How Joe Biden Is Like Toilet Paper

Panic-buying behavior, witnessed in March of 2020

In 2020, Americans got an education in what “panic buying” means. Previously, we’ve witnessed panic buying on regional levels, usually before a natural disaster like winter storms or hurricanes. People rush suppliers to stockpile whatever resources will become necessary in a worst-case scenario. This year, we witnessed the entire country persuaded they needed to stockpile scarce resources (which weren’t actually scarce), most famously toilet paper and eggs.

The nature of panic buying means, you don’t actually believe we’ll run out of important resources. Rather, you believe other people believe we’ll run out. You don’t intend to beat the depletion, you intend to beat the crowds. Much like fad-driven Christmas shopping, when people hoard Cabbage Patch Kids or Furbies because they appear scarce, panic buying creates artificial demand for ordinary, banal resources based on expectations of crowd behavior.

We’ve witnessed, this year, a core distrust of fellow Americans on an historic scale. We apparently believe others will hoard, and implicitly squander, cheap and plentiful toilet paper, while we’re reduced to wondering how soft a puppy feels. I remember friends on social media sneering, during the Toilet Paper Hysteria of 2020, that Americans must be stupid. But that’s projecting; Americans are actually fundamentally distrustful.

Watching the nascent Joe Biden presidential administration unfold, I feel the dull ache of familiarity. Just as Biden’s left-wing critics anticipated, he’s come under fire for nominating future department heads and Cabinet secretaries with close ties to the businesses they’re meant to regulate. This basically repeats the criticism many leftists made of the outgoing administration, that it’s laden with patronage plums for defenders of the status quo.

President-Elect Joe Biden

This probably shouldn’t surprise anybody. Even before the election, the former Senator and Vice President accrued criticism for his policy record, which has involved structural racism, to say nothing of his frequently hands-on approach to women. Biden has signaled a progressive approach to race and sex issues, like an all-female communications staff, and the first Black CIA director. But on economics, where street-level policy happens, Biden is decidedly conservative.

America, broadly speaking, isn’t nearly as conservative as frequently reported. Recent opinion polls reveal frequent left-leaning tendencies in American belief, and by wide margins. 63% of Americans favor universal health coverage. 72% and growing favor increasing the minimum wage. 60% favor keeping abortion legal. Under ordinary circumstances, fifty-five percent is considered a mandate. So clearly the American mandate leans heavily leftist, by conventional numbers.

In the 2020 Democratic primaries, famously flooded with highly qualified candidates, we had two candidates who solidly sided with these majority opinions: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Admittedly, Sanders has accrued a cult of personality which makes my skin crawl; I caucused for him in 2016, but by 2020, he’d become a caricature. But what about Senator Warren? Popular, telegenic, and consonant with American opinion...why didn’t she win?

If one word dominated the last two Democratic primaries, it was “electable.” Democrats believe that popular support lies somewhere between their voting base of civil rights marchers and union members, and whoever occupies the organized right. Republicans have no such belief. Therefore Democrats keep nominating “centrists” who land further right than the electoral mean, while Republicans become increasingly rock-ribbed and doctrinaire, nominating zealots like the last two Republican presidents.

Democrats’ tendency to skew conservative, hoping they’ll tempt the occasional Republican across the aisle, precisely mimics the mentality of panic-buying toilet paper. We don’t think Americans overall want economic policies generally friendly to the corporations who created our current mess, but we believe we’ll alienate Republicans if we change anything substantive. The very fact that Republicans got almost the same percentage of the vote again, proves this is just untrue.

Republicans respond to America’s changing ideological and demographic trends, by becoming more extreme and uncompromising. Sure, they look out-of-touch on individual issues. But taken together, they appear to have principles, and to trust America overall. They don’t begin the negotiation process by promising to fritter their core beliefs away. Maybe they don’t reflect American beliefs broadly, but at least they have beliefs. They aren’t panicking over the goddamn toilet paper.

Joe Biden promises to improve circumstances for Americans in notional ways. He’ll increase rights protections for minorities, for instance. But he’s basically pledged to do as little as possible to arrest climate change, stop economic resource hoarding, or fix the roots of poverty. All for fear of alienating conservative who’ll never support him anyway. He basically distrusts Americans to support policies they believe in. He’s basically panicking over toilet paper.