As someone who has thought of myself for most of my adult life as a proud FDR Democrat, I feel terrible that I will be unable to vote for Joe Biden this year. I’m simply incapable of voting for him because in my moral universe a vote for Biden is a vote for genocide. I might gladly vote for some other Democrat, a non-genocidal non-warmongering Democrat, but that’s probably not going to be an option. (See Steve Schmidt’s Twitter/X comment below).
Will my inability to vote for Biden increase Trump’s chance of winning? If Trump wins, will it be my fault? Will it be the fault of one of the third-party candidates? That assumes that third-party candidates take more votes from Democrats than from Republicans. Do we know that to be true? Even if it is true, there’s a deeper question about where the fault lies, and it’s this: Has the practice of progressives, liberals and left-leaning Democrats (including me!) voting for the “Lesser Evil” over the last few decades enabled our drift toward fascism?
There’s a compelling argument in support of that proposition, and it goes like this: Democratic candidates in recent decades have benefitted mightily, as they are counting on doing this year, from the “Lesser-of-Two-Evils” argument. This has allowed right-leaning and centrist Democrats (like Biden), who might otherwise have insufficient support, to win office. Once in office, like Bill Clinton, these same center-right Democrats have largely ignored progressive issues and abandoned the working class. (See the article “Why and Where the Working Class Turned Right,” by Harold Meyerson and the book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis). The working class, especially the white working class has become a powerful base of support for Trump, with all his fascist tendencies.
What if, instead, our democracy had worked the way it was designed and intended to work, by voters voting their values, instead of voting their fears? If these same center-right Democrats were forced to deliver on progressive issues (forced by the certain knowledge that they would otherwise lose liberal/progressive support), it’s likely they wouldn’t have lost the working class to the fascist-leaning right. What might our world look like now?
At my age, I mght not have many presidential elections left, if any.
“Joe Biden lost the country tonight, and will not get it back. If Trump is a threat and democracy is on the line, then Biden mist step aside. His duty, oath and legacy require an act of humility and selflessness.”
”Donald Trump is not a fascist — and Joe Biden is no Hindenburg either.
“But we can say that Trump’s administration is encouraging the growth of a far Right that includes openly fascist groups. The way to stop these fascists is not by placing hopes in a “lesser evil” like Joe Biden. Biden, after all, spent a career promoting racist, sexist, militaristic, and authoritarian policies, creating the reactionary swamp in which Trump’s support could grow.”
This artticle is an interesting discussion of the “guardrails” in our democratic system that have, so far, blocked any one leader’s full embrace of fascism, and the likelihood that they will — or won’t — continue to function in that capacity. [Don]
Biden supported the campaign to discredit and humiliate Anita Hill to appoint Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He was one of the principal architects of the endless wars in the Middle East, calling for “taking Saddam down” five years before the invasion of Iraq. He rehabilitated the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, after vowing to make the country a pariah because of the assassination of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden is a fervent supporter of Israel, calling the apartheid state “the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East” and declaring “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” His campaigns have been lavishly funded by the Israel lobby for at least two decades.
In the 1970s, he fought school busing, arguing that segregation was beneficial for Blacks. He and South Carolina’s racist senator, Strom Thurmond, sponsored the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior.
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He pushed through the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gutted the federal writ of habeas corpus, abolished the rights of death row prisoners and mandated harsh federal sentencing rules.
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He backed austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. He fought for NAFTA and other “free trade” deals which fueled inequality, deindustrialization, a significant drop in wages and the offshoring of millions of manufacturing jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in countries like Mexico, Malaysia, China or Vietnam.
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Biden long opposed abortion, writing in a letter to a constituent: “Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them. As you may know, I have consistently — on no fewer than 50 occasions — voted against federal funding of abortions.”
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He was at the forefront of deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall, which contributed to the global financial meltdown, including the collapse of nearly 500 banks, in 2007 and 2008. He is a favorite of the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industry, which contributed $6.3 million to his 2020 presidential campaign, almost four times more money than they channeled to Donald Trump’s campaign …
