Biden is already Betraying the People Who Won Him the Presidency
From establishment neoliberal corporatists like John Kerry to Brian Deese, Biden is building his cabinet with exactly the sort of dregs that failed us in the past and do not have the minds or the wills we need for the future. Some of his prospective appointments seem good, but only on the most superficial level. With Kamala Harris, we’ve essentially been directed to celebrate the accomplishment of the first woman/ first Black person/ first south-Asian American to be elected to the vice-presidency, and not look too closely at the less laudable parts of her record and her as a person. With others Biden has announced, like Neera Tanden, we’re again expected to celebrate the first Indian-American woman nominated to hold the position of director of the Office of Budget and Management, and not worry about the fact that she has promoted austerity policies such as cutting social security, medicare, and medicaid. The Biden administration has evidently already decided that it’s more important that a woman of color helps give them points for inclusion and a false veneer of progressivism than it is to actually provide the elderly and the poor and people of color the services to which they should be entitled.
It has been noted and celebrated, as in the case with Tanden, and as was the case with Harris, the fact that Biden is filling his cabinet with more women, more people of color, more women of color than past cracker administrations. Congrats on clearing that low bar, but celebrating people for their identity while overlooking the fact that their beliefs and actions are counter and detrimental to those with whom they share that identity is a betrayal.
The supposed appeal of the Biden candidacy was that he was “electable,” a news media euphemism for a white male with name recognition, and that he would appeal to the quasi-mythical and mostly anachronistic White working class voter base that used to vote Democratic but flipped to Trump in 2016. This may have held to a small extent, but was not the deciding factor.
It was not swing voters or moderate Republicans that won the election for Biden. It was people of color, people from cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta. There were those who changed allegiances when voting for president, as evidenced by the disparity between votes for Trump and the greater number of votes for other Republican politicians. The 2020 election was generally a rebuke of Trump, if a weaker one than he deserved. But the lion’s share of the credit for Biden scraping by in the swing states that won him the election belongs to the voters and activists in cities with large non-White populations. It was Black, Latinx, Asian, Native American, and largely young people who overcame every obstruction put in their way by the antidemocratic Republican terrorist organization, showed up, and gave Biden the votes he needed to win. They didn’t do it, by and large, because they like Biden or think he’ll be a good president. I have yet to hear anyone but poorly informed (mostly white) boomers say that they were genuinely happy to vote for Biden. He was the lesser of two evils for most people that they were once more forced to resort to in our corrupt plutocracy.
Trump had to go, but Biden was never the best choice to replace him. We knew he would be a disappointment, assuming we had any hopes for him to begin with. But it is a callous and cynical betrayal for Biden and his team to thank the people of color and women and young people who held their noses and gave him their votes to then appoint people who will act against the interests of those voters.
There are more Democratic voters in the US than Republican. The “moderate” Republican base is dying. They know it. They know that their popular support is shrinking by the day, which is why they opened up more widely to white nationalists and psychotic conspiracists. The theoretical base of the Democratic party is growing. Young people in general, with specific focus on people of color, are more inclined towards liberal and socialist policies. Certainly more so than to conservatism, neoliberalism, libertarianism, and fascism. They want and need and deserve universal healthcare, corrections to a grossly iniquitous economy, real initiatives to remedy the climate crisis, a complete dissolution and rebuilding of the law enforcement and justice systems. “Market-based solutions,” “reforms,” and other frauds and half-measures are not enough.
The Biden presidency will not be a time to relax, and stop following the news, as many liberals and capitalists hope and intend it to be. Removing Trump does not solve the major problems that precipitated his rise. We need to be more engaged and active than ever, holding Biden accountable for his bullshit. The existential crises we face are more dire than ever before, and as I’ve warned before, we cannot allow the presence of a Democratic president to ease us into complacency. If we do, we’ll die in our sleep.