Super Tuesday Takeaway: We’re Doomed, Probably
We’re doomed. Things looked sketchy before, but “Super Tuesday” did it. It was the nail in our coffin. We, in this context, being the country, the world, humankind. We’re fucked, because people didn’t vote right. In bringing Joe Biden closer to the Democratic nomination, we’ve doomed ourselves.
Am I putting too much importance on the role of electoral politics and voting? Absolutely.
Am I being alarmist? Sure, but with reason.
Super Tuesday was a shit show. Hundreds of polling places were closed in poorer districts and those with higher minority populations. Young people didn’t vote in the numbers they should have (Anecdote: I asked student workers at my job about whether or not they voted. Their answers were worrying. One didn’t realize she’d registered as a mail-in voter, and didn’t recall receiving a ballot, and didn’t know if she was still allowed to vote in person; I explained that she could, but she might have to cast a provisional ballot, which may not ultimately be counted. Another said she hadn’t voted yet, but that she would do so online later, and was surprised when I informed her that that’s not possible, that online voting is not a thing, it doesn’t exist here, yet. A third one just couldn’t get to the polls that day, because of work or school or life shit or whatever, so that was that. That’s a tiny sampling, but these are pretty smart kids. If they’re this ill-informed, ignorant, and unprepared or unable to vote, I am truly afraid for where the majority of young people in this country stand.) Black southerners seemingly overwhelmingly voted out of fear (not my own analysis, but a strong argument I defer to).
Biden was the big winner last Tuesday, but should many of the states he won even count? Should states like Arkansas and Alabama, that will never go Democrat in the general election, even have a say in picking the candidate? Many Southern Democrats might as well be moderate Republicans in any other locale. So I guess it’s fitting that Biden, himself at best a moderate Republican in all but name, won their votes. His win now is a loss for all of us down the road.
Joe Biden can’t win a presidential election. Not against Trump. Probably not against anyone. He’s always been a shitty politician. His policies have been consistently terrible. Whether we’re talking about his pro-segregationist history, his championing of the banking and credit industries at the expense of real people, his attempts to gut social security, food assistance, veterans benefits, and other social welfare programs, his co-authorship and promotion of the 1994 Crime Bill that disproportionately and unjustly persecuted and prosecuted the poor and people of color, his intimate collaboration with the Bush administration to push the US into the Iraq War, there are few positive footnotes we can point to in Biden’s long political history. And don’t give me any shit about how pointing these things out is helping Trump. These are matters of public record. If the public isn’t already informed of them, they should be, and you can bet that Trump would use all of it and more as ammunition in debates and ad campaigns against Biden.
Which brings us to the next reason Biden won’t win. He has dementia. Watch any video of him from the past year, whether making presumably prepared and practiced remarks in debates, or what one can only assume have been off-the-cuff remarks in speeches. He rambles, often completely incoherently, regularly forgetting where he is or whom he’s with or what he was talking about from one second to the next, saying one nonsensical thing after another. He has also repeatedly lied about things like getting arrested when going to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, though it’s possible that thanks to his evident brain damage, he actually believes this refuted falsehood happened. Biden’s innumerable recent “gaffes” are not the product of his stutter or any such speech impediment. He is losing his mind. He is on his way out. None of this is a joke or meant as an insult. My grandmother had increasing dementia for the last years of her life, through my childhood and most of my memories of her. It was painful and frightening and admittedly embarrassing, being with her and witnessing her decline, having only a child’s vague understanding of what was wrong. It should be obvious to anyone who watches Biden, whether they have personal experience to draw upon or not, that something is very wrong with him.
Trump will destroy Biden in debates. Trump is a moron and a liar. He rambles and talks nonsense. He very likely has some kind of brain damage or disease, like Biden. So it seems that it would be a fair, if embarrassing and excruciating, fight between them, no? Except that Trump has a “skill,” trained into him through a lifetime of bullying and bullshitting, for talking over others, yelling, repeating the same shit over and over until the other person shuts up or peters off. Trump won’t beat Biden in a battle of wits, because frankly it will be a witless and embarrassing shouting match between two demented codgery crackers, in which Trump will make himself dominant through pure brainless volume and hollow bravado.
I’m not a political expert or prognosticator, but my short- and long-term memory are reliable enough for me to remember 2016, and the so-called political experts and prognosticators who knew that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, and they are the same ones who think Biden can beat him now. Clinton was a stronger candidate than Biden, in terms of both policy and cognitive ability. Yet Biden has been sold as the “safe” candidate to beat Trump, and based on that baseless claim and pragmatic fear, a brain damaged conservative is the frontrunner to take on the brain damaged neofascist.
We’re doomed.
As pertains to any hopes tied to electoral politics.
Barring any miracles in the coming weeks.