Wrestling With Biden

Withholding votes from Biden is a reasonable response to his support for genocide, but we need to think it through more to convert it to a winning strategy

I am certainly no fan of Joe Biden. Even aside from his murderous policy toward Palestine, I see little positive about this man. Below, I’ll explain that in more depth. But, like him or not, the question of the November election is no small thing, and how to respond to it is not so simple.

At this moment, there is massive rage against Biden, as there should be. Indeed, there actually should be much more than there is, but those of us feeling it are feeling it powerfully. Genocide is as grave a crime as there can be, and Biden continues to earn the derogatory moniker “Genocide Joe” every single day.

I take comfort in the fact that I live in Maryland. I can vote for Cornel West, or some other independent and know it will not affect the outcome of the election as the Democrat will win my state. But so many friends and allies who live in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia (it’s been blue for years but not overwhelmingly so), Nevada, Georgia, and other potential battleground states don’t have such an easy choice.

I support the campaign to withhold votes from Biden over Gaza. But right now, that’s a reaction. We need to think about the strategy for how to turn this into greater political pressure, and about the outcome we wish to see. Because the return of Donald Trump is surely not the outcome any of us want.

The Trump Dilemma

The argument from Biden supporters is an obvious one, but it’s also strong. In what way, they will ask, is Trump not worse than Biden for any worthy cause, including that of Palestine?

The answer, of course, is that he’s not. It won’t do to be glib about Trump. Many of his actions and policies paved the way for both the ultra-right wing government in Israel today and the genocidal devastation of Gaza. Trump’s approach of thoroughly ignoring the Palestinians, including the Palestinian Authority, greatly accelerated the already existing dynamic of pushing the entire question of Palestine to the very back of the diplomatic priority list.

Trump’s enthusiasm for “peace” that was, in reality, military and trade agreements between brutal autocracies and a quasi-fascist apartheid state utterly bypassed Palestinian rights and political arguments. His “Deal of the Century” was an absolute joke, including a map that would have embarrassed the architects of South Africa’s Bantustan project.

His move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem proved to be the final straw severing even the quisling Palestinian Authority’s ability to maintain business as usual with the White House. His recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights shattered the basic norm at the heart of the United Nations charter of the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force, and set a precedent for Israeli annexation of the other territories it occupied in 1967.

It’s always dangerous to play too fast and loose with counter-factuals, but I think it’s safe to assume that Trump would have absolutely backed Israel’s initial response to the October 7 attacks had he been president. But it’s actually questionable whether he would have maintained that support as staunchly as Biden has for as long as Biden has. Depending on who was in his cabinet at the time, there might have been voices that called for real restraint. One can imagine Rex Tillerson or Jim Mattis doing such a thing (obviously, Mike Pompeo would have been every bit as enthusiastic as Biden’s anti-diplomacy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and wouldn’t have bothered with Blinken’s phony expressions of concern for Palestinian civilian deaths).

Still, it’s pretty clear that Trump is at least as bad on Palestine as Biden—which is a pretty horrifying thing to say, as there is virtually no case to be made that Biden is actually better.

That said, Trump is obviously a much bigger threat in many other ways. Biden, it’s true, has subverted democracy in his own way (more on that later), but Trump actively wages war on it. It is eminently possible that if Trump wins in 2024, there may be no legitimate presidential election in 2028 and beyond. The threat is really that grave.

And a Trump presidency, as we’ve already seen, unleashes wave after wave of racism and violent misogyny, as well as a kind of homo- and transphobia that could very well lead to its own genocidal outcomes right here in the U.S. At-risk groups, especially youth, are literally facing greatly increased risk to their lives in a Trump presidency.

As much as Biden’s economic record is vastly overstated (again, I’ll get into this below), he is certainly not prone to damaging stunts like the huge tax cut for the rich that Trump enacted and from which the country has not, and likely will not, recover.

The prospect of another Trump presidency is a nightmare, and one from which we may not escape for a verry long time, even after Trump himself is gone. We barely escaped the last time. And the prospect of Trump being disqualified, whether by the courts (this is unlikely) or by being in prison (only slightly more likely) doesn’t help much, as the Republican alternatives are just as bad as him in many ways. The main differences are that Trump’s rivals are smarter than him but don’t have his charismatic appeal to the far-right, limiting their ability to command and mobilize the masses of MAGAts that he can move.

