Why I am supporting Joe Biden
I’m a millennial. I support universal health care — and believe that there is a realistic path to achieve it. I support an internationalist, multi-lateral foreign policy. I’m not a fan of foreign entanglements. I am positioned on the center-left not because I endorse conservative ideas (I am probably as anti-conservative as it gets), but because I am willing to evaluate policies on their merit. I prefer right-sized government over “big” government. I am a major critic of unencumbered capitalism.
But on Super Tuesday in the Texas primaries, I will be voting for Joe Biden.
Biden is probably not the most inspiring candidate in the world. He has the propensity to say really dumb shit and wear his heart on his sleeve a little too much. I’m disgusted at the fact that he hasn’t apologized to Anita Hill — even at least to empathize with her why his approach to her testimony troubled her. I get how his 1970s anti-busing position is not a very good look in today’s more “woke” Democratic Party. His proposals to cut entitlement spending is unsettling. And yes, I know, he’s an old fucking white guy.
However, he’s probably the only Democratic candidate that honestly gets what the 2020 is about — Twitter pundits notwithstanding.
Donald Trump’s surprising 2016 election was the most shocking populist backlash in American history. In fact, Trump is the first populist to actually win the presidency — we all know how many times William Jennings Bryan failed in the late 19th century. Positioning himself as Conservative America’s general in a cultural civil war, Trump managed to win overwhelming majorities in rural areas and secure a substantial majority of white voters to usher in what has been the most corrupt presidential administration ever.
And because of his sociopolitical populism, which has ignominiously exposed the right side of American spectrum to be fraudulent in its defense of classical liberalism and increasingly honest in its advocacy of cultural authoritarianism, he is still the prohibitive favorite to win in November. That is the reality of the Electoral College — an archaic system that prevents true accountability to all voters. Trump could theoretically lose by historic margins in California, New York, and Illinois; just merely skirt by 100,000 or 200,000 votes in Texas, prevail by just a couple of thousand votes in Florida, and lose half of the Blue Wall — but all he would have to do is prevail in Wisconsin to win an undeserved second term.
Younger voters are understandably swept up in the policy ideas of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Not all of their ideas are bad — some of them are quite good. However, it reeks of an idealism that requires a voting coalition that has yet to exist. There are swaths of the voting constituency that simply don’t believe a class war exist or take issue with neoliberal economics. No matter how great you think their ideas are, they’re not going to win Florida, Arizona, or Ohio.
But Biden understands one thing better than every candidate that has thus far ran for the Democratic nomination — pragmatism. To his credit, Trump understood this as well; he knows that voters and the Republican intelligentsia will live with him so as long as he can deliver on the policies that they seek and the spews the rhetoric that they want to hear. It’s also why Trump is scared to death of Biden.
In 2016, Trump presented himself as the pragmatic choice for voters that had either a completely conservative worldview or a had a worldview of a fiscal conservatism with social liberalism; he ran a very reactionary campaign that didn’t resonate with most Americans, but resonated with just enough in the right places for an unlikely triumph. However, Trump has a base, not a coalition of voters with varying interests.
The Democratic Party has historically been a coalition of voters. In the New Deal Era from 1932 to 1968, the party’s voting base included working-class voters, urbanites, blacks, and racist Southern whites. In the New Democrat era from 1992–2012, the party featured a big tent of voters ranging from the deep-blue progressive, to the center-left liberal, to the moderately conservative. Since George McGovern’s disastrous performance in the 1972 election, the party has tried to eschew ideological puritanism in an attempt to contain parts of the party that is caricatured as the “radical left”.
While today’s party identifies as more liberal than in years’ past, it is still moderate, ideologically impure Democrats that are leading the way in terms of electoral victories. Moderate Democrats led the way in flipping the House; a moderate Democrat triumphed in a surprise special election victory in Alabama; a moderate Democrat prevailed in a hotly contested Senate race in Arizona; and a conservative Democrat managed to hold on to his Senate seat in West Virginia — a state in which Trump captured nearly 2 out of every 3 votes.
Pragmatism is not necessarily an abandonment of values: it’s coming to terms with the idea that sometimes, something is better than nothing. What’s easier? Going for it, getting nothing, and stumble and fall ten steps backward, or going forward, getting at least something or most of what you’re looking for, and regrouping after taking two steps back? Not all socially progressive fights are the same, especially when it comes to society and politics.
But what is the pragmatism that Biden sees? He recognizes that the 2020 election is not going to be about policy, but it is going to be about culture: social and political. It’s going to be a referendum between boorishness and decorum; a battle between authoritarianism and liberal democracy; a fight between selfishness and selflessness; a scrum between inhumanity and humanity.
It’s not so much Biden needs voters to like him; Biden just needs the right amount of voters to live with him. It’s the same calculus that Trump made in 2016.
Biden gets it. And that’s why he’ll get my vote on Super Tuesday and in November.
