Biden is better than Trump
April 5, 2020
Is Joe Biden a better candidate than Donald Trump? Yes. That should be obvious, but not everyone agrees with me. According to a new poll conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post, 15% of Bernie supporters said that they would support Trump if Biden becomes the nominee. Some voters just don’t trust Biden. Some share in the misguided belief that four more years of Trump is just the motivation that America needs to push the country the appropriate degrees to the left, breaking away from the historically moderate democratic party. Though I sympathize with the frustration of Bernie supporters, I have no patience for this #Bernieorbust mentality.
I’ll be the first to admit that Biden is not the perfect candidate. He is a boring old moderate at a time when young people, in particular, are dissatisfied with the status quo and an inadequate state of “normalcy.” We need to keep pushing on healthcare, immigration, eliminating college debt and the climate. My rallying cry since the beginning of the primary season has been “anyone but Biden, please,” but disappointment at a lost opportunity isn’t an excuse not to vote.
This isn’t a “lesser of two evils” situation; this election means something for millions of people’s lives. Not voting at all is effectively a vote for Donald Trump. A vote for Trump, regardless of your motives, is still a vote for the man who has put children in cages, labeled the press as an enemy of the people and betrayed our Kurdish allies, among other things. Biden is famous for misspeaking and sniffing women, but saying he is just as bad as Donald Trump is like saying that, when your favorite restaurant is closed, you should light yourself on fire and walk off a cliff instead of eating leftovers.
You may be willing to live four more years in Trump’s America for an idealistic liberal revolution down the road, but how many people are you willing to throw under the bus for that dream? People will continue to be stuck at the border. Our national reputation will be degraded further by Trump’s mere presence in the White House. Women will be stripped of their reproductive rights. Conservative judges will be appointed. Obama legislation will be rescinded. How many lies are we willing to stomach? How much of our democracy are we willing to sacrifice for the specific flavor of liberal revolution certain voters think they want?
This “for the greater good mentality” that a significant percentage of Bernie supporters have fallen into isn’t democratic, isn’t socialist and isn’t liberal. It’s arrogant and it’s going to get people killed. If you aren’t going to vote in this election because you’re upset about the nomination, who are you trying to help? There is a bull in the china shop, a horse in the hospital, an egotistical chimpanzee in the oval office. If we don’t get Trump out now, there is no telling if we will ever be able to, or if the White House will even be standing when it’s all over. No sense of ideological purity is worth that.
The slogan for the Washington Post is “Democracy dies in darkness.” These days, I’m not sure if it is a warning or a prophecy. My fear with reelecting Donald Trump isn’t just that he is a narcissistic, spray-tanned sycophant, but that throughout his presidency he has undermined the very foundations of our government, attacked the press and has effectively made the truth irrelevant. This is what Trump’s legacy is going to be: lies, misinformation, distrust and darkness. Vote for Biden if he gets the nomination, if not for yourself and your values, then for everyone else who may not make it through another Trump presidency.
Mat Chapin • Dec 26, 2023 at 2:55 pm
It’s wild getting older and watching genocide and realizing that I just don’t believe this anymore.
-Mat Chapin
Mathilda Chapin • Apr 8, 2020 at 2:00 pm
Hi Rohan,
I do enjoy seeing comments on my articles! It’s very exciting.
I will definitely follow through with that book recommendation, I am always looking for more good things to do in quarantine.
I really do understand where you’re coming from and again, I mostly agree. The problem is, I don’t see a revolution. What I see is 15% of Bernie supporters who say that they would support Trump (as the article I cited earlier says), and I remember the same group of people who were so mad that Bernie lost out to Hillary that they did the same in 2016. Ideologically I think you’re spot on, but the deeply disappointing truth is that the reason Bernie didn’t get the nomination is that people just didn’t vote. His supporters didn’t show up. How am I then supposed to believe that a third party candidate is going to be able to muster the votes to defeat Trump? It’s a gamble that I, and frankly most voters, aren’t going to be willing to take. If I were gambling on my own life, maybe I would take that shot. But I’m not, I’d be gambling on the lives of other Americans who cannot survive another Trump presidency. This election has too much at stake to throw it away for ideology. Thinking beyond that four-year window, as you put it, I 100% agree with you.
You say that in four years I’ll be saying the same thing about another republican, but I rather disagree. We cannot fall into the trap of seeing Trump as just another Republican, because he isn’t. He is not normal. This isn’t just another election, and rampant false equivalences are one of the reasons he got elected in the first place.
Best,
Mat
Sean • Apr 7, 2020 at 7:11 pm
Is Trump really the sycophant himself…? Or is that he demands all who work for him to be sycophantic.
Rohan Press • Apr 7, 2020 at 4:35 pm
I’m sorry to be yet another dissenting voice here, but I felt the need to say something. I hope to make clear that the last thing I want to do is come off as aggressive or closed-minded; ‘m just another Whitman student searching for answers just like you!
That being said, I really want to pull apart some of your rhetoric and claims and implicate them in a more structural political argument. You argue that not voting for Biden is equivalent to voting for Trump—what I’ll call an appeal to voting-as-negation, voting not because you’re affirming a candidate’s policies, but so as to impede the opposing candidate. Sure, I don’t want to see Trump in White House for another four years; that would be totally devastating. But, thinking beyond that four-year window, voting-as-negation is, in fact, anti-democratic—insofar as we take radical democracy to be about being able to affirm your own opinions and beliefs within the framework of a community. By appealing to this logic, you’re essentially deferring the moment of revolution—which is exactly the logic bourgeois liberalism uses to further its exploitation. In 2024, you’ll say the same thing for some other Republican candidate. It’s an infinite deferral, one that maintains the power of the Democratic establishment. The only way we’re ever going to break open the two-party system is by acting now, by not conforming to such appeals to voting-as-negation or as the infinite deferral of radical change. I encourage you to read the Invisible Committee’s book called “Now” that emphasizes exactly this point: the revolutionary moment *can only be* the present moment.
