Donald Trump Lost — Great. Joe Biden Being the One to Defeat Him is a Hard Pill to Swallow.
Tags: Centrism, Democratic Party, Joe Biden, Neoliberalism, Election 2020

So many have fantasized about a 2020 Trump defeat since November 9th, 2016, myself included. Yes, Trump being so uniquely awful, naturally it feels good that it became a reality. I was one of the thousands of folks across the country joining the celebrations of the election result. I went to celebrate in Philadelphia, one city out of many deserving much credit (with a major shoutout to Black and POC grassroots organizers) for awarding us Trump’s demise. I wanted to purely celebrate this particular loss, not this particular win. Would we be out dancing in the streets in a rapidly worsening pandemic had it been Biden/Harris vs. Romney/Ryan and not Biden/Harris vs. Trump/Pence? No. Are most people genuinely inspired or energized by someone like Biden? Unlikely. It’s dangerous to rely on cult of personality alone as a means to progressive change (as Angela Davis taught me, leaderless mass movements > individual messiahs), but even still, Biden is so unbearably mediocre. His entire campaign was premised on his relative personal decency, not on calling for audacious, meaningful change. Why couldn’t it have been both, with a focus on the latter? Because this is who Joe Biden is and has always been. Why is it considered “radical” to demand and fight for something more than this?

United how? Healed how? The emptiness of statements like this from Biden isn’t merely an attempt to not be polemical on Twitter unlike Trump (speaking to his promise of ‘personal decency’), but more so an embodiment of his milquetoast style of governance and policy.

Now he will be whitewashed to death by the Democratic party, white liberals, and corporate news media as some kind of champion of civil rights and economic justice when his 47-year track record in government has been more on the side of corporations, lobbyists, police, and the war machine. Lest we also forget that white male supremacy allows Joe to be this level of mediocre and bad and still be heralded as our savior. Most white liberals who voted for him will go back to sleep for four more years under the assumption that “justice” has been served. Nevermind the sober reality that the majority of white people in the biggest referendum on Donald Trump’s America yet told us once again that actually no, this is exactly who they are. But no matter, the not-a-Nazi won, so all that will vanish now. We are at the brink of being back to the “idyllic” normalcy of barely reigned-in capitalism, continued funding and support for a racist, imperialist military and police force, and corporations flourishing at the people’s expense with occasional slaps on the wrist. Why is it considered “radical” to demand and fight for something more than this?

In this ugly stain of a moment in human history — where an unhinged white supremacist at the helm of an empire attempted to unravel democracy and eventually march people to the death camps — people deserved an alternative far more than kinder words and weak reforms. They deserved far more than someone just vowing to not be that guy. They deserved far more than someone who was gung-ho for the Iraq War which killed millions of Iraqis, authored the 1994 Crime Bill that locked up thousands of Black men for even low-level offenses, “worked across the aisle” with segregationists, sometimes even for their causes, and advocated to cut funding for programs like Social Security and Medicare over the military budget. Even if you believe that bipartisanship is a better approach than being an all-out resistance party, it’s hard to look at Biden’s history in Washington and think he will now fight tenaciously for a multi-racial working class. He just doesn’t have the fight in him to steadfastly defend his supposed ideals, whereas the likes of Bernie Sanders on the left and Mitch McConnell on the right do.

People like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Tom Perez of the DNC don’t understand that it’s all of the above and not a progressive agenda that delivered us Trump, and will deliver someone as dangerous as him — if not more — once again. “Trumpism” as an ideology will live on for generations, and even if it does end up receding into the shadows momentarily, the disgruntlement of those 70 million people won’t just disappear. If Biden understood or cared to understand that, he wouldn’t have crafted and marketed a ‘politics as usual’ platform that got us here, but rather an unprecedented bold agenda that would materially change everyday people’s lives — including Trump supporters’. Watching him give his victory speech, I couldn’t help but feel like we were looking a time frozen in the past, not at a promising, exciting future.

Biden would rather offer less inspiring platitudes than Obama did and assume it to be enough to forge unity, when what he needs to offer (a.k.a. fight vociferously for) is guaranteed healthcare, education, green union-paying jobs, while vastly diminishing the power of corporations, the millionaire and billionaire donor class, lobbyists, and imperialist institutions like the military and police. Looking at his half-a-century-long record, we have reason to doubt he will. He will not wake up in the middle of the night and realize that fighting for increasingly popular populist policies is a reasonable solution on his own. He will need to be pushed, and pushed hard. Those energizing the electorate who will push him — AOC, Ilhan, Rashida, Pramila, Ayanna, Cori (all women of color) and others will be labeled as too woke, too unreasonable, and now, in spite of helping to elect him, costing moderate Democrats’ seats. Unsurprising, yet still sad to see. This isn’t about purity— it’s about demanding and fighting for something far more than (in other words, strongly against) the 40 years of Reagan-era-style neoliberal rule that got us here. The idea isn’t to be negative, it is to be hyper-realistic to ensure we don’t keep making the same mistakes.