Friends,
How could people vote for someone who voted for the
Iraq War? How can we move Biden from being a corporate Democrat to a candidate
that recognizes war mongering is what got us into the current disastrous
mess. Tax dollars going to weapons contractors is funding that should have been
going to heath care supplies. We must continue to blast Biden for his
jingoistic policies, and force him to understand the U.S. Empire must end.
Kagiso, Max
A Jingoistic Fantasy and the Utter Futility of Biden’s
China Rhetoric
Peter Beinart
April 20, 2020
The Atlantic
If he wants to
attack Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19, Joe Biden has an embarrassment of
options. The presumptive Democratic nominee could slam Trump
for ignoring his own advisers’ warnings about the potential severity
of the virus. Biden could skewer the president for his administration’s inability
to develop a coronavirus test. He could blast the Trump administration for
failing to adequately stockpile personal protective equipment. He could
condemn the large quantities of misinformation that Trump has
propagated about the disease.
For the moment,
however, Biden has chosen a different angle: He’s attacking Trump for knuckling
under to Beijing. Yesterday, the Biden campaign unveiled an ad—filled with
menacing images of Chinese soldiers—claiming that “Trump rolled over for the
Chinese.” It follows another spot, paid for by the pro-Biden super PAC
American Bridge 21st Century, depicting the incumbent as a stooge for Beijing.
“Everyone knew they lied about the virus—China,” a narrator declares, against
the backdrop of a fluttering Chinese flag. “President Trump gave China his
trust.” On Friday, the Biden adviser Antony Blinken told
reporters that “the president praised China and President Xi more than 15
times.”
The Biden camp’s
logic is easy to understand. Trump has made China the primary scapegoat for his
failures. His supporters are running ads under the hashtag
#BeijingBiden. So Biden and his strategists are meeting fire with fire. They’re
answering the charge that the former vice president is soft on China by saying
that Trump is.
This form of
ideological jujitsu comes naturally to Democrats of Biden’s generation, who in
the 1990s tried to turn the tables on Republicans who had been painting them as
antibusiness, anti-military, and pro-criminal during the Nixon and Reagan eras.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president promising to cut taxes. In
2000, Al Gore proposed to spend more on the military than George W.
Bush. And in 1994, after successfully shepherding Clinton’s crime bill through
the Senate, Biden crowed, “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now
for 60 new death penalties … The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for
125,000 new state prison cells … I’d like to see the conservative wing of the
Democratic Party.”
In the 1990s,
beating the GOP at its own game was at times politically shrewd. Clinton’s
ghoulish enthusiasm for the death penalty—which in 1992 led him to leave the
campaign trail to oversee the execution of the mentally disabled murderer Ricky
Ray Rector—probably helped inoculate him from the soft-on-crime attacks that
had helped sink Michael Dukakis in 1988. Still, Biden’s decision to try to
out-hawk Trump on China has three major problems. First, it promotes bad
foreign policy. Second, it could stoke anti-Chinese racism. Third, it doesn’t
even make long-term sense politically.
Republicans, who promoted economic
integration with China in the past, are now committing themselves to
a cold war with China. If Democrats think that’s a political environment in
which they’ll thrive, they’re making a big mistake.
First, the policy.
The implication of Biden’s new ad is that China didn’t give Trump timely
information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasn’t tough enough on
China’s leaders.
The commercial mocks Trump’s praise for Xi Jinping
and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By
contrast, it shows Biden vowing, “I would be on the phone with China making it
clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You
have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on.” In other words, Biden would
boss the Chinese around.
This is a
jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and
fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden can’t force it to comply. When Beijing has
given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past,
it’s because American presidents spent time and money building joint
U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make China’s leaders feel like
equals. In 2009, Biden’s then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese
leader Hu Jintao in Beijing—in the kind of scene Biden mocks in his
ad—and said the two governments should “build upon our mutual
interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The two
leaders announced that they would “deepen cooperation on global
public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance,
reporting and control.” As the Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Huang Bouey
has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine.
In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submission—in a phone call,
no less—the Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health
cooperation with China actually works.
The second problem
with Biden’s attempt at ideological jujitsu is that, as with the crime bill,
vulnerable people may get hurt. Democratic presidential candidates have bashed
China before. But this isn’t an ordinary moment. The coronavirus—and Trump’s
racist rhetoric about it—have sparked a horrifying rise in attacks on
Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans. To his credit, Biden
has condemned Trump’s “xenophobia and fear-mongering.” Without
meaning to, however, his new ads may exacerbate it.
A presidential
candidate can, of course, attack the Chinese government without attacking Chinese
Americans. But doing so requires some rhetorical finesse—something the Biden ad
lacks. The ad doesn’t say that Trump “rolled over” for “Xi Jinping” or the
“Chinese government” or even “China.” It says he rolled over for “the Chinese.”
As a result, Kaiser Kuo, editor at large of the website SupChina, told me, the
ad may contribute to a political “race to the bottom,” in which “Asian
Americans will suffer even more terribly from racism.”
Were the Biden
camp’s anti-China ads a surefire winner with voters, Machiavellians might
justify them as a necessary evil. But for Democrats, posturing as more
anti-China than the GOP is a poor long-term bet.
For
Republicans—such as Trump, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh
Hawley—stoking antagonism toward China makes ideological sense. The GOP is the
party of military spending, national sovereignty, and white anxiety. For
decades, Republicans have been looking for a new Ronald Reagan to lead them to
victory over a new evil empire. They’ve tried Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. But
China is the most credible candidate yet: a nonwhite, non-Christian, nominally
Communist power that really can challenge America’s dominance in the world.
Democrats are by
nature the party that advocates spending on health care and education rather than
on military confrontation. Democrats are the people who now say, in some
polls, that climate change is their second-highest priority. You can’t view the
climate threat as existential and simultaneously embrace a cold war that keeps
the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide from cooperating. Hawks
won’t find the Democrats’ anti-China posturing credible. Even if a few Never
Trumpers abandon the GOP in 2020, they’ll eventually come home to Cotton’s or
Rubio’s or Nikki Haley’s more respectable militarism. And in trying to
out-jingo the GOP, Democrats will alienate their Millennial activist base.
By 2005, after two
decades of Democrats like Biden and Clinton seeking to beat the GOP at its own
game, the historian Rick Perlstein wrote a short book entitled The
Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo. Perlstein argued that for a political
party, as for a corporation (“Superjumbo” is a reference to
Boeing’s
competition with Airbus), short-term gyrations in response to the vagaries of
the market (the “stock ticker”) can have devastating long-term effects if they
undermine its core identity. Clinton—who passed free-trade deals, deregulated
the financial markets, cut welfare benefits, signed legislation against gay
marriage, and helped fill America’s jails—won two presidential elections. But
toward the end of his tenure, Democrats controlled fewer Senate seats and
fewer state legislatures than they had in 50 years, and fewer governorships
than they had in 30 years. Clinton had won; the Democratic Party had lost.
By attacking Trump
for being insufficiently nationalist rather than being insufficiently
internationalist, Biden is hastening a geopolitical confrontation that
threatens progressive goals. And he’s sowing doubts about what the Democratic
Party actually believes. He’s choosing short-term advantage over long-term
principle.
This is what
supporters of Bernie Sanders were worried about, and Biden is proving them
right.
PETER
BEINART is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a professor
of journalism and political science at the City University of New York.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2020-04-25/jingoistic-fantasy-and-utter-futility-bidens-china-rhetoric
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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