The Last Days of Biden

LOS ANGELES is burning.

At the time of writing, the six wildfires currently raging through and around the city have destroyed over 10,000 homes and other structures, with the largest growing by 1,000 acres over a single night. Within Los Angeles county, more than 153,000 people are now under evacuation orders, while both Canada and Mexico have dispatched aid to assist the overwhelmed state of California in containing the conflagration.

Were real life a movie – though you should always be suspicious of those who treat it as such – presaging the advent of Donald Trump’s second term as president with a great city being consumed by fire would be considered unsubtle, to say the least. But if this is the dawn of the second age of Trump, then these are also the last days of Joe Biden.

There are those who have argued it is somehow crass to place an ongoing disaster in a political context, or even to try and establish what led to this. Alas, such admonitions have not proven terribly convincing to the people of Los Angeles, many of whom are asking precisely why LA Mayor Karen Bass decided in June of last year to cut the city fire department’s funding by more than $17.5 million, while in the same budget providing an additional $126 million for the Los Angeles Police Department (currently grappling with the reality that you cannot shoot fire, but nevertheless valiantly on the lookout for any ‘looters’ who might steal things which would otherwise burn).

View from the air of the Los Angeles fires

Over the course of the Biden administration, great efforts were expended by those in and adjacent to power to silence any suggestion of defunding the police, following that demand’s dramatic elevation by the Black Lives Matter movement. Those efforts, as evidenced by the cop-hugging campaign which preceded Kamala Harris’ Hindenburg-like defeat in November, were largely and unfortunately successful, so it is worth pointing out: one good reason among many for, if not defunding the police, then at least not handing them enough extra cash to remake Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and still have a couple of million left over, is that it leaves less money for shit like this, which is going to keep happening.

It will be keep happening in part because, over the past four years, any serious hopes which once existed that the Biden administration might provide fertile terrain for something resembling a Green New Deal were slowly and intentionally strangled. After weeks of stern and serious post-election op-eds decrying ‘degrowth’ and warning that action on climate change must not come at the expense of the economy, the California wildfires are set to be the costliest in US history, with projected losses ranging as high as $135 billion. How’s that for degrowth?

Of course, that is quite apart from the human cost, which under capitalism is always – at best – a secondary concern. As with defunding the police, the question of prison abolition which briefly but brilliantly animated the public discourse has now also retreated from view, just in time for hundreds of prison inmates to be ordered in as part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s ‘volunteer’ firefighting programme. In recompense, participating prisoners can expect between $5.80 and $10.24 per day, plus a generous extra dollar when assigned to active emergencies, such as a Biblical inferno. Clearly, any suggestion of there being something amiss at the heart of America’s prison-industrial complex was nothing but extremist hyperbole.

In large part, this is the legacy of Joe Biden, whose administration spent much of its time in power actively suppressing even those movements for reform and change to which it once paid vague lip-service. The fear that Donald Trump represented an unparalleled threat to American democracy mutated quickly into a belief that the status quo must be defended at all costs. The people of California are far from the only ones who will suffer in consequence of that.

It will be Gaza

EARLIER this week, Biden attended the funeral of his predecessor Jimmy Carter, whose death at the age of 100 years leaves Biden the oldest of the five surviving US presidents. In the wake of his passing, many drew comparisons between Carter and Biden, and there are no doubt parallels beyond their single terms, though none the latter would welcome. 

Just as the myth was cultivated – often by Carter himself – that his presidency was the last gasp of a conscientious, peacenik-minded liberalism he never truly embodied in office, many have sought to define Biden’s tenure – or explain its abrupt and humiliating curtailment – with references to a sketchily defined ‘economic populism’, or even (God help us all) that perennial favourite ‘identity politics’. 

Such a characterisation holds little water, but outside the ranks of centrist wonkdom, this is unlikely to be what Biden will be remembered for. As the writer Brandy Jensen put it in the final days of 2024: “Jimmy Carter was a pretty bad president who left office and spent the next 40 years trying to make up for that fact. Joe Biden will live for maybe seven more months, the whole time wishing he sent Israel more money”.

It will not be for lack of trying. Other than awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bono (in recognition of his talents, as soon as they can be located) and Hillary Clinton (a participation trophy! An honorary millennial at last), one of Biden’s last acts before shuffling out the door and into the Early Bird Dinner Special of History was to notify Congress of one more $8 billion arms sale to Israel.

It was a conclusive affirmation of where the Biden administration’s priorities have always lain in the war in Gaza, and a final smirking insult to anyone so impossibly, wallet inspector-trustingly naïve as to have credited the idea that the White House ever gave one whisper of a shit about the people of Gaza, or ending the ongoing genocide that Israel has committed with the United States’ unflagging and enthusiastic aid. 

The onus to maintain that fiction slackened over the sunset of the Biden administration, as collaboration between police, politicians and college authorities cracked down on the campus protests which emerged as the forefront of the US pro-Palestinian movement, and even more so once Biden was belatedly strong-armed into accepting he would not be running for a second term, leaving the matter of justifying thousands of dead children to his hapless vice-president. 

