Trauma and triumph: the moments that made Joe Biden

On his road to the White House, the former vice-president has had a dramatic journey, overcoming family tragedy and political tumult along the way

Joe Biden was born on 20 November 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of four children in a Catholic family; his mother, Jean, had Irish roots. The family’s economic fortunes were up and down, with Biden’s father, Joseph, later becoming a successful car-tyre salesman. At school Biden was class president, although his grades were unremarkable.

Childhood, stutter and early career

Biden aged 10 in 1952.

His youth was dominated by a struggle to overcome a severe stutter. A recent biography by Evan Osnos suggests that Biden never entirely shed the insecurity, with the battle shaping his approach to life and politics. In 1966, he married a student from Syracuse University, Neilia Hunter. Biden got a law degree and began practising in Wilmington. He initially saw himself as a liberal Republican. By 1969, he won a seat on Delaware county council as a Democrat.

Biden rose swiftly in Delaware politics. 

In 1972, he scored an extraordinary victory in the state’s Senate election, defeating the incumbent Republican against the odds. Aged 30, he became the sixth youngest senator in US history, but personal tragedy overshadowed this triumph. While he was away setting up his office in Washington, a truck drove into the family car, killing his wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter Naomi. His sons Beau and Hunter were badly injured. Biden was sworn in as senator from their hospital bedside. The loss prompted Biden to think about quitting; instead, he became a long-distance commuter, travelling from his home in Delaware to DC and back again every day, in order to see his young sons. It was a practice he continued for more than three decades, earning him the nickname Amtrak Joe.

Marriage to Jill

In 1975, Biden’s brother set up a blind date with a woman he’d known from university, Jill Tracy Jacobs. The date went well; two years later Biden married Jill, a teacher, in a Roman Catholic ceremony at a chapel in New York. In 1981, they had a daughter, Ashley. Meanwhile, Biden’s senatorial career was taking off. Time magazine identified him as a future American leader. His main international interest was arms control, at a time when relations between the US and the Soviet Union were characterised by mutual mistrust. Biden met with the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and argued Washington should abide by treaties signed with Moscow limiting long-range ballistic nuclear missiles. He also opposed the Reagan administration’s support for apartheid South Africa.

In summer 1987, Biden announced a presidential bid, his first. He was regarded as moderate, likable and high-profile, as chair of the Senate’s judiciary committee. At just 44, Biden would have been the second-youngest president after John F Kennedy. But his campaign for the Democratic nomination unravelled when he made a heartfelt speech about his family. Biden had substantially borrowed a passage from the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. The gaffe sent journalists scurrying to dig up further embarrassing details. They found plenty. Biden, it turned out, had exaggerated his lacklustre academic credentials as well as his participation in the civil rights movement. He pulled out of the race, a victim of his own flaws and what he dubbed the “exaggerated shadow” of his past. Biden was further criticised for his role in supreme court hearings. Women’s groups accused him of mismanaging allegations of sexual harassment made by Anita Hill against judge Clarence Thomas.

Biden’s second presidential bid in 2007 fell apart more rapidly than his first. This time it wasn’t plagiarism that undid him but a classic Joe gaffe. He described his rival Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy – I mean that’s a storybook, man”. The comment sunk his ability to raise funds. Biden found himself squeezed between Obama and Hillary Clinton. He exited the contest after coming fifth in the Iowa caucus. Biden’s tilt at the presidency followed a long stint on the Senate’s foreign relations committee, as chair and ranking minority member. He supported Nato enlargement and its bombing of Kosovo. 

In 2002, Biden backed the US-led invasion of Iraq. He later admitted this was a “mistake” and said President Bush should “level” with the American people about the war’s cost.

After winning the Democratic nomination, Obama selected Biden to be his running mate. This was a surprise. Obama looked beyond Biden’s drawbacks: the condescension, his prolixity when it came to giving speeches, and his proclivity for gaffes. Instead Obama identified what Biden might bring to the ticket: contacts on Capitol Hill and substantial political nous, plus an ability to connect with blue-collar voters and foreign policy experience. 

In August 2008, Biden was confirmed as the Democrats’ choice for vice-president. During the campaign the media spotlight was more on Sarah Palin, Biden’s erratic Republican party rival. Biden campaigned in swing states and criticised the Republican candidate, John McCain, a longstanding friend. After Obama’s victory Biden relinquished his Senate seat and – seemingly – his last opportunity to become president.

During Obama’s second presidential term there was speculation that Biden would make a third bid for the presidency. There was an issue: his age. Had he stood and won, he would have been 74 at the time of inauguration – the oldest president ever. The other factor was Biden’s son Beau, who was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Beau’s death in May 2015 persuaded Biden not to run. He acknowledged the loss of his son had drained him of “emotional energy”, adding: “Nobody has a right … to seek that office unless they’re willing to give it 110% of who they are.” Biden’s frankness about grief and his ability to come back from dark places – not once but twice – would later turn out to be useful political assets. His empathy was in contrast with the narcissism of Donald Trump, the 2016 election’s winner. In a time of pandemic Biden’s emotional gifts would strike a chord with voters.

