Elections in a time of multiple and deepening crises

In one of the most volatile political years in a generation, the stability and even predictability of the presidential election has stood out.

On March 8, a few days after the Super Tuesday Democratic primary and before the full national weight of the COVID-19 pandemic asserted itself, former Vice President Joe Biden led President Donald Trump, 50.4 percent to 44.2 percent, according to the fivethirtyeight.com’s national average of presidential polls. On September 5, during the Labor Day weekend traditionally considered the start of the fall campaigning season, Biden led Trump 50.5 percent to 43.0 percent in the same fivethirtyeight.com average.

The more conservative leaning Real Clear Politics average showed Biden ahead by 7.4 percentage points before the Democratic and Republican conventions held in August, and 7.1 percent ahead after them. Trump’s apparent “bounce” in the polls was hardly noticeable.

It’s hard to square these numbers with the momentous events of 2020. The impeachment and acquittal of the president (remember that?). A pandemic that is on course to kill as many as 400,000 Americans, according to some estimates, by year end. Great Depression-era levels of unemployment that rocketed upward in unprecedented fashion. A nationwide uprising for racial justice that was likely the largest and broadest social movement in U.S. history, according to a New York Times. The collapse of entire sectors of the economy. Mobilization of far-right militias who have literally murdered activists on the streets. Catastrophic wildfires that are rendering huge parts of the western U.S. uninhabitable. And the year had a little fewer than three months left at the time of writing.

In the nearly four years of Trump’s misrule, two facts have been clear. First, an anti-Trump majority—breaking into view at the first Women’s March the day of Trump’s inauguration in 2017—has been looking forward to November 2020 for the electoral chance to throw him out office. And second, Trump has shown no interest in expanding his support from his so-called “base” of 40-45 percent of the electorate that votes Republican and conservative. So, one can understand the stability in the presidential race amidst the general political tumult as a continuation of these well-established trends.

In this set-up, Biden is little more than a placeholder as the not-Trump. Even for those committed to voting Democrat in November, there is less enthusiasm for the Biden-Harris ticket than there is a desire to get Trump out of office. Throughout the Democratic primary, Biden’s main advantage was his “electability” against Trump. As a longstanding member of the Democratic establishment whose politics closely aligned with the party’s wealthy donors and moderate voters, Biden leveraged his insider status to force all of his “moderate” opponents out of the race and to steamroll over Sen. Bernie Sanders.

As of early September, the race appeared to be Biden’s to lose, as Trump looked set to become the first incumbent president to lose reelection since George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. Despite the seeming stability in the race, Biden and his supporters didn’t rest easy. Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016 continued to haunt them.

There are reasons for the Biden camp to worry. First, Trump has the advantage in the undemocratic Electoral College. If he can squeak out victories in particular states—especially in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the three that were key for him in 2016—Trump could still “win” despite losing nationally by millions of votes. He’s already showed how to do it in 2016. Second, Trump and the Republicans have made clear that they will use whatever means (legal or otherwise) to disenfranchise anti-Trump voters, from dispatching “voter protection” teams to harass Black and Brown voters to sabotaging mail-in balloting. Third, Biden’s uninspiring politics and his penchant for placating the right (for example, mounting a $45 million national ad campaign to show that he—like Trump—opposed “rioting and looting” in anti-police brutality protests) could depress turnout among the younger voters who are one of the most pro-Democratic and liberal sections of the electorate.

Despite these caveats, there are clear reasons why 2020 shouldn’t be a re-run of 2016. Even through neither Trump nor Biden is particularly popular, Biden isn’t as disliked as Clinton was. Whether that owes to sexism, decades of conservative demonization of Clinton, or both, Biden just doesn’t have the “negatives” Clinton had. Second, Trump is the incumbent president on whose watch hundreds of thousands have died and millions more have suffered economic devastation. Despite the Republican National Convention’s and the Trump campaign’s attempt to rewrite this history in true Stalinist falsification fashion, the realities of life under COVID-19 won’t allow them to run away from it. And tapes from Bob Woodward’s new Beltway tome, Rage, show that Trump consciously lied, downplaying the disease and costing thousands their lives. Finally, the “anyone but Trump” atmosphere gripping both the left and sections of the right will assure that third-party campaigns will receive much less than the roughly 6 percent of the national vote they received in 2016.

