OPINION | Joe Biden, the minority president

Editor’s note: Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor. His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America. Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International. The opinions expressed here are solely his.

(CNN Spanish) – The minorities, added together, contribute to create majorities. I read that Joe Biden, the president of the United States, has nominated the same number of judges belonging to minorities in four months as those confirmed in the four years of Donald Trump’s term. Magnificent. This is perfectly consistent with your current convictions. Eleven of the 19 candidates are minority women, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is black, Harvard graduate and raised in Miami. She possesses splendid academic credentials that one day, I hope, will elevate her to the Supreme Court. For now, it was confirmed for the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, something considered an honor for any judge.

Simultaneously, Biden has nominated a Cuban-born person for secretary of the US Navy. Carlos del Toro, trained at the Annapolis Naval Academy, where he graduated as an electrical engineer. He was the first commander of the destroyer USS Bulkeley and studied military strategy at George Washington University. He joins Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of National Security, also Cuban by origin, lawyer, graduated from Loyola Law School, who is in charge of almost a quarter of a million employees in that department. In his case, two minorities are united: that of Cuban and that of Jew, since his mother – Romanian by origin – came to Cuba fleeing the Holocaust and arrived in the United States many years later, escaping communism.

For Biden it is very clear that belonging to a minority is not enough. You have to have impeccable credentials to do a good job. Unfortunately, in the United States the lack of collaboration between the two great parties has increased, and many of the best officials who should have been authorized by Congress to work in the public sector did not receive the endorsement of Republicans or Democrats, despite the quality of their resumes.

Perhaps that trend is disappearing during the Biden administration as a consequence, precisely, of the rejection that Donald Trump has unleashed in multiple Republican leaders, among which George W. and Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and John Kasich, former governor of Ohio stand out. They are joined by several dozen strategists and members of the intelligence community who signed a public letter of repudiation of Trump and of support for Hillary Clinton, shortly before the 2016 elections.

In any case, it seems that Joe Biden is very committed to the diversity that he has observed in the United States since he was elected senator from Delaware in the Congress of the country, when he was just 29 years old (he is 78 and has been in public life 49). In his long experience, he has seen how the Democratic Party has been transformed and has added black voters to its ranks, and large numbers of the descendants of the diverse groups that exist in the country: Jews, Indians, Pakistanis, the The Japanese, the Chinese, and, of course, the so-called “Hispanics”, who – roughly -, from highest to lowest percentage, are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, among others.

But diversity does not end with ethnicity, language and religion. The fact of living in the middle of crowds, as happens in big cities, versus the quasi solitude that rural areas provide, prints character. It is not the same, nor does it vote the same, in London, the capital of England, than in the suburbs or in towns away from the hustle and bustle. The extraordinary thing about democracy is that it can harmonize the wills behind an arithmetic rule that does not guarantee that the most talented, or those who are right, since these are confusing categories, rule, but rather those with the most votes. An unappealable question.

Sexual diversity is also important. There are much more tolerant parties and the Democrat has become one of them. Today, it is light years away from that nineteenth century and even the twentieth, because the debate has shifted to the definition of sex and gender. Far away are the mockery of Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, President James Buchanan (she called him Miss Nancy), or the gossip about the relationship of Abraham Lincoln, founder of the Republican Party, with Joshua Speed ​​(they shared a bed for a few years). Some historians point out that it was common and accepted for heterosexual men to share beds in the 19th century, for the price of mattresses. Talking about it is in bad taste for me.