The seasoned, center-left standard-bearer of the party keeps his lead in a crowded primary race
More than a month has passed since former Vice President Joe Biden announced he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, effectively rounding out one of the most unusual fields ever assembled—23 candidates, six of them women, six minorities, with a stunning 40-year age gap between the youngest and oldest.
In that time, a funny thing has happened: Mr. Biden started at the front of the pack and has stayed right there. Normally, this would hardly be surprising, considering how well-known and deeply rooted Mr. Biden is within the party.
But these aren’t normal times, and the political universe was full of people who thought Joe Biden was (you can pick): too old, too old-school, too centrist, too willing to work with Republicans, too weighed down with baggage from past controversies, too prone to campaign gaffes.
Among the “punditry class…the view was that his best day would be his first day in the race,” says Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, an organization of moderate Democrats.
It is very early, of course, and those potential flaws could yet prove fatal. But for now, the buoyancy of Joe Biden raises the question: What is he telling us about the Democratic Party? Four things come to mind:
—Democrats may not have moved as far left as widely thought. Many observers put together the very real energy among the party’s liberal base and the party’s success in the 2018 midterm elections and concluded that the first was responsible for the second. That has emboldened the liberal wing of the party to try to push the party’s agenda well to the left.
This almost certainly represents a misreading of the 2018 midterm election, when the most important victories weren’t by candidates on the left, but by 21 House freshmen who won in districts President Trump carried in 2016. They were centrist candidates, and represent where many Democratic and independent voters are: on the center-left.
That happens to be where Mr. Biden resides as well, and it appears that is just fine with a lot of rank-and-file Democrats. There actually is some unease within the party over the most prominent candidates of the left. In Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling, 36% of Democratic primary voters say they have reservations about or are uncomfortable with Sen. Bernie Sanders, and 33% say that about Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Meantime, just 27% have reservations about or are uncomfortable with Mr. Biden.
—The idea of working with Republicans isn’t anathema to Democratic voters. Mr. Biden presents himself as a traditional Democrat with traditional middle-class sensibilities—but also one who knows how to reach across the aisle to work with Republicans and find actual consensus in a Washington where there has been precious little of that.
“We need to have a candidate who is ready to rebuild trust,” says one senior Biden adviser.
This position also contrasts with many other Democratic candidates, who are appealing to the anti-Trump anger at the base of the party by using the word “fight” frequently, and stressing their eagerness to do battle with Republicans. As it happens, this approach also is designed to put Mr. Biden in juxtaposition to Mr. Trump, who, frustrated with Democrats, increasingly resorts to pursuing his goal through executive orders rather than negotiated agreements.
Neil Gorsuch’s philosophical mentor cites “natural law” to reject same-sex marriage and abortion
Discussion of natural law predates Christianity, but Christian theologians such as Aquinas are key figures in developing the theory (this makes intuitive sense, as natural law appeals to a higher and absolute moral authority on what constitutes justice, and God fits this authority well.) Finnis, a Catholic natural law philosopher, traces much of his thinking to ideas first expressed by Aquinas.
Interpretations of natural law have massive and widely varying influence. The US Declaration of Independence refers to the equality that “the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle” and is clearly founded on a belief in natural law. English Common Law sought to uphold natural law, and those who wrote the US Constitution referred, in the course of various writings, to the notion that God is the ultimate source of legal authority. The concept of human rights is also closely intertwined with natural law.
Though the US constitution is a positive law, the Supreme Court justices have not totally ignored the notion of natural law. Justice Anthony Scalia believed that “the government derives its authority from God,” and Justice Clarence Thomas argued at his Senate confirmation hearing that “we look at natural law beliefs of the Founders as a background to our Constitution.” (Meanwhile, as Mother Jones notes, then-Senator Joe Biden once criticized Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork for not believing in natural law. “As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution…They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator,” said Biden in 1987.)
Natural law philosophers have differing theories on the fundamental rights that must be protected by this law, and these rights are derived from absolute human goods. Georgetown moral and legal theorist Mark Murphy explains that, for Finnis, these basic goods include life, knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, play, friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion.
He argues that it is inherently wrong to intentionally harm any basic good. This framework means that, in Finnis’s view as laid out in articles, abortion is inherently wrong as it’s an attempt to harm life. His theory does, however, allow for some exceptions where abortion would be considered permissible. Finnis argues that if an abortion is carried out to save a mother’s life, then it is not the intention to harm the fetus and so is morally permissible. “Finnis is obliged to say the doctor did not intend the baby’s death, because he believes there is an absolute prohibition on intentionally killing innocent people. (The alternative would be to treat the procedure as impermissible, but this is clearly not his view.),” explains legal philosopher Jonathan Crowe.
Finnis’s beliefs about the absolute value of protecting life also means that the philosopher strongly opposes the death penalty and nuclear armament.
Conversely, Finnis argues that marriage is a basic good and, in his view, it’s a heterosexual good that should lead to procreation. “It is the sort of loving union inherently oriented to family life; it is the sort of living bond that by its nature would be fulfilled—extended and enriched—by the bearing and rearing of children,” he writes. Based on his interpretation of the good protected by natural law, Finnis is strongly against giving same-sex couples the same benefits as heterosexual married couples.
Relatedly, Finnis believes that the “good of marriage” should be the foundation of all sexual relations—in other words, sex is only moral if it takes place within a heterosexual marriage. Homosexual sex, masturbation, adultery, and bestiality are all grouped in the same category and marked similarly immoral by Finnis. “The truly morally significant thing about all non-marital sex acts is that, in diverse forms, they involve disrespect for the basic good of marriage,” he writes.
