Adolph Reed, Jr: Can Biden 'Make America Moral Again?'
Blurb:
Senator and presidential hopeful Joe Biden has said he plans to “Make America Moral Again,”—a counter to Trumpian “division” and corruption. The Real News Network's Jacqueline Luqman spoke to Professor Adolph Reed Jr., who recently co-authored a Guardian op-ed titled “Joe Biden Wants Us To Forget His Past, We Won’t” with Cornel West about the limits of Biden's gestures towards “morality” and bipartisanship.
“The bipartisanship ideal has never really been good for poor people, working people, women, and racial and ethnic minorities,” Reed said. “But in particular, Biden's legacy of bipartisanship includes cultivating friendly relations and even jointly-sponsored bills with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who was one of the most notorious racists of the postwar period.”
The way to begin understanding Biden's approach, Reed explained, is to understand his membership in the influential Democratic Leadership Council (DLC): “Their strategy—frontloading Southern primaries early—would, they thought, give a boost to the most conservative Democrats most conservative Democratic presidential candidates and would give them the momentum to win the nomination,” Reed said.
Luqman added that the origins of the DLC reflected racist strategies of Republicans and helped move the Democratic party to the center right.
“The DLC strategy was arguably the beginning of the neoliberal foundation of the Democratic Party's departure from the pro-worker, pro-marginalized, support for marginalized people party to the corporate-focused and certainly the architects of the push to the right,” Luqman said. “It's interesting that the DLC strategy sort of mirrors the Southern Strategy, and that the Southern Strategy moved Democrats out of the Republican Party, but they end up basically on the same spectrum, politically.”
Back in 1994, Biden co-sponsored the devastating Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. During testimony, he bemoaned the lack of jail space available and proposed inmates be placed in “boot camps”—tents surrounded by barbed wire.
“Under this bill, we can string up barbed wire, we can build Quonset huts, and we can put them in boot camps,” Biden said back then. “We can do that.”
Biden’s comments, Luqman said, were similar to those made recently by corrupt sheriff Joe Arpaio, and Trump himself: “[Those are] the kinds of policies that not just Sheriff Joe Arpaio has, but Trump [has]: putting people who are are undocumented, people seeking asylum, in cages under underpasses,” Luqman said.
Luqman mentioned how Biden handled the Anita Hill hearings during Clarence Thomas's confirmation, and Biden's comments on desegregating public schools and busing—just one of the many issues in Biden's past that make his “Make America Moral Again” slogan so insincere.
“I don't think that Biden's record ought to be able to survive scrutiny, and close scrutiny, and it’s sure as hell going to get a lot of it,” Reed said. “The most important thing for people like The Real News, me, and all of us committed to to egalitarian values, and truth, and dignity, and —[we] have our work to do, because we've got to pull the files on all these candidates and make sure that the images that they want to project are consistent with the realities of the lives that they've lived and the policies that they endorsed."