By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
President Biden, speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., yesterday:
My deceased son, Beau, he was the
Attorney General of the State of Delaware. And what he used to do is go down,
in the east side, the — called the “Bucket” — highest crime rate in the
country. It’s a place where I used to — I was the only white guy that worked as
a lifeguard down in that area, on the east side.
And you know where the — you could
always tell where the best basketball in the state is or the best basketball in
the city is: It’s where everybody shows up.
The east side of Wilmington is indeed a primarily African-American neighborhood; earlier this
year, Wilmington mayor Mike Purzycki described the East Side as “neglected for decades and decades” by city, county, and
state leaders. Whether or not this neighborhood in Wilmington ever had the
“highest crime rate in the country,” the area has been described as “Murder Town USA” in the not-too-distant past of 2014. And yes,
this is the neighborhood with the swimming pool where Biden used to be a
lifeguard (now renamed after the president) as well as Corn Pop’s old neighborhood.
“You could always tell where the best basketball in the
state is or the best basketball in the city is” is a yet another classic,
cringe-inducing use of stereotypes by Biden. It’s not the most consequential
thing that Biden did yesterday, but it fits in with his long history of using
racial and ethnic stereotypes that make him look like an ass: “You cannot
go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.
I’m not joking”; “[Obama is the] first
mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a
nice-looking guy”; “gonna put y’all back in chains; “these
Shylocks”; “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”;
“Unlike the African-American community with notable exceptions,
the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community”; “Are you a junkie?”; “You ain’t
black”; and so on.
(Biden’s frequent use of racial stereotypes might be a
little less irritating if he weren’t always telling us how he stood up to
racism in his life, and about how racist all of his critics and opponents are.)
There are a lot of reasons we shouldn’t embrace cancel
culture. One big reason is that it often elevates an off-the-cuff comment into
a litmus test of a person’s character and decency; we would all hate to be
judged by the dumbest or worst thing we’ve ever said or done. Another reason is
that once a disputed comment becomes a major controversy, it becomes a binary
choice where the person must be fired or canceled or not. There’s very little
middle ground, such as, “You shouldn’t be fired from your job, but that was a
dumb or offensive thing to say, and you shouldn’t have said it. You should
apologize and try to do better in the future.”
But another big reason is that the amount of offense that
is taken is often directly inverse to how important you are to the Democratic
Party at that moment.
If a little-known Republican state legislator had
characterized a heavily African-American neighborhood as “where the best
basketball in the state is,” you probably would have heard it denounced as yet
another example of the callous racial animosity coursing through the veins of
the modern Republican Party. But Biden said it, and many people have gotten
used to him using “poor” and “black” as synonyms.
(Right now, there’s probably somebody out there
contending that “where the best basketball in the state is” is a compliment.
African Americans can speak for themselves, but people generally prefer to be
seen as multifaceted and complicated human beings, not reduced to one simple
hoary stereotype. It’s a bit like describing America’s Latino communities “as
distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami,
and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.”
How Should We Remember Gorbachev?
By the standards of Soviet leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev was
a great man. But that’s not saying much, because the leaders of the Soviet
Union were literally a murderer’s row — a cavalcade of monsters, brutes, thugs,
and mummified corpses. “Looks good compared to Josef Stalin” may very well be
the lowest bar to clear ever.
The coming days will bring a lot of irksome, deliberate
misremembering of Gorbachev in the Western press.
Gorbachev did not want to see the Soviet Union come to
an end. “The greatest unintended outcome of all was the disintegration
of the Soviet Union,” wrote Archie Brown, an emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University and
the author of Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in
Perspective, in 2010. “Gorbachev, by 1988, had consciously set about
dismantling the Soviet system. At no point did he wish to see the disappearance
of the Soviet state.”
The Soviet system was slowly but surely failing; what
made Gorbachev revolutionary was that, compared to his geriatric, half-dead
predecessors, he wasn’t willing to pretend everything was running smoothly. As Gorbachev explained in a 2001 interview, “During the
final years under Brezhnev, we were planning to create a commission headed by
the secretary of the Central Committee, [Ivan V.] Kapitonov to solve the
problem of women’s pantyhose. Imagine a country that flies into space, launches
Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of
women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic
necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a
government. And so our people were already worked up, and that is why the
dissident movement occurred.”
