In 2016, I voted for Gloria La Riva and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. I had no intention of voting for Trump, but I also had no intention of voting to allow the Clinton Crime Family to establish a dynasty in the White House. This time I’m going to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Why? Here are ten good reasons.
1.) There are currently no credible third party candidates on the ballot. Howie Hawkins and the Greens are what the Greens have been for the last 30 years, a “political party” that does no organizing, never shows up at protests, and makes no attempt to expand their base beyond a tiny inner circle.
2.) I don’t want to be able to say in 20 years that I never voted against Trump. Yes, I voted third party in 2016, but a third party vote is more of a vote against both mainstream parties. It indicates you have no real preference. I want to unambiguously vote against the 6’3″ Cheetoh currently occupying the White House.
3.) There are far too many leftists and pseudo leftists who have fallen for the idea of Trump as anti-war or “anti-deep state” or “anti-imperialist.” He’s not. He’s a right wing Zionist and neoconservative who has taken millions of dollars from the Israel Lobby, a radical Islamophobe who wants to limit immigration to people who look like me (ugly white people). He’s made several attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela. He’s continued to aid the Saudis in their genocidal war in Yemen. He supported the coup in Bolivia. He covered up for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In terms of foreign policy Trump is basically Dick Cheney, if Dick Cheney spent too much time on Twitter. I want to be able to point to the Trump adjacent left and say “I’m not one of those.”
4.) Trump has the unconditional support of the Christian Fundamentalist right. Biden at the very least supports the separation of church and state written into the Constitution by Jefferson and consolidated by none other than Ulysses Grant.
5.) Biden is in his late 70s and is unlikely to spend very much time in office. Whoever he picks as his Vice President is who I’ll really be voting for and he’s already promised to pick a black woman. Good. When Kamala Harris or Stacy Abrams continues the sanctions on Venezuela and Iran and starts bombing Yemen or Syria I’ll finally be able to tell feminists and black nationalists to shut the fuck up. Professional managerial class women in New York and Boston will finally stop talking about Putin and go back to pretending that they’ve actually read Anna Karenina. American liberals will go back to forgetting Russia exists.
6.) If Trump is reelected he will unleash a massive wave of repression against Black Lives Matter and pretty much anybody who’s ever gone to a protest (including me). You seriously don’t want to know how bad it would get during a Trump second term.
7.) I live in Union County New Jersey, and overwhelmingly Democratic place the Republicans have no chance of winning and where they make no attempt to suppress the vote. That means voting usually takes me all of 10 minutes.The only thing it will cost me in terms of personal commitment is that I’ll jerk off three times on election day instead of four. Hey, a man’s got to make sacrifices.
8.) I’m old, ugly, bald and my dick fell off ten years ago. But I was barely out of Kindergarten when Biden went into the Senate. He’ll make me feel young again. True, Bernie would have too, but that dream is gone. Every day Biden will remind me of the senile old fuck I’m going to be in 30 years, if the Covid doesn’t get me first. During the Tom Cotton Presidency in 2025, watching liberals rehabilitate Trump the way they rehabilitated Reagan and George W. Bush in 2017 and 2018 will give me a delicious sense of moral superiority, the kind of thing, just about the only thing I really live for.
9.) Bernie, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky and just about every professional leftist I’ve ever gone to see give a speech at Cooper Union has endorsed, or at least semi-endorsed Biden. All these people are smart. I’m a dumb fuck loser incel who’s never had a real job. Surely they know something I don’t. Yeah, they’re all public figures who have to protect their reputations in establishment liberal circles (even though they’ve all got more money than I’ll ever have and don’t really have to protect their reputation in establishment liberal circles), but fuck it. Once when I was a stupid 19-year-old I asked Noam Chomsky a dumb question during a lecture tour (I quoted Pat Buchanan on the Israel Palestine conflict) and he made me look stupid. The very least thing I can do to thank him is to vote for the man he sort of kind of maybe says I should vote for if I lived in a swing state.
