The first markers have been passed, the “hundred days”, the Fourth of July: Time to try  a hand in assessing Joe Biden’s America. The sentiment, personal and from a limited experience: It feels like on top of a smoking volcano.

The vaccination target was narrowly missed. President Joe Biden had declared that by July 4th, the national holiday, 70 percent of the American population should be vaccinated against COVID. The gauge stopped at 66 percent, according to news reports. This is good (Switzerland was at about half of that at the same time), but nevertheless not as good as announced. TV comedian Jimmy Fallon made fun saying the President had slightly changed course: The new goal is good enough.

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COVID has lost its fearsomeness. On the evening of July 4, they scrambled in  front of the 48th street/1st Avenue street barrier like Euro football fans at a public viewing, trying to get on FDR drive in order to view the fireworks. No distancing, no masks. The paper said access was reserved for the vaccinated ones, but who could have controlled this? Certainly,  not everybody is vaccinated in New York City. During our Euro viewing in the Mercury Bar (no crowding there, the available stools outnumbered the customers) we – unmasked – got into talking to the man on our left. He works in the emergency unit of a nearby hospital. With a job like this, he must be vaccinated, volunteered my wife. “No”, said the man who looked like a young Eddie Murphy. He had too many misgivings about the vaccines which were developed too fast and tested too little, he said How about his colleagues? “Same thing. About ten got the shots”. Out of how many? “There are about fifty of us”. Did nobody get sick? “Some did, the older ones”.

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That was in New York City, June 2021. In the spring of 2021 the COVID hotspot of the world and the global example of public health citoyenneté. Shut down then. Now, New York City is open. Restaurants, stores run almost like before (there seems to be a shortage of staff), and in September Broadway and other venues will open again. The emergency is officially lifted. But the town feels different than before. Rudy’s Bar on 9th avenue, one of the few places in New York where you get a beer under 5 dollar remains closed. Traffic does not stand but flows. In Times Square they again offer themselves to the cameras of the tourists, the Naked Cowboy, Spiderman and the Bikini-clad latinas  with “NY” on bare buttocks, but there are almost no tourists. Walking, you easily move through the crowd, even at peak hours. The town is humming, but the handbrakes are not released. No one knows at this time how many horse powers the engine will put to the road.

The big difference is in attitude. A year ago, no gruesome scenario of the pandemic was too outwardly, no warning too absurd not to be taken seriously. Now, the people behave like the Trumpists of last year which believed the virus not to be a really big deal and the pandemic an imagination fabricated by the government. In “red” America where the Republican Party rules and Donald Trump remains household god, this has not changed. In the past weeks I was traveling along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, in the states with the lowest vaccination rates and the highest percentages of new infections in America. There, people behaved like the delegates to a Swiss people’s party conference. But they are not alone. The nonchalance is contagious. I’m done with COVID, declared my friend Paul, Democrat, militant non-smoker and a through and through health-conscious individual. We were on a bicycle tour in Missouri, eight people all in all, nobody a Trumpist, everybody highly reasonable, two or three even vegans, and during six days of riding the issues of infection and protection were just once or twice mentioned and immediately put to rest. The one bar which allowed customers to smoke elicited far more health concerns and a very vocal boycott from the non-smoking section of the group. Did the Trump partisans have a point, when they claimed before last November’s election that the pandemic was just blown up for political reasons and fear and concern would vanish once Biden would be elected? Surely the vaccination changes a lot. But the scourge of the virus  is not over. It has only disappeared as the all-permeating topic. A few days ago, the ticker tape parade for the health workers in Manhattan was just an “in other news” item in the media. The unions even refused to take part because the nurses and caregivers today remain exactly as underpaid as they were before the pandemic.

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The new emergency in New York is crime. A rapid rise of violent acts puts a spell on the citizens. For the first time in twenty years you are warned to take to the streets at night. Neighbors relate incidents. A little boy shot over on Times Square. A woman brutally knocked down on 9th avenue, directly in front of the building. Same thing in Chinatown, there are videos on youtube. The victims often Asians, often women, the perpetrators often street people, some notoriously mentally ill, one guy did not even try to leave after his deed but continued babbling on the sidewalk until he was arrested. He was a homeless man with a long list of violent acts, put into an emergency shelter for the nights and left to himself during the days. In addition to the violence by fist there is violence by gun. The number of shootings doubled from 2019 to 2020 and in the current year the increase already passed 75 percent. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York State just declared another emergency in order to liberate money against the spreading gang violence.

