The Dangerous Seduction of “Going Back to Normal”
By Robert Reich
“Life is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised Thursday in a Thanksgiving address to the nation. He was talking about life after Covid-13, but you could be forgiven if you thought he was also making a promise about life after Trump.
It
is almost impossible to separate the two. To the extent voters gave Biden a
mandate, it was to end both scourges and make America normal again.
Despite
Covid’s grim resurgence, Dr. Anthony Fauci – the public health official whom
Trump ignored and then muzzled, with whom Biden’s staff is now conferring – sounded guardedly optimistic last week. Vaccines
will allow “a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go
by as we get well into 2021.”
Normal. You
could almost hear America’s giant sigh of relief, similar to that felt when
Trump implicitly conceded the election by allowing the transition to
begin.
It
is comforting to think of both Covid and Trump as intrusions into normality,
aberrations from routines that prevailed before.
When
Biden entered the presidential race last year, he said history would look back on Trump as an
“aberrant moment in time.”
The
end of both aberrations conjures up a former America that, by contrast, might
appear quiet and safe, even boring.
Trump
called Biden “the most boring human being I’ve ever seen,” and Americans seem
to be just fine with that.
Biden’s
early choices for his cabinet and senior staff fit the same mold – “boring
picks,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Graeme
Wood (referring to Biden’s foreign policy team),“who, if you shook them awake
and appointed them in the middle of the night at any time in the last decade,
could have reported to their new jobs and started work competently by dawn.”
Hallelujah.
All his designees, including Janet Yellen for Treasury and Anthony Blinken for Secretary of State, are experienced and competent – refreshing, especially after Trump’s goon squads. And they’re acceptable both to mainstream Democrats and to progressives.
They
also stand out for their abilities not to stand out. There is no firebrand among
them, no Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (at least not so far).
For
the same reasons, they’re unlikely to stir strong opposition from Republicans,
a necessity for Senate confirmation, particularly if Democrats fail to win the
two Senate runoffs in Georgia on January 5.
And
they’re unlikely to demand much attention from an exhausted and divided public.
Boring,
reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be
careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.
That’s
because any return to “normal” would be disastrous for America.
Normal
led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.
Normal
is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all
economic gains went to the top. Normal is forty years of shredded safety nets,
and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern
world.
Normal
is also growing corruption of politics by big money – an economic system rigged
by and for the wealthy.
Normal
is worsening police brutality.
Normal
is climate change now verging on catastrophe.
Normal
is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and
embracing white supremacists. Normal is a Democratic Party that for years has
been abandoning the working class.
Given
the road we were on, Trump and Covid were not aberrations. They were
inevitabilities.
The moment we are now in – with Trump virtually gone, Biden
assembling his cabinet, and most of the nation starting to feel a bit of relief
– is a temporary reprieve.
If
the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as
the eye can see. And health and environmental crises that make the coronavirus
another step toward Armageddon.
Hence
the paradox. America wants to return to a reassuring normal, but Biden can’t
allow it. Complacency would be deadly. He has to both calm the waters and stir
the pot.
It’s
a mistake to see this challenge as placating the progressive wing of the
Democratic Party. It’s about dealing with problems that have worsened for
decades and if left unattended much longer will be enormously destructive.
So
the central question: In an exhausted and divided America that desperately
wants a return to normal, can Biden find the energy and political will for bold
changes that are imperative?
Robert Reich's latest book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged
It, How To Fix It," out March 24.
He is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He
served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time
Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the
twentieth century. He has written 17 other books, including the best sellers
"Aftershock," "The Work of Nations," "Beyond
Outrage," and "The Common Good." He is a founding editor of the
American Prospect magazine, founder of Inequality Media, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning
documentaries "Inequality For All," and "Saving Capitalism,"
both now streaming on Netflix.