Biden the candidate

In 2019, Biden launched his third bid to enter the White House. His poll numbers were good. But in the first Iowa caucus he flopped disastrously – trailing Bernie Sanders and Sanders’ fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren. By the time of the New Hampshire primary it seemed that Biden was sunk: he came fifth. And then something nobody had anticipated happened: the most improbable comeback since Lazarus. On the campaign trail Biden appealed to black voters. In South Carolina, they forgave him his patchy record on race and came to the rescue. He won the state overwhelmingly. He then won 18 of the next 26 contests and endorsements from rival candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. When Sanders dropped out in April Biden became the nominee. The prospect of a restorationist Biden presidency became real. Questions about his age hadn’t gone away, though. Neither had Trump, a ruthless adversary and the man he had to beat.

In March 2020, Biden announced he would pick a woman to be his running mate; his choice was the Californian senator and former prosecutor Kamala Harris. It was a bold decision. She was the first woman of colour on a major party ticket in America’s 244-year history. At a time of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter uprisings, Harris was also a symbolic rebuke to the white supremacists who cheered on Trump. Biden would be 78 at the time of his inauguration. It seemed unlikely he would want to serve a second term. That meant Harris was ideally placed to become America’s first female president, should Biden win, and to exorcise the ghost of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat. There was calculation here too: that Harris could maximise the turnout of women fed up with Trump and that of African American voters, especially in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

On the eve of last week’s election, the pundits were unanimous: Biden was going to win, and win big. It didn’t quite turn out like that. On election night, Trump won the swing state of Florida, held Texas and painted much of the US map red. Democratic challengers in the House and Senate fell short. Trump even increased his vote share among Latinos and African-Americans. And yet slowly and inexorably Biden votes began to pile up. He won Michigan and Wisconsin. And in swing states mail-in ballots gobbled up Trump’s early lead. Trump responded in familiar fashion: with law suits and false claims that the Democrats were engaged in fraud. Biden remained calm and confident. By Friday, the race was effectively over, when Biden edged ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia. Late on Saturday morning, as a chunk of Philadelphia votes came in, CNN and other networks called the race for Biden. At the time Trump was out golfing. The news triggered spontaneous street parties across the country, from DC, to New York, to San Francisco. In a victory speech on Saturday, Biden offered an inclusive vision and promised to heal America. “Let this grim era of demonisation in America begin to end – here and now,” he said.

Joe Biden has won ...

… despite Donald Trump’s protestations. A new era is upon us following a result that has renewed hope for the US and the world. After four years of turmoil, misinformation, manipulation and division, a new president offers fresh promise for democracy, progress and for huge challenges like the climate emergency, Covid-19, inequality, and racial injustice.

Read More

Joe Biden’s Faith in America

It made sense to begin with Kamala Harris. The joyful celebrations across the country through the day had been in Joe Biden’s name but in the spirit that Harris had been appointed to the ticket to embody: of young people in cities, of many different races, who had a feeling for the future. Harris, who will soon become the first woman, first Black person, and first South Asian person to hold the office of Vice-President, took the stage on Saturday night wearing a white suit, perhaps a nod to Hillary Clinton but also to the legacy of the suffragettes. She quoted the late congressman and civil-rights hero John Lewis, who wrote, shortly before his death, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” Harris said that what Lewis had meant “was that America’s democracy is not guaranteed. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it, to guard it and never take it for granted. And protecting our democracy takes struggle. It takes sacrifice. But there is joy in it.”

There was joy in Harris. She smiled wide and let her shoulders heave to breathe in the atmosphere. She was speaking before some few hundred people and their cars in a waterfront lot in Delaware—it wasn’t Grant Park, and it wasn’t Washington, or Philadelphia, where thousands of people were out in the streets in happy throngs. But if the setting was a little sterile, it also had the effect of drawing the eye toward the people onstage. Harris spoke of Biden and what will soon be the First Family intimately. He “loves with abandon,” she said, mentioning his wife, Jill Biden, his son Hunter, his daughter Ashley, and his deceased son Beau. “What a testament it is to Joe’s character that he had the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exist in our country and select a woman as Vice-President.” The cars honked; the confetti was readied; Springsteen boomed through the speakers. The President-elect, masked, took the stage at a trot. He said, “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end—here and now.”

