Biden's going to blow this thing
Running against the most unpopular incumbent president in modern-- if not all of American-- history, Joe Biden's polling lead is slipping. It was only four short autumns ago that Senator Chuck Schumer told us, in reference to the previous “most electable” Democrat chosen by coronation, that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Translation: the message of populism and working class issues belong to Donald Trump. As Democrats, we’re going after well-off Republicans.Those suburban Republicans didn’t show up for Hillary Clinton, and political hatchet man Rahm Emmanuel’s prediction that 2020 would be “the year of the Biden Republican” is also in the process of going up in smoke. But not for lack of effort. After insiders pilloried Bernie Sanders for months on end for not being a Democrat, the party convention in August featured a couple hours of current and former Republicans-- John Kasich, Christine Todd Whitman, Michael Bloomberg, Colin Powell, a video tribute to the late John McCain, etc.-- and only sixty seconds of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What Biden has to show for all of it, according to a recent CBS/YouGov Poll, is the support of 5% of self-identified Republicans. And I don't have to tell you that five is one of the lowest numbers there is.
Democrats aren’t even pretending anymore. All they can offer working people is symbolism. The people are in the streets demanding an end to police violence. So Biden gives them a traced copy of the same 1994 crime bill he wrote, the one that has led to mandatory and racially-disproportionate sentencing and hyper-militarized policing. He offers his base a former tough-on-crime state prosecutor as his VP pick, pledges more police on the street, and lectures protesters that “rioting is not protesting, looting is not protesting.” Medicaid expansion is possibly the most popular political issue in the country so the Democrats give them, front and center, Andrew Cuomo, who has slashed Medicaid in New York while simultaneously delivering austerity budgets and massive tax cuts for the super wealthy-- and Biden, of course, who entirely rejects Medicare for All, even though its 69% support among registered voters was its highest ever in April, according to a Hill/HarrisX poll. The West is ablaze with multiple climate change fires and Biden has used the moment to declare he won’t ban fracking. Insiders, lobbyists, and careerists, that's the party. Would-be-Democrat Republican voters, we're led to believe, are starved for this.
The “enthusiasm” gap between Trump and Biden is alarming. According to Fox News, a respectable outfit when it comes to polling, 59% of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their choice, compared with only 43% of Biden voters. That gap is even wider than the one between Trump and Clinton (44 to 35%) at this same point in the cycle in 2016. Trump may have refined his base (We’ll have fewer but better Trumpers, to paraphrase Garbo in 1939's Ninotchka), but this is still terrifying data when even a close finish will embolden Trump to claim outright victory.
You can’t have both. Biden and his handlers (and presumably his nurses) have decided to try to motivate a few Republican swing voters (how big is the Kasich coalition anyway?) rather than to energize an exponentially-larger progressive base. At the same time, we get contradictory speeches from Barack and Michelle trumpeting the importance of voter “turnout.” We still hear dishonest homilies-- from those that have stacked the primary deck-- about the danger of “theoretical purity." These are people that don't understand, or at least acknowledge, the political difference between compromise and being compromised. Shame voting, it’s called, and, as a motivator, it works about as well as the Clinton strategy to label all of the opponents to your right “racist” and all the opponents to the left “sexist.”
Biden won’t lose because of “purists.” If he loses, it will be because people don’t see the difference between the two major party candidates in their lives. And yes, that’s true unfortunately even in the age of Trump. It’s not as if the president is popular with voters. We acknowledge the wisdom of voters when it comes to giving him low approval ratings. Yet we insult their collective intelligence for not going to the polls. Why should they? Because Biden will stop police from shooting Black kids? Or will spend one iota of effort to overhaul community policing in this country? Can he really be trusted to undo the crimes of Trump? To rein in Homeland Security as a military apparatus and its present status as an instrument of terrorism? Will the nation's postal service be reinforced? Will pandemic rules become a federalist issue? Will we be free of "illegal" international influence on our elections? Will manufacturing jobs return? Will the minimum wage be increased? Will bombs stop dropping?
The only thing that swings an election anymore is the level of turnout by the sizable group of Americans that don’t acknowledge political ideology at all. Only 47% of Black Americans under 30 years old, for example, say they will vote for Biden. Is he speaking to them? If he is, he's not making it so that I can hear it. A Black president barely improved their lives, but somehow Biden’s going to do it?
To hear the party tell it at their convention, this election is about Republicans. Black America is, as always, treated as a monolithic group loyal to Democrats. It was bad enough when the politicians didn't deliver on promises. Now they don't even bother with the promises. The message is just pure fear. In fact, Biden is hardly campaigning at all except to tell us who he's not. Non-Black Americans under 30 don’t poll much differently. If there’s a difference between the two groups, it’s only that Black Americans are more honest about their intention not to vote. You endorse and partner with Republicans to construct an economic system in which the three richest Americans have as much money between them as the bottom 50% of us, and then you expect your young people to have even enough human empathy for immigrant women in a concentration camp being subjected to involuntary hysterectomies. That's neglecting to sow the field. I don’t dare speak for Black America or the youth of America, but I will say that at least Republicans don’t do them the disservice of expecting their vote.
People have lost faith in the establishment and the government and this fact is somehow the people's fault. The irony is that the major weapon of the elite, the Electoral College, allowed Trump in and now "populism," which is really just the will of the people, is the largest existential threat to the power of the elite, to the think tanks and academic conferences, to society's winners really. It was the Populists in the 1800's that put up the first formidable challenge to the capitalist system. Not unlike today they were ordinary Americans-- from across the political spectrum-- that were standing up to the banks and to an economic system with no morality. Run from us at your own peril.
There are only four possible outcomes to this presidential election: Trump wins behind a public legitimacy, Trump wins without it and is doubted or marginalized, Biden the same two. We can argue about which of the outcomes are probable and which are not, but democratic socialists and anarchists and radical populists need to prepare for each of the four. None of these preparations should involve shouldering the rotting hulk of the Democratic Party other than some continued attempts to overtake it. We’re about to see the limits of American-style democracy through the prism of the electoral process. The worst outcome, no doubt, is Trump winning with a public legitimacy, which will force us all to ponder ourselves living under a more distinctly fascist government, but as in 2016, remember that Trump’s unpopular, uninspired opponent does not represent the majority, only the pigeonholed “safe” choice selected by a controlling political elite. The energy was there to win it all-- before the flame was inadvisably snuffed out in March. Victory against Trump and Trumpism was for the taking. The movement was only temporarily railroaded and it takes ever more muscle to overcome a railroading. It requires giving the deplorables authentic choices.
If Biden wins in either of his scenarios, the long, brutal fight against a new, deeply-flawed incumbent commences. If Trump wins in either scenario, even if this more direct fascism is empowered, recall the words of Chris Hedges, who has said: We don’t fight fascists because we will win. We fight them because they are fascists. Trump's been allowed to run roughshod over our Constitution and there's been no meaningful opposition to it but to wait for November 3rd and helplessly pray for an outcome that's not at all certain. That delay itself has been an abdication when blood is in the process of being spilled. In full certainty, Election Day will be much more of a beginning than an end.
posted by CM @ 7:00 PM
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