Imagine (presuming you don’t already) that you live in a swing state.Is there a single issue, or an approach to governance, or a character deficit, or a past vote that you would consider to be disqualifying for a Democratic presidential nominee? A commitment to preserving the for-profit healthcare system, perhaps? Waffling on the right to choose? A yes vote for the Iraq War? Would you decline, maybe, to vote for a candidate who had accepted corporate money to fund their campaign? Or one who had been credibly accused of sexual assault? What about a candidate with a record of trying to cut social safety net programs like Medicare? Or one who had eulogized a segregationist?
If your answer is no—that no single issue or “litmus test” is disqualifying—was there once a time, before Trump perhaps, when you would have answered “yes”?
What changed your mind?
[...] Democratic voters and candidates have been repeatedly asked the same question: Will you vote blue no matter who?“Vote blue no matter who,” has become a sort of gospel among moderate Democrats and “Never Trump Republicans.” The logic is simple: Trump is so cruel and presents such an enormous threat to, well, nearly everyone, that he must be stopped at all cost. As my former colleague Mehdi Hassan has argued forcefully and often, no matter what Biden’s flaws are, Trump is worse.
Certainly, the threat posed by Donald Trump would be difficult to overstate. The Federal judiciary is already lost for at least a generation. His withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords is but one example of his contempt for the environmental crisis that threatens life on earth as we know it. And his 2020 budget stands poised to cut essential social programs that keep the most vulnerable Americans barely afloat.
But although I agree Trump must be defeated, I don’t think it must come at the price of abandoning the values which ostensibly motivate our opposition to him. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what this “vote blue no matter who” orthodoxy really promotes.
Last November, former New York mayor and 9th richest man in the world Michael Bloomberg made a late entrance into the Democratic primary as a “stop Bernie” candidate. [...]But Bloomberg’s effort was quickly hamstrung by damning videos which revealed his racist, authoritarian politics—already familiar to Black and Brown New Yorkers—to all. “Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.” he said in one recording. “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 16 to 21. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America.” On transgender rights, he once opined: “If you wanna know is somebody a good salesman, give them the job of going to the midwest and picking a town and selling to that town the concept that some man wearing a dress should be in the locker room with their daughter.”
Yet despite the outcry from civil rights leaders and anti-racist activists, many pundits, politicians, and journalists continued to pressure candidates about their commitment to support Bloomberg if he were to become the nominee. It seemed clear that only one answer was politically viable, Bloomberg’s racist, authoritarian, oligarchical, and misogynist tendencies notwithstanding: Yes.
[...]The rationale for potentially endorsing a Bloomberg candidacy was murky at best. For one, it was not at all clear that Bloomberg presented a better alternative to Trump. Trump is certainly more obvious in his boorishness, but as the saying goes: the devil you don’t know is often more dangerous. Trump is authoritarian but so is Bloomberg: this is a man who lobbied to change New York State law so he could rule for a third term. Both men are oligarchs who openly use their wealth to wield political power. Neither has any respect for the civil liberties of Blacks or Latinos. And of course, to Warren’s point, they’re both infamous misogynists.
Moreover, the risk of a Bloomberg win was remote. At the time, Biden and Sanders led in the polls, and a half dozen other, more qualified candidates remained in the race. It’s difficult to imagine how declining to endorse Bloomberg on principle would have hurt the party. Quite the opposite: by affirming that Bloomberg—a sexist Republican-until-recently who embraces racial profiling and financial croynism—is unqualified to top the Democratic ticket, Warren (and the rest of the Democratic field) would have done a rare and important thing: affirm that Democrats stand for something. That we have our limits.
To allow that Bloomberg could adequately represent the party was a serious concession of principle. And the thing is, when you set the bar low, you tend to attract things that slither and crawl.
Now that Joe Biden is the nominee, “vote blue no matter whoism” is principally deployed to shield him from personal accountability and calls to move left — where the bulk of American voters are on policy. To criticise him or merely decline to endorse him is to “cast a vote to support Trump,” according to prominent pundits.
But, of course, it’s possible to defend the choice of Biden over Trump without pretending he’s flawless.
Biden’s got his own problems.
Biden has suffered personal loss, which has made him a comforting figure to grieving Americans who have lost jobs and loved ones in the pandemic. Yet he still symbolizes a brand of establishment centrism that leaves some younger voters and some in the party’s activist wing uninspired.
“We have to be true to ourselves and acknowledge that Biden is a mediocre, milquetoast, neoliberal centrist that we’ve been fighting against in the Democratic establishment,” Cornel West, the Harvard University professor and a Bernie Sanders supporter, told me.
If Sanders’s primary voters stay home on Election Day out of pique, that could damage Biden’s chances, especially in must-win swing states.