Trump’s Republicans demonized urban America forever as a free range for criminals while the opposite side set its sight on police violence and police bias against minorities. The motto was “pull the plug”, particularly after a policeman in Minneapolis in open daylight, witnesses present, murdered the black petty criminal George Floyd (he was suspected of trying to pay cigarettes with a fake 20 dollar bill). The left demands radical cuts in police budgets (defund the police) or downright abolition of the police as we know it. In its stead more taxpayer dollars should be invested in psychological care units to relieve the police of rather peripheral issues in keeping law and order. In New York City these demands just suffered a crashing defeat. The election of the Democratic Party candidate for mayor – congruent with the election to the office as the city is dominated by the Democrats – saw the victory of a black ex-policeman, Eric Adams, who has no use for defund the police. The candidates who proposed to cut the police budget and the hire more therapists all were defeated. Adams says that he too is for more psychological care for homeless and other sorry cases, but that this is not the way to get the better of the armed gangsters in the poor areas of the city. There, he advocates for robust intervention – counter-violence. By the way: the participation in the primary election of 23 June was 26 percent. Not exactly evidence for the political sustainability of movements like defund the police. (In Switzerland you would have to go back to 1972 – “Federal Resolution on the protection of the currency” – to find a national vote with an equally low participation rate).

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Back to Joe. The geron  in the White House had a good start. First, because rather mediocre tock was put into him, and secondly because he seems to be really serious about keeping his promises. His Democratic predecessor Obama had been attributed downright shamanic qualities as a Washington rainmaker by political esoterics, but from Biden the only thing that was expected was “normalcy”. Normalcy is back, at least in so far as the lord-of-the-manor arbitrariness, the open corruption and the cant of the caudillo years have disappeared. This is what Biden was elected for. Beyond that he rescinded a good number of Trump presidential executive acts, particularly in the areas of labor rights and the environment. And with the majorities of his party in both houses of Congress he realized a massive package of COVID aid –direct payments to every individual (600 dollars), prolongation of the financial protection measures until the end of the year and more.

 

Now the engine is stalling. The Democratic majorities are too thin for ramming other large projects through Congress. In the Senate most procedures (exception: “reconciliation” with the House of Representatives over the budget) demand a supermajority to take action. Closing the speakers’ list and moving to a vote on a proposal requires 60 of 100 votes. As the chamber is evenly split (50-50, with Biden’s Vice President Harris as the decisive vote), each side can sabotage a project by paralyzing the body through endless speaking. This is called “filibuster” and the threat of filibustering deep-freezes the Democrat’s  voting rights bill – a reform intended to stop states from doctoring the access to the voting booth according to political expediency. The Republicans, who  do so systematically,  are en bloc against. The one possible back road is blocked by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin from West-Virginia. A simple majority could change the rules of the Senate and declare the filibuster moot. But Mr. Manchin does not want this and the President is stopped in his track when it comes to voting rights.

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The other big Biden project is labelled as “infrastructure”. It goes beyond repairing bridges, roads or building better train lines and includes a massive investment in greening the economy and strengthening of the fragile underpinning of society. Here, two fronts are open. On the right, as to be expected, the Republican party. On the left those Democrats which expect much more than a mere return to “normalcy” from the Biden presidency. The Democratic left demands a higher minimum wage, health insurance for everybody and the Green New Deal – an ecological reconstruction of historical dimensions. Between those two markers Biden is to navigate. At this time, the outcome is open. In the Senate, a minuscule grouping of Democrats and Republicans agreed on a shrunk package of measures containing mostly grey (whatever can be constructed with concrete) and very little green (a network of e-car charging stations). Red, the social dimension, is left out. But the proposal can be seen as the bud of a bipartisan compromise which looks almost exotic, given the bile and hatred of the past two decades. Biden promised to sign it into law. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives proposes more, sticking to to the campaign promises, including social elements and tax increases for the wealthiest Americans. “Moderates” in the Democratic Party are uneasy, particularly when it comes to tax increases. On the left, some already sense a whiff of abandonment and treason. The representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a twitter queen of American politics, publicly showed disappointment.

 

So much for normalcy in Washington. A Democratic president standing on the slippery ground of his own party’s backing, as seen previously. The new element in the equation might be that the 78 year old Biden at the helm of the presidency is not a modern man, but a premodern one. Not one raised on the milk of “less government, more market”, but one from the era before, when unions were not seen as the brake pads of economic development and government support for those left out by the markets was a given. The Biden presidency shows signs of such an outlook, not least with acquiescing to a global minimal taxation of inter-national tax dodgers. How deep such attitudes reach and how much water they carry is questionable. At any rate, the job approval  is gauged above the water line, 51,5 percent as of this writing. 51,6 Prozent of Americans believe the country to be on the wrong track.

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From the other side of the aisle there is only resistance to be expected. After the defeat of last November, the right appears only more fiercely rancorous. Those critical of Trump were purged from the leadership in Congress. There is no sign of any change of course in the party, nothwithstanding the trial balloon on infrastructure in the Senate. A recent investigation of the Washington Post shows that two thirds of all Republican candidates for the next election cycle believe the presidential election a fraud and Joe Biden an illegitimate President. The same goes for the base. There is not one poll, not one report showing that the Republican voters are turning away from Donald Trump or looking for  an alternative. Not one possible candidate for 2024 has stood up from ducking and covering. To the contrary. It is the toadies and lickspittles who have the floor.

