So Sorry

(Photo: Bruce Davidson)

In July 2021 I was triggered by a tweet asking "Do you think Biden voters regret their vote yet?" Coming as it did on the eve of the threatened expiration of a COVID-inspired moratorium on evictions which Biden was doing nothing to stop (to my memory Freshman congresswoman Cori Bush shamed her colleagues into doing the right thing of extending it before the deadline through her dramatic camping out on the steps of the Capitol), the tweet was really an invitation to Biden abstainers and doomsayers especially on the left to pile on on Biden voters, but as a reluctant, nose-holding Biden voter myself, I felt it my prerogative to answer.  At the time, the answer was "Je ne regrette rien", on the basis that as unsurprisingly bad as Biden had been, I could not imagine that it was worse than the only other alternative would have been.  I do not disavow that opinion.  A Senator of a very small state from the age of 30, Biden has always been among the worst of the worst of the Beltway, as utterly entrenched as they get, with a shameful litany of achievements that indict him as one of the architects (or certainly a handmaiden) of the neoliberal mess we're in.  And his career as president has been largely true to form.  There have been some surprises, but in keeping with his aggressive embodiment of the neoliberal order, we haven't gotten a lot of thrills from Biden's administration.  Mainstream politics (and media and economics and culture) is a lot like mainstream entertainment-- heavy on the violence and prudish on the sex.   You'd think there was a conspiracy to try to condition us or something.  The net effect is low expectations for everything but war and austerity-- the hallmarks of the neoliberal age.  But there are worse things.

Nevertheless, in the fading light of this bizarre 2024 election season, I have had some cause to rethink the regret.  I would guess it's not on the grounds that the July 2021 tweeter and cohort would think, though.  True, Biden's stubborn support of Bibi Netanyahu's genocide in Gaza and his dishonest and easy waffling about it as a feeble attempt to manipulate the public disapproval it's engendered to the detriment of his chances in November  (to say nothing of his more popular and stereotypical encouragement of Ukraine to fight the proxy war with Russia to the bitter end) are challenges to any notion that there could be a greater evil than Biden's posture of American and Israeli exceptionalism in these precarious times.  But I think you could reasonably quibble that banal evil while still pretty fucking evil is slightly less evil than Trump and Steve Bannon's brand.

That's not what I want to argue at this juncture, though, because I'm sure the July 2021 me would be a bit surprised that 2024 me has discovered a cause for regret.  It's just not the depth and flavor of regret that the "Nought No Matter What" crowd would prefer a Biden voter to have.  In my case, it came at the height of the primary season.  Biden, increasingly diminished in faculties and capacity, at the helm of a Jimmy Carter-esque mixed bag of a presidency of minor triumphs, multiple disappointments and major disasters, nevertheless pops the balloon of any Democratic party candidate who might have heralded true change from both Biden's neoliberalism and Trump's would-be spookhouse successor to it by deciding (against nearly universal wishes to the contrary) to seek re-election.  The few brave souls who tried anyway-- and in particular Marianne Williamson-- were met with a resounding "Not now!"  by a conventional wisdom shared even among the most pragmatic exponents of the actual Left still tied to the Democratic Party as the only realistic alternative to the GOP.  With Trump looming as the most likely challenger in November, few Democratic voters had the stomach to entertain a politics of possibility, global urgencies notwithstanding.  

And this is where my regret for the outcome of 2020 enters.  For if Joe Biden had not actually won in 2020, Trump would be finishing out his second and last term.  Certainly he would be striving furiously to change the rules, but it would be a longshot at best.    I won't engage in hypotheticals about what state the country and world would have been in by now and how it would compare to this one.  The point is, Joe Biden as we know him today taking on a candidacy from a position of non-incumbency would have seemed Quixotic at best, a case would be made for it as a sign of advanced dementia.  Instead, 2024 would and could have been a watershed year for politics.  Bernie Sanders for instance could well have made another run, and I have a distinct feeling the third time would have been the charm for him. As it is, Bernie was among those who set aside their own ambitions (if you can call Bernie's calling an ambition) in the interest of keeping a steady course for a second defeat of Trump in November.  It probably seemed prudent at the time.  In retrospect you wonder where were the heroes who, for the sake of the country and of history,  could have talked some sense into Biden and his enablers  and talked them  out of this increasingly dubious cause?  What new era have we delayed by having to endure this geriatric rematch of 2020?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of elective politics, Marco Rubio campaigning to be Trump's Vice President on Meet the Press last weekend said that he would not accept an "unfair election" if the outcome does not favor his candidate-- the latest indication of a new normal in American politics.  Reminding me once again that entrusting the running of our government to self-dealing career politicians and well-funded dilettantes is our first mistake.  Likewise, the bittersweet quality of what could have been with Bernie Sanders if not for the stakes of nefarious forces pulling strings out of view of the electorate is Exhibit A in the case against expecting anything meaningfully good to come out of electoral politics.  

Contrary to the lie we collectively tell ourselves, electoral politics were never actually meant to be democratic.  They were designed to be coopted by a self-selected "elite"-- elite not as in the most intelligent or wise, but merely as in exclusionary-- serviced by a priesthood whose seminaries are our most exclusive universities-- artisanal factories that from the paste composed of the children of the privileged extrude a class of magistrates, courtiers and courtesans.   Graduation from the seminaries is a requirement for ascent to the halls of government (following a sham ritual in which the masses who are not successfully thwarted from voting "choose" the least bad among interchangeable mostly awful and at best mediocre candidates) whose business is likewise the servicing of the elite.   

You shouldn't have to go to Harvard to have your say about the course of our nation.  The answer as always, ladies and gentlemen, is to select our representatives, our leaders, our judges, randomly from among ourselves-- just as we select juries.  The divorce of money from the process of selecting our leaders is enough reason to put our heads together to figure out how we eject these paper tigers from our seat of government and finally install ourselves where we belong.  I have a few ideas some of which I've already shared.  When you compare and contrast the benefits of democracy by lot to our current method of "representation", you will begin to see no end to the ways in which so many of our ills today across the globe -- from purposely austere and unresponsive government to jingoistic war to entrenched arbitrary hierarchies-- are the deliberate result of electoral politics designed to thwart everything that does not benefit a thin sliver of artificially privileged, intentionally unimaginative and morally bankrupt "representatives" who represent no one but themselves.