The debate sucked.

You can blame it on Biden’s cold, or on his well-document stutter interacting with age and fatigue. Those are reasonable excuses for the silly gaffes like “we beat Medicare” (c’mon, it’s obvious what he meant). But then we come to the abortion answer:

Look, there’s so many young women who have been… Including a young woman who just was murdered, and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, they talk about that, but here’s the deal. There’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by… It’s just ridiculous, and they can do nothing about it. And they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.

What was that? Why would Biden say it? Why would he pivot from a winning issue to a losing one? Did he have anything resembling a coherent thought process?

And assuming he still runs, can we justify voting for him?

Yes. And we should be excited about it.

Of course you should still vote for Biden. The reason is that most of a president’s job performance depends on things other than aptitude.¹ It’s about priorities, delegation, policy goals, and who they decide to trust. Obviously I would prefer a president who’s at the top of their game, but if Joe Biden appoints a competent chief of staff and spends the next 4 years getting trotted around Weekend-at-Bernie’s style, that’s still almost as good! Biden is a mainstream Democrat, and the worst case scenario for a mainstream Democrat is that he rolls out a genuinely-pretty-great legislative agenda, appoints liberal judges, and possibly makes some foreign policy blunders that would’ve been even worse under a Republican.

Americans are bizarrely obsessed with the personal qualities of their leaders. 60 years ago, when the inter-party differences were much smaller than the intra-party ones, this might have made sense. Today, though, I’m ride-or-die for Democrats, and anyone with half a heart or half a brain should be too. The difference between the parties is so stark that we mostly know what a president’s policies will be, and the candidates themselves might as well be blunt objects.²

I didn’t always believe this. Four years ago, I was the sort of person who sneered at the “neoliberal” Dem establishment. But things changed. Democrats embraced social and infrastructure spending in a way they never did in the Obama years, leading to a fast recovery and the hottest labor market in two decades. Biden (who, remember, was supposedly from the corporate wing of the party) has been so pro-union that even liberal nonprofits are freaked out. But for Joe Manchin’s bizarre obsession with means-testing,³ we’d have an expanded child tax credit and vastly less child poverty. Solar panels are being installed at a jaw-dropping rate. Real wages are up. In 2020, the dominant narrative among progressives was that the rest of the party would knife us in the back at the first chance they got, and I don’t think we’ve reckoned with how wrong that turned out to be.

The Bolsheviks had a doctrine called “democratic centralism,” which required all dissent to be expressed internally, and all members to follow a decision in lockstep once the party had voted.⁴ If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s capital-D Democratic centralism. Support all the primary challengers you want, try to get your ideological allies onto your county’s Democratic committee,⁵ but as soon as the convention is over, fall the fuck in line.

This autumn, I’m going to go canvassing for the Democratic nominee, I’m going to donate to their campaign, and I’m going to start shamelessly propagandizing in their favor to anyone who’ll listen (our enemies, for all their faults, at least understand the value of propaganda—have you watched Fox News recently?).

And I refuse to care who it is. Shapiro? Hell yeah. Whitmer? Hell. Yeah. Newsom? Suddenly, I think “presidential hair” is the most important quality a candidate can have. Biden? Fuck you, 81 is young. Harris? I would fall out of a coconut tree for her. Like it or not, this is the coalition we’re part of, and it’s time to act like it.

This entry was posted under: politics