So, we settled for Joe Biden. It’s been four long years, even longer and more painful for the immigrants, black and indigenous people, people of color, Hispanic and Latinx people, Muslims, minority groups, public servants and others who have borne the brunt of Donald Trump’s vitriol and discrimination.
The 2020 Democratic presidential primary included candidates who proposed Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal, debt-free public college, a universal basic income, free child care and Pre-K for all, the elimination of medical debt and student loan debt, expanding union membership and so much more.
Instead, the Democrats nominated the candidate who proudly
proclaimed, “I beat the socialist”
. In a field that included candidates from 38 to 79 years of age, from young moderate Pete Buttigieg to old Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, the Democrats nominated 77-year-old Joseph R. Biden, their oldest nominee for President in history. Joe Biden was the clear moderate favorite in a field full of progressives and a Democratic Socialist.
As Biden prepares to govern as the “President for all Americans,” he faces a pandemic, climate change, inequalities of myriad types, a broken justice system, failing diplomacy and more. And every issue seems to require a drastic response.
Joe Biden will lead the “richest” country in the world, with the highest GDP. Yet the U.S. chronically underperforms compared to our Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) peers on countless measures of social well-being. Last year, the United States
ranked 35th out of 162 countries according to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), a benchmark for balancing economic prosperity while reducing inequalities and addressing environmental issues.
Of course, the SDGs provide a quantitative assessment of a messy concept: a country’s economic success is difficult to measure. But one could start by measuring equitable access to justice, healthcare, education, and opportunity. A global hegemon like the United States should not shy away from global standards like these goals. We should be leading our peers and surpassing goals.
Our cutthroat economy is failing the American people. Despite reaching a record low 10.5 percent of Americans living in poverty in 2019, eight percent of the population still lacked health coverage,
according to
The New York Times
. And minority groups experience poverty, along with countless other social issues, at drastically higher rates than white Americans.
Has a recognition of the United States’ abject failures entered the zeitgeist? Do most of us agree that we need systemic change?
Pew Research reported in January
that a majority of Americans–61 percent of adults–believe that there is too much
economic inequality in the U.S
. Yet Pew also reports that most Americans view making health care more affordable, dealing with terrorism, reducing gun violence, and addressing climate change as higher priority issues to tackle than economic inequality.
Can we truly tackle these issues without addressing economic inequality? So long as
the bottom 90 percent of U.S. families own less than one-quarter of U.S. wealth
, how will the majority make their voices heard?
Believers in American exceptionalism see the United States’ history, institutions and traditions as fundamentally different from other nations. But American exceptionalism today describes our exceptionally poor performance against COVID-19.
On pandemic response, the U.S. strategy resembles countries of far lower GDP, far fewer resources and far less developed health care systems. We are in the realm of Brazil, Peru, South Africa, Bahrain and Oman, not our top global economic peers. We began the pandemic with an unequal health care system. We face COVID-19 as we already face higher rates of infant mortality and diabetes, alongside a lower life expectancy compared to most other wealthy countries.
Luckily — and despite the President’s rhetoric — majorities in both parties report that they regularly wear a mask, although Republicans report higher skepticism about the effectiveness of masks. In August,
Pew Research reported
that 92 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans claimed that they wore a mask in public most or all of the time in the prior month. That is still not good enough. As the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests
, masks are most likely to reduce the spread of COVID when they are widely used by people in public. We need everyone on board to root out COVID.
The United States has suffered from widespread disinformation flowing out of the White House and the President’s mouth. Expert advice was ignored. Scientists were sidelined.
The CDC has led drastically fewer press briefings than it led in 2009 during the less lethal H1N1 pandemic. Under the Obama Administration, the CDC led 32 of 35 press conferences in the first 13 weeks of the H1N1 outbreak,
according to
Nature
. In stark contrast, President Trump led nearly 75 percent of the 69 press conferences held over the same period during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who would have thought that a reality show celebrity president would usurp screentime to grandstand during a global pandemic?
The Trump Administration’s
abysmal response to the pandemic
has led to tests that didn’t work and were not widely available, alongside insufficient contact tracing. President Trump’s dangerous rhetoric has spurred on a misinformed debate over mask-wearing as he undercut common sense social activity restrictions. Factors like the United States’ high rates of pre-existing conditions do not account for a U.S. death rate that is seven times higher than the median developed country, according to Vox.
We have the highest death toll in the world.
The landscape of Congress does not bode confidence for a strong bipartisan response to COVID-19 or the ongoing economic depression. Several lawmakers within the Republican Congressional Leadership still
refuse to accept President-elect Joe Biden’s victory
. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is now joyfully described by Senate Republicans as “the apex predator of the United States Senate”,
according to Roll Call
.
Sen. McConnell,
also known as the Grim Reaper
for ‘killing’ Democratic-led bills in the Senate, has
pushed for a ‘skinny’ relief bill
as he scorned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s $2.6 billion dollar relief bill, along with the
$2 trillion dollar relief bill
considered by Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
Given Senator McConnell’s likely obstruction of all Democratic legislative efforts, although the Democrats hold the White House for the next four years, they will continue to fail to make progress unless they take back the Senate.
The promise of progress over the next two years hangs in the balance of two special elections for Senate in Georgia,
neither of which hail optimism for Democratic victories
. All eyes will be on Georgia as the two Demcratic candidates for Senate, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, fight against the negative effects of an off-cycle election and a likely GOP voter resurgence on the special election day, Jan. 5, 2021. The odds are ever against progress.
Outside of Congress, the Biden Administration does have tools to affect change. The incoming administration can take executive action to improve the U.S. pandemic response.
Biden’s national response to COVID-19 could help fix the supply chain issues, equipment shortages, and lack of funding that have hampered the U.S. pandemic response. The Biden platform includes making COVID testing widely available and free. It is significantly more expensive than the Trump COVID response plan according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. But the Biden plan could help eradicate COVID and fully open the economy faster, saving lives, income and revenues in the long run.
We cannot face our problems
by pretending they are not there
. We will be safer with a President that backs our federal agencies and lets scientists lead the battle against COVID. But we also cannot face inequality, our unequal health care system, systemic racism or the myriad issues our country faces by ignoring them. If you worry about raising taxes, a public option or a universal health care system, I beg you, please, be open to even some small reforms.
We are not going to become a European social democracy overnight. But maybe we could
try a public option
for health care. Or maybe we could
reallocate some funding from our police forces to other social services
.
Learn about
the national debt
. The United States isn’t going to default any time soon. Learn about
economic inequality
. We are living in the Second Gilded Age.
If you espouse economic growth as your measure of a country’s success, consider
research that correlates increases in economic inequality with decreases in economic growth
. Learn about the
immense inequality of the income distribution
. Consider
what reparations means
.
Talk with people about what type of country you want to live in. In
On Tyranny
, Timothy Snyder warns against our acceptance of the “
politics of inevitability
, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.” Snyder suggests some small steps we can take to strengthen our democracy. Make eye contact and small talk, with neighbors, and with strangers. Get outside and explore unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Near the end of his little book on democracy, Snyder says that to resist tyranny, “ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything.”
Let’s recognize the problems in our society and do something about it. Because problems don’t disappear in the absence of our attention.