America is too broken for Biden

It beats the hell out of a fascist coup. But here in the USA, normal means broken. That’s why Trump happened.

President-Elect Joe Biden strikes me as a good man. I don’t know him, but I like him. I am very, very glad he is president, given the apocalyptic alternative. The sheer presence of decency and competency in the White House after Trump’s depraved four years is, literally, like being able to breathe again as we drag ourselves through the rest of covid and beyond.

But Biden will never lead us away from the deathly systemic greed and the calm political amorality that pulled America down to President Donald Trump in the first place. My friend Martin Beck, in his honest Letter to Asia trying to explain the insanities of the expiring Trump presidency in a Vietnamese publication, used the term “Too Broken for Biden,” and has let me borrow it. I think it’s a perfect description of this moment.

I have been writing, and looking, for years for something that might finally empower basic, fair, progressive government in America. I’ve been pining for political leaders who are not afraid to lose elections, who’d rather fight for the interests of their constituents and lose than pander to money and expediency and win. I want presidential candidates who at this late point in the fiction of American democracy are sufficiently bold and honest about the rubble of ordinary Americans’ dreams to campaign on the self-evident truths of the wreckage. And who will then champion some elegantly obvious and well-understood solutions.

For example, one issue at the very top of that list, vastly popular on both right and left and across racial lines, is taking private money out of politics and replacing it with a publicly- financed campaign system. All presidential candidates, say, would offer their ideas from a single public podium. Those who make a reasonable popularity cut (say 15%) would get exactly the same amount of time to speak to voters through publicly-funded no-frills messages of their actual ideas and policy visions instead of high-production emotionally-manipulative ads.

It’s irrefutable: if big corporate donors could no longer screen candidates by ponying up the huge money needed to run expensive political and media campaigns, then public officials and public policy would serve public needs instead of corporate desires. The modest public expenditure on no-buy airtime and internet messages would save the nation billions in squandered donations to corporate donors who directly profit from the laws they buy. No wonder non-rich Americans like campaign finance reform.

And it would change the USA overnight. If we equalized our elections this way, it would take months, not years or decades, for our country to embrace free health care for all, which a large majority of Americans (63% in 2020) have consistently said they want. Most other developed nations, including the big one poised tantalizingly just across America’s northern border, already have it. Americans know why it makes sense: having hundreds of redundant big “health insurance” companies sucking profit off the top of our health budgets and wastefully duplicating record-keeping systems is plain stupid. Unless you care more about profit than people. And that’s exactly the moneyed meat grinder that even the best-intentioned candidates run into when they pursue a U.S. Senate seat or the presidency.

I know some very nice, smart, educated, prosperous people who genuinely want for America to treat all citizens better. They often call themselves liberal or progressive. They hate Trump’s guts and have worked to defeat him. But, when cornered on issues like disempowering money in politics and ending profit-based health care and upending our nation’s crazily wealth-favoring tax system and income gaps, too many of them retreat into an alcove of privilege: they call Bernie Sanders’ correctives for the rich draconian, they wish Alexandria Ocasio Cortez would quietly show more respect for her superiors, and they see white and oh-golly-decent Biden as the most “realistic” response their paralyzed America can manage against Trump’s horde of white racial cultists.

But here’s what these cushioned white Democrats of claimed good intention fail to see:

· Trump won because his white base knows, as do nearly all the American people of color whom Trumpists purport to despise, that 21st-century corporate America has been thoroughly broken by its rich rulers. The Trump base is economically more progressive than the wealthy white Democratic donors who detest them. But where Trumpists go wrong, in the long tradition of scuffling American white people, is in embracing the old lie of white supremacy as the secret to regaining their lost self-respect and societal bossdom. They pass over the obvious solution — an egalitarian multiracial democracy not run by the rich — to instead grasp at a 400-year-old pacifier of selfish race-based satisfaction. If big Democratic donors were more interested in true democracy than in maintaining their trust funds, they’d confront Trumpists’ vile racism while fervently embracing their economic populism.

· The smart political response to the Trump base — and goddammit, how has an entire generation of bright Democratic Party strategists missed this? — isn’t to cave to the presumed mathematical middle of America’s befuddled white voters. It’s to outflank the fake populist Trump/GOP white anger narrative with an even fierier true progressive populist narrative. Say, a platform grounded in battling for landmark laws that take money entirely out of politics. Imagine what the Democratic Party could do with a righteous rage that eclipses Trump’s but is based on fact, not hatred, and that isn’t afraid to confront the twin evils of savagely inadequate $15-an-hour wage targets (Biden’s current offer) and wickedly deceptive claims that white supremacy will heal broke and broken white wage earners. And further: Imagine a Democratic presidential nominee who, rather than timidly appeasing the conservatism of cautious establishment voters, instead reaches fearlessly outward with these narratives into the frustrated near-half of Americans who boycott Election Day altogether because they know it’s a scam contest between two representatives of big money. It’s no wonder that Bernie Sanders polled strongly against Trump in 2016 despite a scared Democratic leadership that assumed the corporate-friendlier Hillary Clinton to be the safer bet.

· It was black voters who beat Trump in 2020. Not John Kasich. Not safe mainstream messages. Not the careful deliberation of the white mainstream. Not Biden’s lukewarm split-the-difference campaign platitudes. Trump lost because black voters, historically among the first to suffer from the worst in American politics and the last to be compensated, saw the Trump trains’ empty freight cars coming for them and said Hell, no. It was black voters’ self-organization (consider the tour de force 2020 voter registration drive led by Stacey Abrams in Georgia), not the still-important impact of white voters or strategists, that made the difference in preventing an official Trump autocracy in November. More broadly, people of color are getting tired of saving America from itself in key elections. Me, I hope that Ocasio Cortez, and The Squad overall, ramp up their challenges to Nancy Pelosi and an ancient white Democratic leadership that still believes sucking up to capitalism as usual is a survivable path to the future. Progressive and radical leadership, including bold candidates of color, are the best hope the Democrats have of any future relevance.

Make no mistake: As I said, I’m very happy that Biden won. When the news broke I was in the streets cheering with my neighbors. We now have a 4-year window to stave off the plunge into embittered white nationalist fascism that still looms. Trump voters are more than half of the white electorate. The fanatically misinformed racist cult base that Facebook and Twitter have greedily enabled in the past four years is now a standing threat to democracy. If Biden and his standard-issue corporate-based administration sink to the challenge in the way they appear capable of, and if the Democratic Party slouches toward 2024 with its familiar deference to business as usual in a corporate-ravaged country, I’m bailing for a progressive party that can speak to actual people. Even if two friends and I have to start one.