Progressives Can Still Vote: In the Republican Primary

Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)

Progressive debating about the pros and cons of voting for Biden is pitting good people against each other. If physicist Neils Bohr was right, and “the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth,” then these fratricidal arguments are misdirected.

In the interest of lefty solidarity, here’s an argument that may help bridge the divide. To follow this argument we need two stipulations: (1) Biden is intrinsically a Republican (his conservatism runs deep), and (2) there was once an authentic working-class Democratic Party, as represented by FDR and his political heirs.

On the policy side of Biden, a few of his Republican leanings include his aggressive backing of George W. Bush’s Iraq war, his 40 years of advocating for Social Security cuts and his support for Republicans in their efforts to pass a 2005 bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protection, leaving millions of them in financial distress.

The primeval side of Biden has also aligned with Republicans, even segregationists.

“He has lauded South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond — who Biden called ‘one of my closest friends’ — and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who Biden worked with on legislation to prevent court-ordered desegregation busing. He has also expressed admiration for Sens. John Stennis, James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge. He has even praised George Wallace, an Alabama governor and segregationist presidential candidate.” (See “Deep Personal Relationships: Joe Biden’s Six Segregationist Friends,” Alana Goodman, Washington Examiner, June 19, 2019.)

(In fairness, some of these Biden friends came out of the traditional Democrat South, until Nixon’s “southern strategy” siphoned segregationists into the Republican Party.)

As recently as the 2019 midterm elections, Biden made a paid speech in favor of a Michigan Republican congressional candidate, Fred Upton, who had “helped craft a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.” (See “Joe Biden’s Speech Buoyed the G.O.P. in Midwest Battleground,” Alexander Burns, New York Times, January 23, 2019). Upton won. So much for Biden’s principled defense of the Mitt Romney-inspired Obamacare.

Can we now stipulate that Biden is essentially a Republican? And can we equally stipulate that the classic Democratic Party once had a working-class base? If so, we can look at the November election in a different light: as a Republican primary.

Progressive and working-class Democrats have already lost the presidential election. Even Yogi Berra would tell us, “It’s over.” The authentic FDR Democrat, Bernie Sanders, was defeated. The question is whether we would consider voting in what amounts to a Republican primary. Let’s compare the candidates from that perspective.

Without moralizing, let’s consider the cold statistics.

• Biden has only one sexual assault accusation against him compared to Trump’s multiple accusers. Biden’s lies about getting arrested in South Africa, about firmly defending Social Security, about having the biggest crowds in Iowa, about opposing the Iraq war, etc., remain less numerous than Trump’s limitless detours from the truth. And Trump’s gaslighting has not only led confused Americans into exposing themselves to the coronavirus, but it has stimulated demonstrations against the notion of public health itself, as if the State had no role in defending citizens against a virulent pandemic. Trump seems to be using stay-at-home measures as a scapegoat to divert attention from government nondelivery of promised protections for small business owners and their employees, another form of gaslighting.
• Both candidates speak about normalizing life after the virus, but neither has the grain of wisdom to consider that we cannot and should not return to the consumerist, ecocidal life of pre-pandemic times. But there’s a significant difference. Trump’s head is bloated with venomous narcissism and bad ideas, while Biden’s is largely empty, which means Biden will take the advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci and maybe even heed the climate scientists scorned by Trump. Remember that it was Republican Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency.

There you have it. You can legitimately loathe the corporate Dems and still vote for Biden, because you’ll be voting in a Republican primary.

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