It is tempting to fantasize that we can just hop in a time machine back to 2016. For a lot of people, the Trump era is a time of exhaustion. I hear again and again this sense that time seems to have slowed. That every day is another horror. People are tired of the work and pain of following every calamity. This is wartime, every day is another battle. And I want you to get ready for the reality that the war won't end with the 2020 election.
As much as you may want peace, you can’t go back to 2016. You don’t want to go back to 2015 either or 2014. Because those were imperfect times too. People could tell they were getting a raw deal. Liberals may be nostalgic about a time when the president wasn't an embarrassment. And if you were a white American of enough means, living under Obama meant that politics was easy. It was something you could ignore, because things were fine. It wasn't fine for everybody else, but never mind that.
I want to specifically note that Joe Biden was willing to use Charlottesville as a campaign prop, but he wasn't actually on those streets counter-protesting the Nazis. Why would he be? His skin isn't in the game. He's been in the halls of power long enough that he'll be good and rich no matter what. To Biden, the problem with the Nazis wasn’t that they were Nazis, but they were loud and that he had to see tiki torches on the front page of the New York Times. The problem with Trump isn't Trump or real politics that affect real people, but how it reminds Biden of unfortunate things he'd rather ignore. Biden has lived his entire life fighting for a pretty okay America for those who already have, not the Have-Nots. Biden might as well campaign on "Make America Fine Again". That doesn't mean actually improving America. No Biden, is the man who will make it cleaner and less problematic for people like him. And is that the best we can do?
Other, better, and harder working writers than myself have already gone over the glaring and horrible issues in Joe Biden's many decades in power. You don't stay this long in Washington's highest circles without bad things in your voting record. Biden voted for the Nineties crime bill, he voted for the Iraq War, supported welfare "reform", claimed to have written the PATRIOT Act, and has championed deregulating banks. He has blood on his hands, real victims of his policies. But I want to focus particularly on the Biden of forty years ago. Let's see the Joe Biden who least fits his image as Barack Obama's folksy yet good-natured white sidekick.
Biden would probably call himself today a champion of civil rights. But in 1975 he helped brake the tide of the Civil Rights Movement. This was never taught to me in schools because the entire thing makes us all look bad. We've literally segregated these events out of our national history. (Which is pretty damn fitting, actually.) However, the Civil Rights Movement didn't end with a few marches and legislation. That battle continued well into the Seventies. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't done just by ending some laws in the South, before his death he was heading North. Desegregating the North turned out to be just as nasty as desegregating the South. Only in the North, it lost.
It was easy during the Civil Rights Movement to blame all the trouble on some "bad people". It's very helpful to externalize the problems. America itself wasn't racist, it was just some rednecks in the white hoods who were racist. Never mind that cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago had their own informal Jim Crow. There were places you lived if you were one color and places you lived if you were another.
Federally mandated desegregation policies would have had black students bused to white suburban schools. When white Northern "moderates" had to see integrations in their own backyards, they exploded. In Boston furious parents threw bricks at little black children, mirroring Little Rock, AK parents from decades earlier. Joe Biden ran in 1972 supporting desegregation. When his Delaware white voter base turned against this, Biden changed his tune and fully embraced anti-busing initiatives. He even worked with Senator Robert Byrd, a former KKK member, in passing anti-busing laws. (Biden would later call Byrd "a mentor" in 2010.) Instead of confronting just how deep racism actually was in the US, it was easier just to let integration die. It was all too inconvenient for Joe Biden and his kind.
Schools with heavy minority populations have been behind White schools ever since. Joe Biden isn't even president but he already has a legacy in this country, and you can see it yourself. Visit an inner city school with a mostly black student body and see the horrible, crumbling insides. Then drive out the suburbs and see the shining modern school for their peers. One school prepares you for college, the other prepares you for prison. One school tells you how much society values you, the other one tells you exactly how much the system actually cares. The unfortunate realities of poverty and inequality were not solved in theh Seventies, we just put them somplace else. Out of sight, out of mind. Meanwhile, America could keep telling itself that it had finally solved racism every decade or so.
Joe Biden is not the president of solutions, he’s the president of the status quo. The status quo just isn’t going to work anymore. It's falling apart. Americans have been growing poorer for years, the environment is in collapse, and yeah, racists are marching in the streets. You can't hide this unpleasantness with a nice Neoliberal sheen of paint and pretend that things can go back to normal. Even in 2016 voters knew that normal wasn't working. That’s why candidates like Bernie Sanders and everybody’s favorite old racist, Donald Trump, got as far as they did. Even if Biden could put the facade back up, could we even believe in it? Should we believe it?
What we need is a president willing to take radical and far-reaching steps to actually fix the problems. This week Elizabeth Warren proposed a massive student debt forgiveness plan, aiming to fix a real problem that will threaten our economy if left festering. And that's besides the pile of misery a mountain of debt upon an entire generation has created. Biden isn't the guy who create solutions like that. He's the guy who championed legislation to strip bankruptcy protections away from student borrowers, after all. When Sanders says "Medicare for All", Biden says "fix Obamacare". He's proposing a band-aid on a policy that was itself a band-aid for our broken healthcare system.
Sadly, for Biden and his ilk, band-aids aren't going to work anymore. Once upon a time you could compartmentalize all that was wrong with this country and push it away to somewhere it didn't need to bother you. Maybe you even can dream of returning to that time when you could wake up in a suburban neighborhood, pleasantly read the Times over a cup of coffee, and live happily in the knowledge that your home price would only go up forever. That fantasy is tearing in every direction. There’s no hiding from the economic and racial problems anymore. There is no simple adjustment to get the engine going, the engine itself is rotten. Biden has sold out the most vulnerable people in this country and the world again and again with the goal of keeping things nice. What will he do if you give him more power yet again? Who is next to sell-out?
Donald Trump is not an anomaly that appeared out of nowhere. White supremacy didn't just happen in 2016, it has been year all along. Joe Biden has personally supported it and profited off it. We just let ourselves believe it was gone. We could externalize the problems and not realize, that in fact, the problem was us. I said two years ago there was "Get Out of Trump Free" Card. Because Donald Trump is us. He's you and me and Joe Biden. Unless you take stock of who is gaining and who is losing around here, you're just going to invite more nightmares and freakshows. America can't pretend that things aren't wrong because when we do that, something worse comes around.
If you choose a Biden Administration, you’re not going back to the suburb. You're going to wake up in a rented apartment whose rates skyrocket every year, having to fork over 20% of your income to student loans, living just one medical procedure away from total economic ruin, feeling the thermostat go up ever so slightly higher on average every year, and still on Twitter you'll get notifications about that day’s latest travesty. We're out of rug to sweep things under.
We're not going back to 2016 or 1975 or 1776. If Joe Biden has a time machine, we've already traveled on it. And guess where it took us? Straight to 2019.
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