Not that any of the above will make the election seem cut-and-dried from now through the voting. Trump and his street-thug fans will perpetrate outrages. The presidential debates might produce a day or two of frenzied media commentary. The sheer scale of the administration of what is likely to be the highest turnout for a presidential election in 60 years—during a pandemic—will ratchet up tensions, even if no electoral chicanery is involved. A drawn-out election period, accompanied by street mobilizations and multiple lawsuits, is a real possibility for November and December. Trump will try to provoke and ride any chaos that may help him steal the election. Or he may use chaos to extract concessions from Biden. Trump will step aside and call his supporters to stand down. In exchange, he’ll extract a Biden pledge not to pursue criminal charges against Trump, his family and hangers-on for their rampant corruption.

That final speculation may sound far-fetched, but it would certainly follow Trump’s pre-presidency modus operandi in avoiding the consequences of his multi-billion-dollar bankruptcies and escaping culpability for his multiple scams. And Biden—like most of the Democratic Party establishment—would be inclined to take such a deal: to avoid conflict, to reassure big business, to dampen down liberal aspirations and to extend an olive branch to Republicans. “With Donald Trump out of the White House — not a joke — you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” who will commit to constructive governance,” Biden told the Washington Post in 2019. If this isn’t a joke, it’s a delusion.

Biden is one of the leading figures in crafting U.S. foreign and domestic policy during the neoliberal era. So the flood of corporate money that has moved in his direction since the spring is no surprise. And his selection of Sen. Kamala Harris has less to do with showing solidarity with the U.S.’s current racial reckoning as it does with showing solidarity with Harris’s “deep familiarity with Democratic mega-donors from Silicon Valley to New York.” Biden is a safe bet for an establishment that worries that Trump’s incompetence or belligerence will plunge the U.S. into greater civil disorder and international isolation than he already has. Gullible liberal journalists may help Biden operatives to peddle the notion that their boss is planning FDR-style “New Deal” reforms, but corporate America knows better.

When the Biden campaign announced its support for a couple of policies that the banking sector opposes, it made sure to tell bankers to ignore them, a banker told the Washington Post:

They basically said, ‘Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,’ ” said one investment banker, referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls.

No doubt this same banker, who may find Trump distasteful, didn’t return their windfall from Trump’s 2017 tax cut or the administration’s evisceration of banking regulations.

While corporate America has been somewhat conflicted in its relationship with Trump, the traditional post-Cold War national security elite has been much more critical of Trump. The fact that the Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump over a ham-fisted attempt to enlist the Ukrainian government in his re-election campaign—after hundreds of other outrages, examples of corruption, malfeasance, and negligence—should underscore that. And Dan Coats, a standard-issue conservative Republican who served as Trump’s director of national intelligence, is now on the record (in Woodward’s book) declaring the president a threat to national security because of his fealty to Russia. Endorsements of Biden by hundreds of former federal law enforcement, military, foreign policy, and intelligence officials have become a major feature of the Biden campaign.

To these establishment figures, Biden promises a return to “normal.” But what does “normal” mean in the face of a global pandemic, economic catastrophe, mass mobilization on the left and rampage by the far right? Is the aspiration to return to “normal” even reasonable or practical? It certainly wouldn’t seem to be so for the millions who suffered deportations, predatory health care, police violence, crushing debt or eviction before the pandemic made everything worse. The Democrats are organizing a lowest-common-denominator campaign to “save democracy” from Trump—as if Trump alone is responsible for all the poverty, oppression, and crises that working-class Americans face.

Lost in the Democrats’ focus on multiple daily Trump outrages is any real sense of what they are pledging to do if they take office with a House majority and a possible Senate majority. In the summer, a joint task force of Biden and Sanders supporters issued a 110-page series of recommendations for the next Democratic administration. The document is long on progressive rhetoric, but it mostly focuses on reversing destructive Trump policies. For millions, having a government that isn’t Trump’s may not be enough motivation to vote, especially if they doubt that a Democratic administration will bring perceptible changes in their lives. The fact that Biden seems to be lagging Clinton in support from Latinx voters—despite Trump’s racism and the fact that Latinos are among the groups that COVID-19 has hit hardest—should be a “canary in the coal mine” for the Democrats.