There was a lot of talk about eras in Wilmington on Saturday night—of endings and beginnings. Joe Biden is an old man. There’s no getting around it, despite his soft suits and his tan face and his bright teeth and his intent, vital wife—despite all the attentive wrapping. He turns seventy-eight this month, nearly a third as old as the United States. For a while, he fought his age, trying to appear more youthful than his opponent, but in the end he embraced it. Biden might have been partnered with Harris, but he was ringed by his contemporaries. One plea for Biden’s election, published in the New York Times, was written by the seventy-six-year-old novelist Marilynne Robinson, who argued that the country is less an idea than a family. (“We are asked to see one another in the light of a singular inalienable worth that would make a family of us if we let it.”) One of Biden’s campaign commercials that ran during the World Series was voiced by the seventy-six-year-old actor Sam Elliott. (“No Democratic rivers, no Republican mountains, just this great land and all that is possible on it with a fresh start.”) The Biden campaign’s theme was unity; its method was to emphasize the country’s people, particularly its elders. The victory video his campaign released on Saturday morning, once the networks had called the race, had no images of Biden but instead featured Americans around the country—a transit worker, two young surfers, a field hand—carrying a picture frame, all set to Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful.”

Much of Biden’s speech was drawn directly from the slogans of his campaign: the promise to “restore the soul” of the country, the call to “give each other a chance” and to stop seeing fellow-Americans as enemies. The new element, or the heightened one, at least, was faith. In part, this meant religious faith—Biden read a hymn, which he said he hoped might give some comfort to the families of the two hundred and thirty thousand Americans lost to covid-19, and quoted from Ecclesiastes: “The Bible tells us to everything there is a season: a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow, and a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.”

But Biden seemed to feel a secular faith even more strongly, in the country’s continued potential. He spoke of a renewed faith that tomorrow will “bring a better day.” At the moment, Biden seems likely to take office amid a fair amount of skepticism about what he might accomplish. As disastrous as Donald Trump’s Presidency has been, seventy million Americans still voted for his reëlection. Mitch McConnell may well still hold the Senate, and the rift between the Democrats’ left and center wings seems likely to reëmerge with new intensity once Biden takes office. What plan does he have for surmounting the defining national divisions? The answer, on Saturday night at least, for all the talk of science, was both less and more than a plan: it was Biden’s belief that American unity and greatness are still with us, in some latent way. Biden said, “The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to coöperate with one another is not some mysterious force beyond our control. It’s a decision. It’s a choice we make.”

Political types will say that it’s common for the American people to replace a President with his opposite. But some of this work is done by the successor, who prunes from himself anything reminiscent of his adversary. Trump found his final political form as the opposite of Obama. The Biden who spoke in Wilmington on Saturday night is not the only one to appear on political stages in his career, and it may not be the final version. But it is the version that is most opposite of Trump: a diligent rule-follower, with his black pandemic mask. A gentle and humble figure. A person who acknowledges that he is near the end. A man of the Book.

The Irish broadcaster RTÉ closed its Saturday-evening news program by acknowledging Biden, “a proud Irish-American and admirer of the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney,” and then playing a recording (in fact, a digital ad) of the President-elect reading Heaney’s poem “The Cure of Troy.” Biden may not be a writer, like Barack Obama, but he is a good reader, with a heavy, phlegmy voice; he extracts feeling from words. Biden read, “Believe in miracles / And cures and healing wells. / Call miracle self-healing: / The utter self revealing / Double-take of feeling. / If there’s fire on the mountain / Or lightning and storm / And a god speaks from the sky / That means someone is hearing / The outcry and the birth-cry / Of new life at its term.” New life at its term: in Biden’s voice, Heaney’s optimism sounded like it belonged to America all along.

Read More

The Biden Era Begins

Joe Biden Named 46th President-Elect, Making Kamala Harris the First Female VP in History

American democracy has survived Donald J. Trump.

American democracy was on the ballot on Election Day, and although American democracy won, an occasion of immense relief, the margin of victory should not be exaggerated.

Joe Biden, the victor in the popular vote by a margin so far of more than four million, has won the Electoral College and will become the forty-sixth President of the United States. Senator Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Black father and an Indian-American mother, will make history as Biden’s Vice-President. Donald Trump, who will finish out his term as the most cynical character ever to occupy the Oval Office, was mendacious to the last, claiming victory before the ballots were counted and accusing an unknown “they” of trying to steal the election from him. He is sure to pursue his case, however misbegotten, in the courts and in the right-wing media. It would also come as no shock if he provoked civil unrest on his own behalf. If four years have proved anything about Trump, it’s that he is capable of nearly anything.

The unhinged, if predictable, spectacle of Trump’s press conference early Wednesday morning at the White House was outrageous even to some of his closest allies: here was an unstable authoritarian trying his best, on live television, to undermine one of the oldest democratic systems in existence. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he complained. “This is an embarrassment to our country.” As far as he was concerned, citing no evidence, “we have already won it.” Trump was willing, as always, to imperil the interests and the stability of the country to satisfy his ego and protect his power. On Thursday evening, Trump reprised this malign and pathetic performance, as he took to the White House pressroom to claim, again without proof, that he was being “cheated” by a “corrupt system.” Reading from a prepared text, he said that his vote was being “whittled down” as ballots were being counted. He spun a baseless conspiracy theory about dishonorable election officials, a burst pipe, and “large pieces of cardboard.” His words were at once embittered and deranged; his voice betrayed defeat. There has never been a more dangerous speech by an American President, and it remained to be seen if his party’s leadership would, at last, abandon him.

