Let's Get This Over With

After the Super Tuesday primaries, it is increasingly likely that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. This is somewhat unfortunate because Biden will lose to Trump in spectacular fashion. 

He'll lose by a wider electoral margin than Hillary did and win the popular vote by a slimmer margin. There's going to be a lot of pieces dissecting what went wrong, how it could've happened, and who's to blame eight months from now, but for once in my life I figured I should get something done ahead of time.

The Left is Too Divided

This is going to be the big one. I can already see the think piece headlines, the gloating talking heads on Fox, the condescending on CNN, and the lamenting on MSNBC. So many people are going to lambast Bernie Sanders and his supporters for not backing Biden because he didn't live up to their impossible purity test and I am already rolling my eyes at this. 

What this will fail to understand is that the reason leftists by-and-large rejected Biden is because Biden, along with most mainstream Democratic politicians, aren't on the Left. 

This isn't a No true Scotsman argument, just an honest assessment of where people stand. A crippling aspect of American political culture is the refusal to see politics as a binary, of two opposite sides arrayed against each other in order to find the perfect balance between their viewpoints. Obviously this is just dumb. Politics work on a spectrum, meaning people can be political opponents and still be working within the same ideological framework.

Biden is a fundamentally center-right politician. He doesn't necessarily believe the government should actively discriminate against people, but he's not exactly opposed to it, either. He thinks the government should step in at times of disaster like hurricanes or the financial crisis; but that intervention is a temporary action meant to reestablish the normal workings of business and finance as quickly as possible. 

In his internet infamous interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, Biden said that even if Congress passed a Medicare-for-All bill, he wouldn't automatically sign it. His reasons for doing so were concerns over its budgetary impact and whether it would delay the ability of citizens getting healthcare "now."

These sound reasonable enough, but they're indicitive of where Biden's core concerns lay. He mentions taxes and how terrible a burden it'd be on the middle class, but it ignores the burden of paying potentially thousands in premiums every year and the tens or hundreds of thousands debt on top of it. Does Joe Biden really think that a tax increase that amounts to maybe a few hundred or a thousand dollars spread out over a full year is a greater burden than $100k in medical debt?

Biden also repeats that $35 trillion number so many times it becomes a fucking mantra. Broken down, that's $3.5 trillion a year. Our current total healthcare spending, both government and private, is $3.6 trillion. By 2027, that number is expected to climb to $6 trillion. So what it comes down to is Biden is freaking out about the budget impact of a national policy that cuts costs by nearly 50%. It's also important to remember that that $3.5 trillion covers everything, for everyone, whenever they need it. 

Freaking out about the Medicare-for-All price tag is like being told you could live in a mansion and pay the same rent as your shitty college apartment but saying no because you can't spare $700.

At the heart of it all is that Biden doesn't see the payments and obligations to private insurers and hospitals because they generate profit. The jobs they create inflate both the cost and complexity of our medical system to no benefit, but hey, economic activity right?

In Biden's view, the government is the only possible source of undue obligations or burdens. If private enterprise costs too much then, well, that's the market's problem to fix. The government can't get too involved or provide services directly because then that robs a potential bootstrapper of their profit stream. 

And that's really it. In the left's view, the government not only has the capability but the obligation to provide directly for its citizens. Personal freedom is meaningless if the only outcomes of education to better yourself or using medicine to save your life leaves you in ruinous debt. If the only way to avoid those things is to stay at a job you hate or throw yourself at the mercy of a company willing to pay your tuition once you've "proved" your worth to them, that's just feudalism with extra steps. 

The Youth

Biden's numbers from young voters in the primaries are abysmal. They won't get better, and his weakness here is fatal. 

It's easy enough to figure out why. Bidens only response to every major concern of my generation has been, in so many words, "Fuck you."

On climate change, student loan debt, income inequality, Biden has insisted that sure, they're kinda problems, but everything's basically fine, okay? 

This is so astoundingly tone deaf that I'm honestly impressed by it. Axios had a story that showed Biden's potential Cabinet picks and it's just every Wall Street ghoul you can think of. Biden is legit prepared to hand over the reigns of power to the very people who destroyed the world 13 years ago and walked away scot free and he expects a generation who's grown up in the wreckage of that financial crash to go along with it? Are you kidding me?

Even without all that, Biden has nothing to offer. He condescendingly lectures about how incremental change is the only thing possible, that it's the only way anything gets done. Trump has blown this excuse to bits; he's proven that if you want to change something, all you need to do is do it and the rest will pretty much fall in line. 

