If you had told me a year and a half ago that I’d be celebrating Joe Biden’s emerging as the nominee out of the Democrats’ election process ,I wouldn’t have believed you.
But that’s where I am now.
Back a year and a half ago, looking at the rise of fascist power in America – as I’ve been focused on that gathering danger for some 16 years – I likened the challenge facing us here in America in these times to that facing Britain as the Nazi regime steadily rose in power during the 1930s.
Correspondingly, I was likening the failures of the Democratic Party, over the course of a generation, to confront the reality of WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST (the title of my 2015 book, written before Trump stepped out onto the stage) to the failures of British leaders during the 1930s to recognize the threat that Hitler posed, and to do what was necessary to confront that threat.
In a piece I posted on this site in March of 2019, I wrote:
The Democrats – good people with almost invariably good intentions and reasonable and constructive policy proposals -- have dealt with the Republican Party with the same kind of blind spirit that characterized the prime ministerships of Baldwin and Chamberlain [Britain’s leaders in the 30s],who didn’t realize until it was nearly too late that what they were up against was not something with which one can bargain and seek common ground.
While the Republicans have done the equivalent of seizing the Sudetenland [Hitler’s early land-grab, in 1936], and the Democrats have remained collegial.
While the Republicans always treated Obama as the enemy to be defeated. He never treated the Republicans as an enemy he needed to defeat.
That piece was titled “Can the Democrats Find Their Churchill for 2020,” because it was Winston Churchill who recognized all along the nature of the threat and what needed to be done to meet it and who finally roused his nation to save its freedom and its values.
And it was Churchill – in a development that had looked even more improbable a year before than Joe Biden’s chances of becoming President appeared after the early primaries – who became Prime Minister after the war he’d warned against had begun, with Britain’s very survival as profoundly threatened as the survival of America’s democracy has clearly become since Trump survived his impeachment trial and began even more brazenly acting like an American dictator.
And it was Churchill, as Prime Minister, whose wartime leadership quite possibly proved the difference between the Hitler regime achieving lasting domination over Europe and its being defeated by the Allied powers.
Looking at the Democratic race in that context, Biden was hardly the Churchillian candidate I had in mind. My main reservation about him, in fact, was that he practically epitomizes the Democrats’ failure to recognize what the Republican Party has become, and the urgent need to compel it to transform itself completely or to be driven into obscurity.
(That remains one of my main concerns about how he will conduct his presidency, assuming he wins: I’ve said before that the time will come when he will need to be asked, “If the Republicans try to nullify your Presidency, and to obstruct everything you attempt to do – as they did with President Obama – how will you deal with them so that they will not benefit from that indefensible strategy, as they did during Obama’s eight years in the Oval Office?”)
But here we are with Biden as our nominee, and here I am positively excited about that, because I see that he is the man for the moment.
In an op/ed column that ran on Monday in the Washington Post, Paul Waldman writes about how it is timing that so often catapults a leader into power. And he spells out how it is that now – on his third try on a quest for the presidency that began more than 30years ago – Joe Biden seems just what is required of this moment.
Here’s how Waldman articulates the great fit between the man (Biden) and the moment (when Democratic voters wanted above all else someone who could defeat Donald Trump):
Democratic voters.. didn’t want the most charismatic person, or the one offering the most comprehensive program for change, or the one who embodied their party’s future. They wanted the candidate who would be least offensive to other voters— in other words, an older white man with plenty of experience and a reputation as a moderate…. When the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis hit, the case for someone with Biden’s profile — experienced, calm, reassuring — became even stronger…Biden looks like the right candidate right now, even if he wasn’t before and wouldn’t be again.
So, in a way I never would have guessed, it turns out that the Democrats have found their Churchill for the 2020 Election. It is precisely in being the right person for the right moment, that Biden turns out to be, in fact, the Democrats’ Churchill.
Here’s a passage describing how this idea of matching the right leader for the right moment – an urgent, dangerous moment—is exemplified by the extraordinary story of Winston Churchill’s becoming Britain’s indispensable wartime leader. (This comes from an exceptionally good biography of the man – Churchill: Walking With Destiny, by Andrew Roberts.)
Hitler’s attack turned Churchill’s perceived weaknesses into priceless assets almost overnight. His obvious interest in warfare was no longer warmongering, it was invaluable. His oratorical style, which many had derided as ham-acting, was sublime now that the situation matched his rhetoric. His obsession with the Empire would help to bind its peoples together as it came under unimaginable stress, and his chauvinism left him certain that if they could get through the present crisis, the British would prevail over the Germans. Even his inability to fit comfortably into any political party was invaluable in the leader of a government of national unity. (p. 513)
May Joe Biden rise to his pivotal moment in history as successfully as Churchill rose to his.