The Ruse of Joe Biden’s Technocratic Centrism

The existential conflict between liberals and conservatives

In his first two speeches as the presumptive president-elect, Joe Biden laid out what he thinks government should do.

“The purpose of our politics isn’t total, unrelenting, unending warfare,” he said in the first, short address. The purpose isn’t “to fan the flames of conflict, but to solve problems, to guarantee justice, to give everyone a fair shot, to improve the lives of our people.

“We may be opponents but we’re not enemies,” he added. “We’re Americans.”

And in the second speech, Biden built on these themes, saying, “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end — here and now. The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another is not due to some mysterious force beyond our control. It’s a decision.”

He went on to emphasize the need for cooperation: “if we can decide not to cooperate, then we can decide to cooperate. And I believe that this is part of the mandate from the American people. They want us to cooperate. That’s the choice I’ll make. And I call on the Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — to make that choice with me.”

Cooperation is needed, he suggested, because this is what Americans can expect from their government, based on their history: “The American story is about the slow, yet steady widening of opportunity.” In short, because of the internal divisions in the country, the government can pass worthwhile legislation and solve problems only by compromising, not by dictating some extremist principles that most Americans reject.

Indeed, for three decades as a senator, Biden was known for reaching across the aisle and working with Republicans, since that’s how American government worked back then, through moderation rather than tribal warfare.

In an earlier address, from July, 2020, Biden was more emphatic on this point: “That’s part of a president’s job, to lead, listen, and heal. And to listen to everyone. Even before today, our politicians have become too mean, too personal, and too ugly. It weakens us. It distracts us. It divides us. It’s not who we are. And I refuse to accept the idea that our nation is permanently divided. It is not. Principles must never be compromised, but ‘compromise’ is not a dirty word. It’s how our government was designed to work.”

Technocracy and Centrist Liberalism

What Biden is assuming here is the outlook of centrist Democratic technocracy. This is the view that politicians should be in the business of hiring experts to solve actual problems for the country, not engaging in partisan bickering or focusing on raising money just to stay in power.

This liberal rationale derives from the scientific engine of Western progress. The classic liberals’ hope was that just as scientists largely figured out how nature works, we can progress socially by emulating scientific methods, by looking at problems objectively, appealing to experts, and applying policies that have confronted the data and been rigorously tested. A liberal’s policy platform is akin, then, to technology that makes use of scientific theories.

All of which is progressive and humanistic because it’s opposed to faith-based dictatorships, as in the theocracies and absolute monarchies entailed by the conservative’s fear of novelty.

Granted, there have been scientific geniuses who’ve arrived at their insights in Romantic fashion, alone and in communion mainly with their private vision. But science distinguishes itself by calling for public testing of assertions. Moreover, science advances by overturning dogmas, presumptions, and intuitions, and is thus antithetical to conservatism, which is why the Scientific Revolution was crucial to ending the hyper-conservative age of feudalism in medieval Europe.

The problem with liberal technocracy is that scientific objectivity applies only to the means of achieving social goals, not to the values that determine the selection of those goals. You can be more or less efficient in using policies to reach certain desired ends, but there’s no scientific procedure for deciding what we ought to be reaching for in the first place.

Therefore, the technocratic conceits of centrist Democrats would be irrelevant to dealing with differences in the values of American liberals and conservatives.

The Incoherence of Biden’s Platitudes

But let’s look more closely at Biden’s stated values. In the first place, I’m struck by their incoherence. On the one hand, he says American political parties need to cooperate and compromise for the sake of a slow and steady widening of the citizens’ opportunities. On the other, he says Americans need to end the demonization, since their political opponents are still Americans.

Follow the logic, though: the first point implies that Americans aren’t so united after all, that they’re deeply divided, which is why they can aspire only to compromise, not to dictation based on a one-sided view of how society should be run. Indeed, the first point is that Americans are united only superficially or nominally, according to the name of their country, the “United States of America,” but they’re not actually on the same page.

In the second speech, Biden refers to these divisions in euphemistic fashion, by appealing to the tired cliché about “better angels.” “Our nation is shaped,” he said, “by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. It is time for our better angels to prevail.” (Biden had recourse in that speech to a second stale cliché, too, to the notion that “the arc of the moral universe” bends “towards justice,” which suggests the speech-writers phoned it in.)

In any case, Biden’s suggestion is that all Americans are internally divided between their better and worse impulses, but of course what Biden insinuated is that since the latter half of the last century, at least, Democrats have been guided by the better angels, whereas Republicans have been captive to the darkest impulses. If that’s the message that comes across, Biden is conceding that American society is deeply divided, not on trivial matters but on questions of value; moreover, thanks to the age of internet-based conspiratorial thinking, we can add that Americans are divided even on questions of fact.

Yet in what I’m calling the second point, Biden appeals to some imaginary underlying agreement between Democrats and Republicans, to what we might call “Americanism,” to a shared American ethos. That’s why he thinks he can treat the internal divisions as a matter of superficial demonization and of mere wild, mean rhetoric.