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My little journey down South confirms the verdict. Sure, there is less talk about Donald Trump because there is not that much to hear from him any more. The caudillo has disappeared from the published realm ever since the social media companies cancelled his accounts. He started some kind of a blog and retired it very soon for lack of attention, but this means nothing (who reads a blog?). Nevertheless, the former President remains active. He has resumed his appearances at rallies where he supports candidates of his ilk and begs for money. His political war chest is intact, regardless of the legal problems of his companies in New York. And Trumpism itself is alive and well. It spreads without the head, like a worm continues to live when cut in half. Fox News, the right-wing talk shows and the ubiquitous Christian stations keep spewing bile and venom. They feed the sentiments of being shorthanded, unnoticed, disrespected or discriminated which are widely felt outside the big cities and ever more easily articulated among folks in the countryside. These are millions of people, not all of them politically minded, and not all of them voters. The former Clinton advisor William Galston recently wrote about their “sense of displacement in a country they once dominated” – the disposition candidate Hillary Clinton disqualified as “deplorables”, thus stoking the fires against her even more. The sentiments Galston refers to are entirely understandable indeed, as the leading voices of the left, the “liberals” are doing much to increase the alienation. The cultural wars in America are not waged by the right alone. There is also a cultural war waged from the left. The grotesque ramification of “sexual identities”, the insistence on racism as the cradle of all social ills, their codification in school curricula – all this is for millions of Americans too distant from the world they live in – too far out to be understood, let alone accepted. For those millions, health insurance and minimum wage are closer than “sexual identity”. The de-economization of the American left is backfiring. What did they say in the Clinton (Bill’s) campaign? It’s the economy, stupid!

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It is quiet in Joe Biden’s America, more quiet than in the Trump years where provocation and reaction, fake news and correction chased each other like dogs chase a fox. Eerily quiet. He who stays clear of Fox News and Christian radio can live in a Trump-free world of resurrected normalcy where the ousted one is as diligently un-talked about as Lord Voldemort is in a Harry Potter novel. He who limits himself to Fox and the like lives in the counterworld where the caudillo is the martyr of the good cause and a redeemer future things to come That the November election was falsified is part of the political creed in Trump world. In Biden world the same notion is a lie – never mentioned without the adjective “false”, for instance in the reporting of the New York Times. That  the result might have been too narrow to be ascertained beyond doubt, is excluded on both sides. Both have thrown over board what must be a given in democracies: that narrow election results must not become objects of interminable legal quarrels, and that losers must accept their defeat, however narrow, at one point.

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Joe Biden’s America is a divided country. We in the red zone, said Brian, a hotel manager in Vicksburg/Mississippi, about the “red” states which are governed by the Republicans. For him, the rest is foreign territory, far away and without any link to his universe. Two zones, two worlds, two ways of thinking – nothing common. Take the freedom of speech: For Trumpists it is clear that the former President has lost his by being blocked from Facebook and Twitter. A liberal cannot see this, never. A liberal sees a violation of freedom of speech if the right is limiting the teaching of left-wing views in the cultural wars. Both sides are right, but to acknowledge this is a taboo on both sides. The fundamentally American position that everything is allowed to be said and published, is crumbling.

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Red and blue America are segregated in a similar way like the reformation split the Switzerland of yesteryears. This segregation can be observed in the remainders of the political fights of last year. On the drive through the country, I quite regularly saw “Trump” signs and slogans, most old and decaying, but some pointing to the next round in Presidential politics. At Bagnell Dam in Missouri, at the end of the Lake of the Ozarks, I saw a stall with “Trump 24” paraphernalia. How’s business?” – “Brisk”. Biden signs on the other hand have completely disappeared, also in areas which vote Democratic. There, particularly in the better off neighborhoods, people rather keep their Black Lives Matter signs in the front yard.

 

 

The divide gives you the creeps. You sense an unrest underground, a feeling like life in a quake zone. It might be that similar sentiments were registered in the years before the civil war, when the social rupture by and by caught up with all facets of life. Like today, opined Brian, the hotel clerk in Vicksburg. Sure, slavery was abolished, but the difference between conditions for the slaves back then and for the immigrant workers of today is quite small. The largest one concerned sex trafficking, die enslavement of women for the sex business. That we did not have back then.

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Times in politics before the civil war were rough too, and violent. In 1856 the representative Preston Brooks went after the Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber. He beat him so forcefully with a walking stick, and for such a duration (intervention came late)  that Sumner barely saved his life. We are not at such a point today. When Trump’s hordes stormed the Capitol on 6 January of this year (4 individuals dead), the members of Congress stayed together despite widely divergent political outlooks, peacefully and probably joined in despair. But the fear of party doctrine is huge. Republican leaders regularly diminish the attack into some kind of strong civic protest, perhaps a tad out of hand, but nothing more. Even Vice President Mike Pence whom the attackers threatened to hang because he presided over the certification of Biden’s election, is distancing himself from the boss only in the most circumspect of ways (we don’t see eye to eye), holding the nose in the wind like a nervous hunting dog. One cowardly canine, this one. The red-blooded American, as iconized by the national propaganda, does not talk like this when threatened with violent death.

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What did Ronald Reagan, the Wotan of Trumpism, say? You ain’t seen nothing yet.