An Argument for the Strategic Value of a Biden Presidency

Without a Democrat in the White House, where does the conversation about the Establishment Left go?

There’s a lot of effort in the dialogue around November’s election to refrain from vote-shaming, and to make verbal signals indicating one’s distaste for vote-shaming. I think that’s awesome —I didn’t vote, in the 2016 General Election. I just didn’t give a fuck.

After the Democratic Primary of the same year, and the disrespect and sabotage to which Bernie Sanders was treated, I felt it was dishonest to vote as if they represented me. And I just can’t seem to get behind the Greens —who, for all their grass roots work, seem to only draw in an ivory-tower intellectual crowd who, for all their intellectual sophistication, are apparently as equally open to candidates of substance as they are to wackos like Roseanne Barr (or, you know, maybe I’m just lazy and uninformed).

Really, I think it’s important to respect the act of voting as a personal right, a privilege, and (according to some points of view) an obligation —of every individual citizen. Vote-shaming is bullying. But there’s a mentality one gets into, when one feels disaffected by one’s community, that becomes very much a binary ‘Us and Them’ way of looking at the world. I think it’s entirely natural, and understandable, and we shouldn’t take it personally. It’s Group-think.

The thing is, the problem all of us on the ‘real’ left face —all the Berniebros, the #NeverBidens, the people who are dismissed as ‘Russian Bots’ on Twitter (in some cases by national leaders)— is that, more than a specific candidate, we crave real and informative systemic change in this country, in nearly every sector. We want to revive Glass-Steagall, we want to kill Citizens United, we want to Demilitarize the national Policing culture, we want to end the United States’ campaign of Global Domination before it leads to all-out Global War.

No Democratic candidate will deliver these to us, save for in some Rainbow Unicorn Puppy vision of the future, wherein the Squad has grown into such a force as to occupy a majority of seats in the House and the Senate, and has also somehow managed not to be infiltrated by the insidious corruptive forces of Human Nature, in the process. In the context of the ever-worsening Climate Crisis and the related travesties that will continue to come with it, the Economic crisis which is sure to come on the heels of the COVID Pandemic, and all of the smoldering figurative Tinderboxes we’ve agitated across the globe over the last couple decades, it seems childishly naïve to imagine that any progress we achive in the next four years won’t be completely undermined or negated by some sort of national or global disaster —whether in happen three years, or five.

It’s almost goddamned October. This is the point at which the extreme voters start cursing the centrist voters, after weeks of listening to them pre-berate us for what they anticipate our vote will be. They’re so fucking lazy, we say —the Moderates. They only pay attention to any of it for maybe nine months, every four years. Then they come in, with their ignorant majority of votes, they start parroting the things all the mediocre corporate-friendly candidates say on TV (because that’s the only candidates the TV will air), and they blame us —the people who actually give enough fucks to be thinking about this shit day in and day out, year after year— they blame us for candidates like Donald Trump, because we wouldn’t vote for their candidate, when the time came. We had to stick to our ‘issues’ and our ‘ideals’. Really, what a bunch of children we are on the radical Left!

And, at least in the recent narrative, that’s after obvious collusion and conspiracy, between the party and the media conglomerates alike, to silence and deaden the effect of meteoric grassroots campaigns such as the Sanders one. It would be one thing, if the primary election had felt like a fair representation of the candidates’ actual appeal and following.  These Basics, these Middle-of-the-roader, Please-sir-may-I-have-another types fuck up the whole system for everybody, and expect us to apologize for it.

I know. It’s bullshit and it’s fucking stupid. But Trump is way more fucked up than Biden.

I mean, really —“Come on, Maaan!”

The Trump Presidency of his first term has achieved a kind of nightmarish gravity to it that I can only compare to a cartoon. It makes me think of the dark side of Imaginationland, in the epic three-part South Park story arc of the same name. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Pinhead and Chucky were all in a gang together. Islamic Terrorists blew up shopping malls with ManBearPig. It was just every horror you could imagine, all hanging out together in a desolate lounge, waiting for a victim to terrorize.

In our present moment we face a similar playground for nefarious evil. We face an impending Economic Crisis. The intensifying Climate Crisis is beginning to take a greater visible toll, every year. Riots are happening, because police are MURDERING UNARMED CITIZENS on a regular basis. This is not only ‘not a good time’ for someone like Trump to occupy the greatest seat of power in the world, it’s potentially the worst time in all of Human History. Julius Caesar had only a fraction of the destructive power available to him that Trump has at his command, you know? And there is a thick vein of Our Country’s blood, that seriously admires what Trump’s been doing to it.

Guys, I’m simply not ready for a fucking Civil War yet. I don’t even know how to safely use a gun, other than to not aim it at other humans unless I mean to shoot them. I’ll put up a good fight and everything but, God damn!

I think Biden’s a horrible candidate. I detest the smug, self-satisfied way he’s governed himself in this weird bunker-campaign election year we’ve seen. Every time I see his face it’s like he’s just reveling in the fact that he’s had the easiest job any presidential candidate ever had, tying down his constituents. It’s like the entire Universe is conspiring to just hand it to him. And he’s like, “Hey! This is pretty cool!” The fucking classic car ad he ran? “Could My Old Man Drive A Car?”

Oof!

