why anyone opposing further wealth concentration in the US (to pick just one worthy cause) should not vote for Biden (abridged quote):
Jim Kavanagh wrote:Here we go again. Now that Bernie Sanders has completed his predictable circuit of loss and capitulation, leftists—those who stand for socialist and anti-imperialist, or even serious social-democratic and antiwar, politics—again confront the quadrennial quandary: Must one vote for the thoroughly neo-liberal and imperialist Democratic presidential nominee? Not just because Bernie—and, more importantly, Bernie’s agenda—is out of the picture, but because of the way he was taken out of the picture by the Democrats, the situation of extraordinary crisis in which it happened, and the horrible-on-every-level leading man the party settled on, 2020 has given us a gloriously clear version of a Hobson’s choice. I won’t be voting for Joe Biden. Here’s why, and here’s what I make of the arguments why I should vote Biden no matter what, a corollary of Vote Blue No Matter Who (VBNMW).
The basis of the VBNMW argument is that there is a decisive, dispositive, ethico-political difference in kind between the Democratic and Republican parties. In this line of thinking, the Democratic Party as an institution, and/or its nominee personally is, or wants to be, a force for progressive change on behalf of working people, and the Republican Party is the primary institution obstructing such change.
2020 has certainly left that argument in tatters.
We all know now what the Republican Party stands for. Its purpose is to advance the interests of capital against the interests of the working class. ... And the Democratic Party? Does it, in contrast, advance the interests of working people against the predations of capital? This pretense has been barely breathing since the last crisis, when the Democratic tribune of the working middle-class, Barack Obama, bailed out the banks, allowed the 1% to soak up most of the wealth, and left the working class to rot in the social devastation of the cool new gig economy. Even the supposedly not “working-“ but “middle-”class is now driving from their six-figure debt palaces in their five-figure debt chariots to queue up for bags of “welfare” food.
In that context, this primary season, the party... launched a full-spectrum offensive against the softest of social-democratic campaigns, led by Bernie Sanders. With its coronation of Joe Biden as its nominee, and Bernie’s own always-already given capitulation, the party has dispelled any lingering aroma of an FDR-style soft welfare-state legacy that it had long-since snuffed out. The Democratic Party has again—and finally, I hope—revealed itself to be an intractable enemy of the working class, the main obstacle of any serious program of the left, and a dedicated tool of the dictatorship of the ruling class.
Yes, the main obstacle. Given the demographics and the state of the social economy, the Republican Party... could not stop any social-democratic policy that a real opposition party and press representing working people’s interests wanted to enact. Those policies are not stopped by the opposition of the Republican Party. They are stopped by the opposition within the Democratic Party, which takes them in its false embrace, to co-opt and kill them. As it just did with Medicare-for-All.
Really, register this: The principal immediate goal of the Democratic Party in this primary (and when I say “Democratic Party” I always include “its allied media”), in the midst of a pandemic, was to kill single-payer healthcare, the most basically humanistic and politically advantageous social policy—indeed, as the present pandemic makes clear, the most obvious social necessity—one can imagine. The Party strangled it, and smothered any other such initiative, by coalescing around Joe Biden, who has vowed to veto Medicare-for-All even if it passes congress, has long sought to cut Social Security, and promises his billionaire donors that, if he’s elected, “nothing will fundamentally change.” No Republicans necessary.
We won’t even mention the principled difference between the two parties regarding U.S. imperialism (or whatever else you want to call it: militarism, American exceptionalism, regime-change wars, “foreign policy”), because nobody even pretends anymore that there is one. Furthermore, there is no longer the facade of personal charisma that distinguished Obama, and identity correctness that distinguished him and Hillary from Republican opponents, and inspired a lot of energetic support among Democratic constituencies. Joe Biden is arguably at least as much of a racist, sexist, liar, and war-monger, and more incoherent and cognitively impaired than Donald Trump.
