Opinion | Joe Biden and the Party of Davos

Is Donald Trump an aberration? If he is, Joe Biden is the perfect Democratic candidate to defeat him next year, the steady hand that can restore decency, steer a middle course between Wall Street and Main Street, and reinvigorate the shaken liberal democratic order.

I don’t think Trump is an aberration. On the contrary, he’s the face, however duplicitous, of a revolution against the Party of Davos, the network of elites whose economic and cultural prescriptions came to be seen by myriad voters across the United States and Europe as camouflage for a self-serving heist. Biden has been a regular attendee at Davos.

Trump’s brilliance lay in seeing that he could become the perfect impostor, the wealthy and highly visible figurehead of a 21st-century movement of the dispossessed and the invisible. He could be their voice. He could say the unsayable. He could disrupt. He could restore violence to a wan political stage of PowerPoint slides. He could take on the China that had put millions of people to work on the cheap in its factories and so, from the Midwest to the British Midlands, de-industrialized much of the West.

If people felt like nobodies, felt abandoned, felt there was not only growing inequality in wealth but inequality of recognition, felt their very language had been anesthetized by all-knowing elites more at home in global capitals than in the provinces of their own countries, then somebody could speak for liberalism’s disappeared — and maybe even win. Steve Bannon saw this. Trump grasped this and did win, not as the creator of a movement but as the media-savvy messenger of a groundswell.

This revolution is not an American phenomenon. It is much wider. Its first clear-cut expression was not Trump’s victory but Britain’s Brexit vote. The revolution is still in the top of its first inning. It is political, economic and cultural, driven by a resurgence of those unhappy twins: fear and nationalism.

There’s been a movement in people’s minds, a radical change in the way people live, perceive and conduct their politics. The old paradigm won’t work. Biden, whom I admire for his impassioned defense of the American idea that Trump has sullied, represents the old paradigm. That’s a big problem, whatever Biden’s early lead in polls. He’s ill-placed, as a pillar of the ancien régime, to overturn the revolution. This is not personal. It’s societal.

For all his Scranton blue-collar beginnings, Biden will be pilloried as a faithful servant of the Party of Davos that secured impunity for the financiers behind the 2008 meltdown, a heady growth in inequality, China appeasement and the arrogance of money-wooed Democrats estranged from their working-class constituency. Unfiltered politics, technology’s dubious gift, will hurt him. These politics prize agility more than honor. The world has moved on. Whither I’m not sure, but it has. Things shift. That’s the way of the world — inexorable as biology.

One of the most significant exchanges so far of the fight for the 2020 Democratic nomination came in the last few days when Biden said of China: “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” To which Bernie Sanders shot back that the United States had lost three million manufacturing jobs to the 2000 China trade deal. “It’s wrong,” he tweeted, “to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors.”

Not only economic, I would add. China is set on an implacable course to run the world in the second half of this century. If that is not precisely what you want for your children, thinking that “they’re not competition for us” is precisely the wrong place to start. It’s lazy thinking — and laziness has hurt the liberal center a lot over the past decade.

Europe is instructive on the revolution’s reach. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the rightist, anti-immigrant deputy prime minister, grows in popularity. In Spain, the Socialist Party triumphed in the April 28 election, but the rightist Vox party came from nowhere to take 10.3 percent of the vote, entering Parliament and breaking a post-Franco taboo. Santiago Abascal, the Vox leader, contrived a near-perfect political and cultural synthesis for the current gestalt: a virulent rejection of immigrants and a strident defense of bullfights. Politics as blood sport is back.

Emmanuel Macron, the upstart French president, was forced down from the Jupiter-like heights when his proposed hike in gasoline tax triggered the Yellow Vest protests. He was thinking of saving the planet; citizens affected were thinking of making it to the end of the month. Oh! Macron began a three-month voter-listening exercise called the “Great National Debate” that has culminated in proposed tax cuts and recognition of the need to be more “humane.”

Such listening is critical. Trump got out there; he listened better than Hillary Clinton. My impression is that, among Democratic contenders, Elizabeth Warren is listening most closely. Her proposed tax on the super wealthy reflects that — while billionaires, like China, get a pass from Biden. Trump is not an aberration. Only the innovative will beat him.

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