uniformed police of the new Republic, thus drawing stark divisions between the left-wing of the Revolution, representing this burgeoning working class, and the right-wing, which saw its intellectual ancestors as the British, American, and French liberals of the 18th Century — men such as Jefferson, Lafayette, or Edmund Burke — as opposed to the more radical paths trod by Robespierre in the 1790s or by the growing socialist labor movement of the 1840s. As Marx writes: “During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had ‘saved’ society from ‘the enemies of society’” under the banner of “‘’property, family, religion, order.’”
In essence, Marx correctly noted that the so-called democratic republicans, who ousted the King and attempted to found a representative Democracy, were mostly moderates who feared “anarchy”, socialism, communism, and the power of the working class; as such, when faced with a potentially violent mob of proletarians, they turned rightward, falling in line behind the charismatic chief of police, and holding tight to their traditions of “property, family, religion, order.” As a result of this division between the left-wing, which would grow over the next century into the various socialist and communist parties of the world, and the right-wing, which would grow over the next century into modern conservatism, neither side won, instead turning a tinpot dictator into a very real Emperor.
This brings me to why our situation has been so different. 21st Century America also has a moderate wing, much like those right-wing French Republicans of the 19th Century who, although they opposed monarchy, truly did not want to topple the social order. President Biden hails from this moderate wing, as do the members of the Lincoln Project, as do honestly most of our political leaders, from either party, over the past 30 years. It would not be surprising for this right wing to tremble in fear of the more radical elements in our society, as they often have done. But in the summer of 2020, as protesters angrily marched in the streets, the moderates among us did not cower behind “property, family, religion, order,” but celebrated the protests. Affluent, white neighborhoods sported an endless sea of BLM lawn signs; centrist Democrats came out in full support of the cause; and, when faced with actual violence and destruction as a result of some of these protests, apologies, contextualizations, and explanations carried the day, instead of condemnation or distancing. In short, the moderate wing acceded to the radical wing, driven largely by a more pressing fear of the growing Fascist movement that already had control over the White House.
And the radicals among us, to be fair, returned the favor, turning out in record numbers to vote for Joe Biden, the most right-wing Democratic nominee for President in at least a generation, possibly since before Roosevelt. Many Republicans remain incredulous that Biden could have received more votes than Obama — and yet, he did. Whereas Code Pink couldn’t eagerly support Kerry in ’04 and Bernie Bros wouldn’t vote for Clinton in ’16, this time around, all idealism was cast aside before the unified vision of defeating Trump. The radical wing of the American Left chose this old, white, male, a champion of corporations and an opponent (at least in the past) of racial equity, as our standard-bearer. We, too, chose unity over division, in pursuit of a common cause.
This is something we really ought to be proud of, openly and vociferously. Moderates and Radicals alike, you all came together, you resisted the urge to let your petty differences get the better of you, and defeated Fascism peacefully, in the face of so many historical precedents to the contrary. It is an achievement to be proud of, even to be celebrated, but it is also not in the least bit a final victory, and to make that point I’ll turn to another historical parallel, one you probably already know.
This story begins, forebodingly, in Germany, in 1923, when a small group of a few thousand angry young men, suffering from political and economic humiliation in a rapidly-changing world, attempted a poorly-organized, poorly-funded, poorly-armed but nonetheless violent coup against the democratic government of Weimar Germany. They were rebuffed by the police, with only a handful of deaths (a total of 20, including 4 police). The leaders of the attempted coup were arrested and jailed, and the problem was solved forever: Germany experienced a century of peace, prosperity, and brotherly love, with no major problems ever again.
Except … what actually happened was that one of the leaders of the attempted Nazi coup served 8 months in prison, was controversially pardoned, learned from his mistakes to build a stronger Nazi party, and less than 10 years later, he capitalized on national fears spiking in the face of a collapsed global economy to win political power legitimately, leading to arguably humanity’s darkest decade.
The election of 1932, which saw this victory of Adolf Hitler (in case you were still wondering who), was another exercise in pointless disunity. The centrist government, led by Paul von Hindenburg, was virulently opposed by the Communist Party, led by Ernst Thälmann, thus leading to a split among anti-Nazi voters. Thälmann, a Stalinist, followed the hard party line that anyone who was not an active member of the Communist Party, who didn’t accept Stalin’s word totally and without dissent, was a Fascist; the Communists were fond of calling everyone a Fascist, ranging from Hitler down to any other Communists who weren’t directly supportive of Stalin. This narrowmindedness, most historians agree, helped split the working-class vote of Germany between Thälmann and Hindenburg. Hitler won that election with only 37% of the vote, far less than Trump has already garnered (twice, now), due to the disunity between the moderates and the Left.
This is a lesson to be heeded. After the failures of 1848 and of the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx lost faith in the ability, or even desire, of liberal democracy to help the working class. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, he writes tellingly that “in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of ‘republic or monarchy’ … that here ‘bourgeois republic’ signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes.” In short, Marx came to believe that liberalism and monarchism were indistinguishably bad, and in 1917, Lenin took that mantle and ran with it. Lenin wrote that “Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government,” that they would never “yield to the influence of the bourgeoisie,” and that “to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step.” Lenin abandoned all hope of reconciliation between moderates and radicals, and in so doing, gave the world the gift of the U.S.S.R. This is, I think we can all agree, the wrong road to go down.
President Biden has asked us to remain unified against our existential enemies — global pandemic, climate change, and political extremism. It seems self-evident that this third category is a euphemism for Trumpian Fascism, but we who consider ourselves radically left must also take it as an invitation for us not to go down the road of foolhardy idealism, refusal to compromise, ideological purity, and division. We have narrowly escaped a Fascist coup only through unity, and it is only through being vigilantly unified, and forgiving our more moderate friends their penchant for moderation, that we will continue to serve as a bulwark against disaster. Yes, this means that change will be slow, but at least the changes will be, we can both hope and expect, for the better, and not for the worse, or for the worst.
The title of this essay comes from E.M. Forster’s brilliant piece, alternately titled “What I Believe” and “Two Cheers for Democracy.” In it he writes: “So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love, the Beloved Republic, deserves that.” (Forster is referencing the poem Hertha, by Algernon Charles Swinburne). So, too, I say that Biden’s call for “Unity” deserves two cheers, but only two. As Forster opines, only Love deserves three; that is to say, only our idealism, that we can and must keep alive in our hearts. But we must not neglect to cheer, heartily, twice, for this compromise, for this proud unity.
I’ll finish with one more quote from European history, this from the much-maligned British politician of the late 18th Century, Edmund Burke, who as a Liberal opposed the French Revolution in a text that has become a hallmark of conservatism, if “conservative” is taken to mean Tories and not Trumpists. In this controversial work, Burke writes of how little excitement there is to pursuing gradual progress through calm legislation:
“Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time have soon become the most decided, thorough-paced courtiers; they soon left the business of a tedious, moderate, but practical resistance to those of us whom they have, in the pride and intoxication of their theories, slighted as not much better than Tories….Plots, massacres, assassinations seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. Cheap, bloodless reformation, and guiltless liberty, are flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene, a magnificent stage effect, a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination grown slack with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years’ security and the still un-animating repose of public prosperity.”
I, who as a youth definitely yearned for the “great change of scene,” have long cherished these words, including Burke’s admonition against painting, with the same brush, my less-radical allies as my virulent enemies. I, for one, am eager to heed President Biden’s call to unity: unity with moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats, and all other non-ideological, professional compromisers whom I do not need to love or admire in order to happily support.