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So, 2020 has shown clearly that there is no affirmative case for Joe Biden or the Democratic Party. There is, at best, a case for sympathizing with the sincere left-progressive actors—many of whom understand all this, and themselves feel trapped within and fighting against it, because they are afraid to leave. Indeed, the best—at least most honest—arguments are from those who acknowledge how horrible—not trivially “problematic,” but unequivocally horrible from a left perspective the Democrats and their candidates are. A couple of very clear versions of that position can be found in articles from Daniel Ellsberg and my friend Tom Gallagher. Ellsberg put it perfectly:
“”Supporting Biden? Me?!
“I lose no opportunity publicly… to identify Biden as a tool of Wall Street, .. someone who’s launched an unconstitutional war… “Would you call that support?“…
“I don’t ‘support Biden.’ I oppose the current Republican Party.”
And my friend Tom Gallagher wrote a forthrightly-titled article: “Vote for the War Criminal – It’s Important!” He acknowledges that it’s “fair” to say their “military policies would ultimately turn out to be essentially the same,” and asks, pointedly: “So if we were to consider Biden as he really is, that is, among other things, a war criminal, how can we even vote for him, much less argue that it’s important to do so?”
For both of them, of course, the answer to that question was that Trump would be worse, at least on domestic policy. As Gallagher says “on domestic policies there are clear opportunities” for making a choice. Per Ellsberg, Trump would be “much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues:…Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment” than Biden. [Ellsberg’s italics]
Oops, those Ellsberg and Gallagher quotes are from articles they wrote in 2012 about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I changed the names to highlight the point: No matter who the candidates of the two parties are, and no matter how bad the Democrat is, the Republican is always “catastrophically worse”—mainly because of alleged differences on domestic policy. And the person insisting on the catastrophic necessity to vote for the acknowledged criminal Democrat always assures us that, as a real critical leftist, s/he will absolutely, positively, pinky swear, continue, as Ellsberg promised, to “lose no opportunity publicly… to identify [Tweedledee Democrat] as a tool of Wall Street,” war criminal, etc.
Maybe you’re thinking, “But Trump! He’s Hitler. I read it in The Nation. And Bernie says he’s ‘the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.’ He’s so much worse than Romney. And so much worser than Biden, than Romney was than Obama.” Really? But wasn’t it easy to think the above quotes were talking about Biden and Trump? Looking back, does anybody think the difference between Obama and Romney—now a “moved to tears” hero of the Democratic #Resistance!—was “catastrophic,” or much of a difference at all? And when did Bush—he of the million-casualty war—get demoted from arguably the most dangerous modern president to Michelle’s and Ellen’s best bud?
Please consider that it’s the same line they trot out every four years, jacked up this year to Hitler level because it’s got to be worse than, and you need to forget, the previous overstatements. The Democrats have spent the last four years focusing all your attention on demonizing Donald Trump as a Nazi-Russian agent, rather than analyzing the structural problems of U.S. capitalism that produced him, precisely in order to get you to accept that line for Election 2020. But this time, like every time before, it really is different? Abusive relationship, anyone?
The two signature Democratic-legacy safety-net programs, Social Security and Medicare? Did I mention Joe Biden? Hasn’t he been bragging about trying to cut them for decades? Didn’t Obama and he try to cut Social Security with their Grand Bargain? What about the devastating priority concern for Americans today, healthcare? Didn’t Obama, with a veto-proof Democratic Congress and Senate, institute Mitt Romney’s plan for that? Didn’t that Obama-Romney plan become, as it was intended to be, an impediment to real single-payer healthcare? Hasn’t Biden promised to continue using it as a blocking substitute for Medicare-for-All?
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And don’t forget, domestic issues only! To browbeat leftists, invoking the specter of Hitler, that it’s “our high moral and political responsibility” to vote for the Democrat, we have to put aside both Joe Biden’s war-mongering history and disposition, and the now-banal observation of such analysts as Ajamu Baraka, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert Parry, that the Democratic Party, which impeached Trump for not sending deadly weapons quickly enough to actual Hitlerite fascists (whom Biden helped bring to power!), is “now the aggressive war party.” That’s excluded from the calculus of our high moral responsibility.
