The Myth of Joe Biden
Joe Biden is a giant in American politics, a titan. The notoriously warm, blue-eyed Delaware Senator with the dazzling smile turned Vice President of the United States under Barack Obama for two terms has been in politics since 1972. Two years shy of 50 years in American national politics, Joe Biden continues his toil of working for the American people. Running for President for a third time after failed attempts in 1988 and 2008, this is without a doubt Biden’s last shot at an ascending to the highest office in the land. He is, by traditional standards, a remarkably qualified candidate for the Office of President of the United States.
Let’s take a look at those qualifications. He won six terms in the U.S. Senate, from 1972 to 2008, usually with around 60 percent of the vote. He’s a gifted debater, he’s electrifying to meet in person, and he’s served in what many regard as a successful White House already. He is the sensible center, the old guard candidate who is promising a return to that sensibility in American politics. He polls remarkably well with African-American voters. He is largely the anti-Trump. He is non-threatening, happy, and laissez-faire. His potential Presidency is a promise that we will return to a time when Americans can stop paying attention to politics again. For some, this is the most convincing argument for Biden’s candidacy; that we will return to a place of mollified politics that is disengaging and process-oriented. It is a promise that we will move back into a time where we can focus on our TV shows, our movies, our sports. It is, fundamentally, a return to American bread and circuses.
But let’s ask the obvious question about that point. The question that burns in the back of my mind, and in the back of the minds of young activists around the country who look at Joe Biden and the “old guard.”
Do we really want to go back?
Do we want to go back to a time when the government can take advantage of a placated public to build rules that are detrimental and openly harmful to African-Americans, to immigrants, to consumers, to students, and to the public at large? Do we want to return to a time when only the very involved pay attention to the corruption-laden government, and the existence of open corruption is written off as a cost of doing business? Is our goal to go back to a time when we simply don’t talk about injustices facing minority communities, where we simply ignore corporations taking advantage of consumers and small-business competitors without the government keeping the game fair? Do we want our foreign policy to go back to a place where we’d sooner engage in a drone strike than finding a solution diplomatically?
I would argue that we don’t.
But the stakes are higher than simply defeating Donald Trump, or returning to “normalcy,” even if that normalcy is inherently unjust or openly discriminatory. The stakes are made higher by a whole party behind Trump being complicit in his corruption. As I write this essay, California representative and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff argues with his whole self against this corruption, and the expectation is that he will fail in his endeavor. Imagine ten years ago being told that failure in holding up the rule of law was the expectation. The cleanup of this mess will go long beyond four years. This will take decades of careful leadership, decided by an engaged and informed public, to fix the problems that brought us to Trump. President Trump is not the disease, he is the whitehead on top of the pimple on the face of American politics. He is the maggot rolling in the infection of a corrupt American democracy, rotting from the inside out: disgusting to look at, but not the root of the problem. Joe Biden critically fails to see this problem from its core. Joe Biden is a career politician whose loyalties lie with a system long dead, killed by corruption brought into itself by the well-intentioned methods of men like Joe Biden and his friends. They did what they thought was best, and brought this mess upon us. How many more times, how many more attempts, will we give Joe Biden and his friends to make well-intentioned but ill-advised attempts to destroy American democracy? Are we even sure that, if elected, Biden would hold these people accountable?
Joe Biden is a titan, but titans are myth. Words on a page of a bygone era. As the age of Greek antiquity has passed us, so too has the age of American compromise. The age of the sensible Republican, the age of moderation, is gone. Joe Biden may be the sensible candidate to win in 2020, but he will be 83 years old in 2024. The once-fierce debater has been blunted by age, a relic of that bygone era of pleasant ignorance in American politics. His staff keeps him away from the media as much as possible, like a treasure in a political museum, not to be touched or damaged by interested hands. In his interview for the New York Times endorsement, he was combative, evasive, and vague. He is a shell of the political force he once was. He exists in the American political lexicon as a crumbling pillar in the Acropolis.
But this says nothing of his policies. Can anyone pin down what a Biden presidency would even look like? How would he address the crises facing the country after Trump’s presidency? What would Joe Biden do to lead us through the crisis of climate change, and rising sea levels? How would Joe Biden fix the problems of American corporate malfeasance towards the People of the United States? Would Joe Biden argue for a return to sensible and diplomatic foreign policy, or would he continue down the path set by the President whom he served by using the military arm of the United States to exact revenge on those whom war has not been declared by the U.S. Congress?
Perhaps Joe Biden would simply return to the policies of his time in the Senate, where he argued against the scourge of drugs in our communities. A well-intentioned argument that exacerbated the problem of a fundamentally unequal justice system, giving harsher penalties to largely African-American communities and tearing apart black families. Maybe Joe Biden’s policies would include the extension of the crime bills of the 1990’s, which were created to clean up the mess of the drug policies which he supported. Those ideas would prove to be folly, but we have heard nothing from Joe Biden on these subjects other than he wants to cure cancer and beat Trump.
I would invite Joe Biden to join the club.
But focusing again on policies, would Joe Biden double down on his support of the 2005 bankruptcy bill, which prevents students saddled with criminal amounts of student loan debt from shedding that debt when the free market fails to meet the needs of their consumers? A bill which he was warned would create this massive problem by the leading bankruptcy lawyer in the country, on national TV, and he voted for it anyway? Joe Biden doesn’t support eliminating student loan debt, which disproportionately affects black Americans and continues to be the jaws of life to a racial wealth gap in this country, holding it open for more and more generations to be born into worse and worse conditions despite the desperate efforts of their parents and grandparents to build a better life. Joe Biden has worked tirelessly, constantly, in well-intentioned attempts to make life better for all Americans while ignoring the inequities that American history has created.
He should not get another chance to prop up those failures.