There can be no overstating the magnitude of the tasks facing Biden. If he survives whatever challenges, legal and rhetorical, that Trump throws his way in the coming days and weeks, he will begin his term facing a profoundly polarized country, one even more divided and tribal than the polls have suggested. It is a nation in which one half cannot quite comprehend the other half. He also confronts a country that is suffering from an ever-worsening pandemic, an ailing economy, racial injustice, and a climate crisis that millions refuse to acknowledge.

Many Biden supporters had hoped to gain a more resounding mandate, and on Election Night there were early glimmers of hope in Texas and Ohio. In the end, with close finishes in so many states, Biden would have to be satisfied with unseating the incumbent. Crucially, he outperformed Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and widened the playing field to Arizona and Georgia, where Democrats have struggled for years. The polls had been, almost uniformly, wrong, often by significant margins. They again underestimated Trump’s over-all support. Predictions of a towering “blue wave” washing away the Trump Administration and the memory of the past four years proved to be a fantasy. And yet the end of the Trump Presidency is, by any measure, a signal moment in modern American history. These four years have wrought tragic consequences; there is no question that another four would have compounded the damage immeasurably.

Throughout his term, Trump openly waged war on democratic institutions and deployed a politics of conspicuous cruelty, bigotry, and division. He turned the Presidency into a reality show of lurid accusation and preening self-regard. But what finally made him vulnerable to defeat was his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans. His disdain for scientific and medical expertise, his refusal to endorse even the most rudimentary preventive measures against the spread of the virus, was, according to medical experts, responsible for the needless deaths of tens of thousands. Perhaps the most emblematic sign of his heedlessness was the Rose Garden ceremony at which Trump announced his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court; within days, it was clear that the ceremony, a predominantly mask-free affair, with people seated in tightly packed rows, had been a superspreader event.

The pandemic also served to heighten the difference in character between the two candidates. For many months, Trump betrayed little sense of loss. Fellow-feeling is not in his emotional vocabulary. At his rallies, he ranged between flippant and indifferent, unwilling to acknowledge the gravity of the pandemic in any recognizably human way. “We’re rounding the turn!” he declared again and again, as the death toll rose higher and a new wave of cases crested in hundreds of American towns and cities. For a fleeting moment, when he was ill himself, Trump pretended to experience a glimmer of sympathy for people who had died, been sick, or feared the virus. That soon passed.

To Biden, loss, and the recovery from loss, is the very condition of life. As a young man, he suffered the deaths of a daughter and his first wife in a car crash; more recently, his elder son died of brain cancer. Biden is a man of transparent flaws—regrettable political decisions during his long Senate career, a speaking style that often tips into bewildered verbosity—and yet in his public life he rarely fails to project a quality of empathy. That quality may have been as essential to his appeal as any policy proposal.

Trump could never bring himself to promise an orderly transfer of power. He now will doubtless cast blame, concoct conspiratorial reasons for his downfall, and, if past is prologue, compare the beneficence of his rule to that of Abraham Lincoln. It is hard to imagine him appearing at Biden’s Inauguration and behaving with even an ounce of grace. He knows well what follows, and he cannot bear it: Joe and Jill Biden will move into the White House, and he will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, where he could spend years fending off creditors, prosecutors, the Internal Revenue Service, and the judgment of history. Trump might develop a new media venture. He might even lay plans for a run in 2024. The Constitution allows it.

But, even if Trump’s career in elective politics is over, Trumpism will, in some form, persist. In 2016, he recognized the hollowness of the Republican establishment and quickly buried front-runners for the G.O.P.’s nomination, from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio. As President, he made the Party his own, bending former opponents to his will and banishing anyone who questioned his authority, his judgment, or his sanity. Republican leaders made it plain that they were willing to ignore Trump’s antics and abuse so long as they got what they wanted: the appointment of right-wing judges and diminished tax rates for corporations and the wealthy. His appeal was nearly as frightening to Republicans in Congress as it was to those who voted for Biden. Trump has lost this race, but it is hard to describe the election as a wholesale repudiation. Tens of millions of Americans either endorsed his curdled illiberalism, his politics of resentment and bigotry, or were at least willing to countenance it for one reason or another. The future of Trumpism remains an open question.

