Massimo Gaggi in the essay “The Biden bet” (Laterza) retraces the first year of presidency and analyzes its difficulties in the face of the crisis of democracy in the USA
In the summer of 1972, while Joe Biden on the threshold of 30 years was surprisingly defeating the very popular Republican Senator Caleb Boggs in Delaware, Massimo Gaggi, an Italian high school student, was in Virginia, guest of a professor and volunteer of the Democratic Party who took him with himself in the black ghettos where he persuaded people to vote during George McGovern’s campaign for the White House. “I returned from the United States enthusiastic, convinced that I had witnessed a slice of history: the construction of the campaign by which the South Dakota senator and standard bearer of an extremely progressive left… would have defeated the surly and hated Richard Nixon ». And instead McGovern strained, even in his own state.
“For me it was a lesson in indelible political pragmatism – writes Gaggi, former correspondent and deputy director, now a columnist for“Corriere della Sera”
, in his new book Lto bet Biden
(The third) -. But the shock was also strong for the Democratic Party, which will never again rely on a candidate so far to the left. Until 2020, when Biden presents with the reassuring tones of the old centrist patriarch, a program that is very far to the left compared to the line followed in the last thirty years by the Clintons and Obama’s parties ». Fifty years after McGovern, the wager that gives the essay its title is about much more than an election. Biden has “become a sort of last resort for democracy” and its difficulties are intertwined with the deterioration of institutions in “a country that has been sliding for decades on the inclined plane of the involution of its political system and social model”, as Gaggi wrote in his previous bookCrack America
(Solferino, 2020).
The gendarme America of the world no longer exists, although it remains the leading country of the West, but is undermined by two internal crises to which Biden “must devote most of his efforts if he wants to save American democracy”: “extreme political polarization has reached the point of having little less than the half of the electorate who consider him an illegitimate president “; and the “economic and administrative crisis of an impoverished country with a middle class on the ropes, crumbling infrastructures and an extremely deteriorated administrative machine that causes serious malfunctions in crucial areas such as health … or the very presence in Afghanistan”.
The historical novelty of this presidency is that Biden is convinced that “the conditions have matured to ferry the United States out of the Reagan era that for forty years, the span of two generations, with its radically neoliberal policies imposed absolute marketism in a climate of annoyance or even contempt for what is managed by the public sector “, explains Gaggi, with” a program of relaunching industry, environmental rehabilitation, social protection and revaluation of the middle class perhaps too burdensome, with some simplistic solutions and some slightly dated ideas … but potentially effective to shake a country that has been experiencing slow decline for some time “.
Paradoxically, the initial successes, starting with the passage of the $ 1,900 billion package to counter the effects of Covid on the economy, which is the embryo of a new “more European” policy of family support, were also possible thanks to Trump who, ignoring budgetary constraints and spending heavily, “swept away the republican ideology based on fiscal rigor, leaving the austerity hawks disarmed, at least for a while” . But the climate that made possible the launch of huge interventions did not last long. Since last summer Biden has had to deal not only with the Republicans, but also with the two Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema: given the small majority enjoyed by the party, their opposition is sufficient to slow down the progress of his program. of reforms, from the social and environmental plan to the law on voting.
The wager to restore an identity to the left takes place in the midst of a crisis of democracy which is not only a political phenomenon, but a cultural one. The consensus on the “liberal democratic ideas that were the infrastructure of the development of the West in the 75 years of the post-war period”, Gaggi writes: not only because a “trumpized” Republican Party has espoused “alternative facts”, it “cancels” those who it does not comply and tries to change the rules even on how votes will be counted; but also why there is a young radical left, convinced that “liberal democracy is ineffective if not actually a screen for perpetuating injustices and inequalities”, which tends to “put out those who do not adapt to new ethical codes on racial, sexual and social identity issues” (phenomena called cancel culture
e woke culture).
There is no consensus on the “true” history of America and how to tell it in school; in journalism there are those who believe that a militant approach in exposing the facts is preferable to objectivity. The right exploits these debates to spread fear that “white America” may see its history denied and rewritten, while many on the left fear that the Democratic Party is getting involved in cultural wars far from people’s priorities.
A year after taking office, Biden’s popularity is at its lowest, the pandemic slows the recovery, inflation erodes purchasing power, the Supreme Court rejects his vaccination obligation. Will he be a president who, underrated like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, will bring the drive to change the country out of the crisis? Or, with the “new hurricane Trump on the horizon”, will his presidency be just “the calm (so to speak) between two storms”? Let’s get ready to witness this slice of history.
The appointment
Friday 21 January at 3 pm Massimo Gaggi presents his book with Ferruccio de Bortoli and Viviana Mazza. The meeting is streamed from the Buzzati room on time.news and on the Facebook channels of the «Corriere» and the Corriere della Sera Foundation.
January 21, 2022 (change January 22, 2022 | 20:12)
© Time.News