Why Biden and the Democrats won't get my vote
I attended a Black Lives Matter rally on Saturday. It was a march from the state capitol building to and from the Des Moines police station, followed by a collection of planned speakers. The weather was cooler than in summer, and the numbers were definitely down from the protest population peaks of three and four months ago. One of the speaking presentations has stayed with me. She began with a pronouncement that the gathering of people, speaking for us, had not come out into the street to ask for justice. They were not asking for it, that is, they were demanding. Then she spoke for five or ten minutes about the importance of voting and while doing so listed no demands.I don’t mean to pick on this person, who is more vulnerable in society than me, is spending her Saturday marching for her very life on the streets of the city, and who no doubt balances her activism with another full-time job, but what exactly are we doing out here? If it’s about voting, who am I voting for? What am I demanding? Who’s got what we need? And if they don’t surrender it to us, what will we do? If she had been more specific about her ballot choices, I suspect I would have failed to see the connection between what she was demanding and how we hoped to get to it, as both “viable” political parties have been long times in power without any noticeable improvement in the areas she laid out as her concern. And is this disconnect part of why protest crowds are getting smaller? We only need to go back as far as the 2003 anti-war street movement and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement to see what happens when a true populist movement meets an American quadrennial election and the movement gets turned over to the Democratic Party, the graveyard of progressive action.
The problem with reaching me as a voter through this message of “this is the most important election of your lifetime” is that I’m old enough now for this to be the fifth presidential cycle in a row in which I’ve been delivered that same message. Primal fear of the other candidate is getting to be old hat. Shaming voters who are outside the two party structure into becoming an increasingly smaller group unto themselves hasn’t done much in the real world to remove this existential threat to my life and liberty. If it had, the message would be changing. The two presidential choices we get every four years aren’t getting any better, I know that much for sure. At the end of each cycle, we’re still just voting between a pair of gangsters, racketeers for big business, big banks, and military industry.
Trump is definitely an environmental threat. So is Biden. On the left, we all agree there is a climate emergency. The emergency is now literally a fire. Several gargantuan forest fires. But the Democrat tells everyone that will listen that he’s for fracking. He wants you to know that his opponent’s campaign is lying when it claims he will end the practice of hydraulic fracturing. (Aside: If Trump was planning to run against Bernie Sanders the entire time, why didn’t we just give him Bernie Sanders?) That’s Biden’s economic message meant in particular for the all-important people of swing state Pennsylvania-- the people that have also been hurt the most in their lives by dirty energy. Biden has made his position very clear on this. He’s only against new fracking permits, and only when they’re on federal land. It goes without saying that he’s against the Green New Deal, but progressives otherwise claim that this climate crisis is an emergency. Is it or isn’t it? Biden’s environmental policy is the equivalent of trying to put out the wildfires with a Big Gulp.
Trump is also a threat on the pandemic. So is Biden. Covid-19 swept in and killed 200,000 Americans so far, along with our collective sense of self-sacrifice, our patriotism, and our humanity. But on a positive note, it also obliterated the intellectual honesty of our long-running economic philosophy debate. There is no marketplace anymore, no Obamacare, no pre-existing conditions, no competing drug prices. There is only Medicare for All. It’s not business vs. public health, not the elderly vs. the young. It’s socialism vs. extinction. That’s the debate. We have money for months in the treasury to help working people financially through a pandemic if we prioritize that money, which neither party has any interest in doing. What does it say that they still don’t get it-- even when faced with a global-scale catastrophe that’s been made exponentially worse by the old system and the old mindset-- and then even when the socialized solution to the problem has the polls on its side? They can’t listen, or they won’t listen. Democrats only describe symptoms but refuse to properly diagnose the disease. Republicans defend the disease outright. The former is at least better in theory, but it makes no difference when there’s no treatment being applied in either case.
Don’t talk to me about compromise. Aside from the fact that Democrats can’t understand the difference between “compromise” and “being compromised”, there actually was a compromise. Bernie was the compromise. You told the Naderites and the anti-imperialists not to run outside the system so Bernie didn’t. He ran inside the party and the DNC and the wielders of institutional power squashed him. Twice. He’s not a real Democrat, now they say. So what are they really saying to us when they eliminate both options? They're saying shut up. So I say to them, no, you shut up. You rigged the game in 2016, as Julian Assange and WikiLeaks revealed. Then you suppressed the loudest voices again this year and made your gamble. You made your decision to lose me and others when you decided, despite the evidence of the rallies, that there were too few of us and too many angry Republicans to be alternately and possibly persuaded, and that those of us on the weak side, without any other option, would see only orange and vote one more time for the best we think we can do. We’re a battered spouse.