So is the prospect of a Biden Presidency. At first, Biden ran a wobbly campaign as a centrist, a meliorist, open to such reforms as an expansion of the Affordable Care Act and a reassertion of such international accords as the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement. But, unlike his opponent Bernie Sanders, Biden would never use “revolution” or “movement” to describe his intentions. Having spent more than forty years in Washington, he entered the field hoping to be a candidate of restoration, compromise, and reassurance, a return to some indefinable form of “normal.”

In the early debates and primaries, Biden stumbled. His opponents highlighted his uneven record, his rhetorical blunders, and his age. (Biden, who will be seventy-eight on November 20th, is older coming into the White House than Ronald Reagan was when he left it.) His early campaigning did not inspire confidence. Pundits recalled how, in 2008, he had scored one per cent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and quickly bowed out. Would the same happen in 2020? Memories of his performance at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and other moments of misjudgment were a drag on his candidacy. His effort seemed tired, without evident purpose. Writing in BuzzFeed News at the time, Ben Smith rightly observed that Biden’s campaign was “stumbling toward launch with all the hallmarks of a Jeb!-level catastrophe—a path that leads straight down.”

But, after getting buried in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Biden persisted, deploying a steady appeal to his own ordinariness, a sense of decency. His message, to a great degree, was that he’d been Barack Obama’s Vice-President and that he had the best chance of beating Donald Trump. In South Carolina, thanks in part to an endorsement from Representative James Clyburn, a lingering glamour from his place in the Obama Administration, and heavy support from Black voters, he won the primary. Thereafter, his campaign came alive. He and Sanders, in particular, continued to debate the issues, but one sensed that among all the Democratic contenders there was an underlying priority—the need to deny Trump a second term.

On April 8th, after suffering a string of primary defeats, Sanders suspended his campaign. Calling Biden “a decent man,” Sanders declared that he had won the ideological argument on climate change, the minimum wage, and many other issues. And, in some ways, he was right. He had hardly converted Biden to democratic socialism, but he had at least pushed him in the direction of greater ambition. Biden, who had begun as the most establishmentarian of the Democratic candidates, now seemed to understand that some sort of Obama-era restoration was insufficient to the moment.

Events in the following weeks shaped the Biden candidacy even more than the competition had done. Almost immediately after becoming the presumptive nominee, he had to confront two realities: the Trump Administration’s bungling of the pandemic response and widespread demonstrations, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, that had been sparked by the killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, and the legacy of systemic racism. Biden was forced to recognize that if his Presidency was to meet the challenges facing the country he would have to act with no less dispatch than Obama, who had come into office, in January, 2009, amid an economic collapse. More and more, Biden made the case that, as President, he would emulate Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

In late October, Biden spoke at Warm Springs, in rural Georgia, where F.D.R. had a home known as the Little White House and would come for polio treatments. Biden’s theme at Warm Springs was national healing. “These are all historic, painful crises,” he said. “The insidious virus. Economic anguish. Systemic discrimination. Any one of them could have rocked a nation.” He vowed, in a sense, to go well beyond his instinct for centrism. To manage the public-health emergency, to deal with economic distress and catastrophic climate change, he would have to build a broad political coalition and act with compassion and determination. “God and history have called us to this moment and to this mission,” he said. “The Bible tells us there’s a time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to heal. This is that time.”

The success or failure of the Biden Presidency will depend on whether his speech in Warm Springs was a matter of stagecraft or true intent; his political fate, and the country’s, will depend on whether he can unite a radically divided country (at least to some degree) and, at the same time, make good on his commitment to confront these myriad crises with anything like Rooseveltian ambition. The Senate will not make it easy. Biden will find himself challenged by the same sort of ideological and political resistance that Obama met when Mitch McConnell vowed to thwart him at every turn.

The task of repairing liberal democratic institutions and values awaits Biden, too. The country’s intelligence agencies concurred that Vladimir Putin had acted on his long-standing antipathy for Hillary Clinton and meddled in the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Historians and experts in cyberwarfare will continue to argue about the degree to which Russia interfered in the election and the degree to which it mattered. What is less mysterious is why Putin preferred Trump. The Russian leader wished to be left alone, free of American intrusion in Ukraine, free of nato’s influence in the Baltic States and in Eastern and Central Europe. So long as the United States was tied up in its own internal tumult, so long as the new President disdained postwar international alliances, Putin was pleased. For him, America’s pretensions to moral authority on the world stage were—particularly after its military adventures in the Middle East—a colossal hypocrisy. “The liberal idea,” Putin told the Financial Times last year, has “outlived its purpose.” Trump’s victory seemed to vindicate Putin’s dark conviction.

The pandemic revealed the human cost paid by states without humane social safety nets and equal access to medical resources. It also revealed the capacity of capable democratic leadership. Angela Merkel, in Germany, and Jacinda Ardern, in New Zealand, were exemplary in the way they communicated the facts with their populations and acted to contain the virus based on scientific evidence and rational decision-making. Trump’s behavior, by contrast, resembled the denialism and the autocratic style of Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil.

