Pretty much. Any time someone gives me one of these speeches, I'm like-- the fuck d'you want me to do, pal? I'm probably voting for Biden, but I can't see myself doing anything better than that. Let's pretend-- let's just pretend-- that I'm of the opinion Trump is the disease and not the symptom so I'm convinced Biden putting his hand over that Bible will just cause all the cages to spring wide open. Guess what? I can't fucking persuade my other leftist pals that's the case. I can't. I've tried. Does that make them bad people? Who gives a fuck? It's not like declaring them bad people magically hands their vote over to you so you can cast it for them. You're still as fucked as you were before. Either you need them, or you don't, and if you need them either you can persuade them, or you can't. COVID is changing some of the calculus for this, but the question is still authentic on whether people should vote or not.
The "incremental change is better than accelerationism" argument is well understood and near-universally agreed with. It's a good starting point in theory, then, to make a case for Biden. The proof you have to make is that not voting for Biden is a) such a dire thing that you have to hold your nose and vote for someone you actively loathe (that Super Tuesday shit is never just gonna be water over the bridge) and b) effectively accelerationism. To do that, you have to establish that Biden produces better outcomes than Trump-- and believe it or not, even in an intersectionalist grouping of leftists that's not wholly understood to be the case. Not merely because of climate change-- and let's be clear, Biden's climate change policy is disqualifying. Not merely because of the question of what happens after Biden's single term if there's a return to the status quo-- that, let's be clear, Trump's election was a reaction to. Not merely because very few of us will get any visible improvement in our own lives because of this-- which, let's be clear, is the primary driver of enthusiasm in any electoral campaign no matter how noble the goal. Not merely because we are tacitly ceding our own voices and collapsing the enthusiasm of what meager movement we've managed to scrounge together-- that, let's be clear, many of us are convinced is the ONLY way to organize a response to the coming threat of ecofascism. But also because Biden is not trusted-- neither in terms of his integrity nor in terms of his competence. We remember how he's talked about how we need to compromise with Republicans-- and so the question is, is he even going to fight for the kids in cages that we're beat about the head over as a rhetorical cudgel by his supporters? I mean, what the fuck are you gonna do if he decides not to pursue that avenue? You gonna protest him? Are you? You gonna tell us to wait for his successor in four years who is DEFINITELY a lock instead (and conveniently, definitely NOT a leftist)? Also, are we gonna pretend, like Biden is, that 2012-2016 didn't happen? Because let's be clear, it's not an open question if Biden is gonna drive down-ticket enthusiasm with a message laser-focused on BEAT TRUMP, and if he doesn't we are fucked by simple dint of obstructionism.
Look, here's the honest truth: if you can imagine two tiny people in a trenchcoat who hold each other in unreserved and abject loathing, that's the Democratic party as a result of First Past The Post. That runs deeper than Bernie and should be clear by now for anybody with eyes to see. Party A keeps telling Party B it HAS to vote for Biden, even has to VOCALLY SUPPORT Biden, or Party B just wants Trump to win; while at the same time implying that Party B is useless and inconsequential anyways and that their ideas are unworkable. So which is it? We're being told we're actively endangering the election just by criticizing Biden, for example, giving an underwhelming speech for a couple minutes in the middle of a pandemic while being nearly unseen. This is who the candidates whose policy positions most resembled his decided to drop out to support. And yet those of us whose policy positions are nearly diametrically opposed to that are supposed to be the ones who are responsible for being the necessary support? It's implicitly understood we don't get anything in return for this-- it's our moral obligation. Do you have any idea how hard that makes it for me to sell other people on the idea of a Biden presidency?
You can't guilt people into handing you a win.
And that's without a global pandemic beating down the door and making the case that we need radical change and we need it now. That's without a stock market literally calling to be fed with the blood of workers. That's without a foreign policy position that's more precarious than it's ever been and that calls for a decidedly non-interventionist approach to foreign policy. That's without whatever else this fucked up nightmare of a year has in store for us before November! Is this conversation driving some anxiety in you, dear reader? Better hope shit doesn't get worse in this grand old year. Somehow.
