What We Can Take From The Leaked Biden Audio
Tags: Politics, Status Quo, Current Events, Opinion, Joe Biden

When someone voiced concern about a lack of progress, his reply was, “you shouldn’t be disappointed, what I’ve done so far is more than anybody else has done this far.” Apparently he thinks we should be happy with performative liberal identity politics. This is further evidenced by his “if it doesn’t count for y’all, well, to hell with y’all” spiel, in which he continues to seem to suggest that civil rights leaders should be happy with the diversity in his staff alone. This is the same kind of attitude behind many failed police reforms and attempts at “affirmative action.”

He bragged about winning the election on “three platforms” one of which was “restoring the soul of this country because of what I saw happen in Charlottesville,” and claimed that “no one else was talking about it.” That is demonstrably false, even if he’s just talking about politicians. Furthermore, in light of how this comes up around the same time as his statement that “the words of presidents matter,” this implies another almost-direct admission that all we can expect is performative identity politics. While it is certainly better to have a president who says that racism is bad, as opposed to one who openly runs on it, words are not enough.

Please note the use of the word “performative.” There are real issues of race, gender, and other things that often get swept aside as “identity politics,” and when politicians engage in these kinds of theatrics, it makes it that much easier to ignore the real problems. While it may be easy to give him credit for at least drawing attention to certain issues, if nothing is done to change the system that causes them, nothing will change.

Speaking of nothing changing, his statements on where he stands with the issue of policing were problematic as well. When he said, “we’re not [talking about defunding police], we’re talking about holding them accountable,” that was a clear indication that he has no intention of doing anything any differently than what has been tried in the past. We have further evidence of this as well, in his call to “get police more money” for the “god-awful problems” he thinks that they experience. We’ve tried his idea of “reform” before, and it turns out it actually adds to the problem. The worst part of this is knowing that people like Biden and Harris have access to the same research as the rest of us, but they clearly care more about appealing to conservatives and the false ‘“law & order” narrative. Biden said “it matters how we do it,” and he’s right. The evidence just shows that his idea of how we should do it is wrong.

For the record, he’s also wrong about it the idea of defunding police costing Democrats wins they were hoping for during the election. As Krystal Ball pointed out on Rising, perceived alignment with Nancy Pelosi (who Biden seems to support) and Democratic party corruption were bigger problems.

The way Biden talked down to the others at that meeting reveals a lot about him, and the substance of what he said reveals a lot about what we can expect from his presidency, which apparently isn’t much of anything good.