Let’s also consider how honest the I-know-how-bad-he-is pundits can be about their promise never to let up on, “to lose no opportunity” to make their thoroughgoing left critique of the war criminal and Wall Street tool they are insisting we must vote for. Pundits like the old SDS’ers who wrote the appeal in The Nation, and who also “think ‘endorsing’ [their scare quotes] Joe Biden is a step too far,” and just want to “work hard to elect him.”
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From now until November, the must-vote-for-Biden folks are going to have to convince enough of those disillusioned people in enough swing states not to stay home or vote for a third party that really does support their positions on important issues, but to go out and vote for Joe Biden to save us from the fascist apocalypse. In trying to fulfill that moral imperative, will they really “lose no opportunity publicly” to say: “Joe Biden is indeed an imperialist, functionary of finance capital, sexual harasser, compulsive liar, and cognitively challenged.” Or will they take the tack some on the VBNMW “left” took about Obama, telling the “rancid sector of the far left” to “please stop your grousing!” and shut up and vote for Biden?
As it has to be. You can’t really “work hard to elect” Joe Biden and avoid unironically endorsing him. Once you decide you have to choose sides in the two-horse American electoral race, because “the very existence of American democracy is in jeopardy,” you cannot continually acknowledge to enraged Bernie supporters and other leftists what a dog your nag is. If you do, you will not get enough of their votes, you will lose, and American democracy—whatever that is, “You know, the thing”—will come crashing down. To prevent that from happening, your fellow travellers on the Biden bus will discipline you. They will browbeat you to fall back to focusing on the apocalyptic evil of the Republican and to hide or avoid the truth about your terrible-in-his-own-right Democrat, because the truth hurts your cause.
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I do not accept the substitution of unpolitical lesser-evilism with absolute evilism, which is exactly what the invocation of Hitler is. It’s not I who is demanding purity; it’s they who are assuming it.
Particularly annoying is the “If you don’t vote for Biden, you’re voting for Trump” line, which hides a number of logical and ethico-political flaws. Sure, there’s a logic to that in our zero-sum electoral system, where any third possibility is effectively excluded. That logic is also, indisputably, reversible (as Caitlin Johnstone has pointed out in a trenchant way): If not voting for Biden means actually voting for Trump, then not voting for Trump means actually voting for Biden. Either way you put it, it’s just re-stating the obvious: The guy who gets the most votes wins.
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So, The Democratic Party is not a party of the left. The idea that there’s any natural connection between the left and the Democratic Party, or that someone on the left is a Democrat or should be expected to vote for a Democrat, by default is—well, a figment of the MSNBC bubble universe. In any given circumstance, a leftist decides whom to vote for, or whether to participate at all in a corrupt capitalist electoral system, not based on their assumed Democratic identity, but based on an analysis of whether and how it will advance working-class power. A leftist does not betray their position by not voting for or supporting a Democrat; they betray their position by voting for or supporting an enemy of the working class.
As a leftist, I’m pleased to count myself among the majority of voters who are equally independent from, and tendentially dismissive of, both the Democratic and Republican parties, and owe no allegiance or vote to either. And when you tell me Biden will lose if he gets fewer votes than Trump, my response, too, is: “Thanks for spelling that out for me. What else you got?”
There’s another signature rhetorical maneuver of the “If you don’t vote for Biden, you’re voting for Trump” cohort (especially the “even though we all know how bad he is” group) that reprises a classic liberal concern for shedding and assigning guilt in a way that I find particularly deceptive and offensive. I refer to the surreptitious elision of political and moralizing discourses, a perceptible shift from a “political” register when they talk about whom they are voting for, to a “moralizing” register when they talk about whom you are not voting for: “Me, renowned leftist, a Biden supporter? I’m not supporting him (or any of the terrible things I acknowledge he has done and will continue to do), I’m just voting for him. But, you, if you don’t vote for Biden, are complicit in and responsible for all the horrible things the other guy, whom you didn’t vote for, may do.”