I roll my eyes at charges of election malfeasance leveled against Trump and Republicans. This from a Democratic Party that does everything in its considerable power to keep third party choices off the ballot. What hypocrisy to draw up one-party congressional districts, to put unreasonable requirements on state ballot access, to engage in backroom dark arts, to partner with Republicans on a “bipartisan commission” designed to keep third party candidates off the debate stage, and then have the audacity to come out and issue a claim against Republicans of unfair tactics. Takes one to know one. This year those charges come in the immediate aftermath of the latest criminal example of American Intelligence and American weapons toppling a democratically-elected president in Latin America, Evo Morales of Bolivia, lying about it, and neither party in the American oligarchy making even a peep about it. (But huzzah! Morales’ party was returned to power by Bolivian voters in overwhelming fashion this week after only one year.)
Our third party candidates are called traitors. Or we’re dupes. (You can actually judge the effectiveness of the resistance by the fury of the response.) If we’re really in a #resistance, as we’re told we are, and I agree, voting for the “least worst” doesn’t translate to me as engaging in the #resistance. It feels like capitulation in my gut to give them the only thing they want from me while I’m being offered nothing. When Sanders conceded, what did we get in return? I missed it if it was anything at all. Since when is that how politics is supposed to work? The bigger the threat Trump becomes, the less of a voice we seem to have in the resistance. The more we're told to trust the people that picked Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
All we hear from Biden, as if in a drumbeat, is that he’s against Medicare for All and in favor of fracking. According to The Nation, support among Democrats for a ban on fracking has dropped from 65% to 49% since before the two presidential debates. Biden also voted for the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, and was complicit in Obama’s violent foreign policy. The Obama administration pretty decisively killed more people than the Trump one has, and deported more people besides. Biden’s not remotely progressive. Trump is a white nationalist, but Biden supported segregation and didn’t want his kids “growing up in a racial jungle.” He eulogized Strom Thurmond and authored the 1994 crime bill. Both candidates have been credibly accused of sexual assault and both their families have tried to game the system. It’s a truly ugly choice. Bernie must be trying to avoid, as they all seemingly must, the Nader punishment-- the financial starving of his movement, the doors closed in his face. But Bernie’s endorsement of and subsequent campaigning for Clinton in 2016 still wasn’t enough for many Democrats not to pin the blame for the defeat of their historically-unpopular nominee somehow on him.
Tribalistic Red vs. Blue is the only weapon they wield. More important to remember from back in March, other than Sanders’ fulfilled vow to support whomever the nominee would be, is what Biden’s campaign said vaguely, in a moment of humility, about the importance of outreach to Sanders voters, explicitly to young people, who backed Bernie by a 4 to 1 margin. Now try to think of an example-- any example-- of how they have done that in the subsequent seven months.
The practice of strategic voting only serves to suppress real alternatives. It’s an insincere ballot. I have no way of adding a comment to my ballot telling Biden that my hypothetical vote for him is a protest one against Trump, rather than an endorsement of him and his Washington/Kiev swamp rat political policies. He’s going to treat it as a mandate for his agenda either way. Nor would he care anyway which of the two reasons it was since he’s making off with the only thing from me he will ever need. Do we think a defeat of Trump in 2020 will lead to a leftward shift in American politics? After the cathartic moment of his drubbing, what’s next? Are the Republicans, tails between their legs, going to go back to Mitt Romney as their candidate in 2024? Don’t put your money on it. It will be another Trump in four years, regardless of this year’s outcome, more dangerous, someone who can galvanize the Trump base but with a more polished personality and slicker skills of thievery. They’ve learned a lot, and they’ll come armed with less baggage. And the left will be moving, as it has since Reagan’s first inauguration, ever more rightward to combat the radicalism on the other side that has no counterbalance. Republican voters make demands. Democrats are afraid to. Both goalposts always shifting right. They win. We lose. Again. And again. And we’ll all be forced to contend with 2024 as the most important presidential election of our lifetime.
I made a deal with Democrats in January that I’m pretty sure I posted here and I know I repeated to all of them who asked. I’m sticking to it: You nominate Bernie (or anti-imperialist Tulsi Gabbard) and you’ve got my vote in November. You nominate someone representing the dying empire state, and you don’t. My ballot will be sincere, as always. The other promise I’ve made to all publicly-elected officials that I think is also infinitely fair to both of us is that you don’t lie to me and I won’t lie to you. My ballot will not be a lie. Sadly, I simply do not have a candidate in this race. I’m very glad that, after so many years of bipartisan endless war, bipartisan crimes of toppling foreign governments, torture, extrajudicial murder by Democratic presidents against black and brown and United States citizens abroad, murder by police, a war on the War on Poverty, and the overall cheapening of human life, so many liberals have finally located the basement of their moral tolerance in the person of Donald Trump. Some of us had already found ours.
posted by CM @ 1:10 PM
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