Nevertheless, for a time the White House devoted considerable resources to fostering the impression it was working tirelessly for a ‘ceasefire’, albeit according to its own particular and risible definition, which shifted with such ease and frequency a cynic could be forgiven for thinking confusion was the point. Eventually however, the Biden administration – irrevocably wedded to an Israeli state only interested in the kind of peace Tacitus would recognise – came to advocate a ‘ceasefire’ that was indistinguishable from the total destruction of Hamas, and which therefore permitted anything and everything Israel might deem necessary in order to achieve that exterminatory goal.

As the journalist Adam Johnson noted in July of last year: “This rhetorical sleight of hand was sufficient to successfully reframe the White House not as the primary patron of mass death, an active party responsible for the maimed children, bombed schools, and hospitals, but an Aw Shucks, relatively powerless, neutral arbiter promoting a ‘peace process’ that never goes anywhere and is defined entirely by bad-faith, absurd demands for unconditional surrender by one side. So long as this Diplomacy Theater provides cover, the White House will hide behind it.” 

Even as it became more and more difficult to believe that Biden knew what room he was in or why, he did know – and still does – that it was within his power to effectively end the war in Gaza. Early in the conflict, Israel defence minister Yoav Gallant acknowledged as much, grumbling that his government had only agreed to allow limited humanitarian aid into Gaza because “the Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

Despite this, others have – with mysterious confidence – disputed whether threatening to withdraw US military, intelligence and economic aid to Israel would have forced an end to the war, but in these final days of the Biden administration, we will never know; the threat was never made, for reasons far simpler than concerns over its potential efficacy. This genocide came with the blessing of the United States.

For Biden, the wholesale slaughter of Gaza – the purposeful destruction of its schools, hospitals and refugee camps, the gleeful eradication of its society and culture, the bombing, burning, freezing, sickening and starving of its people – was nothing but a PR problem to be waited out. And he did.

Let them eat vibes

It is ironic – sort of, in an Alanis Morissette kind of way – that among those now at work weighing and qualifying his legacy, it is not Biden’s unwillingness to halt a genocide that has elicited the most controversy amongst mainstream commentators, but instead his domestic record, especially with regards to the economy. Given the pivotal impact some analysts feel this had upon the Democrats’ crushing defeat in November, this is perhaps unsurprising.

It should be remembered that within the first few months of Biden’s presidency, amidst the devastation wrought by the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package represented in the American Rescue Plan was greeted with much fanfare, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer describing it as “one of the most sweeping federal recovery efforts in history”, and economist Jeffrey Sachs describing Biden as potentially “the most transformative president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

It should also be remembered that there is a powerful centrist cohort within the Democratic Party that does not care for this kind of talk. Their concern was not so much for the Rescue Plan itself which, like the whole notion of ‘Build Back Better’, was never going to be another New Deal in the making, nor would it have been allowed to be. By splitting social spending programmes from infrastructure projects instead of combining them into one filibuster-proof package, the individual planks of that monumental-sounding endeavour were left predictably vulnerable. Within the year, provisions introduced to see Americans through the pandemic such as the expansion of Medicaid, increased unemployment benefits and direct stimulus checks were stripped away, with nothing concrete to replace them. Business as normal resumed.  

Nevertheless, even as any hope for significant government intervention receded from view, the mere perception of it was presented by some as a dramatic and heretical break with neoliberal orthodoxy – despite being nothing of the sort – and was thus never forgiven by those who tend to its flame. 

Chief among such acolytes was former Treasury Secretary and economic advisor to the Obama administration Larry Summer, the human equivalent of a broken calculator and a chief architect of post-2008 austerity, who balked at the size of the American Rescue Plan and instead suggested that ruinous inflation could only be staved off by “five years of unemployment above 5%.” As inflation did indeed begin to bite as part of the larger cost-of-living crisis, the idea that this might be combated without throwing millions into joblessness – say, through the use of price-controls – was naturally dismissed as a crackpot fever-dream.

Perversely however, as things grew increasingly grim, the American people who by now could see that Build Back Better was a fugazi and that no real rescue was on the way, Biden’s erstwhile centrist critics began to mount a weird defence of the economy on his watch. A blitzkrieg of gaslighting told all those who could not afford rent or food that they had in fact fallen prey to an insidious delusion, a ‘vibecession’, and that life was Good, Actually – if you don’t believe it, look at this graph. Amazingly enough, voters did not respond well to this line of argument at the polling booth.

So here is the final, bitter irony for Joe Biden: those within the upper echelons of his party, who were perfectly happy to defenestrate the old man once it could no longer be ignored that he had the political and mental acuity of rice pudding, nevertheless consider his ‘legacy’ – an economy where being able to eat is less important than the right numbers going up, a world order in which genocide is preferable to not-genocide, and a political environment where surely, this time, Trump can be defeated if they just figure out which minorities to throw under the bus –  more worthy of protection and loyalty than Biden himself.

Biden will be gone by the end of the month, but that legacy will endure for a long, long time to come.