No Joe: The Socialist Case Against Biden
by Hank Kennedy
This op-ed is one-half of a two-part series on American electoralism and the 2020 US presidential election.
“It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”-Eugene Debs
It is not easy being an anti-Joe Biden socialist. This election cycle has seen open letters from Students for a Democratic Society alumni, the DSA North Star Caucus, Noam Chomsky and others begging leftists to vote for Joe Biden. As if this is not enough there’s now a campaign to get DSA members to campaign for Biden as DSA members, in violation of our 2019 Convention decision to endorse no other Democrats than Bernie Sanders. Against these daunting odds, I’ve booted up my computer to give three broad arguments for why socialists should not vote for Joe Biden.
It Goes Against Our Historic Tradition
The American Socialist movement was founded on a tradition of political independence from capitalist parties. Besides the heroic example of Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, and was jailed (by a Democratic President!) for his anti-war activism, there were Congressmen Meyer London and Victor Berger and Mayors like Emil Seidel and Frank Ziedler. Even Bernie Sanders ran successfully as an independent for mayor of Burlington, then Congress and Senate before being bitten by the Democratic Party bug. In 1989 he said “It is absolutely imperative that the progressive movement raise the issues and the analyses which will educate the people of our nation to begin to understand what the hell is going on. And I honestly don’t believe that that can take place within the Democratic Party.”
These candidates followed the example set by Karl Marx who argued, in an address to the Central Committee of the Communist League,
“Even when there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint.”
Biden is a Uniquely Terrible Candidate
Biden is probably the worst Democratic candidate of the 21st century. Aside from his sexual impropriety with women and his possible senility he has been on the wrong side of nearly every issue in politics. He voted for the war in Iraq, that killed a million people; the PATRIOT ACT, that eroded our civil liberties; NAFTA, that shredded good paying manufacturing jobs; “welfare reform,” that further immiserated the poor; deregulation of the banking industry, that led to Wall Street’s criminal destruction of the global economy; the racist Clinton crime bill, that fueled mass incarceration; the homophobic DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and many other terrible pieces of legislation (See Branko Marcetic’s wonderful book Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden for all the gory details).All of these issues votes fly in the face of socialist principles and reflect Biden’s subservience to corporate power. Biden also has more billionaire donors than Trump, leading the President 106 to 93. He cannot serve two masters, both the billionaire class and the working people. Given Biden’s past record it’s easy to guess which side he will be on.
Recently, progressive elected officials like Bernie, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib and organized labor have tried to paint Biden as a people’s champion who will fight for progressive issues. Sanders even went so far as to say that Biden will be the most progressive president since FDR. This is simply unbelievable given Biden’s past record. A tiger does not change its stripes and a racist, capitalist, imperialist doesn’t overnight become an antiracist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist.
Electing Biden Won’t Necessarily Lead to Less Evil
Claims that a Democratic President will necessarily lead to less evil fly in face of our recent experience. Barack Obama, the “lesser evil” Democrat presided over more deportations than any 20th century presidents, lead the United States to produce more oil and gas than Saudi Arabia (and asked for thanks from the energy industry), prosecuted twice as many government whistleblowers as all preceding presidents combined, supported the murderous war in Yemen and launched ten times more drone strikes than his immediate predecessor.
Democrats in power generally serve to cement their Republican predecessor’s polices, like how Obama continued the PATRIOT Act, the Bush tax cuts for the rich, torture at Guantanamo Bay, and the War in Afghanistan. Any Progressive items, like a public option for healthcare and the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act were allowed to quietly die in Congress.
Advocates for a Biden vote insist that this time will be different. It is hard to see how that will be possible given that he has promised to: not ban fracking, veto Medicare for All while a pandemic rages, increase funding for police during uprisings against police brutality, and give apartheid Israel “ironclad” support.How is Biden supposed to be pushed to the left when he is running to the right of even his old boss and has told rich donors that “nothing would fundamentally change”?
The “f-word”
The elephant in the room regarding supporting Biden is the “f-word”: fascism. According to this argument Trump is a fascist dictator in the making and therefore any terrible Democrat must be supported to defeat him. There are two problems with argument, first if Trump had the ability or will of a Mussolini or Hitler, he would already have illegalized his opposition and socialists would be in labor camps rather than debating on who to vote for. He had control of all three branches of government for two years and the Democrats and other parties are still allowed to legally operate.
The second problem is that voting for a right-wing Democrat is exactly the wrong way to combat fascism. In the 1932 German Presidential election, the German SDP (their DSA) supported right winger Paul von Hindenburg against the Nazi candidate, Adolf Hitler. Hindenburg was bad, yes, but an attitude of “anybody but Hitler” ensured he got the SDP support. Hindenburg won the presidency, promptly appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany and the rest, as they say, is history.
Conclusions
I agree that we need to defeat Trump and the rightwing movement that supports him. The way to do that is to not sacrifice our independence to help a candidate who is half a step away from being as bad as Trump. Instead as socialists we should pull the lever for the strongest socialist candidate, Howie Hawkins of the Green Party. Then, we must begin constructing our own mass Democratic Socialist Party, like the one of Eugene Debs, to fight the two parties of racism, war, and big business. After reading this article, I hope you will join me in the effort.
The Detroit Socialist is produced and run by members of Detroit DSA’s Newspaper Collective. Interested in becoming a member of Detroit DSA? Go to dsausa.org/join to become a member. Send a copy of the dues receipt to: membership@metrodetroitdsa.com in order to get plugged in to our activities! Detroit DSA’s Electoral Committee meets biweekly on Tuesdays at 5:30PM.