10.) Part of the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is that I thought he’d be less likely to start a dumb conflict with Russia than a bloodthirsty neocon like McCain. Yeah he overthrew Qaddafi in Libya and armed Al Qaeda (who exactly do you think the White Helmets are) in Syria, but at least he negotiated a peace treaty with Iran and tried to open up diplomatic relations with Cuba. Donald Trump is jingoistic, neoconservative racist who blames China for Covid-19 and just might try to start a war (with a country that has nukes, a billion people, and an oversupply of 18-30 year old men). Biden probably won’t.
The Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where 70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of sentences.
Biden, as Naomi Murakawa points out in “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” was a driving force behind the notoriously harsh penalties in the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and the three-strikes legislation in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which also provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and the aggressive prosecution of 60 new capital crimes.
He sponsored legislation to dramatically curtail the ability of those in prison to appeal and led the passage of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 and The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He oversaw the militarization of the police and the massive expansion of death-eligible crimes, which he has repeatedly bragged about.
Biden was also at the forefront of the re-segregation of our public school system and has repeatedly called for cuts to Social Security. He was instrumental in the disastrous trade deals such as the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and austerity programs as well as establishing the most pervasive system of mass government surveillance in human history.
Watching Stacey Abrams, who certainly knows better, twist herself into contortions to lavish praise on Biden, even tossing the #MeToo movement overboard, is another sad example of the corrosive disease of careerism. Biden, one of the most important architects behind the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people, is personally responsible for far more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump.
If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, plundering of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic debacle. The myopia of the ruling elites is that they think they can foist Biden on us because he is not Trump. But the game is up. The façade of democracy no longer works.
Remember how Barack Obama “saved” us by bailing out Wall St. and the big banks to the tune of trillions in early 2009. Then waged unending wars. Left black Americans bereft. He cared, too, didn’t he. Our leaders always care.
Obama was the black guy in the white hat. Trump is the white guy in the black hat. Hollywood on the Potomac, as Gary Wills called it when Ronald Reagan was the acting-president.
Now Obama’s war-loving side-kick, the pale-faced, twisted talking Biden is seriously offered as an alternative to the Elvis impersonator in the White House. This is the false left/right dichotomy that has the residents of the doll’s house in its grip.
If you can’t see what’s coming, you might want to break out of the house, take off your mask, go for a walk, and take some deep breaths. The walls are closing in.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.
I’m interested in seeing if Stacy Abrams, who’s partly built her brand around protesting voter suppression, has anything to say about last night’s primary in Kentucky, where there was a very obvious attempt to suppress the black vote. If she does and if Biden chooses her as his VP, that might be one argument for their ticket over Trump and the Republicans, who heavily depend on voter suppression.
If there’s one difference between him and Trump I think maybe it’s that unlike Trump he’s not heading an openly white supremacist ticket. Unlike Pence, whoever he chooses as his VP is not likely to be a Christian fundamentalist who supports gay conversion. Other than that I largely agree with you. Biden is pretty much worthless. The only reason I’ll probably vote for him is to make a statement that I don’t consider Trump an alternative to the establishment, something that a lot of leftists have been sadly duped into believing.
This current round of protests may provide the way out. Over the past decade, the cops have violently suppressed leftist protests and allowed right wing protests go to on. But this time Democratic party mayors have been unwilling to suppress the BLM demonstrations, even if they could have, which is doubtful. Interestingly I also think this might make the Democrats try to block a second round of stimulus checks since it’s clear a lot of people are protesting simply because they have more time during the pandemic. Makes me wonder if the Democrats might want to join the Republicans in pushing people back to work.
LOL
One very sad business going on is stout anti-liberal radicals that so hate them they flip over into fascist advocates. Moon of Alabama, Mike Whitney, Fred Reed. Suddenly they are calling BLM a conspiracy, denouncing black culture and so on.
We have seen this degenerate phenomenon before. Max Schactman and the State Department Socialists. All over Europe one time revolutionaries who flip over into virulent reactionaries. Out of blind hatred for social democracy or liberals. That is happening right now and will bring Trump a fresh layer of able supporters.
I’m in the ‘pox on both your houses’ camp. Trump and Pence are evil personified. But equally so are the horrific liberals and Democrats. I would not stain myself by giving that lot one scrap of support.
But things are very unstable except they are certainly heading downwards.