To rebuild trust in democratic processes, Biden needs to restore faith in the integrity of government itself. He needs to empower scientists and medical experts at the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. and oust charlatans at the Department of Justice and fossil-fuel lobbyists at the E.P.A. Trump routinely mocked figures of integrity like Anthony Fauci and threatened to fire them. He railed against the perfidies of the “deep state,” slashing programs and regulations, undermining the work of devoted public servants. It is encouraging that Biden has said that on his first day in office he would “stop the political theatre and willful misinformation” and “put scientists and public-health leaders front and center.” He needs to make it clear that expertise is invaluable in all realms of government: the courts, public health, environmental science, diplomacy, defense, the economy. In order to repair American democracy, he also needs to address the antediluvian mechanism of the Electoral College and help reform an unjust system of voting.

Biden’s election is a moment to take stock. Another four years of Trump’s recklessness would have meant the intensification of a public-health disaster. It would have meant squandering more time in a fight against a climate catastrophe that is already upon us. It would have meant that Trump, an authoritarian by instinct, would be even more emboldened to surround himself only with satraps and advisers willing to do his bidding. It would have meant more attacks on the press, more assaults on truth itself.

During the 2016 campaign and beyond, Obama generally upheld the tradition of post-Presidential discretion, but he feared the worst and could not always contain himself. At one point, he called Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, and said, “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.”

Joe Biden is just as much a small-“d” democrat as he is a big-“D” one. It is, finally, possible to see an end to a singularly destructive carnival. As President, Trump never seemed to realize how much wreckage, political and spiritual, he was inflicting on the country. Nor did he care. For him, the Presidency was a show starring himself, and everyone had to watch. The job came with a big house, a motorcade, a fabulous plane, limitless business opportunities, and, best of all, round-the-clock media attention. 

At a rally late in the campaign, in the Lehigh Valley, in Pennsylvania, he glanced at an eighteen-wheeler that was parked nearby. “You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away?” he said with a smirk. “I’d love to just drive the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of this. I had such a good life. My life was great.” To the end, it was all about him.

Read More

How Black Lives Matter Is Changing the Church

Brenda Salter McNeil used to think that it was not the place of a pastor to talk about systemic racism. Ferguson changed her mind.

One December evening, in 2014, Brenda Salter McNeil, a pastor and Black evangelical leader, descended into a church basement in Ferguson, Missouri, to meet with young activists from a broad-based group called Ferguson Action. In the four months since Michael Brown, a local eighteen-year-old, had been fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a police officer, Ferguson had become the national center of protest against police violence and the proving ground for the new Black Lives Matter movement; some of the activists running Ferguson Action went on to lead the B.L.M. movement nationwide. Salter McNeil, who is in her fifties and wears thick-rimmed glasses, had come with a handful of other evangelical leaders on a pilgrimage sponsored by Sojourners, a progressive evangelical organization, to ask the activists what role the church should take in addressing police brutality against people of color.

Several of the religious leaders who came that day were proponents of a church movement called racial reconciliation, which seeks to end racism by addressing it as a sin in individuals that can be eradicated through Biblical study, confession, and prayer. Salter McNeil—who became Christian at the age of nineteen and went on to receive a master-of-divinity degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, where she began to identify as evangelical—was one of the most prominent figures in the racial-reconciliation movement. For the previous thirty years, she had touted reconciliation around the world, often addressing tens of thousands of listeners, mostly conservative white evangelicals, at conferences and megachurches. When she spoke, she explicitly avoided talking about aspects of structural racism, such as the racial wealth gap, or the high death rate of Black mothers during childbirth; she sought to insure that her sermons were rooted in the Bible and not, as she saw it, in politics. She also stayed away from topics such as sexuality and abortion, for fear that she’d be labelled a liberal with a hidden agenda. Her workshops focussed on inspiring personal stories but left listeners with few practical tools to root out racism in their communities.

To the young activists in Ferguson, the church’s failure to address systemic racial injustice in the United States rendered American Christian leaders like Salter McNeil part of the problem. In addition, they took issue with what they saw as the church’s culture of homophobia and misogyny. That evening, when Salter McNeil and others asked the activists how the church could support them, the young activists expressed their rage. “They told us that they hated the church’s misogyny and hypocrisy, and how we treated L.G.B.T.Q. people,” Salter McNeil told me recently. “They said, ‘It seems like you work harder to keep people out of the church than to let them in.’ ” The more she listened, the more Salter McNeil began to think that the activists had a point. “It was that night that I really understood how disappointed young people of color had become with the church. They experienced us as not simply irrelevant but on the wrong side of justice.” The next day, the activists sent a text to the evangelical leaders. “We are meeting on the steps of the municipal court building at 4 p.m. Are you coming or not?” it read.

