Democrats are Desperate to Lose

Between their shameful defeat in the 2016 election and 2020, Democratic leadership has had an epiphany: they don’t want to win.

It’s not that they don’t believe a progressive candidate can’t win, nor is it as simple as they don’t want a progressive candidate to win. They don’t even particularly want one of their own corporatist cucks to win either. The leaders have found it genuinely more advantageous for them to lose pivotal elections than to win them. Having Trump in office, playing the role of the buffoonish arch villain, has made it so easy for the Democrats to look good. Having him as a foil makes virtually anyone else look better by comparison. The corporatist Democratic leadership has had a free pass to help push through capitalist policy and further bloat the already morbidly obese military industrial complex, while slow rolling and sidestepping addressing the climate catastrophe and any number of other crises, while shilding themselves with the #resistance label.

That’s why they picked Joe Biden, and why they forced him down the American Left’s throat. Because they were certain he would lose. But then, because of Trump being even more of a feckless and incompetent piece of shit than normal, for instance playing a central role in (a number coming closer to) two-hundred-thousand Americans dying from a preventable disease, Biden’s poll numbers started getting stronger. So they corrected that, by giving him Kamala Harris as a running mate.

Kamala Harris isn’t the worst partner Biden could have picked, or had picked for him. Amy Klobouchar or Susan Rice would have been worse. But she is still a bad choice. Harris has improved over the years. Her record in the senate is better than her career as a prosecutor. She’s sharp and a good speaker, making her a decent counter to Biden. But adding her to the ticket doesn’t help his chances. Every reasoning given for why she’s a strong candidate, in the context of the upcoming election, is flawed. Pundits have talked about how she’ll appeal to young people and people of color. But young people have made it clear that their views and politics are more progressive than older generations and well to the left of both Biden and Harris. As for older Black voters, Biden already takes that bloc for granted and somehow managed to have his campaign’s corpse dragged back into life by them halfway through the midterms. Neither Biden or Harris has done much to win the votes of other minority communities before or during their campaign. So if not young folks or POC, who is Harris meant to appeal to, apart from people who were already committed to voting for Biden?

While it’s unclear whom Harris is meant to attract, it’s easy to assume who she’ll push away. An oft repeated reasoning for Biden’s candidacy is the idea that he’ll appeal to the “working class voters,” a term used euphemistically here, and erroneously, to refer specifically to working/middle class older white men with a propensity towards bigotry. The hard hat and lunch pail folks. The folks that the Democratic party long took for granted, which doesn’t exist in as great numbers anymore thanks to neoliberal economic policies, outsourcing labor and crushing unions, and of which many are inclined against voting for a woman or a person of color. Whatever headway Biden is meant to make with that base may be undone by partnering with a woman of color, particularly considering the decent probability that the elderly and dementia-addled Biden will die during his first term and be succeeded by Harris. As loathsome as it is to cater to bigots, if the success of your candidacy is rooted in their support, you’d do well to get a sense of their thinking, and how easy it will be to scare many of them away with the prospect that they may end up being led by a woman, and a non-White one at that.

Harris doesn’t appeal to major constituencies that weren’t already going to vote for Biden, but she will potentially push away progressives and bigots alike. The people who are opposed to her based on her anti-poor, anti-POC, “tough on crime” record and her history of enforcing racist policies, and the dumb old crackers who are opposed to her for base bigotry alone make up a large portion of the voting base required for the Democrats to win in November.

But this doesn’t all fall on Biden and Harris alone. It’s the DNC, old guard Democrats like the Clintons, and the party’s major donors who’ve dug the hole for this campaign to be buried in. Not only have they forced a pair of coservative DINOs, both with substantial histories of racist and regressive policies, who are disingenuously and cynically attacked or lauded by Right and Left alike as radical leftwing progressives or similar nonsense, they’ve made the position of the party clear with this year’s virtual convention.

I get that the Dem leadership believes that they need to appeal to “moderate” Republicans, the “never Trumpers” who’ve switched their allegiances under the reign of the great diarrhetic pumpkin. But they’re wrong. As the new Republican party gets itself more comfortable in the realm of fascism, idiot conspiracies, and destructive batshit lunacy, the leaders of the Democratic party have been moving to turn their party into the old Republican party. It is a disastrously stupid move. Who the fuck are they intending to switch or sway with men like John Kasich and Colin Powel? And why the fuck is Michael Bloomberg still being given a platform to speak and allowed to continue calling himself a Democrat?

Meanwhile, an actually progressive and popular Democrat like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was given just about a minute and a half to speak, and she was an exception. Julian Castro, the only Latino candidate in the primaries (the Latinx community, again, being a constituency that Biden and Harris have been weak in rallying) wasn’t given a spot at all. There were a few decent representative voices, but “few” must be stressed. Much of it was old guard Democrats and Republican turncoats. Very little time was given to progressives and to young representatives, the prospective future of the party.

Over and over again, Democratic leadership refuses to look forward and meet the active mass of young progressives where they are. They do not want the Democratic party to be the progressive party. They’re happy to give lip service to such edgy issues as “racism is bad” and “fascism is problematic,” but they’re too invested in Wall Street and the neoliberal “free trade” system for them to ever consider adopting the policies of leftwing activists and voters. They’d rather give time to trash heaps like the Clintons, or losers like John Kerry, and scumbag Republicans (who are no less scumbags for opposing Trump), people whose histories and worldviews do not align meaningfully with the young progressives they should be trying to win.

Though it is fair to note that who besides old people, infinitely tiresome moderate types, and boring nerds even take the time to watch the Democratic National Convention?

If Biden does not win, it will not be Bernie Sanders or Bernie bros, and it won’t be Russian trolls, or even Kanye West’s aggravating and outrageously problematic ass that will be to blame. It will be Joe Biden and Kamala Harris themselves, and more so the Democratic leadership that set them up to fail, who will be to blame.