Nina Turner, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, told me she has no appetite for the choice she faces: “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.”
The problem is that corporate Democrats serve the same masters, but must operate under a veil of pretense. Their corporate donors are equally motivated as Republican donors to cut the social safety net, preserve for-profit health insurance, protect private real estate against profit-undermining housing laws, and slow the pace of environmental reforms. The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republican messaging aligns straightforwardly with their economic goals: Cut taxes for the rich. Protect “individual freedoms” from government overreach. Encourage “self sufficiency.” They’ve branded austerity so that it’s welcomed by their constituents. Meanwhile, Democrats attempt to disguise that they’re offering versions of the same wrapped in rainbow flags and kente cloth, but have the clumsy task of rationalizing why they fail to deliver more than tokenism and lip service.
For Republican corporate donors to be happy, Republicans must win, and they do. For Democratic corporate donors to be happy, Democrats must lose. And they do.
Candidates like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramilla Jayapal and Jamal Bowman excite voters and are able to message differently exactly because they don’t take corporate PAC or lobbyist money. And in the context of the 2016 and 2020 primaries, millions of Americans got a taste for what it felt like to be offered concrete, people-funded plans to advance their lives.
[...] Now, establishment Democrats want the base to put their substantive differences aside and coalesce behind Biden. But for millions of voters, what they’re getting for that exchange feels inadequate.
If Democrats want the same party cohesion conservatives enjoy, the answer isn’t to become more like Republicans and coalesce behind a flawed candidate. It’s to start acting like Democrats. It’s time to regain the public trust. And you don’t do that by asking them to vote for a “D” before an idea.
Being clear about what you’re fighting for matters. Especially in the shadow of the incredible health and economic crises currently facing America, universal healthcare still matters. Abortion rights still matter. Climate change absolutely matters. And backing popular, progerssive solutions to the COVID crisis-- solutions like monthly relief checks-- would certainly go a long way toward proving that the country wouldn’t just be better under a Biden administration, it could thrive.
[...] Biden declines to support popular progressive policies because, frankly, he, and the people who run his campaign, are paid not to. Biden’s senior advisor, Steve Richetti, is a former healthcare lobbyist. The organizers of his super PAC include Larry Rasky, whose lobbying firm works for Raytheon, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, and the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. More billionaires donated to Joe Biden’s campaign than any other-- at least forty-four billionaires, in fact, representing the real estate industry, the finance industry, and big tech. Voters may want Medicare for All, but what incentive do these men have to kneecap the for-profit healthcare industry? How will the needs of renters and unemployed gig workers stand up against the interests of real estate and life insurance billionaire Eli Broad, who contributed $25,000 to a Democratic Party PAC?
[...] Most Democratic voters can accept that they need to vote for Biden to prevent a second Trump term. But more voters, particularly new or formerly disaffected voters, would be convinced to turn out (and volunteer and donate) if party leaders truly recognized what’s at the root of Sanders’ appeal. In his platform, millions of working class and poor Americans felt their most fundamental concerns were genuinely being addressed-- often for the first time in their political lives. They saw in him a candidate with a values-based vision of what this country could be: a belief that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was not just a slogan, but a bedrock principle that life shouldn’t be contingent on a co-pay, race shouldn’t influence liberty, and happiness shouldn’t be held hostage by corporate titans too stingy to pay a living wage. I suspect that many can’t forget the feeling, cultivated by Sanders’ movement, that a better world was possible and that yes, they deserved it. And frankly, they shouldn’t ever forget.
[...] I am deeply concerned that each time a corporate Democrat attempts to disavow us of our principles by smearing our values as unreasonable “litmus tests”-- each time they tell us that a policy implemented the world over is “pie in the sky,” that demanding healthcare as a human right is akin to whining for “a pony,” that women’s rights are conditional on who the woman is and how powerful the man is that she’s crossed-- we lose our ethical moorings.
And with each election cycle, as progressive candidates are openly thwarted by big monied interests who are deeply invested in the status quo, I’m concerned that we have no strategy to ratchet back the rightward creep that “lesser of two evilism” enables.
“Vote blue no matter who” lowers the floor of what Democrats stand for to a hair’s breadth above Trump’s scalp. And the effect of repeatedly lowering the standards of the only powerful resistance party is grave. [...]
I agree that Donald Trump presents a unique and grevious threat to this country. But it’s also true that every four years we’re told the same. Republicans are becoming more right-wing, more reactionary, more openly white supremacist. But it happens, in part, because Democrats chase them to the right, thinking electoral victory can be found in splitting the difference rather than taking a stand for good. Year after year, Democrats vote to keep Republicans from winning “at any cost.” At some point, the conscience coffers will be empty.