“The message was put up or shut up,” Salter McNeil said. Although she was accustomed to preaching before thousands of listeners, she was terrified to take part in a street protest: she worried that she would get trapped in a crowd and attacked by the police. She didn’t know the basics of preparing for such an endeavor: that, for example, she was supposed to carry a driver’s license in case she was arrested, to scrawl the number of an emergency contact on her arm, and to have a cloth mask to cover her face in case the police shot canisters of tear gas. She decided to attend anyway. When she arrived at the courthouse, she was startled by the diversity of her fellow-protesters. She saw older white Mennonites dressed in bonnets holding a white sheet that said “Black Lives Matter.”

The police had put up barricades to stop the protesters from reaching the courthouse steps, and some of the protesters began to shake them, trying to pull them down. Salter McNeil watched as a young white protester with spiky hair rushed ahead and climbed the fence. “I thought, This little white guy is going to cause the police to react, and they’re going to react with violence against us Black people,” she said. Overwhelmed with terror, she knelt in the street and began to pray as the swirl of bodies pressed around her. One by one, although she didn’t notice, the other faith leaders knelt nearby, and so did some of the young activists who, the night before, had expressed disgust with the church’s failure to take a meaningful stand for Black lives. McNeil told me that, in that moment, she felt the nearness of God in a way that she never had from the pulpit or stage. “It changed my life,” she said. “That day, Jesus came into the neighborhood.”

Salter McNeil is one of a growing number of leaders in both evangelical and mainstream churches for whom Black Lives Matter has prompted a crisis of moral conscience. “What Black Lives Matter did was highlight the racism and white supremacy that still has a stranglehold on much of white Christianity,” Jemar Tisby, a prominent church historian and the author of “The Color of Compromise,” told me. “You have this phrase and this movement that is forcing people, essentially, to take sides.” In her new book, “Becoming Brave,” which came out in August, Salter McNeil writes, “I began my journey sincerely believing that if I could convince evangelical Christians that reconciliation was not some politically motivated agenda but a Biblical calling rooted in Scripture, they would pursue racial justice.” She now believes that this has proven naïve, and that religious leaders must begin more actively campaigning against systemic racism if they are to effect change.

Black Lives Matter has created this reckoning in part by prompting a backlash against the racial-reconciliation movement, which has held sway in evangelical circles since the nineteen-nineties. In 1996, Bill McCartney, a former football coach and the founder of Promise Keepers, an influential evangelical men’s organization, helped to launch a wide-scale effort to “disciple” a million men in the project of undoing racism through Biblical teachings. The project was idealistic: in 1997, as Chanequa Walker-Barnes writes, in “I Bring the Voices of My People,” the organization “declared a lofty goal of eradicating racism in the church by 2000.” At its inception, the movement’s aims were intensely practical: it funded efforts to rebuild Black churches targeted by arson, agitated for the hiring of more racially diverse staff in evangelical organizations, and developed curricula around racism. But early efforts to spur broader policy changes fizzled. At the Promise Keepers conference in 1996, when conversation turned to practical ways of dismantling racism through programs like affirmative action, white evangelicals became upset and derailed the discussion. As McCartney told the authors of the book “Divided by Faith,” “Of the 1996 conference participants who had a complaint, nearly 40 percent reacted negatively to the reconciliation theme.”

Over the next two decades, racial reconciliation moved away from efforts to combat institutional racism and focussed instead on addressing personal feelings about race. This focus sits more easily with the theological underpinnings of evangelical Christianity, which emphasize a believer’s personal relationship with Jesus and portray sin and salvation as matters of personal choice. Today, the reconciliation movement centers around gimmicky one-off events, like pulpit-swaps, in which Black and white pastors switch congregations. Conversations abound race are reduced to “relational” confessionals, often one-sided chats in which white Christians share the ways in which they’ve committed the sins of racism, and Christians of color are cast in the role of confessors, required to hear and then to absolve their white counterparts. Subjects such as mass-incarceration or economic inequity are written off as outside the purview of the Bible and tainted by politics.

The Black Lives Matter movement has pushed the church toward a more urgent confrontation with racism. Austin Channing Brown, the author of “I’m Still Here,” a memoir about her childhood as a Black girl in a white church, told me, “Black Lives Matter has forced the church to move beyond an easy rhetoric of ‘togetherness.’ ” Salter McNeil put it more bluntly. “People are sick of the kumbaya party,” she told me. “The idea is that if we can sing in Spanish and eat with chopsticks, we are somehow reconciled. But young people know that’s hollow.” The problem, as they see it, is that racism is often a function not of personal malice but of the way systems are built: white people can profess love for racial minorities, but if their school system remains segregated as a result of decades of policy that benefit those in power, Black people will remain disenfranchised. “If you still support policies that cage up children, or that cause people of color to die of covid-19, that’s not reconciliation.” she said. “It’s a smokescreen for racism, and you’re not going to put my face on your pamphlet.”

