Biden's America | The Spectator

Godfrey’s Race to Dinner

Portland, Oregon If you want to know whether you’re a racist, look in the mirror. If you are white, you’re a racist. It really is that simple. No matter how progressive you think you are, having black and brown friends cannot repair the innate racism of your birth. Your vanilla voice is not welcome. Your low-pigment opinions are invalid. The back of the bus is where you need to go when it comes to having a say about race. And don’t give me your white fragility. Thankfully two Women of Color have taken it upon themselves to educate white women on their privilege. The ‘Race to Dinner’ service offers liberal white women and other daughters of the Confederacy the chance to have dinner with proudly black Women of Color.

Spectator Editorial

Biden offers no change and no hope

For too long, Republicans and the media refused to take Joe Biden seriously as a presidential candidate. It’s hard to blame them. The former vice president may poll well, but his previous tilts at the White House had been disastrous. His 2020 campaign has been a string of awkward public gaffes and senior moments — the old boy just isn’t all there. Even his staff seem embarrassed by their candidate. America may be the United States of Amnesia, as Gore Vidal called it, but surely it isn’t about to elect Dementia. Or so we thought. Biden’s clear and present mental degeneration, the elusiveness of his own mind, makes him a strangely effective candidate. It’s hard to oppose, let alone revile, a man who often seems to have no idea what he is saying.

Matthew Continetti

What will Biden do?

The oddities of Joe Biden’s third presidential campaign are impossible to ignore. He is the oldest man ever nominated by a major political party, and the first nominee since 1992 to lose both Iowa and New Hampshire. He has been in seclusion inside his Delaware home since March, rarely venturing out of his basement. After winning the primary as a moderate, he has tacked left for the general, reversing the traditional sequence of presidential nominees. Nor has Biden played it safe as his lead grows over President Trump. On the contrary: he has become more ambitious. In April, in a bid for the Bernie Sanders vote, Biden proposed lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare and forgiving some student loan debt.

Michael Lind

How liberal globalism went bankrupt

When future historians chronicle the period after the Cold War, the rise of China will dominate their accounts. Beginning in the 2000s, China unleashed a flood of state-sponsored manufactures, many of them produced by western multinational corporations using Chinese labor on Chinese soil. This impoverished much of the already pressured industrial working class in the US and Europe, triggering populist revolts in rustbelts like the American Midwest, the north of England and eastern Germany. The recycling of profits from China’s chronic trade surpluses through the global financial system enriched western financial interests and helped to inflate bubbles in the real estate and stock markets. These burst in 2008, causing the Great Recession.

David J. Garrow

Obama’s disappearing legacy

The presidency of Barack Obama was heralded as a transformative event in American racial history. So why did it seem to do so little to advance racial equality or alter long-standing patterns of African American subjugation? We hear that, if he wins in November, Joe Biden, the former vice president, will restore the essence of the Obama-Biden administration and put America back on a path to racial justice. But over eight years, what did Obama achieve? Long before Obama ran for president, a wide range of black voices questioned whether he was ‘black enough’ to represent African Americans. At Harvard Law, Obama’s election as the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review drew national news coverage.

Daniel McCarthy

Same old same old

American politics is getting senile. Donald Trump and Barack Obama were both elected as agents of change, repudiations of an ancien régime represented by the Bush and Clinton dynasties. But after eight years of Obama, Hillary Clinton inherited the Democratic party anyway. Frustrated with just how little had changed, voters clutched for a more radical alternative in 2016 — and they found it in Trump. Now, if polls and betting markets are to be believed, the country is on the verge of turning its back on Trump. But if he does lose in November, his defeat does not promise to be a source of renewal — not when the alternative is a 77-year-old former vice president.

Bridget Phetasy

Twitter has stolen my life

Recently I had one of those dreams. I woke up wanting to forget it immediately, like most dreams. But it reached out from the depths of my subconscious with a message that rippled and reverberated through my waking day. You know those dreams? They’re sticky. In my dream, I’m sitting at the bedside of an older woman. She looks familiar. I can’t place how I know her — she isn’t my mother or an aunt — but I can’t shake the feeling that we are related. The woman holds my hand. She is dying. ‘Bridget,’ she asks, ‘how do you feel about the time you spend on Twitter?’ What a weird question for a woman on her deathbed to be asking, I think. Nonetheless, her question makes me defensive.

Andrew Bacevich

Biden is not the president America needs

In a 2008 essay in the American Conservative, I encouraged my fellow conservatives to vote for Sen. Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election rather than his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain. I have zero regrets about writing that essay. The editor of this magazine wonders if I would venture a similar endorsement of Joe Biden, certain to become the Democratic nominee in this year’s race. The answer is no. Whether I end up casting a grudging vote for Biden remains to be seen. Certainly nothing could persuade me to vote for Donald Trump. Yet, as was the case in 2016, the ballot will offer other choices. And there is always the option of staying home. By any conceivable measure, Trump deserves to lose his bid for reelection.

Sheldon Roth, MD

Donald Trump isn’t mad

It is alarming how psychiatric diagnoses have crept into the political commentary. Donald Trump, we’ve been told, has narcissistic personality disorder, malignant narcissism, narcissistic alexithymia, bipolar disorder, hypomanic temperament, delusional disorder, paranoia, senile dementia, extreme hedonism, histrionic personality disorder, impulse disorder, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia. He’s also been called a sociopath and psychopath. Even normality has, in Trump’s hands, been transmogrified — pathologized — as ‘malignant normality’. Many psychiatric professionals have attempted to make such diagnoses, but they are wrong. President Trump does not demonstrate any diagnosable mental illness.

Paul Wood

The war for your mind

The romantic plans of a Kazakh bodybuilder named Yuri Tolochko have become one more casualty of the coronavirus pandemic. He was going to marry his ‘fiancée’, Margo, a silicone sex doll, in March, but they both agreed on the need to delay. ‘My baby supported me on this. We are determined and our mood is good.’ His Instagram feed depicts their domestic idyll: a bald, muscle-bound man gazes adoringly at a pneumatic blonde who, it must be said, stares back somewhat blankly. You might already know this if you get your news from Russian outlets like RT — Russia Today — or Sputnik. Their websites have an unerring eye for the human-interest stories that make for irresistible clickbait.

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