Musings on Biden and METOO
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“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time. But nobody fails to understand that this is like jumping into a cauldron.”
-Joe Biden, 2018
It is a truth rarely acknowledged that mass protest movements, driven by raw emotion, rarely achieve much (at least within a short space of time). They tend to be victims of their own success, growing too fast to establish a proper internal structure before fractures within the movement start tearing it apart. Movements like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March and #METOO started well, offering the promise of real change and better lives for all, before they ran afoul of their own contradictions.
These problems tend to manifest in a number of different ways. Infighting within the group, often over focus or politics, can shatter the movement into a number of different factions. Individual members can sell out, either through a desire to monetise their experience or a honest belief that a diluted version of the cause will appeal to more people. Political battles, particularly when they intersect with the cause, can threaten it’s integrity. And, worst of all, the cause’s excesses can and do power a reactionary movement that is unwilling or unable – for fear of creating conceptual superweapons (here and here) that can be used against them – to acknowledge that the original cause was valid. In a sense, the activists drive their movement onto the rocks because they want whatever they want NOW.
People have a right to be angry. But people who allow their anger to override their common sense can be very dangerous.
This is a key part of human – and mob – psychology. Anger is a good servant, but a dangerous master. A person who is angry may calm down and start thinking calmly again; an angry mob will keep the anger going until they’re trapped in a vicious circle. Those who try to talk their fellows into calming down and thinking will be seen as traitors. Humans do not react well to being betrayed. Mobs can turn on someone they think betrayed them with terrifying speed. They can also go too far very quickly. Think how easy it is to have a very bad day, then ruin your relationship with your partner/siblings/parents/children with a single anger-driven act. Now scale it up by several orders of magnitude and you see the problem with mob rule. Activist groups have only a limited amount of goodwill from outsiders. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
METOO started well. There was little doubt Weinstein deserved to be called out. His behaviour was an open secret for years. It also exposed how the media could be manipulated to keep his victims from telling their stories and how many abusers had ties to prominent politicians, including – most strikingly – Hillary Clinton. Weinstein’s fall led to others, exposing people who ranged from being abusive and exploitive to people who showed terminally poor judgement. It looked as if things would change for good.
However, the rot had already started to take root. There was little coherence in how accusations were made, no standards for what constituted abuse, no patience for the legal system’s show movement and, most importantly of all, no way to curb the excesses of the movement. The willingness to uphold trial by mob, for example, ensured that people who felt the victims had been denied a fair trial would turn against the movement. The failure to define abuse ensured that male workers would edge away from their female co-workers, denying women the chance for mentorships, networking and everything else they’d need to reach the very highest levels. And this was impossible to stop. If there is no solid definition of bad behaviour, the safest thing to do is keep your distance.
As Nelson Mandela understood – and so few others have grasped, before or since – it is important to create a world everyone can live with. METOO had a good chance to dictate terms of surrender. It wouldn’t have been perfect, but it would have been progress. It failed to take the chance before it was too late.
This came to a head during the Kavanaugh Hearings. The first accusation levelled against Brett Kavanaugh was inherently impossible to prove. If one goes by the standard of ‘Believe All Women,’ then Kavanaugh should have been hounded out of public life; if one goes by the standard of ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ then Kavanaugh should have been assumed to be innocent until proof surfaced. The political storm surrounding the hearings ensured they became political. In the absence of proof, there was no perfect solution. METOO started to be seen as – accurately or not – a weapon to be deployed against the GOP.
This might not have proven fatal, if METOO had acknowledged the problem. It might have seemed absurd to argue that METOO should try to go after a balanced ticket of Democrats as well as Republicans, but it would have gone a long way towards ensuring a certain degree of bipartisan support. And there was a very big – and obvious – target, Bill and Hillary Clinton. There has not yet been any serious accounting for Bill’s actions while in office, nor Hillary’s role in covering them up (and the money she took from Weinstein). This is something that should have been done a long time ago. Indeed, hard questions should be asked about how much Obama knew when he allowed his daughter to intern for Weinstein. Was the Secret Service asleep at the switch? But this opportunity was lost.
And now, we have the charges levelled against Joe Biden.
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Like Kavanaugh, it is impossible to prove the charges. Biden has the presumption of innocence. That said, there are circumstantial reasons to suspect there may be some meat to them. It was never established that Kavanaugh and Christine Ford actually met; Tara Reade worked for Biden during the time of the alleged assault. There’s no evidence that Ford told anyone of the assault at the time; there’s some evidence that Tara Reade did. Kavanaugh has no history of inappropriate behaviour during his career; Biden has an endless series of photos showing him engaging in just that. In short, there’s good reason to suspect there’s some truth to the story.
But you wouldn’t know it from the (lack of) reaction.
The left has done its best to bury the story (although some left-wingers are starting to break ranks.) There has been no call for a full investigation, for automatically giving Tara Reade the credence given to Christine Ford. METOO appears to have adopted the mantra of ‘believe all women, unless it is politically inconvenient.’ At the very least, the scrutiny that was aimed at Kavanaugh should be aimed at Biden. It would have suggested, very strongly, that METOO was a politically-neutral movement. Instead, we have a fracturing movement that can no longer claim the moral high ground. I’ve heard right-wingers openly gloating about how the affair exposes hypocrisy and double standards – and how they’re going to teach the left a lesson by using their weapon – impossible to prove accusations – to crush Joe Biden.
Civilisation depends on a shared understanding and application of the law. If [X] is unacceptable when Bob does it, it’s equally unacceptable when Alice does it. Double standards – “do as I say, not as I do” – are maddening even when there’s a good reason behind them. There isn’t one here. If you burn down all standards of common decency – and weaken the rule of law – what are you going to do when someone does it back to you? Why should they not? You did it to them first.
The blunt truth is that due process exists for a reasoning. The wheels of civilised justice grind very slowly, but they grind very fine indeed. This isn’t satisfactory for the angry people who want whatever they want now, yet it is the only way to ensure proper punishment and lasting change. In a bid to embarrass and weaken President Trump, METOO has become a political football, a weapon that can cut both ways …
… And now, as Joe Biden has come to discover, it has.
I don’t know if there’s truth in the accusations levelled against Biden. But we live in a world where increasingly fewer people, right and left alike, care.