Despite some pundits’ attempts at rosy projections, Trump has been holding marginal leads in most polls for months. That bodes poorly, as Democrats usually have to win the popular vote by significant margins to win the electoral vote. And Biden continues to trail in swing states.

As November draws closer, I suspect that at least some number of the people who are withholding their votes today for Biden out of their outrage at his facilitation of genocide will stare the prospect of another Trump presidency in the face and relent, hold their nose, and vote for Biden.

But that is by no means a sure thing. And if it does happen, it is not entirely clear that it’s a good thing in the long term.

The reality of Joe Biden

One of the key features of politics is that it’s a world of make-believe on par with Hollywood. Some of us buy into he image of the candidates we end up supporting. Others try to calculate what the candidate will really bring to the office when we get beyond the smoke and mirrors of an electoral campaign and press conferences.

Sometimes it’s hard to know. To this day, people ignore Barack Obama’s track record and consider him a liberal president. He wasn’t. He was a centrist. But two things were true about him. One, he was the most liberal president since Jimmy Carter, even if that was only because the only Democrat between Carter and Obama was Bill Clinton, a decidedly right of center Democrat.

Two, Obama campaigned on a progressive platform. It was why he defeated John McCain so soundly. When his policies were shown to be in line with mainstream Washington, he had a tougher time winning a second term, and many of those who voted for him abandon him in 2012, some even going  over to Trump in 2016.

Biden is no centrist among Democrats. Back in the 1970s and 1980s Biden was the very picture of the grey area between Democrats and Republicans. His comfort with conservative Republicans and Dixiecrats who had not yet moved to the GOP was repackaged in 2020 and presented as evidence of his “ability to work across the aisle” rather than of his essential conservatism.

Biden’s racism brought us the 1994 crime bill which was his crowning achievement until he had to repackage that in 2020 as well lest everyone be reminded of his nearly boundless racism when he was trying to project an image of outrage at the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville. His Catholic objection to women’s reproductive freedom that caused him to lead the fight to defend the Hyde Amendment (which barred federal funds from being used to help women get abortion services) until he was forced, kicking and screaming, to finally abandon that position in 2020 lest his conservatism undermine his standing among liberal women.

Biden was Obama’s pick for VP in 2008 in large part because of his racism. The old friend of segregationist Strom Thurmond was meant to reassure white racists that white supremacy would not be a main target of the Obama presidency (and it wasn’t) if Obama won. It was also very much meant to reassure supporters of Israel that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world would not endanger the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S. (and it didn’t).

As president, Biden capitalized on some opportunities early on. The infrastructure bill was largely a done deal by the time he reached office and his utter dismantling of the so-called “Build Back Better” bill—a bill many believed he never intended to see become law in anything close to its original form—and its transformation into the Inflation Reduction Act fulfilled his most important campaign promise: that nothing would fundamentally change, while also taking some actions of key issues such as climate change (though many climate activists said much of the good in the bill was offset by concessions to fossil fuel corporations), drug pricing, and some tax reform and other economic measures, .

Yet it remains important to note that Biden, or at least his advisers, understood in 2021 that they needed progressives. As a result, one key victory was secured, and the National Labor Relations Board was revitalized and brought back to its original mission of defending labor in the United States. That was payment to Bernie Sanders and the progressive movement that came out in force in 2020 to support Biden.

In truth, Biden has done little else. While he likes to tout himself as a friend of unions, union membership hit an all-time low in 2022 (figures for 2023 are not yet available). While the new and improved NLRB was a factor in some major union victories, the pandemic actually provided a bigger boost to labor, organized or not, as people realized that they were more necessary than they had been convinced of before.

Bidenomics is a bad joke, and a rather pathetic trick Democrats are trying to pull. When economic numbers were strong under Trump, Democratic pundits and legislators all, quite correctly, pointed out that presidents really have little to do with the economy one way or the other. Of course, they can do real harm by doing something very stupid like Trump’s tax cuts. They could also do some real good, as both Trump and Biden did by putting more cash in the hands of consumers, during the pandemic rather than the wealthy, thus powering the economy instead of smothering it.

I defended Biden on that very basis when he was being blasted early on for rising inflation, a circumstance which had virtually nothing to do with him and everything to do with structural problems with the supply chain brought to the fore by the pandemic. Again, the punditry and I agreed. It wasn’t Biden’s fault.

