Born-again Biden

I ended my last blog post with the Georgia voting restriction bill, an example of how the politics of the plantation lives on in contemporary culture. The bill stirred up strong criticism, from grassroots organizations to business leaders and even from President Joe Biden himself. Just three months after his inauguration, journalists and columnists already laud him as a transformational president who has brought progressivism back in U.S. politics. Such observations are hyperbolic, to say the least. What Biden has been trying to do so far is to make government reassume its core duty: serve its citizens. Over the past decades, we apparently have grown so accustomed to neoliberal thought and practice that we now see an administration returning to its basic tasks as a new kind of radicalism (something I also wrote about in Volkskrant). And when we take Biden’s political past into account, it is not hard to understand why many have begun to consider him a born-again radical progressive. He belongs to a party that historically has been very much invested in the plantation complex; the founding father of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson, was a wealthy planter from Tennessee and until the 1960s the southern plantation bloc had a major impact on the Democratic agenda. Once the civil rights movement successfully pressured the Democrat-controlled federal government to pass sweeping antiracist legislation, the white South began its exodus to the Republicans. Still, out of the seven Democratic presidents who served after World War II, five came from the (Border) South, including Joe Biden – his home state of Delaware was a slave state that remained in the Union during the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) and it had racial segregation until the 1960s. Less than two years ago, Biden fondly recalled working together with segregationist Democrats, like the outspoken white supremacist and plantation owner James Eastland, the long-time U.S. senator from Mississippi. So instead of calling Biden a radical and transformational politician, let’s just say he and his party may be on the road to redemption.

Then Senator Joe Biden with U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Carter owned a big peanut plantation in his home state of Georgia