Consider how Democrats have responded to the national uprising against police violence. With a few exceptions, little has been done to enact reforms—much less “defund the police” in the U.S.’s major cities, most of them Democrat-controlled. Action in state legislatures has also been minimal. And in Democrat-dominated California a package of reform bills targeting policing went down to defeat as the state’s Democratic establishment, led by Attorney General Xavier Becerra, fronted for the state’s law enforcement lobbies. Biden has made clear that he opposes the movement demand to “defund the police,” and he has cover from Democratic liberals like the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network and MSNBC host. Sharpton called the demand to defund police something “a latte liberal may go for as they sit around the Hamptons discussing this as an academic problem.”

Add this to Biden’s condemnation of looting, his support for fracking, and his opposition to Medicare for All, and we have the picture of a mainstream Democratic administration, no matter what the Biden-Sanders task force said. And for those who didn’t get the message from the Biden campaign, Biden’s most longstanding and trusted adviser, former Sen. Ted Kaufman, has already told the country to get ready for austerity under a Biden administration. At the same time, Biden said he will consider increasing military spending from the Trump administration’s already obscene military levels.

Where does this impending choice between the greater and lesser of two evils leave the U.S. left? Despite the potential for rebuilding an activist left that the summer’s racial justice uprising showed, most of the U.S. left remains captive of the U.S.’s bipartisan electoral system. The Green Party campaign of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker is the only serious choice for those who are committed to building an independent left alternative. But most people who consider themselves “on the left” are opting for the Democrats’ lesser evil once again. The late socialist Hal Draper’s words, written in the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, sound as if they could have been written yesterday:

Every time the liberal labor left has made noises about its dissatisfaction with what Washington was trickling through, all the Democrats had to do was bring out the bogy of the Republican right.

The lib-labs would then swoon, crying “The fascists are coming!” and vote for the Lesser Evil. In these last two decades, the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right.

Draper’s description of the “lib-labs” describes almost exactly the actions of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have been hailed as heroes of the “new socialist movement” for having “raised working people’s expectations and changed national politics.” Sanders’ pledges to support Biden against “the most dangerous president in the modern era” and Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) warning that “November is about stopping fascism in the United States” validate Draper’s points. It isn’t just that they have begrudgingly come around to Biden. Sanders and AOC have helped to legitimize Biden to a whole swath of voters who supported Sanders in the primary. AOC co-chaired the Biden-Sanders task force on climate change—the one that omitted references to fracking and included support for nuclear power—with that most establishment of figures, former Sen. John Kerry. AOC’s cover for Biden’s climate policies dovetailed with support for Biden-Harris from the activist Sunrise Movement, whose statement on Biden’s selection of Harris is almost embarrassing to read. Sanders, his “concerns” about Biden’s approach notwithstanding, has been and will continue to be a loyal soldier for Biden-Harris to the end.

The electorally focused left has mirrored the Sanders/AOC “Popular Front” with Biden. This is nothing new for long-time lesser evilists who, despite their radical rhetoric and backgrounds, transform themselves into progressive Democrats every four years. Jacobin, as the “Marxist” voice of the new social democracy grouped around Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America, has been critical of Biden-Harris. But it has left little doubt about who it and its most prominent writers want to win in November. A search for “Biden” in Jacobin’s online edition turned up Branko Marcetic’s a total of 20 articles. Seventeen of them are blistering, and accurate, articles on Biden’s neoliberal politics and career written before and during the primary—when Sanders was still in the running. But the most recent of Marcetic’s articles purports to advise Biden how to win (i.e., adopt Sanders’ program) and worries that Biden could still screw up an election that’s his to lose. It’s of a piece with Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara’s proclamation that “You’ve Probably Heard Socialists Won’t Vote for Biden. Don’t listen to that. We may not like him, but we don’t want him to lose.” In other words, members of the new social democratic movement have been granted a plenary indulgence for vote for Biden, while still claiming a commitment—at some undefined future—to build an actual independent socialist party.

All of this doesn’t bode well for the left even if Biden wins. Those who are calling for “unity” against the fascist threat now won’t stop doing so when a still-hypothetical Biden administration confronts wall-to-wall Republican opposition and right-wing mobilization in the next two years. The summer racial justice mobilizations provided a glimpse of what’s possible when masses move into action. But a much more determined, organized, and political resistance will be needed to take that struggle to the next level, no matter who ends up as president.