But when things perked up and inflation fell, suddenly the tune was different. Bidenomics was this miracle for the economy that averted the recession that seemed to loom. No, no, it had nothing to do with a bounce back from the lows and diminished production of the pandemic years. It was all Joe the miracle worker.

It’s nonsense, and, interestingly, few who are not already Biden loyalists are buying it. That’s not because the general public suddenly got better informed about economics, but because the Democrats failed to recognize the reality that most Americans are living. Inflation may have fallen, and wages may have eked their way up a tad, but the overwhelming majority of us are still struggling, living paycheck to paycheck, if that. Prices are still high, especially for necessities such as housing and food. And, while inflation may have finally dipped very slightly below wage gains (although, again, these are rates, so prices are still rising, just more slowly), that still leaves prices far, far higher than what they were just a few years ago, a hike the meager advances in wages cannot begin to match.

That’s why people aren’t convinced by Bidenomics. It’s not because the messaging is poor, and it’s not because people are stupid. It’s because the rhetoric doesn’t match people’s lived experience.

Biden has accomplished nothing for workers. Workers, in recent years, have done it for themselves. He talks a lot about women’s right to control their own bodies, but has done absolutely nothing to make legislation happen, despite the success grassroots groups have had on the ground in numerous states that should have paved the political way for federal legislation. And it would have if there was any leadership on the issue from the White House.

Much the same can be said about issues of race, policing, and LGBTQIA* rights, all of which have seen fierce battles, some which have been won by grassroots activism, but all of which have gotten no help from Joe Biden.

Back to Gaza

Biden’s domestic agenda is terrible, to be sure. But there is no way to argue that it is as bad or as dangerous as Trump’s. Biden might not do much to address structural racism and other fundamental issues in American society, but he is also not seeking to encourage white nationalism. Nor is he trying to increase misogyny or reduce women to reproductive vessels; nor increase the forces that can make life so challenging for LGBTQIA* people, especially youth.

Moreover, progressives can pressure Biden, as we saw with the NLRB. It wasn’t enormous, but it certainly mattered. Republicans are immune to such pressures from progressives.

But on foreign policy, there is much less difference between the parties. This isn’t new, in the abstract. There has long been a “Washington consensus” on foreign policy, which held for many years. It was always a consensus of terrible, largely imperialistic policies, be it in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or in great power competition with China, Russia or whomever was the adversary.

Trump, with his isolationism and admiration for strongmen shook up that consensus. But the Washington consensus remains largely in place, even if first the neoconservatives and later Trump radicalized parts of the right a bit.

But if the choice between Trump and Biden is terrible but clear on domestic matters, it is far worse and much murkier in foreign affairs.

Many Americans were angry at the way Trump genuflected to the Saudis while he was in office. Yet, despite his rhetoric on the campaign trail, Biden has been just as deferential to Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman (MBS) as Trump was. There has been none of the personal business dealings that Trump and his family stealthily engaged in, but Biden has similarly abandoned all pretense of protecting human rights in his dealings with the Saudis. His administration’s perfunctory mentions of human rights are hollow and cynical, and the policies are really little different from Trump’s.

The comparison between Trump’s and Binde’s policies resemble each other to a great extent regarding Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and many other dictatorial states. Of course, Biden has been very adversarial with Vladimir Putin, whom Trump couldn’t stop fawning over, but he has been just as needlessly abrasive and confrontational with China. And he seemed to intentionally bypass the early opportunity to restore the Iran nuclear deal (a deal which even Trump administration and Israeli intelligence officials all agreed was working) and we have remained on the edge of conflict with the Islamic Republic ever since, just as we were under Trump.

And when it comes to Israel, Biden has been absolutely appalling. Defying his own rhetoric again, Biden has made no effort to reverse any of the damage Trump did in his four years in office. He has not tried to reverse Trump’s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan (or his recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, for that matter), or any of Trump’s other actions.

More than that, Biden made no effort at all to ease Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza from the first day of his administration. As I wrote numerous times, he continued Trump’s policies of isolating and ignoring the Palestinians, albeit with a few token meetings from Antony Blinken meant to mollify critics, and nothing more.

Biden pressed hard for a Saudi-Israeli normalization pact, which would have robbed the Palestinians of the one diplomatic card that had not yet been destroyed by Israel or the U.S.

