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State of the Union

The Progressive Case Against Voting for Biden

9/15/2020

3 Comments

 
Isaiah Jones

This post is unusual, as the author is not a member of the Political Union Executive Board. However, we felt it would be in the interest of public discourse to publish his response to Pamela’s article from a few weeks ago. As always, all of the views expressed in this post belong to the author and not to Political Union as an organization
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With one of the most consequential elections looming, the messaging from left-leaning media outlets such as The New York Times,  CNN,  Vox, and more has been very clear: Progressives should swallow their pride and vote for Biden. The fear of a repeat of 2016 has led to calls from liberal elites to set aside differences to focus on defeating Trump. Under the guise of party unity, Democrats have been reaching out to Bernie supporters to back off from their ‘extreme’ views and support more electable policies and candidates. But in doing so, Democrats put pressure on progressives to compromise their values and settle for Biden. So in this article, I will try to justify the decision to vote for non-major party progressive candidates for president.

It is important to acknowledge that the Democratic Party is not progressive. For decades now, mainstream Democrats have framed the desires of the common people as too ‘extreme’ and instead bended to the wishes of their corporate donors. This is extremely clear in Democrats’ refusal to push for policies that the overwhelming majority of the population supports, and makes it difficult to justify voting for their candidates. Sixty-three percent of Americans support tuition-free public colleges. Sixty-seven percent support the federal legalization of marijuana. And sixty-nine percent of voters, including 88% of Democratic voters, support Medicare For All. Yet the Biden campaign has already announced that they will not sign these into law.

At this point it seems worth mentioning that liberal media seems to love mentioning that while Biden does not support these policies, he is running on the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party. While this statement is somewhat true, I believe that this is the wrong way to frame their agenda. “Most progressive” is not a positive term; it's an excuse not to do more. Remember, it is the most progressive politicians of the 1960s who are responsible for the failure to commit the necessary resources to enforce desegregation. The unwillingness to follow through with progressive ideals is what has perpetuated racial inequality to this day and will be what prevents meaningful change into the future.

Democrats need to realize that the best way to win elections isn’t to compromise morals and appeal to the center, which is to say, corporate interests. It is to run on common-sense progressive platforms with the broad support of the American people and allow people, not corporations and wealthy individuals, to benefit from the wealth generated by their own production. This certainly will not be accomplished by Biden, who has received more than half of his $300 million-plus campaign funds from large contributions. The Democratic Party’s refusal to appeal to even their own base ostracizes the progressive wing of the party in the name of NeverTrump politics.

On top of this, Democrats twice now have had the chance to run a candidate who has been consistent in his message of equality but both times undercut his path to the nomination. In 2016 this was the controversy around the party’s backroom support of the Clinton campaign. This year this happened when moderate candidates Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out last minute to consolidate their voters behind Biden just ahead of Super Tuesday, after it was clear that Bernie was leading in the polls. Then, instead of appealing to this core group of voters, they’ve run two of the most establishment, corporate-funded candidates in Clinton and Biden. 

In this year’s case, it too isn’t just that “Kamala is a cop” or that “I want to abolish the police,” as Pamela Chen suggested in a post on Political Union’s blog last week. It is that both Harris and Biden have spent their entire political careers promoting racist and classist policies. As Senator from Delaware, Biden helped author the 1994 Crime Bill, ushering in the era of mass incarceration, and repeatedly through the ’90s and ’00s pushed to cut and restrict social security programs. Biden then spent eight years under the Obama administration actively supporting drone strikes in Syria, the continued waging of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the expansion of the surveillance state, and the most deportations under a single administration in American history. 

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, as the Attorney General of California oversaw the arrests of thousands for drug violations, defended the death penalty, and resisted calls to investigate certain police shootings. With these track records, it is no wonder that progressives are lukewarm on the promises that Biden and Harris have made in recent months. This year could have been the Democratic Party’s opportunity to reform and shift philosophical course and demonstrate that they have learned from their mistakes in 2016. Instead, they gave more speaking time to former Republican presidential candidate John Kasich over prominent progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at this year’s Democratic National Convention. No matter how much Democrats may say otherwise, voting for Biden will mean a corporatized, watered-down version of progressivism that will continue to maintain the current unjust order. 

Let me be clear. I still think there are genuine upsides to voting for Biden over Trump. He has declared his dedication towards the nomination of left-leaning judges, support for LGBT rights, raising the federal minimum wage, and belief in climate change (the bar is so low!). Unfortunately, due to the currently flawed electoral system, if you are voting in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, I do think that you should still vote for Biden to prevent another four years of a Trump presidency. 

But for everyone else, if you genuinely care about building an equitable society, putting an end to imperialist and expensive wars, and addressing the devastating impact of climate change, consider voting for a progressive candidate for president. America is reaching its breaking point. With racial tensions caused by police brutality flaring across the country, wildfires blazing along the West Coast, and millions of people struggling to make ends meet amid a deadly pandemic, it is clear that we need massive changes to the current system, which Biden will not accomplish. There are other options available such as Howie Hawkins, the nominee for the Green Party, who has been pushing for progressive causes including eliminating campaign financing from lobbyists. We should not have to keep settling for the lesser of two evils. Biden is not our champion.