Salter McNeil told me that, for decades, she didn’t talk about racist policies, because she thought it would make her seem overly partisan. Now she sees these issues as beyond squabbles between Republicans and Democrats. “Partisanship is what party you choose,” she said. “Politics is about the policy that impacts people’s lives, and we should all be talking about that.” She finds inspiration in the Biblical scenes that depict Jesus as a radical figure—a man of color—flipping tables in the temple to point out economic injustice and agitating for the dignified treatment of lepers and prostitutes. Christ sought to upend corrupt social hierarchies, not to reinforce them or to look the other way; Salter McNeil now sees this as the heart of her own work.

Others have called upon the church to examine its own history of racism. In 2014, Jennifer Harvey wrote a book called “Dear White Christians,” which argued that racism has pervaded the white church in America since the days of slavery. In 2015, Michelle Higgins, a Black pastor and organizer, stood up before tens of thousands of people at a popular evangelical conference in St Louis, Missouri, and told them that, as she put it to me, “mission work was really an exercise in exporting racism, and that evangelicalism was a moral protection for white supremacy.” The backlash against Higgins was swift: by the next morning, she’d received numerous death threats. Today, her criticisms are gaining ground. “For the last five hundred years, Christianity has been influenced by Martin Luther’s effort to decentralize the church,” Lisa Sharon Harper, the founder of a progressive evangelical religious group called Freedom Road, told me. “For the next five hundred years, the principle effort will be decolonization.”

Since the killing of George Floyd, Salter McNeil has been busy agitating against police violence and speaking about the role that Christians can play in ending injustice. Before the pandemic, she might have addressed her listeners in person. Today, her audience is largely virtual: she speaks on podcasts, and preaches at Quest and Cornerstone, evangelical megachurches where she works as a pastor, via Zoom. She often critiques the shortcomings of reconciliation, as she and others have practiced it. On a recent episode of the podcast “Churchleaders,” she prayed aloud with the host.“These children are in these streets around the world saying ‘Black Lives Matter,’ because they can see the hypocrisy and the disparity in how one group of people are treated by police,” she said. “Let’s stop making excuses.”

There are some indications that these new leaders are gaining ground in religious communities. Lisa Sharon Harper has gained tens of thousands of followers on social media. Austin Channing Brown’s book was added to Reese Witherspoon’s book club; and Jemar Tisby’s book, which was published in 2019, recently hit the Times best-seller list. Some conservative churches are also beginning to engage with movements for social justice. “Black Lives Matter has forced Christians to do some actual social-change work,” Drew Hart, a professor at Messiah University and the author of “Trouble I’ve Seen,” told me. Recently, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Hart lives, Pentecostals and evangelicals hosted rallies against racial injustice, an effort that was unprecedented for the community. Despite considerable blowback, InterVarsity, a campus evangelical organization, has supported Black Lives Matter since 2015. “The example of Jesus’ life and work among the dispossessed, and his call for radical equality, serves as a blueprint for taking apart unjust systems,” Hart told me. “The gospel is actually powerful enough to transform our society if we take Jesus seriously.”

Of course, not everyone is listening. Recently, on Facebook, a white man chided Salter McNeil, writing to her that people liked her better when she didn’t speak about social justice and just quoted Bible verses. “Did it hurt? Yep, it did. I deleted him,” she told me. “But he made a telling statement. What white-dominant culture has said is that if you would just show us it’s in the Bible, if you wouldn’t be angry, if you wouldn’t bring up politics, we’ll listen,” she went on. “Most of us said, O.K., I hear that you don’t want the Angry Black Woman. If we could be intellectual enough, Biblical enough, gracious enough—if we could do it in a way that didn’t make white people feel guilty and shamed, then things would change,” she told me. “My sister, that just isn’t true.”

In her workshops, Salter McNeil still encourages participants to try to reduce racial prejudice in their own hearts, and she believes that the church offers helpful spiritual tools in this regard: confession allows an individual to recognize the harm he has caused through racism; lament creates a space for grieving that harm; repentance is a means to undo the harm in practical ways. Now, however, Salter McNeil also speaks out against U.S. policies that she sees as racist—for example, the cruel treatment of undocumented immigrants in detention, or policies that are causing people of color to die of covid-19 at a higher rate than whites. She turns down speaking engagements when she fears that she will simply be used as a token Black presence, but won’t really be heard. When I spoke to her, in July, she had just declined an invitation to speak about race to a group of wealthy, white Christians in Florida, whom she feared just wanted a person of color to headline their event. “When I say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and they respond, ‘Don’t All Lives Matter?’ there’s someone to answer their question, but it isn’t me any longer,” she said. “I don’t want to answer questions that I’ve answered for the past thirty years, nor will I. The time is way more urgent.”

Eliza Griswold

Read More