Liberal Mythology
One of the more annoying takes that I've seen lately is that we need to wait and see before we criticize the new administration. Underlying this claim is the assertion that we can't yet make judgments because we lack the evidence on which to make them, and that this evidence will only be available after the administration takes power and starts acting. That is, until the Biden administration actually does "things," we can't judge those things. This claim therefore seems to be based on the very reasonable assertion that we shouldn't make judgments until we have evidence on which to make them. But as with many liberal myths, it’s disingenuous.
Even though this claim presents itself as rational, and consequently, presents those who are judging the Biden administration as irrational, the exact opposite is true: this assertion is wholly irrational and only veils itself in the guise of reason. The truth is that we don’t lack evidence about the Biden administration, we’re overflowing with it. Biden is the oldest president-elect in American history, and has spent his life in public service, serving seven consecutive terms in the Senate followed by two terms as vice-president. So there is perhaps no other political figure about whom we have more evidence on which to make judgements. Given this, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that withholding judgment, given the preponderance of evidence, is a wholly irrational position to hold, and a position that is akin to the claim (misattributed to Einstein) that the definition of “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Granted, surprises do happen, but that’s precisely why we call them surprises—they’re events that run counter to what the evidence suggests.
If you’re someone who nonetheless makes this claim, you naturally have to defend yourself against this obvious retort. The way that this is often done is through the use of another liberal myth: that the institution of the presidency causes such a wholesale change in the office holder that it is reasonable to expect that Biden will act differently than the way that he has acted over the course of his life. That is, even if we know who Biden is and how we might expect him to act, the office of the presidency is so transformative that we can’t really know how the new Biden—the “presidential” Biden—will act once he becomes the president. Therefore, the reason we can’t judge Biden is because, while we have plenty of evidence about how he has acted in the past, that was a different Biden, and we don’t yet have any evidence about how the new “presidential” Biden is going to act.
But this is just another example of liberal mythology: that the gravitas of the office somehow makes president’s “presidential;” that president Biden is qualitatively different than Senator Biden and Vice-President Biden. This is just a subsidiary myth used to shore up the flaws in the original myth, because presidents—as with everyone else—generally act in the way that their prior actions would lead you to believe. Because of course they do. And this myth is even easier to debunk. For instance, I’m partial to a story told by Seymour Hersch in which President Johnson took a reporter on a tour of his ranch and took a shit right in front of him as a way of putting the reporter in his place. Quite presidential! But if you haven’t heard this one, you’d think that Donald Trump would forever dispel this myth. And yet, here we are. We therefore have to treat Donald Trump as an anomaly because the maintenance of our illusions requires that he be one. But try that with LBJ’s poop.
If there’s any silver lining, maybe it’s that the underlying irrationality of liberalism is increasingly becoming clear. While it was once a useful ideology for hiding the machinations of power, this only works when times are good. When times are tough, liberalism has a harder time hiding the very real material crises through which we are living. In part, Donald Trump’s election was a response to this dilemma—the dilemma of contemporary material crises and the failure of liberalism to address them. But as in other parts of the world, it does seem like the far right have been the only ones to capitalize on this rupture, by offering a more full-throated embrace of irrationality itself. However, this need not be the case, because this very same rupture also opens up the possibility for a truly rational alternative.
As has been true since Plato’s time, the only rational society is a socialist society—a society based on the rationality of human need rather than the irrationality of arbitrary power. But as Plato also knew, until such a rational society, we will forever find ourselves in need of the obfuscating power of myth, be it liberalism’s mythology of reason or conservatism’s mythology of unreason. Unfortunately, there is only one way out of this cave. Fortunately, a little light seems to be trickling in.