The campaign to elect Joe Biden has two expressed goals: (1) To win the White House, and (2) to do so on terms which will allow the centrist Democrats who make up the Biden campaign to weave a narrative which discredits the progressive left. To defeat Trump and the progressives at once.
Joe Biden is an ideological and dispositional moderate, a centrist. For nearly fifty years, he’s been a leading member and proponent of the moderate Democratic establishment — an establishment that made him what he is today. He’s a compromised, politics-as-usual establishment tool who stands in the way of meaningful change. He wants to maintain the existing establishment power structure of which he is a part. His campaign’s agenda or platform — if he has one — is to return the country to 2008, or what he thinks of as “normal”. This seems to be a concession that his brand of liberal centrism has reached a dead end and has nothing more to offer.
The people who are advising Joe Biden during the campaign — and who, if he’s elected, will take up the most senior positions in a Biden administration — all come from Biden’s long-time staff, the Obama administration, the Hillary Clinton campaign, or the lobbying industry. Here’s a list of them: Ted Kaufman, Steve Ricchetti (a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries — and you thought a Biden administration would expand healthcare), Ron Klain, Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers (there’s a name which should strike terror in your heart), Bruce Reed, and Mike Donilon. All of them are white men. All of them are old, establishment fogies. All of them want to see the progressive left snuffed out, and their privilege, power, and status maintained. They all have a personal interest in standing still — not in moving forward. You can rightly call them conservatives.
Joe Biden opposes the Green New Deal. He opposes Medicare for All. He opposes legalizing marijuana. He’s opposed to banning fracking. He’s opposed to taking corporate lobbyists and their money out of politics. He wants to increase funding for the Pentagon and police departments — not reform and reduce funding to both. He continues to support the Obama administration’s (and Trump administration’s) aggressive deportation practices, and does not support abolishing ICE or decriminalizing border crossing. And the economic plan he unveiled recently is a copy of Donald Trump’s “Buy America” plan. Poor Joe has no original ideas and can’t stop plagiarizing.
For those who support a progressive agenda and who would like to see this country improve and move forward — rather than stand still or go back to “normal” — a moderate Joe Biden administration promising the status quo ante would be an enormous step backward from which it may take decades to recover. Their best hope now is an establishment-discrediting Biden loss in 2020, four more terrifying years of the Donald Trump presidency, and a progressive Democratic win in 2024.
