Why I Won’t ‘Settle For Biden’ (And You Shouldn’t Either)

If you’ve been following politics during this pandemic, you’re probably aware that ‘Settle For Biden’ has become something of a mantra for U.S. liberals. Even ex-Sanders supporters, who were decrying Joe Biden as a decrepit neoliberal six months ago, are now convinced that securing Joe Biden’s presidency and denying Donald Trump a second term takes precedence over all other political issues. But should backing Biden really be our number one priority? Should it be a priority at all?

For the ‘Settle For Biden’ argument to work, two premises must be accepted. 

1. Donald Trump represents a unique danger to U.S. ‘democracy’; he is, according to Bernie Sanders, “the most dangerous president in American history“. 
2. Joe Biden would be a substantial force for progress. According again to Sanders, he would be “the most progressive president since FDR“. 

First, is Trump the unique evil he is portrayed as? To find out, we must compare him to his predecessors. What has Trump done that’s beyond the pale? Is it his warmongering? His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, waged drone wars in seven countries, killing thousands of innocents. Is it his vile treatment of women? He shares that with Bill Clinton, who, like Trump, is a sexual predator whose relationship to deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is well documented. What about his racism? In this, he follows Ronald Reagan, who created much of the modern system of mass incarceration, which Michelle Alexander has called ‘the New Jim Crow’.

Trump fits snugly into an unbroken pattern of US militarism, misogyny, and white supremacy. Despite being an exceptionally evil person by almost any standard, by the standards of U.S. presidents, he is fairly unremarkable.

But even if Trump is no anomaly, perhaps Biden is. Perhaps he can stray from the path laid by his predecessors. Examination of his campaign promises would appear to confirm this. There’s only one issue, which is that campaign promises are non-binding.

Will Biden fulfill his promises? We have no way of knowing the future; we can only extrapolate based on the past. Does Biden’s record show that he is likely to pursue his progressive promises in the face of opposition? No. As senator from Delaware, Biden faithfully served corporate interests. A case in point is Biden’s involvement in the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, which allowed corporations to flee bankruptcy to the legal sanctuary of Delaware. 

Biden is not only a corporate serf; he is also a warmonger and segregationist. As chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations, he was one of the architects of the Iraq War. He teamed up with Dixiecrats to pass anti-busing legislation, hobbling efforts to desegregate schools.

Even though Biden’s record is atrocious, many of his supporters acknowledge this. They claim, however, that Biden will be “held accountable” by voters, pursuing progressive legislation out of self-interest. But these arguments are flimsy. He has already all but publicly announced that he will not seek a second term, making him even less accountable than a normal first-term president, who would at least have to worry about re-election.

More broadly, however, the idea that Biden will be held “accountable” to the interests of voters displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of “democracy” in the USA. What mechanism within the political system do voters have to hold a president accountable? If Joe Biden’s administration decided to decrease rather than increase investment in green energy, what exactly could the people do to stop him? 

The U.S. political system is designed from the ground up to be as unaccountable as possible to the people. Biden is accountable, however, to the lobbyists, donors, and oligarchs to whom he owes his career. Margaret Kimberly puts this bluntly in an article for Black Agenda Report: “Even if the people were sufficiently well organized to call anyone to account, they would be begging Biden… to act in direct opposition to the interests of the donor class who put [him] in [his] position…”.

Even if this was not enough to show that Biden is unlikely to pass meaningful progressive legislation, his own campaign has repeatedly signaled as such. In mid-August, for example, one of Biden’s top aides, Ted Kaufman, said that “When you see what Trump’s done with the deficit… forget about Covid-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.” Kaufman is signaling that Biden’s administration likely will not be spending enough to meaningfully combat climate change or the pandemic. This is made even more clear by the fact that several of Biden’s top advisors on climate policy are closely connected to the fossil fuels industry.

That said, there are some campaign promises which Biden will certainly keep. Biden has frequently sought to appeal to xenophobia. In a campaign ad that accuses Trump of having “rolled over to the Chinese“, he extends the hysterical assertion that Trump is “Putin’s Puppet” to China’s Xi Jinping. While Donald Trump is an imperialist president like any other, he is widely seen by the U.S. ruling class as having weakened the USA’s ‘global leadership’, a euphemism for the U.S.A.’s imperial world hegemony. Restoring the U.S. ‘global leadership’ would entail ratcheting up US aggression against its nuclear-armed geopolitical rivals China and Russia, as well as regional ‘enemies’ like Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea.

With all this in mind, can the ‘Settle For Biden’ position be seen as reasonable? For this argument to make sense, Donald Trump must be a uniquely dangerous president, and Joe Biden must be a force for progress. Neither of these premises proves true. The broader point is that a focus on individuals is a smokescreen. Whether or not Trump is more or less evil than Biden is irrelevant: they are both agents of the same evil system. Having Joe Biden in office might make white liberals feel better about themselves, but will do nothing to combat white supremacy, or U.S. imperialism, or climate catastrophe. 

To continue supporting and advocating for one side or the other of the duopoly under these conditions is not only extremely privileged, it is suicidal, as even the most privileged among us will burn eventually due to climate change rendering the Earth uninhabitable. Our priority must not be “defeating Trump”, but dismantling the system that created both him and Biden.

So I won’t ‘Settle For Biden’, because voting in U.S. presidential elections is the practical and moral equivalent of doing nothing. Whether you choose to waste your time by participating in the farcical 2020 election is irrelevant. What matters is whether you choose to participate in substantial political activities: marching in the ongoing national movement for Black lives; organizing Mutual Aid groups in your community to assist those who are struggling due to the pandemic; writing, reading, and educating yourself and others. Don’t let the Democratic Party establishment trick you into thinking that all that is secondary to securing the election of Joe Biden, a representative of the very institutions that are destroying us.

I’ll end with a quote from the great Malcolm X, who made this point better than I could back in 1964.

“If [Democratic incumbent Lyndon] Johnson had been running by himself, he would not have been acceptable to anyone. The only thing that made him acceptable to the world was that the shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists, knew that the only way people would run towards the fox would be if you showed them a wolf. So they created a ghastly alternative. And it had the whole world… hoping that Johnson would beat [Republican nominee Barry] Goldwater.”