Isaiah Jones is a Weinberg junior from Hong Kong studying Computer Science. When not at Main Library working on a programming assignment, he can be found reading Reddit NBA threads, playing squash, and trying to get more sleep.
3 Comments
Pamela Chen
9/15/2020 01:57:08 pm

I DO think it's important to recognize the flaws with both Biden and Harris as politicians, especially with their voting track records and less than stellar campaign, and it's hard to compare them to other candidates who may have always stuck to an ultra progressive platform their entire careers.

But, I still don't see any real productivity in telling people who don't live in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin to vote for some random Howie Hawkins just so that they can feel a marginal absolution by taking a fictional moral high ground through third party voting. In my opinion, too much is at stake this election to be self-righteous with a protest vote. Every single vote this November is crucial, no matter the state it's cast in, and I think that a vote that exists just to try to stick it to the Democrat Party is a vote squandered.

Let's vote for Biden and THEN work on campaign finance reform so that we don't have to vote for him again. Voting for Howie Hawkins will do nothing but bring another four years of Trump.

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Isaiah Jones
9/16/2020 03:47:10 am

First of all thank you for your comment! I greatly appreciate any and all feedback.

Secondly, I totally agree that this is a particular important, high stakes election. But as I stated in the article, I am not just taking some fictional moral high ground. We can make the argument that every single administration since WWII, both Democratic and Republican, is responsible for committing war crimes. Voting Democratic again, and Biden again, is an implicit approval of their prior heinous actions. Tell the 3.2 million people deported and the thousands of civilians killed by drone strikes during Obama's two terms about their fictional problems. I mean, just a couple days ago Biden said he might increase the military budget in certain areas!

Additionally every vote is not crucial. Part of the reason that the US has such low voter turn out is that people do not feel like their vote matters which is true in most states. This will always be the case while we have the electoral college and while we have a First Past The Post voting system. More Democratic votes in safely Democratic states will not give more electoral college votes to Biden. Both parties are far too entrenched and far too powerful to possibly work to create the fixes to issues with our electoral system this country desperately needs. And let's vote for Biden and then work out our issues is exactly the same argument made for voting for Hilary yet here we are, voting for the same things we were voting for in 2016.

Until Democrats can select candidates who firmly represent the people and aim to release the chokehold the two party system has on the American people I do not see why I should vote for their candidates.

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Eric Rosin
9/19/2020 06:59:38 pm

I’ve become increasingly conspiratorial in my thinking over the past few months since Bernie lost, since the DNC colluded with the other moderate candidates to sink his candidacy. The brutal irony of it is that they did it because, so the party line goes, ‘extremists’ would be unappealing to the party’s image of the ideal voter, ie all the moderate Republicans out there who want a return to Clintonian/Obamian normalcy - you know, free (rigged) markets, civil (silencing) discourse, American strength abroad (endless funding of the MIC’s pathological need to slaughter brown people), etc.

They forget, of course, that most Republicans, especially the evangelicals, are born-and-bred fascists. The Repubs have been thus since they got Reagan into office. The magical moderate - the Chevron Democrat, as Jacobin so eloquently put it - may exist in sufficient quantities to swing Biden’s candidacy, but not in sufficient quantities to swing the election. So the candidate they put as the most likely to win is arguably the least likely to win.

Of course, if the dems wanted to win, they would stop fetishizing the magical moderates and appealing to them by packing their own convention with Repubs, instead focusing on galvanizing the base by supporting progressive policies, you know, all the ones that Obama promised but didn’t deliver. They would have a ground game in spite of the pandemic. They would spend their donor-class money to drown out every redneck TRUMP poster in Florida or wherever with Covid casualties, giant billboards saying ‘this is Trump’s America, more Americans killed than in Vietnam’.

But they don’t. They have no ground game. They have not saturated the media with how great Biden is in contrast to Trump, just said ‘oh he has a very progressive platform’ and tried to cover up all the gaffes that suggest otherwise (That senile bastard straight-up said ‘nothing is going to fundamentally change’ to Wall Street donors. What does that tell you about his real policies?).

So I’m starting to think that the Democrats don’t really want to win, because that would require them to embrace policies like the Green New Deal (Nancy Pelosi’s ‘Green Dream or whatever’) or Medicare For All. Better to lose narrowly, keep money flowing into their coffers from hysterical liberal suburban mothers, be the party of token hashtag-resistance. The donor class which has both parties by the balls doesn’t want real change in this country. The pandemic has done wonders for the stock portfolios of the rich. Why should they give a shit about death and unemployment and probably a second Great Depression? So they tell the Dems, ‘look like you want to win but don’t try very hard.’ And the Dems, senile Third Way twits to a man, comply, because they know that to do otherwise would cost them their Martha’s Vineyard mansions (lookin’ at you again Barack).

They will, of course, blame the Sanders left for their loss. No matter how much Bernie backs Biden now the media will turn on the people who voted for him as insufficiently patriotic or something like that. They will let themselves lose again in ‘24, by putting up, oh, I don’t know, Kamala Harris, against, say, Tom Cotton, or god forbid Ivanka. By 2040 we’ll be told that we need to vote for Kanye West to stop Richard Spencer’s second term.

History will repeat itself, not as tragedy, but as farce.

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