March 25, 2021 11
order that climate change should be re-
garded as “an essential element of US
foreign policy and national security.”
It is equally obvious that, in the face
of the pandemic, public health is a na-
tional security priority. Both questions,
of course, erase the distinction between
the national and the international and
upend the imagery of America First. If
Biden is to fulfill his desire to restore
its claim to global leadership, the US,
among the world’s worst performers on
both carbon emissions and Covid- 19
deaths, must first take responsibility
for its own failures.
Law and order must be thoroughly
reimagined. There could be no clearer
example of the possibilities of taking
an old cliché and infusing it with new
meaning than that offered by the most
abused slogan in the US: “To protect
and serve.” Policing and the wider
criminal justice system have been vec-
tors of fear and insecurity for too many
communities for far too long. At the
heart of the Black Lives Matter move-
ment has been the terrible irony of its
own slogan—the need to insist on what
ought to be obvious. Yet that very ne-
cessity points to the possibilities of this
moment in American politics. Black
communities are not making outland-
ish demands. They are merely seeking
the fulfillment of the most basic prom-
ise of any democratic system of justice
and law enforcement—that it protect
and serve the public. The implications
of this pledge are radical; the under-
taking itself is, properly speaking, con-
servative. It seeks to validate law by
applying it equally and to create order
by generating the consent without
which, in a democratic society, it can-
not be sustained.
Biden has quite rightly defined cli-
mate change as an “existential” ques-
tion. But economic insecurity is also
experienced as a matter of existence.
It shapes the conditions of life for vast
numbers of Americans. There is an
ecosystem of social decency in which a
sufficient income, a right to timely and
appropriate health care (regardless
of income), access to education from
pre- K to college, a safety net for un-
employment, ill health, and old age,
and the sense of having an equal voice
in public decisions are as essential
as breathable air and clean water. To
those who lack these basics are added
the millions more who live in dread of
losing them. We know from history that
democracy cannot survive long in an en-
vironment where faith in the ability of
the state to build a floor of decency has
been eroded. Just as Biden rolls back
Trump’s sustained assault on the natu-
ral world, he has to give ordinary Amer-
icans concrete reasons to reclaim that
faith for themselves and their families.
This has to be done clearly and em-
phatically. If, as Biden seemed to sug-
gest in his recent town hall meeting in
Wisconsin, he adopts a gradualist ap-
proach to raising the minimum wage to
$15 an hour or canceling up to $50,
of student debt, the audacity of real
change may be adulterated into endless
haggling with recalcitrant Republicans.
It might be useful to recall T.S. El-
iot’s quip that while “immature poets
imitate; mature poets steal.” Too often,
Democratic administrations have
ended up imitating Republicans, trying
to mimic or even surpass their most re-
gressive policies. Bill Clinton’s declara-
tion of his intention to “end welfare as
we know it” is a shameful example. So
is the 1994 Violent Crime Control and
Law Enforcement Act, which Joe Biden
used to claim ownership of and refer
to as “the Biden Crime Bill.” Biden’s
championing, as chair of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, of this disastrous
legislation, with its “three strikes and
you’re out” mandate for mass incarcer-
ation, was a self- conscious act of imita-
tion—in this case of Nixon. As he put it
at the time, on the Senate floor:Every time Richard Nixon, when
he was running in 1972, would say,
“Law and order,” the Democratic
match or response was, “Law and
order with justice”—whatever that
meant. And I would say, “Lock the
SOBs up.”The consequences for Black com-
munities of this imitative gesture were
devastating. But there were also conse-
quences for the American political sys-
tem. If the primary tactic of Democrats
is to split the difference between them-
selves and hard- line conservatives,
there is an inbuilt incentive for the
right to move ever further to the right.
Halfway between decency and proto-
fascism takes you a long way down the
reactionary road.
There is good reason to think that
Biden’s regret for his central role in the
creation of the criminal justice disasters
of the 1980s and 1990s is sincere. But
learning the lessons of that catastro-
phe means not just reversing a partic-
ular set of policies, urgently important
though that is. It demands the adoption
of a very different way of dealing with
Republicans: don’t imitate, steal. What
Biden and the Democrats can and
should do is to annex the idea of secu-
rity once and for all, to grab it from the
right and make it what it ought to be:
the signature tune of social, economic,
political, and environmental renewal.
With the triumph of Trumpism, the
Republican Party has forfeited any
right to what used to be the conser-
vative values of safety, caution, and
protection. Its anarcho- despotic main-
stream can offer only environmental
chaos, a public health disaster, eco-
nomic precariousness, and a deeply en-
dangered democracy. It will, of course,
seek to disrupt and defy the new ad-
ministration at every turn, and Biden
and his party cannot simply override
its destructive negativity. What they
can do, though, is to make clear over
and over to the American people what
exactly they are being denied: security
in a time of threat. That, and not the
“story... of unity,” is the tale Biden has
to keep telling, the theme that fuses his
responses to “cascading crises” into a
single stream of argument.
Biden has been given the opportu-
nity, in the words of the African prov-
erb cited by Theodore Roosevelt in a
different context, to speak softly and
carry a big stick. His personal experi-
ence has given him the empathy needed
to assuage the hunger for reassurance
in the face of existential threat, for con-
solation in the face of mass death, for
resilience in the face of economic anx-
iety. Now, at the pinnacle of his public
life, those same desires have become the
most potent weapon in the struggle for
democratic decency. We are at a historic
juncture in which being a safe pair of
hands does not mean playing it safe. Q
—February 25, 2021