21.09.2023
Staggering to next crisis
Joe Biden’s growing incapacity, the likelihood of him being replaced mid-term by Kamala Harris if re‑elected, and a potential impeachment trial show that the abnormal is becoming the new normal. Paul Demarty looks at America
America’s slide towards gerontocracy is, it seems, entering an acute phase.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell repeatedly freezes up during press conferences, apparently suffering from some kind of seizure. Rumours about his failing health have swirled for years, but still he clings on to his position despite being 81 years old.
On the other side of the Senate aisle, there is the increasingly debilitated condition of California Democrat Dianne Feinstein. She turned 90 this year, and the last third of her life has been spent in the upper house. She struggles to remember the names of her aides and family members, recently launched into a speech in the middle of a formal voting procedure, and has given power of attorney over to her daughter. Not even the most credulous Democrat-sympathising media deny that she is in the grip of dementia any longer. She was absent from the Senate for three months, yet, for some unfathomable reason, she is required to soldier on.
The main problem, however, is Joseph Robinette Biden. A senile senator is, after all, manageable - there are another 99 of them to pick up the slack. But there is only one president of the United States of America. Biden frequently suffers from lapses of memory - or perhaps flights of fancy. In a recent speech, he claimed to have been at Ground Zero on September 12 2001 (he was not); in another, he somehow managed to assert that he witnessed a bridge collapse in Pennsylvania (he did not), that his grandfather had died days before his birth in the same hospital (he had died a year earlier, in another state), and rattled off an anecdote about chatting to a train conductor (the conductor would have been dead at the time the conversation supposedly took place).
That is before we get to the endless trips and falls, the return of his stutter and, rather earlier, his evisceration in presidential debates by a clearly sharper Donald Trump. Liberal media outlets have tended to brush over the problem uncomfortably, reasoning that he is still the only thing between America and the return of Trump. Some are happy to cry ‘ageism!’ (but can they really believe it?). Yet, if this is so, what a sorry picture is painted. Either US politics is wholly lacking in new blood or it is so corrupt that no opportunities exist for new blood to break through.
Corruption
Ultimately, this is indeed a matter of corruption. The Democratic National Committee and its associated bodies exist to ensure the dominance of the business-friendly and most fanatically imperialist wing of the party over elected representation, and outright monopoly on presidential nominations. It was backroom king-making that ensured Biden’s nomination in 2020, the outrageous ‘superdelegate’ system that gift-wrapped 2016’s for Hillary Clinton. The nominations follow the money; and the money has no desire for left-Democrat planks like Medicare for all. With no feasible alternative, the money follows ‘Sleepy Joe’. (Biden’s relationship, over many years, with health insurers based in Delaware, has occasionally brushed up against the acceptable edges of propriety.)
There is, of course, a more immediate corruption scandal, although exactly what the ‘scandal’ is depends rather on your point of view. The Republican majority in the House has launched an impeachment inquiry against the president, on the basis of his son Hunter’s dubious business dealings. Hunter, the most prodigal of sons, has proven a persistent source of scandal for his father - addicted to crack cocaine, a cheerily relentless customer to the sex industry, and an obsessive documenter of his various debauches, it was his failure to collect a laptop from a computer repair shop in 2020 that led to the last great controversy before that year’s election, when a New York Post exposé on the contents of the laptop was suppressed by state authorities and social networks, on the false basis that it was Russian disinformation.
Indeed, oddly, this is not Hunter’s first time in a walk-on role in a presidential impeachment. In 2019, the Democrats attempted to impeach Donald Trump when a recording was leaked of him apparently threatening to withhold military aid from Volodymyr Zelensky, then newly elected as Ukrainian president, unless Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine were investigated for alleged corruption. Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, a natural gas exploration company, in 2014, while Joe was still vice-president under Barack Obama. It is obvious to all with eyes to see that this was not due to the young man’s business acumen. This sinecure was designed to get access to his father.
The Republicans allege that Hunter repeated this trick with many different oligarchs and foreign organisations, and that “the Biden family” received up to $20 million in payments. In spite of their digging, little hard evidence has been found that Biden senior received any of this money; on the most flattering interpretation, it seems to have flowed into Hunter’s pockets, and from there into those of his drug dealers. That said, they do claim to have evidence that Biden attended dinners and took conference calls with Hunter’s clients - team Biden claims that nothing untoward was discussed … so that’s all right then.