But if Americans aren’t really so divided, why have their political representatives had to compromise to produce legislation that appalled the extremists on either side? And if the political and cultural divisions are real, albeit relatively recent in their most extreme form, the appeal to underlying shared Americanism is fanciful.

E Pluribus Multis: Divisions from Individualism

The culture-war rhetoric may be mean, as Biden says, but it wouldn’t be arbitrary demonization. Each side would see the other side as the epitome of evil, because the sides are so different from each other. We fear the other, the alien, that which we don’t understand because it’s so unlike us. Widespread demonization, then, is a mark of foreignness and attests precisely to the lack of shared values.

Of course, people can be brainwashed into seeing cultural differences that don’t exist. But more often, demonization is a form of scapegoating, of casting aspersions on foreigners, as in the ancient Romans’ condescension towards “barbarians,” the Church’s witch-hunts, and the Nazis’ demonization of Jews and of other “inferior races.”

Biden’s criticism of American demonization can be parodied, since we can ask why there’s ever been any social conflict in the world, given that we’re all equally people and human. We share a species, so why do we fight? Obviously, because the traits we share generate many social and psychological differences. In particular, what we share as people is some limited freedom which enables us to go our separate ways, as we’ve done in our various societies and cultures.

Similarly, the United States is founded on the principle of individual liberty, which means we can hardly expect Americans to be especially united; on the contrary, they’re bound to be divided because what they share is precisely the cherishing of their right to go their separate ways. And that’s what they’ve done, producing a welter of subcultures that characterize each of the fifty states and that have recently culminated in the tribal cold war between the “red” and “blue” or the rural and urban Americas.

The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill said that eccentricity is a mark of a healthy, liberal society — not unanimity, but the tolerance of people’s different expressions of their freewill. So again, cultural differences in a liberal culture wouldn’t be surprising.

Tribalism and the Media Landscape

But we can lay such philosophical explanations aside, because it’s patently obvious that Americans are currently deeply divided. According to Democrats, Trumpian Republicans represent the darkest impulses, whereas those Republicans see Democrats’ progressive leanings as totalitarian, socialistic, and un-American.

Clearly, social media technologies which are rampant in the “United States” have exacerbated the divisions, producing informational silos and alternative realities, as the documentary The Social Dilemma makes clear. Curiously, the stereotype that elderly politicians like Joe Biden don’t know any better because they’re stuck in the past is untenable. After all, Donald Trump is likewise elderly and stuck in his ways, but his genius has been in understanding the media landscape and exploiting its capacity to divide.

Nevertheless, Biden’s sentimental clichés fly in the face of the reality that his early presidential speeches ignore. Biden boasts that he received more votes than any other American president, but he fails to address the fact that in 2020 Trump received more votes than Barack Obama did in 2008.

Moreover, Republicans voted for Trump largely because he’s a political outsider. That means it’s absurd to think Trumpian Republicans will have much in common with Democrats. Trump was hand-picked because he’s the antithesis of the typical politician. Republicans began to purge their moderates since Newt Gingrich reshaped Congress and since the invention of Fox News and of the other mass-media outlets of right-wing extremism in the 1990s.

The divisions are manifest in the 2020 voting patterns, since they appear as a split between the urban and rural populations, and between the college-educated voters and those without that higher education. There are racial divisions, too, although these are less pronounced, since Biden won back many of the disaffected suburban white voters in the swing states, while Trump increased his share of the vote from Latinos.

Democrats can fairly ask, therefore, whether Biden-style “compromise” will be a euphemism, in the present context, for capitulation to Republicans’ authoritarian or “conservative” demands.

Democrats and Vice President Biden in particular already tried to reach across the aisle to proto-Trumpian Republicans, under Barack Obama, and Mitch McConnell stymied those efforts, preferring to block the Democrats’ legislative agenda rather than compromise. There’s no apparent reason why the situation should be improved so shortly after the Trump era of naked Republican authoritarianism and after Trump lost his bid for reelection by nevertheless garnering some seventy-three million votes.

Conservative Animalism and Liberal Humanism: The Heart of the Divide

What Democrats need now isn’t reflexive, feminizing sentiments about the need for cooperation and for unity and “healing.” Leave healing to the medical doctors. No, what liberals generally need to understand are the real natures of Trumpism and of the “conservatism” that spawned it. Sure, we can leave out the gratuitous insults, but pretending that Donald Trump and his followers are Americans in good standing is preposterous, reckless, and counterproductive.

Return to Biden’s claim that “The purpose of our politics isn’t total, unrelenting, unending warfare, not to fan the flames of conflict but to solve problems, to guarantee justice, to give everyone a fair shot, to improve the lives of our people.”

Do Trumpian Republicans agree with that? Arguably, these Republicans prefer the warfare because they’re unremittingly cynical about all American institutions. They’ve lost faith in their government’s capacity to solve big problems. All these Republicans want is vengeance against the establishment. That was the main point of electing Trump to office, to embarrass and disgust professional politicians like Biden.

