Biden’s Invisible Ideology

The Brooklyn-reared boxing trainer Charley Goldman, who crafted Rocky Marciano, the undefeated heavyweight champ of the nineteen-fifties, once made a wise statement: “Never play a guy at his own game; nobody makes up a game in order to get beat at it.” He meant that there was no point getting into a slugging match with a slugger or a bob-and-weave match with a bob-and-weaver. Instead, do what you do well. Damon Runyon, another New York character of that same wise vintage, said something similar about a different activity: if someone wants to bet you that, if you open a sealed deck of cards, the jack of spades will come out and squirt cider in your ear, don’t take the bet, however tempting the odds. The deck, you can be sure, is gaffed on the other gambler’s behalf. Never play the other guy’s game: it’s the simple wisdom of the corner gym and the gambling den. The other guy’s game is designed for the other guy to win.

An instinctive understanding of this principle was part of the brilliance of Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign—and that we do not think of it as brilliant, despite his decisive victory against an incumbent, is part of its brilliance. Donald Trump invented a game: of bullying, lying, sociopathic selfishness, treachery, and outright gangsterism, doing and saying things that no democratic politician had ever done or even thought of doing, and he did it all in broad daylight. (A notorious line attributed to Nixon—“We can do that, but it would be wrong”—was about paying hush money. Even Nixon wouldn’t pardon his henchmen. Trump did.) It was a game designed for Trump alone to win, but all too many got drawn into it. It was a game that some credit to a Russian model of disinformation but actually seems rooted in old-fashioned American Barnumism, weaponized with John Gotti-style ethics. It was designed, in plain English, to throw out so much crap that no one could ever deal with it all. Trying to bat the crap away, you just got more of it all over you, and meanwhile you were implicitly endorsing its relevance.

Biden, by contrast, insisted that the way to win was not to play. In the face of the new politics of spectacle, he kept true to old-school coalition politics. He understood that the Black Church mattered more in Democratic primaries than any amount of Twitter snark, and, by keeping a low profile on social media, showed that social-media politics was a mirage. Throughout the dark, dystopian post-election months of Trump’s tantrum—which led to the insurrection on January 6th—many Democrats deplored Biden’s seeming passivity, his reluctance to call a coup a coup and a would-be dictator a would-be dictator. Instead, he and his team were remarkably (to many, it seemed, exasperatingly) focussed on counting the votes, trusting the process, and staffing the government.

It looked at the time dangerously passive; it turned out to be patiently wise, for Biden and his team, widely attacked as pusillanimous centrists with no particular convictions, are in fact ideologues. Their ideology is largely invisible but no less ideological for refusing to present itself out in the open. It is the belief, animating Biden’s whole career, that there is a surprisingly large area of agreement in American life and that, by appealing to that area of agreement, electoral victory and progress can be found. (As a recent Populace survey stated, Biden and Trump voters hold “collective illusions” about each other, and “what is often mistaken for breadth of political disagreement is actually narrow — if extremely intense — disagreement on a limited number of partisan issues.”) Biden’s ideology is, in fact, the old ideology of pragmatic progressive pluralism—the ideology of F.D.R. and L.B.J. Beneath the strut and show and hysteria of politics, there is often a remarkably resilient consensus in the country. Outside the white Deep South, there was a broad consensus against segregation in 1964; outside the most paranoid registers of Wall Street, there was a similar consensus for social guarantees in 1934. Right now, post-pandemic, polls show a robust consensus for a public option to the Affordable Care Act, modernized infrastructure, even for tax hikes on the very rich and big corporations. The more you devote yourself to theatrical gestures and public spectacle, the less likely you are to succeed at making these improvements—and turning Trumpism around. Successful pluralist politicians reach out to the other side, not in a meek show of bipartisanship, but in order to steal their voters.

This is an ideology whose invisibility is guaranteed to disappoint all of us loudly articulate ideologues. It was frustrating to many that Biden did not, in his joint address to Congress, in April, say more than a few carefully wrought words to the effect that the election he won was as free and fair as any in our history, and that the Big Lie denying it was not merely the obnoxious tic of a sore loser but a direct and violent threat to American democracy—a form of secessionism or sedition, and, like them, not to be tolerated.

He didn’t say as much as he might have or as many might have wanted. But this was surely due to his conviction, and the conviction of his circle, that an atmosphere of aggravation can only work to the advantage of the permanently aggrieved. With so many Americans in the grip of a totalized ideology of Trumpism—one that surmounts their obvious self-interest or normal calculations of economic utility—the way to get them out of it is to stop thinking in totalized terms. You get people out of a cult not by offering them a better cult but by helping them see why they don’t need a cult. This is a difficult wisdom—and one that, perhaps not accidentally, was offered often during the campaign by the man who is now Biden’s Transportation Secretary. Pete Buttigieg said at the time that you can’t defeat a cartoon villain by being a cartoon hero. You defeat a cartoon villain by helping people remember that life is not a cartoon. He put it simply to the press: “Trump appeals to people’s smallness, their fears, whatever part of them wants to look backward. We need to be careful that our necessary rebukes of the President don’t corner people into the kind of defensiveness that makes them even more vulnerable to those kinds of appeals. What we really need to do in some ways is talk past Trump and his sins.”

Talking past Trump turned out to be a good tactic. There is, nonetheless, an overwhelming feeling, as the inventory of Trumpism continues in its horrors, that confronting Trump’s sins is equally urgent. And not just among predictable progressives: Jennifer Rubin, the former conservative commentator now turned, by anti-Trumpism, toward, well, liberalism, argues that Attorney General Merrick Garland ought to be cajoled—or shamed—into doing the necessary work of finding out how Trump politicized the Justice Department and weeding out the people who let him do it. “Investigating wrongdoing, rooting out unethical behavior and getting to the bottom of the politicization of the department are central to restoring the Justice Department’s reputation,” she wrote. “In allowing miscreants to escape accountability . . . Garland has effectively told his department that there are no consequences for unethical or even illegal conduct.”

On front after front, it seems as if even the most blatant wrongdoing will once again go unpunished, because of an undue “institutionalism,” an inexplicable passivity, or a sheer unwillingness to look evil in the eye and call it by its name. Trump out of office may be the same character he always was—a grifter trying to become a gangster, oafish and comical in his grifting, sinister and dangerous in his gangsterism—but the damage that Trump did to the country remains. By ripping apart the premises of democratic government, Trump stripped the country of its basic civic immunity. And, like a virus that infects the country, long Trump is an ailment that won’t go away.

The urge to fight it, hard, before it can return, seems irresistible. Yet Biden and his circle resist this fight, and it would be foolish to think that they resist it only out of blindness and opacity. They are betting on Charley Goldman’s wisdom: you can’t win playing the other guy’s game. This wisdom has taken them further than the more aggressive conventional kind might have imagined. On the other hand, there was a national leader—an emperor rather than a President, as it happens—who once thought that he had found glory in invisibility when all that was waiting for him was public humiliation. Is Biden protected by the invisible armor of his ideology or merely naked to his enemies? Which of the two it turns out to be will determine much of our future.