It’s an attempt to attenuate their complicity with Biden’s likely terrible policies by describing their act of voting for him in terms of political realism, only then to adopt a moralizing discourse that hangs responsibility for Trump’s possible future actions on voters who did not vote for him. They’re trying to shame people for what they are not voting for, while minimizing responsibility for what they are. Nice try, but you can’t make the indirect, negative choice more moralistically consequent than the direct, positive one. The most direct line of complicity is from the voter to the candidate s/he votes for.
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And, of course, this is not just a matter of time, but of principle. Ethico-politically, everyone has, and should have, a line they won’t cross, a deal-breaker. For any leftist of any kind, there is some issue that would immediately stop them cold from voting for a Democratic candidate who held it. VBNMW implicitly has its deal-breaker: being a Republican. But that’s a hollow criterion that cannot hold, even for those who promote it. At some point, in some instance, the question “Don’t you prefer the better to the worse?” dissolves in the face of: “Are you really good with that?”
The difference between me and Bernie, Noam, and The Nation’s SDS’ers is that they find no deal-breaking that in Joe Biden, in the Democratic Party, or in the electoral system itself, while I find a slew. (Gotta wonder what it would take.)
Indeed, for me and many others, not just a certain number of his policies but the whole of Joe Biden’s/the Democratic Party’s policy paradigm is a deal-breaker. But let’s pick just one. Let’s go with the one highlighted by Thomas J. Adams and Cedric Johnson in a brilliant article:
“If this catastrophe makes one thing clear it’s that at this moment the most meaningful divide in US political life is between those actively working toward single-payer health care and those unwilling to embrace it.”
This real catastrophe we are living through has made it glaringly obvious that healthcare as a human right, not a commodity or perk of employment—universal, single-payer, free at point of service—is, ethically and politically, a minimal, indispensable demand. It’s a policy that was settled decades ago in every other advanced country in the world. It’s a program against which there are no arguments except the need to preserve the profit-making prerogative of private health insurance companies. Even the “How are you going to pay for it” argument has now evaporated in the light of a $4.5 trillion bailout!
It’s also a program that would virtually guarantee an election victory for any candidate or party that embraced it and really fought for it fiercely. It’s a program that Donald Trump and the Republicans could not stop—if there were an opposition party with a leadership and an allied media that enthusiastically explained and promoted it, that would ferociously demand of any opponent: Name the person who should be afraid to go the hospital to treat their coronavirus or their cancer. Name the parents who should be afraid to take their child to the doctor because they can’t afford it—for a single day, for lack of a single nickel. And if you don’t name your own child or yourself, then sit right the fuck down.
I have zero tolerance for any more evasive bullshit about this issue. Every argument and hesitation against single-payer is an excuse and a hypocrisy. Opposing it at this point is gratuitous cruelty to the people on behalf of the insurance companies. As far as I’m concerned, any and all of the candidates and parties who don’t support it—and certainly Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, which have made a point of setting themselves against it—deserve no leftist’s political support or vote. Anyone who urges voting for a candidate or party that does not support this, and will not challenge that party or candidate directly, constantly, and as pointedly as suggested above, is a silent shill and has no claim to be acting as a critical leftist.
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That’s a deal-breaker for me. One of them. If it’s not a deal-breaker for you, if you think, rather, that it’s important to work on getting those votes for Joe, so be it. But if you try to tell me I’m betraying my “high moral and political responsibility” because that shit I will not eat, I’ll tell you to sit right down.
My summary response to the argument that leftists have some political or moral imperative to vote for the Democrat: You got nothing.
Voting for the democrats at this point is tangibly worse than not voting at all. You are an enabler for the sham. The only possible reason would be if moderately better environmental policy was of overriding importance but even there better off holding out for a Democratic party that isn't beholden to the exact same legacy-industrial donors (just with 80% more greenwashing).
