Lockdown Update Day 160

[elisi]

First an article from just a couple of days ago:

Vox: The kindness is the point
The DNC’s best argument in the time of coronavirus: Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, is a decent man.

This sort of ties with something I've been meaning to post for a while. Thanks to a now-forgotten recommendation I listened to one of Ezra Klein's podcasts, 'Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful'. (Follow link & scroll down.) Can't remember exactly when it's from and I can't find a date, but I'd say... June?

It's all chewy & interesting, but this is the part that really struck me so I transcribed it (bit long, so put it under a cut):

Ezra Klein: There is a real way in which.. Joe Biden makes me hopeful about this? Joe Biden is weird, he’s like… the control group of american politics? He’s been in it so long, and he’s kinda always been in the centre of his party-

Ta-Nehisi Coates (laughs): Yeah, he’s right at the centre of every issue.

Ezra Klein: Exactly. Everything. And so looking at the way he’s changed, you can see the way politics around him is changing, like that conversation we were having earlier about… there’s work being done, like inside the 'pass the bill' like Biden, he’s always right there in the centre of the 'pass the bill', and then he’s also slowly reacting to what’s happening outside, right, whereas the culture - and people are making this point, The New York Times had a good piece on this, that if you looked at his first video about the George Floyd killing and the protestors that had turned violent, it just didn’t have any of the ‘on the one hand on the other hand’, like you know, the ‘order is important but so is the-’ like - it was just straightforward, right like: there has been a murder committed by police. And that is the cause of this. Like, even more so than the way Obama would talk about things like this a couple of years back. And if you look at Biden’s - even just his platform now, his policies, like, this guy was a partial author of the crime bill… and like, the crime bill was - like Bernie Sanders voted for the crime bill, that was a consensus document in American politics. And like now, the whole thing is moving away from it. Including Joe Biden. So this is when you really see in him - yeah, something is changing. And this is another reason why people are like, yeah.

[...]

Ezra Klein: I have not been feeling super optimistic lately about… life, but in terms of the election something that I think is interesting about him, and maybe is a good match for this moment, is here you have a candidate who I think to a lot of people, compared to Donald Trump - and really compared to the other folks in the democratic field - he is going to represent a kind of calm stability, familiarity and continuity, and he’s going to marry that with also being the candidate who also believes that the path to that is more humane approaches to policing, is racial justice, is taking hopefully structural inequality seriously, when you listen to the speeches he is giving right now, you know they’re… much more progressive on these things than democrats have ever really been before. Like ever. And yet he’s the old white guy who’s been in politics forever. And it’s not a good thing that those two things need to be married together, like it’s not a good thing that Joe Biden has so much more running room than in what he can say than what Cory Booker does, like it really isn’t — but, in this moment, the fact that the person who believes that there should be justice here, is also the person that people associate maybe with calm, I think is a good thing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Yeah. I don’t really know how this plays out, you know, but I think we are very much in an unprecedented moment. And I think, you know, direct analogues to other periods don’t quite work — the democratic party is so different, demographically, than it was even 25 years ago.

And this seemed like a suitable art work for this post:

Revisiting The Work Of Sonya Clark: Unraveling The Confederate Flag (x). The work is from 2016 and you can read about it here.