My point is that resistance is always about affirmation, not negation. I will be voting for the candidate with whom I most agree—because that’s exactly the kind of action that the system can’t understand; an action that contains within it the potential for the rupture of power structures themselves. If Bernie is not the nominee, that means I’ll be voting for a third-party candidate. If everyone else did the same, we could finally end the vicious cycles of structural violence that define liberal and moderate politics (which is always already anti-political, anyway, inasmuch as it is a politics of displacement, but that’s besides the point).
Anyway, thanks for fostering some good discussion.
Rohan
Mathilda Chapin • Apr 6, 2020 at 6:46 pm
Hi Connor,
Thank you for your comment, genuinely.
First off I want to say that you’re right, I should have said progressive as opposed to liberal, my bad. You referenced my homelessness research (or article?) and you are correct once again, I have absolutely no faith in any candidate or politician to address the issues that I care about, homelessness, the climate, our prison system, and so on. I would also like to say that my article is not intended in any way to advocate for Biden over Bernie, simply for what seems like the unfortunate inevitability of Biden over Trump.
Actually, I agree with about 80% of the points you made. By all means, take to the streets, scream from the rooftops and post itemized complaints on your senator’s door, but please, just in case that doesn’t pan out, find the time to vote (for someone with a chance of beating Trump) as well. I agree that we are not going to make the progress that we need to, as you say, exclusively through electoral means, but there is room for more than one line of attack in this battle. Realistically, voting for a third-party candidate in this election would be about as effective as voting for Jill Stein four years ago.
After this election I will be rejoining you, yelling at society and the internet about the inadequate politicians we have. But if this whole revolutionary change thing doesn’t work out right away, if we have to wait until 2024 or beyond for the changes we want, I don’t want to have to explain to my friends who are currently living in parking lots with no health insurance hoping not to fall to the pandemic that our president ignored, why I couldn’t spend five minutes voting Donald Trump out of office effectively.
Build that new system and I will be happy to join you when it has a chance of working. But in the meantime, I will do whatever is in my power within the system we already have to enact change. It might be a baby step forward, but that baby step corresponds with human lives. I understand your ideology, but I am not willing to pay the real-world price for your inaction.
Best,
Mathilda
Connor Rauch • Apr 6, 2020 at 1:09 am
This line of thinking makes me quite furious. The author, who has studied homelessness in LIBERAL utopia seattle (the author’s misinformed characterization of Sanders’s agenda as “liberal” as opposed to “progressive” made my skin crawl), should know more than most that no liberal politician is going to save us, our planet, or our most vulnerable friends. American politicians of the two dominant political parties for decades (and centuries!) have gleefully locked immigrants in cages, drone bombed innocent families, betrayed and actively subverted builders of better worlds, and facilitated the exploition of our earth’s resources. They will continue to do so unabated as long as we see our choices as limited to two bourgeois parties. Also, neither trump nor Biden can speak in coherent sentences. Joe Biden won’t save us, Jay inslee isn’t a friend, andrew Cuomo’s draconian austerity agenda will prove murderous, and jenny durkan is happily destroying homeless encampments and constructing youth jails amidst pandemic to continue to build her and her friend, jeff’s, neoliberal dream city. Yes, Trump is an evil dork, but Biden is undeniably an asshole also. The coronavirus and all our “leaders'” inadequate response is beginning to mobilize labor and make evident to people beyond the working-class that their welfare is precarious in lives governed by the logic of capital. Whitman students, all of us are privileged to some degree, though, of course, some exponentially more than others, by fact of our access to higher education, etc. Most of us belong to the American bourgeoisie (don’t you dare deny it!). We have an obligation to betray our positions of privilege in order to organize with the vulnerable and subaltern members of our society to mobilize mass political mayhem (strike, protest, boycott, obstruct the efficient logic of the profit motive, generating alternative systems to the state, etc.) and to form a party that works through and for the working-class, the subaltern, and the elided citizens of the world. As Sanders’s campaign demonstrates, this can never be accomplished through advocating within the democratic party, and, as 1980s socialist french president Francois mitterand has proven, cannot be maintained exclusively through electoral means. This anti-party party may already exist or is yet to be formed. The american green party is more established than most radical american parties (and will likely be on 2020 presidential ballots in most if not all 50 states) and socialist alternative has repeatedly proven in seattle its electoral potential (1 city council member and a couple of allies on council), ability to organize, and capacity to mobilize citizens to help push genuinely progressive legislation through a council shamefully intimidated and influenced by the spector and pretty penny of Bezos and other city elites. So whitman college, now is the time to go beyond imagining a better future in the classroom and our academic pursuits and risk something for once to actually realize a democratic society and a vastly more socially and economically equitable system. 2020 is not a choice between trump or biden. It’s a choice of being content with two different versions of the same sickening and suffocating status quo or having the resolve to fight, through all means available and ostensibly unavailable, for a livable future, the demolishing of prisons and detention centers, an end to war and senseless death, the dismantaling of racism-sexism-capitalism, and to plant the seeds of a lovely society devoid of oppression. Bourgois politicians won’t save us, but mass class suicide, left- populist advocacy, and the general strike just might!