So no, Democrats can anticipate from these radicalized Republicans more “total, unrelenting, unending warfare” and staunch opposition as opposed to compromise — unless, of course, Democrats surrender their principles and do whatever Republicans want, to make it seem as though their government were still functioning — which Biden and centrist Democrats are liable to do.

Moreover, these Republicans don’t believe the government should be giving “everyone a fair shot.” They’re “libertarians” who think everyone should be “free” — which is to say abandoned to make it or to fail on their own, with no governmental safety net. This is to say that these Republicans merely voice the basic conservative values, which amount to social Darwinism.

To suggest that all Americans agree that the government should enforce egalitarian standards of fairness in the economy, even after four years of Trump’s tribal protectionism and his sporadic applications of the Republican’s Darwinian creed is to engage in Democratic gaslighting.

The root division, therefore, which is obscured by the talk of “Democrats” and “Republicans” and even of “liberals” and “conservatives,” is that between progressive and science-centered or promethean humanists, on the one hand, and regressive, animalistic, anti-humanists on the other.

That’s the reality that reared its ugly head under Trumpism, as it appears also under all bastions of conservatism, from the family unit to theocracies, monarchies, and dictatorships. These eminently conservative, regressive ways of organizing society only revert to the evolutionary, default social structure of the dominance hierarchy or pecking order, in which a strong minority rules with an iron fist over the weaker majority.

Regardless of the conservative’s rhetoric, that’s the effect of her policies. So-called conservative thought consists of so many rhetorical obfuscations of the dubious pretense that people aren’t functionally different from animals and that we lack the power, the freedom and the reason to transcend animal norms.

Existential Freedom and the Ruse of Centrist Compromise

What does compromise between humanists (liberal Democrats) and animalists (conservative Republicans) look like? Do centrists like Biden meet in the middle with their moderate counterparts in the other party?

Perhaps they did decades ago, when Democrats began their shift away from being a working class party and capitulated to conservative shenanigans, and before the high-tech tribalism and the elimination of political moderates, when there were conservatives and liberals in both parties. Now that the parties have polarized, their respective purities only channel the primeval abyss between progressive humanism and regressive animalism.

More recently, there’s been no meeting in the middle as a result of the Democrats’ compromises with Republicans. As is clear from comparisons of the US to other democracies like Canada, Australia, or Norway, the United States has moved steadily rightward over the last several decades, since Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton ended the New Deal and the agenda of big businesses began to dominate America’s political discourse.

What this means is that Americans have become infamous for their mounting economic inequality, which has regained the plutocratic proportions of the Gilded Age; the US middle class has shrunk or is on precarious ground, with many Americans hooked on opioids, perhaps because they lack the inherent fortitude to cope with the fact that the progressive American Dream has faded.

As the comedian Dave Chappelle points out, the current epidemic of white people’s addiction to pain-killers echoes the earlier epidemic of African-Americans’ addiction to heroin. The point is that the cause is comparable, namely victimization by the society’s rightward shift towards maximal individual “freedom.”

You see, Republicans and big business merely co-opted the progressive humanist’s chief value. The point of freedom is that people are autonomous in ways that animals aren’t; we have the capacities for self-awareness, imagination, and rational planning, which liberate us from the natural life cycle to some extent, as we work on building a more suitable, artificial environment that reinforces our personhood.

That progressive point about human freedom hardly entails that everyone ought to be left alone to succeed or to fail solely on their own merits. On the contrary, because personhood is so precious in the universe, we ought to be repulsed by the prospect of allowing anyone to fail to such an extent that he or she ends up living like an animal that’s enslaved to circumstances. This is the positive, “socialist” aspect of liberty which conservatives ignore or downplay.

The Biden Democrat’s practice of centrism, then, is based on an illusion. Bill Clinton’s triangulations only enabled Gingrich to lay the groundwork for ever more governmental tribalism, and Barack Obama’s failure to use Wall Street’s 2008 meltdown to create a second New Deal only gave the game away to the “conservative” Republicans. In condemning progressive humanism, the latter animalists aim to neutralize American democracy by way of encouraging those “dark impulses” that would establish a sophisticated, plutocratic disguise for a large-scale, primitive dominance hierarchy in the US.

There’s no meeting in the middle here, because the conservative has the gravitational pull of the entirety of nature on her side. That’s why democracy, social progress, and even rationality are so fragile, because we easily resort to our default impulses that would enslave us to our evolutionary life cycle, to being preoccupied with surviving by dominating others or by scrounging for scraps and competing for mates; we lose our personhood when we act like unknowing animals.

Joe Biden’s centrist platitude about the need for political compromise is based on the presumption that conservatism is a legitimate mode of thought and that it has equal philosophical weight with progressive humanism.

On the contrary, people as such are engaged in an existential revolt against the impersonal universe. Implicitly and effectively, conservatives side with natural selection and with the mindless, amoral universe against the human experiment of personal freedom and transcendence. Liberals side with the rebellious humans — unless the former lose their nerve.