Biden, who knows as well as anyone that Israel does not care about American words but only about American actions, took no action to stem the rising tide of settler violence, despite his administration’s occasional expressions of “concern.” Indeed, the only time he took even the mildest action to pressure the far-right Israeli government was over the judicial reform, stating that the reason he was pressing Isrfaeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the matter was that the planned changes would make it harder to maintain the special relationship. No concern for Palestinian rights was ever shown.

From there it was hardly surprising that Biden would back Israel’s campaign to ethnically cleanse Gaza to the hilt, as he has done.

It must be made clear that, even in terms of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Biden’s behavior is unprecedented. Washington has always constrained Israeli actions and set limits beyond which the Israelis risked losing U.S. support. Reagan did it in Lebanon when he threatened to end the sale of F-16 fighters if Israel didn’t stop its assault in Southern Lebanon. Bush the elder did it to end the first intifada and Israel’s disproportionate reaction with the Madrid Conference. Bill Clinton did it when he forced Netanyahu to carry out the agreements in the Hebron Protocols. Bush the Younger did it when he threatened loan guarantees if Israel didn’t alter the course of its apartheid wall. Obama did it by making it clear that Israel needed to halt Operation Cast Lead when he took office.

Even Trump did it, in his own, corrupt way, when he pressed Israel to shelve its plan to annex huge chunks of the West Bank when he wanted his son-in-law to put together the Abraham Accords. Only Biden has claimed he had no power to stop Israel from committing some of the most horrific war crimes of this century.

There are no words for the depth of Biden’s crime. It is far beyond what any American president has done before him in Palestine.

This cannot be the choice we have for our president. It cannot be a choice between a purveyor of genocide and a fascist wannabe dictator. And there is no reason why it should be.

As I’ve pointed out many times, most Democrats don’t want Biden to be the nominee in 2024, quite apart from his appalling behavior in Gaza. This was true before October 7, and it’s true now. Some argue that it would be too late to replace him, but that is sheer nonsense. Lyndon Johnson dropped his 1968 bid for re-election in March of that year. Biden could do the same. And given that he is trailing a man who tried to overthrow the U.S. government, he really should.

The simple fact is that Americans deserve a better choice than an election between a right wing Democrat who has engineered a genocide in Gaza and an outright fascist. It’s a no-win situation, not unlike the recent election in Argentina, between a representative of a failed government (indeed, the finance minister from that government that saw inflation run wild, nearing 200%), Sergio Massa, and Argentina’s own version of Trump, Javier Millei, who eventually won. His draconian economic measures have already sparked protests and violent repression in response.

We can and should do better. Of course, I believe that a progressive candidate would do much better than most pundits believe because progressive policies (battling climate change, significant raising of the minimum wage, universal health care, canceling student loans, even universal basic income) are much more popular than mainstream Democrats want to admit.

But I’m not arguing here for an overnight revolution. Time is short, and one thing we should all be able to agree on is that a Trump, or any Republican, victory in November must be avoided. But not at all costs. Not at the cost of thousands more Palestinian—and quite possibly other Middle Eastern—lives. Official death counts in Gaza have now topped 23,000, and with those missing, almost all of whom are likely dead, it may be over 30,000. That’s an incredibly appalling number from a population of 2.2 million.

The call to withhold votes from Biden must say more than merely demanding a ceasefire. It must demand that Biden step aside. We probably won’t get a candidate who is much better, but it will at least be one who is not personally responsible for this genocide. We deserve at least that much, and democracy demands at least that much. And certainly, the people of Palestine deserve, and absolutely require, it.

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Recent Articles

The U.S. can’t blindly support Israel and prevent escalation in the region at the same time

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/the-u-s-cant-blindly-support-israel-and-prevent-escalation-in-the-region-at-the-same-time/

Finally, one last note. There has been renewed interest in the book I co-authored with Marc Lamont Hill, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. I’m a bit ambivalent about the reasons, obviously, but many are saying that they are finding it very useful for contextualizing the current moment in U.S. policy toward Palestine. If you have friends that might find it helpful, or if you yourself might, you can order a copy from an independent bookseller here.

Also, follow me on Twitter @MJPlitnick; at Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MitchellPlitnick; on Bluesky @mjplitnick.bsky.social; Threads @mjplitnick; or Mastodon @MitchellPlitnick@journa.host for my latest hot takes, comments, and news updates.