Joe Biden’s gamble of running as a centrist in the primaries, but then moving to the left in the general election (the opposite of the conventional approach) has failed quite abjectly. This should give the US Democratic left pause—including the cabal of Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and the ever-growing leftist academic ecosystem.
America retains a conservative majority, although under Trump the right has openly espoused a racist vision of conservatism, rather than the traditional one based on free trade and unfettered competition. In state after state in the 2020 election, there was a dramatic contrast between the cities (multicultural and cosmopolitan) and the rest (solidly Trumpian).
The contradiction at the heart of the American project is that (like the whole of North and South America) it began as a colonial venture by the overcrowded nations of Europe, and was enabled by genocide against the native inhabitants of America. In order to protect themselves against native-Americans, the colonisers built a culture of self-defence—central to which was the possession of guns. The rest of the world finds this aspect of the US bizarre, but it is central to what makes an authentic white American (who thinks of himself, or herself, as custodian of Americanness). Until the 1950s, it was the “shining city on the hill” only for the huddled white masses of Europe.
The US expanded by acquiring large chunks of Mexico (California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona), which made it somewhat diverse; there was immigration from colonies like the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and of course the descendants of slaves from Africa and indentured labour from Asia—but these Asians were largely denied citizenship. Over time, but really only in the early 1960s, the racist immigration laws (similar to those that Australia had until then, South Africa until the 1990s) were abandoned, and a more multi-hued and cosmopolitan US emerged.
The Anglosphere of English-speaking peoples grew for two centuries only by admitting other white Europeans. It took an Irish-American (JFK), descendant of the first dissidents from the Anglosphere (and, as a Catholic, naturally sympathetic to the downtrodden in white America), to open the US up to non-racial immigration—which has, surely, been a shot in the arm for entrepreneurship and innovation over the subsequent six decades.
Now the US is at a vital fork in its road, with white Americans no longer constituting the majority of babies born in the US this year. The cities (even in red states) embrace this multi-hued destiny, the countryside is suspicious of it. Socialism and fear of the “other” constitute the nightmare that the dwindling white majority will fight doggedly against. The mainstream media (CNN, NYT, WaPo) and liberal politicians need to stop looking down their noses at these folks whose forbears made America—just as much as African-American slaves and Asian labourers on the west coast did.
Finding a way to embrace all those that comprise the US is the challenge for the new President. Fortunately, Biden hasn’t come in on a Blue Wave; he can thus hew to the centre, as he has through much of his career in the Senate and Blair House. Socialism is alien to the American way of life, but it is possible to widen access to public goods (like clean air, affordable education and health care) without simply expanding the role of government.
If the US is to again begin leading the “free world” against the new communist (or state-capitalist) threat, a President Biden needs to truly build an encompassing vision of America that isn’t manufactured in the self-serving liberal-academic bubble.
Those inhabiting that “liberal” bubble ought to shed their unthinking alliance with Islamists (and hence against Israel and, often, India) and sly embrace of China, the world’s most egregious traducer of human rights from Tibet to Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Trump has alerted the world to the dangers of allowing China to cheat in international trade—by massively subsidizing the limitless creation of industrial capacity that destroys the rest of the world’s producers, while allowing IPRs to be rampantly trampled.
Biden will do well to build on Trump’s gains over the past year and a half in reducing China’s bilateral trade surplus with the US—but to expand it to wider action against Chinese dumping, as the Obama administration had begun to do in steel and aluminium in 2016. Biden has proposed to convene a “Global Summit for Democracies”, which will only be meaningful if the Quad (of the Indo-Pacific’s leading democracies—the US, India, Japan and Australia) acquires real military muscle through a joint security and economic strategy for the Indo-Pacific. Strengthening the India-US partnership, while helping the Tibetans and Uyghurs, can be the basis for Biden to not only build a better Indo-Pacific, but also widen his own domestic base in the process—by reshoring some manufacturing from China while re-centring global supply chains in India.
Prasenjit K. Basu is a former Chief Economist for India & SE Asia at Credit Suisse First Boston, and author of the award-winning book “Asia Reborn”.