this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Because, at the best… Philips is a younger, dumber version of Biden. At the worst… he spent the entirety of his career toeing the party line.
He’s as milquitoast and boring as Biden. The only thing I can commend him on is primarrying Biden.
I’d love it if any of a dozen progressives got in there. But 2016’s primary made it clear: the DNC will never allow a progressive candidate.
Which is why we’re stuck with a candidate very, very few people actually like; who can’t do the one thing he campaigned on when it actually matters (work across the aisle. Not his fault, except to say he’s out of touch if he thinks the republicans actually care.).
Biden could barely keep his own party in line; even when they had nominal control of the house and senate.
You’ll notice three things about all the. It legislation: they were from that period where they had control, they were extremely hard to get passed, and most of them are barely adequate to maintain the status quo rather than reverse anything.
You’ll also notice that Biden sure loves to take credit for all of that when, while he did do some heavy lifting; he was far from the only one doing the heavy lifting.
Nobody likes a boss that doesn’t acknowledge hard work. Worse, you’ll notice he doesn’t accept equal blame when the rest of the party can’t get shit done.
Kind of, yeah. But let me complete the picture that that forms one accurate portion of:
A self-described socialist, with genuinely good genuinely left-wing ideas about taking on Wall Street and corporate crime and fighting for the rights of working people, came within a realistic distance of being the nominee. If he'd won the nomination, he would almost certainly have won the general if he didn't get assassinated. He was the most popular politician in American politics for years after 2016, and he's still to this day half a generation later more popular than both Biden and Trump.
Yes, the DNC is full of corporate-cash-infused criminals who did everything they could to tank his chances, and their corrupt efforts succeeded and ultimately handed the election to Trump. That is the sad nature of big money politics in the United States; "we" as leftist reformers are up against a corrupt system.
BUT EVEN WITH THAT HE ALMOST FUCKING WON
It was extremely close. A socialist was almost the Democratic nominee. All these "good leftists" who are talking about how useless it is to engage within the system somehow miss the lesson from that, and somehow conclude that "well, we tried one time and it didn't work, time to move to exclusively whining on the internet about how I wish it was different, full-time."
I cannot get my head around how the lesson of Bernie Sanders can possibly be anything other than that genuinely good people can have a realistic shot within the rigged game that is American politics. Taking home the lesson "well yeah but he didn't win, the one time that passionate internet people all got together and voted in the primary for someone who was fuckin great, so forget the whole deal" seems cynical, defeatist, and doomed to self-fulfill the prophecy that nothing good is going to happen in US politics and things are going to steadily get worse and worse.
Thanks guys
(Edit: Oh, I got carried away talking about Sanders -- it's wholly untrue that Biden didn't get anything done. Even with the Republicans arrayed against him determined to not allow him to do anything, and even if "well we better stand back and if the Republicans take over then oh well" is about the most backwards reaction to that situation you could imagine, if it was true that they'd conspired to destroy positive progress during his term and succeeded.)
Just to clarify, I’m not advocating anything other than a political solution. Rather, just an observation that the DNC in its current form will never allow progressives in power.
But there is appetite for progressive policies; which is precisely why they tolerate literal fascists at the table. as blackmail.
The good news is, assuming the fascists don’t absolutely destroy the country, the other arc is destroying their political party; at which point progressives can fork off from the centrists and make a genuine run for it; and drag the country back into not sucking.
Unfortunately, right now we’re more likely to get wrecked. Biden is starting to slide right just to get things done. Without getting the same back. (Fortunately, republicans are too fucking stupid to capitalize on that.)