David Marsden

Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic 📚

Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. (p. 127)

This seems to sum up his career neatly. Far from the popular public image that he has cultivated and that the media have happily gone along with for the most part.

Foreign policy

“I’m not going to start World War Three for you!”

Not Biden, but British army General Mike Jackson refusing to follow Biden’s friend General Wesley Clark’s orders to confront Russia in Kosovo. (p. 172)

The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. It seems that Biden wants to go out with a bang, despite his previous utterances.

”There is no such thing as a winnable nuclear war.” (p. 152)

Biden saying one thing and doing another is characteristic of his entire political career. He’s not unique in that respect, of course, and perhaps he’s actually better at it than most. He did get elected president after all.

Israel

Biden was the ultimate Friend of Israel. He helped provide Israel with huge amounts of US aid money, and Israel lobbyists on his campaign staff returned the favour helping Biden raise huge amounts of money to run his various election campaigns.

Biden spent his entire career giving unqualified support to Israel, and claimed that Americans “couldn’t afford” to criticise Israel in public.

Yugoslavia

Toward the end of Bush’s term, the ex-communist Eastern European country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a miasma of nationalism and ethnic and religious sectarianism, forces unleashed by a Western-imposed program of economic “shock therapy” that in essence exported Western neoliberal policies to the once prosperous country, running its living standards into the ground. War soon broke out. (p. 156)

Later, Biden agitated for Clinton’s military intervention in Serbia, which lay the foundations for future “humanitarian” bombing campaigns elsewhere.

If you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war. (p. 158)
###Iraq

Despite [or because of?] his role in starting the war, Biden was still considered one of the party’s wisest heads on foreign policy. (p. 173)

George W. Bush apparently followed Biden’s instructions on selling the war on Iraq to the American people and the United Nations.

Biden proposed an ethno-nationalist “three state solution” for Iraq similar to Israel’s proposals to came up Arab states into weaker sectarian units.

He proposed to Balkanise Iraq into smaller ethnic and religious sectarian states with limited freedom of movement and borders controlled by foreign troops.

A bit like Gaza and the rest of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories now.

Flawed as it was, the plan burnished Biden’s credentials as a foreign policy expert. (p. 179)

Iraq duped Biden forcing withdrawal of US troops. In response, ISIS ‘emerged’ from an oppressed religious minority.

War on Terror

Biden’s ‘counter-terrorism plus’ policy saw the US bomb seven Muslim countries without declaring war, much like Israel is now doing with more American bombs.

That helped to fuel anti-Americanism and an immigration and prisons crisis.

Instead of providing homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails. (p. 85)

Domestic policy

Race relations

Racist Clinton doubled the American prison population and achieved the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Mostly with black people.

This policy usefully helped to reduce official unemployment figures and paint Clinton’s neoliberalism as an economic miracle.

Another lesson Biden had first wrongly internalised from American apartheid: that people of different backgrounds simply couldn’t live together in harmony. (p. 177)

Instead Biden backed segregation (busing) and individual states’ rights over a united federal states of America.

Women’s rights

”I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” (p. 184)

Biden on the Roe v. Wade decision in 1974

Biden’s neoliberalism

Biden presented as a progressive liberal on the side of the working class. But he spent his career siding with Republicans and moving the Democrats ever further to the right.

At one time even a former Klan recruiter thought Biden had gone too far. Another Klan leader praised Biden’s election platform claiming it was as if it had been written by a Klansman.

Supporting spending cuts

Biden said Jimmy Carter was nothing special, and welcomed Reaganomics as a step in the right direction. Although in typical Biden fashion he also claimed Reagan’s first budget would be an economic disaster before voting for it (along with 29 other Democrats).

Reagan’s cuts cost 270,000 jobs and reduced access to financial support for millions of Americans. Rather than reducing the deficit, it increased it, and made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Like Thatcher in Britain, Reagan’s greatest achievement was in transforming his opposition into his mirror image. You still get a choice at the polls, but there’s very little, if any, substantive policy difference between the two.

”Biden isn’t a liberal anymore.”

Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, who lost to Biden in the 2012 vice-presidential election, but declared a more important victory.

Biden’s support for tax cuts for the rich wasn’t a one-off. This was a repeated pattern of voting indicating where his true loyalties lay. Indeed, later he proposed his own tax cuts that were more severe than Reagan’s, and “right out of the Tea Party playbook”.

Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. (p. 68)

No longer aligned with the working class, Biden now focused on the middle class, solidly Conservative, tax-and-government fearing supporters of the super-rich.

”It’s the middle class, stupid.” (p.147)

Much like the South where Biden always pivoted for support of anti-union, pro-slavery and white supremacist votes. Biden could have tried to bring Southern voters to the Democrats, but instead chose to lead the Democrats to align with the politics of the South.

Biden had successfully facilitated the decades-long wholesale robbery of working- class Americans by law enforcement. (p. 91)

Enter Bill Clinton, who with Biden’s full support, carried on Reagan’s economic policies leading to ever more cuts in government spending and hardship for millions more Americans.

Biden again offered trillions of dollars of cuts to retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, giving Mitch McConnell everything he asked for.

As president, much of Obama’s job involved cleaning up messes that Biden had helped create. (p. 191)

The major legislative accomplishments that Biden had racked up in prior decades had succeeded because they had been in pursuit of Republican goals. (p. 199)

Biden did what he always did: plead fealty to working class voters in public speeches filled with references to his Scranton roots while privately appealing for the support of big-money interests. (p. 214)

By 2020, Biden had shifted (and shifted the Democrats) so far to the right, he was finally electable and the safest establishment option to defeat Trump as president.