Election 2020: Ridin' with Biden Update

​WHYDIN’ WITH BIDEN: A Late Ridin’ with Biden Introduction

By Christopher Sloce

Photo by The Center for American Progress

Doug Henwood, economic journalist and host of the Left Business Observer, has been asked by a few people if he would do a follow-up on his book on Hilary Clinton’s run for presidency (My Turn). He made a very good point: “He’s dull and third-rate. Hillary is a smart and substantial character, an enemy one can respect. Biden is a waste of protoplasm.”
​

I don’t disagree with him at all. But I wasn’t doing much with my protoplasm anyway which has led me to write “Ridin’ With Biden”.

His Joe Biden-ness has became more and more apparent the longer he stays in the race: the pinched nerve defensiveness that manages to be both snivelling and aggressive, the inability to not say the dumbest thing at the worst time to say it, his total mediocrity in service of a bland centrism that is more concerned about tweaks to a system than it is creating any kind of justice or better society. Centrism is nothing if not “it’s good to be king” politics. So let’s burn some more grey matter, shall we?

He’s still the front-runner: you don’t ignore the Lakers just because they have the bench depth of a sake order as long as they’ve got Anthony Davis and Lebron James. As long as he’s the front-runner, he deserves scrutiny. And name recognition counts for a ton. If Donald Trump didn’t have The Apprentice, he doesn’t get elected, most likely.

Teaching people how to read the news: I hope that somebody seeing a harder-left analysis of news gets them to think about the fact that all news has its own biases that are easily accessible if you dig a little deeper. This doesn’t require you read whatever left critical theorist du jour to understand-- just understand that neutrality doesn’t really exist and is about an imposition of a culture’s values. We’re taught to think once upon a time there was sanity in news until the ogres at Fox News came along. That’s untrue.

Biden is more the Democratic party than we’d like to act: you don’t take a party by the exceptional, you take them by the mean. There are, unfortunately, more Bidens than Ilhan Omars in the party, and they need to sell the Ilhan Omars down the line to keep this party theirs. Joe Biden is the beneficiary of an idea that the American system is as perfected as it’s ever going to get. Why fix what isn’t broken? I don’t even need you to be versed in criticisms of capitalism or even be a bleeding leftist to understand it. Look around you for a ten seconds and think of who you know. Somebody is getting screwed on medical bills. Somebody is struggling to make rent. You work a job and make nowhere near the value you produce. And think for ten seconds about how stuck society feels. How can you look around and think we’re doing as good as we can be. Do you actually think things are dynamic? You don’t have to, but here’s the thing: Mitch McConnell does. Steve Bannon does, which is why he tried to create a Nazi church in Italy. If you’re fighting somebody who thinks things can be made better (no matter how evil what they want is) and you can’t come up with anything to sell people other than ‘not Trump’, you will get plucked and pilloried. Biden is a vote for that, and he needs to be cast away.

I Can Talk About All the Democrats This Way: there’s nothing as depressing as this Presidential race, except maybe climate change. I have everything from forceful disappointed criticisms to total scorn for this entire field. 4 years to become an actually meaningful opposition party totally squandered. And here’s the thing: I don’t know if Trump is going to win. You have to think he’s radioactive enough at this point he’s a dead man. But the amount of pain and terror we’ve been through for four years can’t galvanize anymore than this?
​
Joe Biden and Charlottesville: I was in Charlottesville at Unite the Right. I’ve wrote about it extensively. Never under my name. But I was there.

I am saying this now because I think it’s important. Right now Ted Cruz is introducing a law to label ‘antifa’ groups domestic terrorists. Which is ludicrous and obvious red-baiting to anybody with half a brain, but it doesn’t matter. Sort of like gang enhancements, all you need to do is make it look like somebody is enough in a gang to hit them hard. Meanwhile, as I right this, another mass-shooting has taken place, with its author a manifesto writing malcontent, this time writing about ecology and fascism. Name a single mass-shooting done by an anti-fascist.

I’ve watched anti-fascist groups defend churches from fascists. Clergy who went to stand against fascists in Charlottesville have specifically said that if anti-fascists weren’t there, they might be dead. Ted Cruz claims to be a Christian, yet he’d let the wrong Christians die if it means they’re leftists, too. What kind of Christian is this?

I’ve kept quiet about it for years because I felt like it would be gloating or would effect somebody’s life in the negative, but honestly, I can’t give you any more of a reason as to why I started hating Joe Biden than that alone. All I heard Resistance types say when Trump got elected was how much they’d be doing, and yet again, in one of the most obvious shows of right-wing terror I’ve ever witnessed, they were at brunch. Watching Joe Biden use Heather Heyer’s body like a prop remains one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen. Truly grotesque.

Do you really think Joe Biden is going to fight white supremacy? His friends were segregationists. Do you think he’s going to fight misogyny? How many women does he have to paw before you disabuse yourself of that notion. All those things you think he’s a step up from from Trump are bullshit, frankly. You’ll get some tweaks to policy and then in 2024 some other Republican will run and use the Trump tactics better than him, probably less on the nose, and then you’ll be back to the terror.

Look, the writers at the Onion who helped create the Biden myth have stepped away from it. I used to make those jokes. If we’d have known we were rehabilitating the guy I think we all would have stopped. We didn’t know. So here’s a chance using the best weapon I know how: analysis and rhetoric.

Expect the next issue this Friday.