From our spot in the cheap seats, it seems that Biden acquiesced in his role as his son’s killer offering: access to the vice-president of the USA. This is, from the point of view of political morality, corrupt. The American legal system may not see it that way, since it - like its English progenitor - is morally vacuous, and defends the privileges of the exploiters, such privileges including the right (de facto if not de jure) to suborn officials.
Even that is not relevant to Biden’s chances, however. The way the American system works is better known every passing year, it seems: the House of Representatives can vote to raise articles of impeachment (essentially filing charges); and the Senate effectively runs the trial, and decides on a vote whether the president shall actually be removed from office. The House vote is on a simple majority; the Senate requires a two-thirds majority to convict. The votes reliably go down partisan lines (not since the last days of Richard Nixon has this looked like breaking down, hence his resignation to avoid impeachment).
So the process looks pretty predictable at this point: the Republicans have a slim majority in the House, so Biden could well be impeached; but, even so, the Democrats have a majority in the Senate, so Biden will remain in office. House majority leader Kevin McCarthy knows this as much as anyone else, so this is clearly a stunt - as much a stunt as ultra-Trumpite congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s decision to show her colleagues blown-up reproductions of some of Hunter’s, ahem, more intimate self-portraits back in July. There is an opportunity to call the president to testify to these charges, which is an opportunity to fix the stink of corruption on him - or else to give him more opportunities to exhibit his senescence.
It must also be seen as a tit-for-tat counterstrike on the part of Republicans for the flurry of indictments of Trump this year. And, just as Biden clearly is corrupt - a classic representative of the “swamp” Trump promised to drain - so Trump clearly did attempt to overturn the election result, and even sent a mob of his followers on the most ham-fisted coup attempt in modern political history (you just can’t get the staff these days …). Conviction on any of the charges against him, however, would not necessarily disqualify him from standing; and, if he won, he could perhaps just pardon himself of any crimes.
Morbid symptoms
In other words, we look to be heading next year for a contest between two historically unpopular candidates, with maybe three past impeachments between them (plus who knows how many criminal charges?). Either result will be presumptively illegitimate to the losing side. The Republican diehards have long indulged fantasies about the illegitimacy of Democratic presidents and candidates, from Whitewater to ‘birtherism’, to Hillary’s emails - and now to Hunter’s dodgy dealings. The Democratic faithful have now caught the bug, thanks to Trump.
It would seem, then, that we are watching a crisis of legitimacy unfold in the American system (indeed, arguably this has been happening since 2008), which has the potential to grow over into a full-blown constitutional crisis in the near future. The significance of January 6 2021 coup attempt in this process should not be understated, merely because it was altogether comical in execution. A mob would not have to be much larger, and its forces not much more coherent and organised, to have created a standoff - and the standoff would have posed the sitting president against the military of which he is formally commander-in-chief. Elements of the US state core had already repeatedly intervened against him, and will continue to do so in the run-in to 2024.
Arguably this could not have come at a worse time for the US capitalist class and state core. The hegemon is in the midst of two major pivots, in the domestic and foreign-policy strategic spheres (not to say one urgent matter, the proxy war in Ukraine). It is gearing up for great power confrontation with China in the Pacific, and simultaneously attempting to reshore (or alternatively ‘friendshore’) various strategically critical industries. Beneath all the froth, there is substantial agreement on the necessity of all this between the reactionary and liberal wings of US power. Yet achieving it requires a certain level of stability and continuity. Industrial policy must continue beyond the biannual congressional election cycle; effective strategic action requires unity - or at least a working relationship - between the military, intelligence and civilian-political apparatuses. Neither can be taken for granted if a prolonged constitutional deadlock were to arise.
As to where this is all going, we have no more than speculation. Biden’s victory in 2024, even with the effective support of the deep state and the media, is by no means guaranteed (just ask Hillary …). If he wins, how long can he really serve, given his state of health? That would mean a handover of power to Kamala Harris, whose tenure as VP has been largely anonymous, and who is not a little ineloquent and gaffe-prone herself (some cruel commentators have suggested she might be as fond of downers as Hunter is of uppers). If Trump should prevail, all bets are off.
Like that other egregiously corrupt chief executive, Warren G Harding, Biden promised a “return to normalcy”. Nothing of the sort has been forthcoming - perhaps nothing of the sort is possible. It seems that the decades-long assault on the US working class has achieved such a level of social atomisation that the achievement of hegemony itself is problematic. At times like this, Marxists tend to reach for Gramsci’s diagnosis of the “interregnum”, in which “the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born”.
We need not look hard to find morbid symptoms.