Why don’t the kids like Biden?

Here’s why:

Imagine you were on a boat that was rapidly capsizing.

Now imagine the captain of the boat said the only reasonable course of action was to find out what the rapidly rising sea water wanted and compromise between the needs of it and the drowning crew.

This primary season and the animosity directed toward Bernie Sanders has revealed, yet again, that the true struggle within our society is as Marx described it-not between the DNC and the RNC, but between the 1%, their enablers, and the rest of us. That the 1% has somewhat factionalized between the very rich with savior complexes and the very rich with victim complexes isn’t that relevant because both are acting as anti-democratic forces and can’t be trusted to do anything about the coming climate devastation outside of looting the remains.

Michael Bloomberg’s proposed path to the nomination was predicated on either a) a Super Tuesday triumph created by vastly outspending all other candidates in the relevant states, b) a brokered convention where it turns out the DNC and 50+% of the country would subvert the vote because they loved Michael Bloomberg as much as Michael Bloomberg loves Michael Bloomberg. Was it really surprising he crashed and burned as quick as he did? But more importantly, both paths just presume that somehow the popular vote, the basic idea on which democracy is founded, would be subverted. Elizabeth Warren is now floating the same idea. Messaging from the DNC suggests Biden would take similar action if Sanders doesn’t get a plurality. A large proportion of the candidates running basically presume that the voting process will be rendered irrelevant in the final rounds.

It’s been said that the primary rule of institutions is that people within them will by and large jockey for power within the institution over power in the larger sphere. Generally speaking this isn’t the worst thing since when the opposite happens you tend to see the rich come to an agreement to act as a coordinated criminal enterprise and loot the middle class and poor. That’s what’s happening now.  The bi-annual Republican “tax cuts” (re: massive handouts to the 1%) aren’t because the 1% need more money to live, but because they need to proportionately dominate a large percentage of liquid capital and infrastructure in order to permanently cement their authority.

What authority? The authority over democratic mechanisms, norms, and restrictions against poisoning (the Sacklers, Flynt), robbing (2008), and the use of the state’s monopoly on violence to beat down any attempts by the population at large to stop these exploitative and criminal practices (violent destruction of the OWS encampments).

But to go back again to the rule of institutions, this rule in action is causing the current crisis within the Democratic party. They are vociferously acting to protect their donors from their voters so they can maintain their positions on the sinking ship vs. righting the ship. As I illustrated with the sinking boat metaphor, the stakes of the current international crises (climate change, collapse of capitalism into surveillance feudalism, etc. etc.) make a moderate/centrist stance ironically but profoundly radical-if we value ourselves and our neighbors, the bare minimum we need from any candidate is a plan that will prevent us all from roasting to death in our own carbon emissions. You can call that “The Levine Test”.

Biden doesn’t pass that.

Sanders does.

The Biden campaign so far has entirely hinged on the big bluff of “electability”. There is no rational argument for this. It is a lie that has been repeated by scared rich people until enough scared people below them decided that was the truth.