Of course, though Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has worked closely with Finnis, that does not mean the two share the same views. Finnis supervised Gorsuch’s Oxford dissertation on euthanasia in the 1990s, and the Supreme Court nominee developed this work into a book where he argues that euthanasia is impermissible as “human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong.”
Gorsuch’s views on abortion and gay rights outside of the same-sex marriage debate remain unclear, as he has not explicitly written or ruled on either subject. Meanwhile, when the Guardian asked Finnis about Gorsuch’s nomination, he replied “I have resolved not to say anything to anyone at all.”
Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin next month. Only once he’s confirmed will we know how much Finnis’s thinking has shaped the Supreme Court nominee.
The New Right Is Beating the New Left. Everywhere.
From Australia to Europe, the signs are multiplying that conservative populism is on the rise.
Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear: The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.
Start with Australia, where Prime Minister Scott Morrison won a surprising victory last week. Before the election, polls had almost uniformly indicated that his Liberal-National Coalition would have to step down, but voters were of another mind. With their support of Morrison, an evangelical Christian who has expressed support for President Donald Trump, Australians also showed a relative lack of interest in doing more about climate change. And this result is no fluke of low turnout: Due to compulsory voting, most Australians do turn out for elections.
Or how about the U.K.? The evidence is mounting that the Brexit Party will do very well in this week’s European Parliament elections. Right now that party, which did not exist until recently, is in the lead in national polls with an estimated 34% support. The Tories, the current ruling party, are at only 12%. So the hard Brexit option does not seem to be going away, and the right wing of British politics seems to be moving away from the center.
As for the European Parliament as a whole, by some estimates after this week’s election 35% of the chamber will be filled by anti-establishment parties, albeit of a diverse nature. You have to wonder at what margins the EU will become unworkable or lose legitimacy altogether.
Meanwhile in the U.S., polls show Joe Biden as the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He is one of the party’s more conservative candidates, and maybe some primary voters value his electability and familiarity over the more left-wing ideas of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That’s one sign the “hard left” is not in ascendancy in the U.S. Biden’s strategy of running against Trump is another. It’s hard to say how effective that will prove, but it is likely to result in an election about the ideas and policies of Trump, not those of Democratic intellectuals.
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has remained strong, and Trump’s chances of re-election have been rising in the prediction markets.
One scarcely noticed factor in all of this has been the rising perception of China as a threat to Western interests. The American public is very aware that the U.S. is now in a trade war with China, a conflict that is likely to provoke an increase in nationalism. That is a sentiment that has not historically been very helpful to left-wing movements. China has been one of Trump’s signature causes for years, and he seems to be delighting in having it on center stage.
The Democratic Party is not well-positioned to make China a core issue. Democrats have been criticizing Trump’s tariffs for a while now, and it may be hard for them to adjust their message from “Tariffs Are Bad” to “Tariffs Are Bad But China Tariffs Are OK.” Their lukewarm support for free trade agreements — especially the Trans Pacific Partnership, which could have served as a kind of alternative China trade policy — also complicates matters. The net result is that Republicans will probably be able to use the China issue to their advantage for years to come.
Elsewhere, the world’s largest democracy just wrapped up a lengthy election. The results in India aren’t yet known, but exit polls show that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling coalition — and his philosophy of Hindu nationalism — will continue to be a major influence.
In all of this ferment, I am myself rooting for a resurgence of centrist cosmopolitanism. But I try to be honest about how my ideas are doing in the world. And in the last few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of evidence that a new political era truly is upon us.
Is Biden Really the Most ‘Electable’ Democrat?
With a field this large, let’s not jump to conclusions.
Biden, like Clinton, is extremely vulnerable to Trumpian forms of faux-populist attack. He is a 36-year veteran of Washington who backed the Iraq War, cultivated close ties with banks and credit card companies and played a leading role in shaping the punitive policies that helped produced mass incarceration. As he did with Clinton, Trump can slam him on these issues and sow division among Democratic voters. It’s how he won in 2016 — targeting black voters with Clinton’s past positions to discourage and demobilize them. It worked. For all the focus on blue-collar whites, Clinton also missed Obama’s benchmarkswith black voters. Had she reached them — or had she come close — she would be president.
It’s possible none of this will touch Biden, for the simple reason that he is a man. And the gender politics that constrained Clinton’s career — that harmed her standing whenever she reached for national office — don’t apply to Biden. Unlike her, he may retain enough of an appeal to blue-collar whites and remain the most formidable challenger to Trump.
There’s another possibility — that those blue-collar voters are gone. That their shift away from the Democratic Party, which began long before 2016, is permanent. And that Biden’s personal appeal isn’t enough to reverse it. Remember, if he wins the nomination, Biden will represent a coalition defined by its racial diversity and gender egalitarianism. If the backlash to those forces is driving the Trump movement, then the candidate who stands for them will face the same reactionary fury, regardless of how well he plays blue-collar identity politics.
Joe Biden will have to juggle this and the larger burden of standing for the past and its failures. Perhaps, despite running two failed campaigns for the presidency, he’s a deft enough politician to handle all of this and make a compelling case against Trump. Perhaps his electability isn’t a mirage. The point is that we don’t know. And with nearly two dozen candidates in the Democratic field, it seems premature to treat Biden as the one with the least risk.