Plus, incremental change is completely inadequate to the challenges in front of us. Spending three years to work out an agreement to begin phasing out fossil fuels ten years from the signing date is a resignation to the catastrophic effects of climate change that Biden and his rich benefactors won't have to face. We need someone who recognizes that these are the problems of now that need to be dealt with now and Biden not only has no interest in being that person, he doesn't even believe that person is really necessary. 

Put all this together and you have a candidate who not only doesn't represent the interests of an entire segment of the voting population, he's actively dismissive if not outright hostile to them. I'm already preparing myself for the months of mental work I'll have to do to choke down the revulsion I'll feel voting for Biden. But I know there are hundreds of thousands of people like me who won't. 

It's not worth it to them to fight back that existential despair knowing that voting for Biden means consigning the world to a different flavor of certain doom than Trump. And I can't blame them for that. 

I mean, they saw what happened. When Bernie won New Hampshire and Nevada the DNC, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and MSNBC all rallied behind Biden, who looked on the verge of a breakdown the more the primary went on, to make sure the narrative and momentum of Sanders campaign stopped dead in its tracks. 

And hey, it looks like it's working. But this isn't about a candidate, really. What made Bernie so compelling to so many people is he made them feel like they mattered, that they were important, and, most importantly, they were seen. Recognition is a powerful thing, once given, it creates a level of trust and commitment that's hard to break or transfer, especially when that same level empathy isn't given. 

What the DNC has done with their media blitz against Sanders and his platform is tell all the people who believed in him that they don't matter, that their problems just aren't worth solving because it's too inconvenient and expensive. 

In his essay The Rebel, Albert Camus said that when a man says "No" what he means is "Yes." That yes, he does have value, his concerns are relevant, and yes, he can refuse what is being commanded of him. Biden will make the same mistakes Hillary did in that he will focus exclusively on the evils of Trump's administration while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge or rectify the actions he took that directly created this situation. 

He won't reach out, he won't do the work, he will simply point and say "At least I'm not that dude." He will act as if he is entitled and we will all pay dearly for the fact that he is not. 

The Russians

Ah, yes, our favorite Cold War hit is back from the grave. This trope is going to do so much work over the next weeks and months. It will undoubtedly come up when ashy critique of Biden from the Left about how his previous actions plus current plans don't add up to these problems at hand. At which point, shills everywhere will instantly harp on whoever's making the critique for being a Russian stooge working to divide the Democrats and ensure Trump's reelection. 

Will some of those critiques originate or get boosted by Russian-operated bot accounts looking to fuck with our political system? Of course. Is that relevant? No. 

What should be the bigger concern here is that if you don't want your presidential nominee harassed for their policy record of screwing over working class people and the poor then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't work so hard to elevate a candidate who has a record of screwing over the working class and the poor. You should especially not tell people who headed legitimate concerns that those concerns aren't real, or, even if they are real, that theoretically serve the interests of a foreign bad man, so shut up.

All the Russia hysteria does is leave a vulnerable, problematic candidate with the same vulnerabilities and problems. Since Biden and his surrogates will do nothing to fix his problems except scream "Putin!" at them hoping they'll go away, they won't adapt, won't modify anything and then they'll go down in flames wondering how all this could happen to them again. 

As I see it, those are the big three reasons the media and pundits will trot out after November to make sunset of it all. It's all overcomplicated nonsense to disguise that Joe Biden is a terrible candidate that has next to no chance of winning. What's hilarious though is that if I'm the people running Biden's campaign, I am thanking god for the miracle of the coronavirus. 

The best thing that can happen for Biden is for people to not physically see him or be in his presence. Sure, we all had a giggle when told that factory worker spouting that 2nd amendment NRA nonsense that he was full of shit because honestly, fuck the NRA. But what happens if he pulls that on someone who brings up climate change, or healthcare? What if someone calls him on the effects of his crime bill and he loses it on them? 

That's not to mention the fact that his debate performances have been getting worse as the primaries go on so, yeah, if you need a healthcare system that cannot handle the fallout from a global pandemic as an equalizer, maybe you shouldn't be running for president. 

Hopefully, I'm wrong. The world is a volatile place at the best of times and calling not only the outcome but the response to something eight months away is inherently reckless and more than a little stupid. Still, that the best case scenario of me being wrong is that the collapse of our society into a fascistic autocracy on a planet in ecological crisis makes worrying about being wrong feel silly.