Gorbachev remained a believer in the Communist system
until it no longer mattered. As Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government, wrote in 2006, “[Gorbachev] wanted to reform
communism, not replace it. But his reforms snowballed into a revolution driven
from below rather than controlled from above. In trying to repair communism, he
punched a hole in it. Like a hole in a dam, once pent-up pressure began to
escape, it widened the opening and tore apart the system.” Long after he
retired, Gorbachev himself admitted that he “went on too long
in trying to reform the Communist party,” and that he should have quit the
party during a key fight with other Communists in 1991.
Gorbachev deserves no more than partial credit for
ending the Cold War. Yes, a lot of us on the right can be accused of
being excessively nostalgic and starry-eyed about Ronald Reagan. But if Reagan
hadn’t enacted the 1980s defense-spending buildup and rejected Gorbachev’s
proposal to end the Strategic Defense Initiative at the Reykjavík Summit, the
creaky, wheezing Soviet Union might have figured out a way to keep on running
for another decade or two.
Under the Reagan revolution and with the rapid
technological advances occurring in the U.S. in the 1980s, the whole world
could see that the Soviet Union was declining — an overmilitarized, backwards,
no-longer-quite-so-“super” power, decaying from within and falling further and
further behind a thriving, advanced, dynamic, and innovative alternative. When
Gorbachev came to power in 1985, there were 50,000 personal computers in the
Soviet Union; in the United States, there were 30 million. (The radioactive
disaster at Chernobyl and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan didn’t help
the U.S.S.R.’s chances for survival, either.)
Gorbachev wasn’t always a reliable ally for democratic
reforms in Russia. William Taubman, the author of the best English-language
biography of Gorbachev, is a fan of the man but clear-eyed about his bad decisions,
including those he made after leaving office:
I struggle to understand the degree
to which Gorbachev has supported Putin, and I would say this, first of all:
Gorbachev understood that by the time Putin took over in 2000 after nearly 10
years after the collapse of the Soviet Union under his own rule, Gorbachev
believed that at that point, Russia needed a certain amount of
authoritarianism. In fact, he said that, but he accompanied that by saying that
he believed that Putin was basically a democrat, and that in due course, sooner
rather than later, Putin would return to some of the democratic features that
he and Yeltsin had tried to foster. I think in that sense he misjudged Putin.
Gorbachev opposed Putin’s reelection in 2012.
So he’s been very critical,
Gorbachev has been very critical of Putin, but as late as April 2017, when
asked by a German newspaper, “Do you still trust Putin?” he said, “Yes, I still
do.” . . .
I imagine that Gorbachev feels that
when it comes to dealing with the West, some of Putin’s toughness in response
to the expansion of NATO may not be an entirely bad thing.
Russia experts in the U.S. tend to have a clear-eyed and
nuanced view of Gorbachev, but very little of this view permeated the minds of
the more casual observers of Russia. It is hard to overstate how much the U.S.
media perceived and celebrated Gorbachev as a visionary statesman. In
1989, Time magazine declared that Gorbachev was “the Man of
the Decade” and called him, “the force behind the most momentous events of the 80s and the
man responsible for ending the Cold War.”
The brief appearance of a Mikhail Gorbachev lookalike
in the
opening scene of The Naked Gun offers a little bit of
sharp geopolitical commentary in the middle of an otherwise silly (and
hilarious) movie. At an imaginary meeting of the world’s most notorious
dictators, thugs, and extremists in Beirut, the lookalike suggests that he’s
running a long con on the West:
Gaddafi: Nonsense! The solution is
not bold enough for Libya. I say, wipe out Washington and New York!
Gorbachev: What? And spoil three
years of good public relations? I have the Americans believing I am a nice guy!
In some of their polls, I am more popular than their president!
I suspect that the Zucker brothers — descendants
of Russian Jewish immigrants — were not going to forget that even a
nice and polite head of the Soviet Union was still a Soviet leader.
So, why is Gorbachev a great man by Soviet standards?
Because for two generations, every Soviet leader who faced an uprising
suppressed it with brutal violence. Gorbachev wasn’t going to do that; his
country and his people had suffered enough. He knew when to give up the ship,
or more specifically, when the ship wasn’t worth saving.
Well, that, and the Pizza
Hut commercial.
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