He wears those aviator sunglasses around —trying to evoke Tom Cruise’s Maverick, from Top Gun, I assume. But he’s a lot more like the kid Tom Cruise played in Risky Business, partying in his underwear on his parents’ dime, hoping he gets away with it before the credits roll. How does anybody know he’s going to work for them at all, when he goes around acting like a kid on vacation in his election campaign. Every time I see him on camera he is way too happy. It’s like he’s stoked that he’s not having to do anything. It’s like he won the Lotto!

Have you looked at it this way, though? —If you don’t end up with Biden in the White House, you’ll lose the opportunity to talk about the problems within the Democratic Establishment, for the next four years. It will all get buried, by more Trump shit. Don’t believe me? just think about how far away 2016 seems, from now.

You’ll have to go through another long, drawn-out, and ultimately disappointing process representing this last one —wherein you get into escalating rounds of textual jousting on social media with people who should have the sense to see the logic in your political views, but for the life of them can’t seem to actually communicate beyond slogans and regurgitated TV talking points, enough to even process what you’re saying.

It will make you crazy, all over again. And you’ll likely have to do it against the backdrop of a different Democratic candidate than Joe Biden. Potentially, a more serious contender. You know, like what if Robert Downey Junior had never done cocaine, and he decided to be the next corporate lackey on Pennsylvania Ave? Who wouldn’t vote for fucking Iron Man?

(Note: I have no idea what RDJ’s actual political leanings are, it was just a random analogical device that occurred to me. He would make a dashing commander-in-chief, though, would he not? Probably funny as fuck, too. Ho Hum, probably a corporate shill…)

Seriously, if the radical left doesn’t have the opportunity to work against a Biden Presidency’s ill narratives, they lose control of the ball completely. At least in terms of their ability to continue a meaningful dialogue with the Moderate Left. Those moderate partisan loyalists want to think of Politicians as Ushers at Disneyland, helping us live a utopian fantasy. We know they’re more akin to carnies, running some kind of rigged game in a dingy, stained tent, with only shitty prizes to offer if you actually do win.

I mean, you’re a sucker if you play but what else are you going to do, when you’ve let carnies take over the whole fucking world?

Seriously, though, if Trump wins again the left goes back to square one in this conversation it’s been having with itself. And we’ve gone pretty deep into it, at this point. Also, if Bernie doesn’t run again in 2024, or someone like him, there won’t be the same momentum to ride on. It won’t be as fertile an environment for popular action and uprising, or even dialogue —other than further opportunities to impossibly stand in protest against the likely intensifying acts of police brutality we can expect under a two-term Trump presidency. We’re talking body counts, now, when we speak of protests in this country.

I understand that many of us see Biden and Trump both as representative of different angles of fascism —at least, in its present form. But if we don’t all vote for Biden, we might lose the ability to further elucidate to the Moderate Left exactly why he is a fascist —or, at the very least, the antithesis of a democratic candidate ‘for the people’.

And you know, just in the same way that they need us, we are dependent on them. The moderates; the Milk-Drinkers of the Left. I think it’s likely I speak for everybody alive when I say I didn’t always see the world as clearly as I do today. And I’ll probably change my mind about some things, yet, between now and the day I die —however far off that moment may be. We need to allow space in our own hearts for the people with whom we disagree to change their minds, just as much as we need to hope they have that space in their own hearts, to care enough to change —at least when it comes to things like Environmental destruction, rampant global economic injustice, perpetual war, etc, etc, et al.

I really just want this current chapter in our history to be over. I want to be able to change the channel and stop seeing his face, sneering at me from whatever screen I’m looking at. And I want to keep on hearing how Biden is a full-of-shit money-suckler, and how that fact about him alone is the central characteristic which makes him appealing, to the corporate interests governing the Democratic Establishment of today. I want us to unmask the Democrats to our neighbors in the Left, but we can’t do it if they aren’t in power.

This isn’t rocket science, people. If you think fighting against Trump’s Federales will become less costly to us over time, I think you’re fucking nuts. I object entirely to the way protestors have been treated but, at least to some extent, that’s to be expected in a Police State (not that I think we should be living in one, at all). What I’m truly frightened by is the citizen-on-citizen violence happening, and Trump has had a direct part in the incitement of it.

It seems like the original sin, in a wholly new, tangential Hatfields-and-McCoys-style feud, one that could stretch on who knows how long into the future —at least, it seems like it could stretch out indefinitely, if Trump takes the White House for another four-year ride. It’s scary, the sort of ghosts he’s resurrecting, and only so that he’ll have somebody to stand beside him on the Playground when all’s said and done. In the time he’s occupied the White House, he’s literally invited the White Power Crowd to have a national Coming-Out!

I’m super serial —vote or don’t vote; if you do vote, vote how you want— but if you’re trying to achieve something with your vote, consider implementing an intentional strategy in the way you decide to cast it.

And if you want to talk about strategizing for the undermining or overthrow of the Democratic Establishment I would suggest that you might have better odds of succeeding, if there’s a Democrat seated in the White House —especially if you can maintain the same energy you’ve managed in this Pandemic Election Cycle on a regular basis, once he’s sworn in.

In closing, I realize that George Bush won the election in 2000, and in 2004, with the entire country aware of the fact that he had a cocaine problem in his youth. So I apologize for my suggestion earlier in this writing that a Robert Downey Junior run for president would be on any level unrealistic, based on his similar background with the drug. What do you guys think? AOC vs RDJ in the 2024 DNC Primary?

You heard it here, first.