All Left Hands on Deck. Step 1: Defeat Trump. Step 2: Challenge Biden.
Such contradictions should lead to clear analysis and strategic action. We need approaches that respond to imminent emergencies -- first, bailing out the boat before it sinks, and then charting a course toward where we want to go.
The Trump regime must be brought down, or the left will be up against the wall. As Cornel West says, “A vote for Biden is . . . a way of preserving the condition for the possibility of any kind of democratic practice in the United States.”
No one has described the current crossroads more astutely than Naomi Klein, who tweeted last month: “Vote for a more favorable terrain. Our struggle goes way beyond elections. We’re in the streets. We’re talking to our neighbors and co-workers. But who controls the presidency changes what’s politically possible for our struggles.”
Under the Trump regime, the terrain has a stone wall around what’s politically possible for progressives. And Trump is becoming more and more authoritarian , week by week, as he manipulates and expands executive-branch power.
With three weeks of voting to go, the race between Trump and Biden is likely much closer than the forecasts usually presented by corporate media. Biden’s lead in virtually every swing state is appreciably smaller than in national polling. Over the weekend, even while reporting that Biden is 12 points ahead of Trump nationwide in the new ABC-Washington Post poll, ABC noted that four years ago Hillary Clinton had a polling lead with the identical 12-point national margin a mere 17 days before her loss to Trump.
A recent
open letter
signed by 55 progressive activists and writers (including me) asserted that
“voting for Biden in
swing states
is essential.” We added: “Protestations that Biden is beholden to elites
are true but beside the point. The lesser evil is evil, but in this case,
the greater evil is simply off the charts.”
The left should play a leading role in defeating Trump, the off-the-charts
evil. That’s the first step. And if Trump is defeated, the second step is
to confront President Biden from day one.
With systemic injustices now screaming out to all who are open to hearing,
the left would have a historic opportunity under Biden to expose and
confront the Democratic Party -- which talks a good game while often
helping corporate elites to rip off the public and pollute the planet. The
coronavirus pandemic has “laid bare the inequities, corruptions, and
cruelties of our political life -- features that the [Trump] administration
did not originate but which it has magnified and exploited,” The New Yorker declared two weeks ago in an
editorial
endorsing Biden.
The editorial acknowledges that returning to a pre-Trump status quo would
not be enough: If Biden wins, “he will have to govern with boldness,
urgency, tenacity, and creativity. In the face of such challenges, realism
and radicalism are not so far apart.” The left will need to insist that
“radicalism” can be the utmost of realism.
That will require persistently challenging the reflexive stances of
corporate media and corporate Democrats.
Helping to defeat Trump
is the current imperative. An election victory would make it possible to
immediately confront the Biden presidency with grassroots movements --
relentlessly organizing against the fossil-fuel industry, systemic racism,
income inequality, corporate power, militarism and so much more. As the
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said days ago, “the chance of
having some influence on his administration is just incomparably greater
than the zero chance of influencing the Trump administration.”
In a cogent new video, Ellsberg
offers clarity: “As a leftist, and antiwar and antinuclear activist for
half of a century, I share all of the left-wing criticisms of Joe Biden and
the Democratic Party. That means that I expect to have a lot of
oppositional activity ahead of me in the next four years whoever is
president. I want Joe Biden to oppose as a president in my activist
activities rather than Donald Trump.”
_______________________
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author
of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death.” He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California for
the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
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