Why Are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Backing Joe Biden?
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Pretty much anybody who is anybody is fleeing the sinking ship that is the Joe Biden candidacy these days. Nancy Pelosi, the only major Democrat from this decrepit era with any sense, has been trying to find a way to push President Biden off the ticket since his disastrous debate. The Democratic Party has become riddled with holes, leaking every thought that comes out of its collective hivemind, as they panic over a candidate who is currently running as much as fifteen points behind his own swing-state Senators.
Joe Biden will almost certainly not win this race as it is currently constituted. The narrative around his candidacy is that he is a doddering old man who is totally unfit for the rigors of a second presidential administration. Every interview he does only serves to reinforce the notion that his brain is past its expiration date, and only a fool would support him at this point.
So why are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez backing Biden?
It actually makes a lot of sense if you step back from the madness and observe the landscape of the panicked Democratic Party and the narratives around the election. The choice is between a hot head who dodged a bullet and a sleepy old man. Nothing will change that general outline now. Biden could become Che Guevara overnight and the larger story of his loss would still be centered around his age. The Dems cannot blame the left for this one, especially given that it’s all the Democratic donors and centrist power centers fleeing the Biden Titanic.
So why not jump on it? What do you have to lose? Not to mention that if your real goal is to push him off the ticket, lefties embracing something has long proven to be the best way to get the Democratic Party off its ass. If Biden is replaced by the centrists and donors staging the world’s laziest coup, you’re right back where you were before the debate anyway: generally shut out of the major decisions currently being made and being told to appreciate the historic gains Biden won for the left before he backed a genocide in Gaza.
Something must change. And it must be big. Joe Biden will be dodging gaffes and defending his age every day until the election unless he can find a new narrative. The explicit anti-Trump campaign will not work anymore with a now sympathetic figure who authored one of the most enduring images in the quarter millennium of this country’s history. Joe needs a whole new campaign if he really is going to pull this off.
Enter progressive policy.
Biden establishing policy initiatives with Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wonks was a big deal that helped make him the most popular candidate among young people in American history in 2020. Every campaign needs a base of enthusiasm fueling its engine, which is why Trump’s J.D. Vance pick is so savvy even if it does leave him wide open to the most obvious political attacks in the world. The problem is that Joe Biden has never been the biggest fan of abortion, and to call him an imperfect messenger on what very clearly should be the Democrats’ number one campaign narrative is an understatement, so he needs something else that’s more up his alley.
This is a start (that likely would need low interest rates to not have the opposite intended effect).
Scoop: Biden WILL announce plan to cap rents at 5% nationwide, sources say
Would strip tax benefit from corporate landlords who dont comply
Plan, which likely requires D control of Congress, comes as Biden emphasizes populist econ ideas after debate
W/ @rachsieg… https://t.co/iOcmE9ig0e
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) July 15, 2024
If all this were passed we’d be looking at the greatest advancement of progressive policy since at least the 1960s.
In the first 100 days of his second term he will:
– Expand Social Security and Medicare benefits
– Lower childhood poverty by making the child tax credit permanent for working families
– Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
– Pass the PRO Act
– End all medical debt
– Reduce…— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 13, 2024
Many have correctly pointed out that none of this could be accomplished without abolishing the filibuster, something that both Bernie and Biden have opposed, so how this plan all actually would be accomplished is still very much TBD. This obviously has a “night before a final reading the entire book” vibe to it, and if Biden was truly committed to progressive policy, this would have been on the agenda long before his crumbling brain became the center of our political debate.
What’s happening is that Bernie and his leftist allies in Congress are throwing Biden a lifeline, and I am very much here for this gambit where I see very little downside in swinging for the fences.
Lefties I love us, but we do not really have much of a plan to take real power in America. As far as I can tell in my experience being one of the specific Bernie Bros those cable news anchors have whined about since 2016, our plan seems to be:
1. Highlight the obvious and widespread failures of capitalism.
2. ???
3. Socialist revolution!
Reflexively opposing everything the gears of American imperialism proposes is likely to lead us down a more just path, but this isn’t always the best route to accomplish our goals. America is so tragicomically fucked up that allying with a man you have rightfully accused of abetting a genocide does makes sense in service of the larger progressive movement during this surreal moment of collapse.
All Upside, No Downside
There is a massive power vacuum in the Democratic Party right now. The center and donors are abandoning Joe Biden en masse. His polls are catastrophic.
But his congressional candidates’ polls aren’t. The freakout right now is fueled by the fact that Democrats across the country would be in pretty good shape if they didn’t have this aged albatross weighing them down. Biden’s stubbornness does center on a nugget of truth: there is upside here. Vice President Kamala Harris would be far better suited to find it, but if we are stuck with the stubborn old man and his schmucky inner circle of familial sycophants driving us all to hell, there is a real opportunity here for advancing progressive policy in a major way.
Arguing about communism is a massive upgrade for Dems over the current discourse around whether the president is sentient or not. If Biden and his congressional candidates can rally his deserters around a coherent and aggressive policy agenda, maybe that’s enough to counter Trump’s impending Reagan 2.0 campaign capitalizing on his newly found sympathetic image.
Let’s indulge the president and Sanders’s delusions for a bit and assume that Biden does come back to win with the wind of a galvanizing progressive agenda at his back. You really think all these people abandoning ship will be welcome back in Bidenworld? The president is famously an extremely loyal man, and if Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of The Squad saved his legacy, they would surely skyrocket up the internal White House power rankings and have much more influence in a second Biden administration than they do now.
For those who doubt this possibility, would you believe it if I told you that someone who voted for the Iraq War became the face of the Green New Deal in the Senate? If there’s one thing to be learned from the Biden era, it’s that there is real value in electing and supporting transactional politicians for the left, as all we have to do is bring them votes and we can get a seat at the table in a way that we never could with the wing of ideologues in the party like Hillary Clinton. Besides, I don’t have much confidence that whomever the centrists and donors would replace Biden with would be more receptive to progressive policy than a desperate Biden is now.
Of course, not everything on this agenda would be accomplished, but if half, or even half of half were passed, the impact would be huge, as we have already seen with many progressive items passed through Biden’s signature legislation. Just the narrative alone would be massive for socialism: it saved Joe Biden and the rest of us from the clutches of a second Trump presidency.
If centrists and donors weren’t abandoning Biden en masse right now, this would be a naïve strategy where the left would surely be undercut yet again by moneyed Beltway interests the moment power became attainable again, but the widespread public rebuke from an entire class of Democrats presents an opportunity to seize power and reform the party in a way that hasn’t existed since Barack Obama tricked us into thinking he could do it back in 2008.
This gambit to save Biden is all upside and no downside. If Biden drops out soon, or loses in November, this episode will be forgotten immediately amidst the avalanche of Democratic infighting following it. You think the leaks are bad now? Just wait until the fight to fill this power vacuum actually begins.
Sanders and AOC are trying to front-run this battle, and dominate an arena no one wants to step foot in. It’s a savvy strategy, and those criticizing them for supposedly tanking their legacies should consider the upside in this play, as it may be the best window to power that socialist policy has discovered in a century.