Biden is Progressives’ and Greens’ Only Choice in 2020

• Nate Craig

Last fall, in 2019 while the primary was heating up, I felt like the progressive moment had finally come when Sen. Sanders was leading the crowded field of democratic contenders followed closely by Sen. Warren. They each carried their own revitalized message of “Hope and Change” and they both had congressional records to match the message.

I had been so inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign -and so fed up with the DNC as 2016 unfolded- that I ran for Mayor of Phoenixville, PA as a Green Party candidate. My team and I knocked thousands of doors, and my platform took Bernie’s national platform and localized it. On election day, I had gone from no name recognition to gaining 10% of the vote.

After realizing how much work one local campaign took, I realized the time, focus, resources, and effort that would be required to build a viable third party were not lining up with the focus of the Green Party.

I pleaded with the Green Party at their next state meeting to take lessons from 2017 and obsess over local politics. I wanted us to get frighteningly good at local politics. My argument: “13 million Pennsylvanians can’t be reached with a $3,000 campaign budget. There’s no point in running state-wide campaigns, we need to figure out local, then build to larger offices once we’ve earned voters’ trust as elected officials.”

My argument fell on defiant ears. As soon as I finished speaking one of the long-time Green Party leaders stood up and announced: “We’re still looking for US Senate and US Congressional candidates, it’s not too late to get on the ballot for 2018.” In other words, they were unwilling to put in the work of becoming a real party, building trust, ever winning an actual race. They wanted to indefinitely run candidates as a form of protest, and to hell with electoral realities. I registered as a democrat that day. In 2019 there were 3 local campaigns throughout PA.

If either Sanders or Warren had taken the democratic nomination in 2020, my argument to members of the Green Party about whom to vote for in the general may have been fundamentally different.

Sen. Warren supports a Green New Deal. Warren imperfectly champions racial justice, she’ll advocate for LGBTQ rights until she’s blue in the face, she mercilessly prosecutes white collar criminal bankers from her seat in the Senate. Her endorsement of Biden is potent saying, “when presented with new facts and new arguments, he’s not too proud to be persuaded.”

Sen. Sanders has championed racial justice since before millennials were a twinkle in their parents’ eyes, he actively supported gay marriage when it was practically political suicide, and has been working against growing political economic disparities since before he was Mayor of Burlington, Vt. He reoriented the entire democratic primary in 2020 around Americans’ right to healthcare.

Like many progressives desperate for a candidate I could believe in, aching for a politician with integrity, I regularly donated to both Sanders’ and Warren’s campaigns. I gave $27 when I had the cash, hoping that one of these progressive champions would win and take our causes all the way to the White House (maybe change the mansion’s godaweful name).

Then, against all odds -and every moderator the corporate media threw at his campaign, Sen. Sanders surged and won two of the first three contests, while getting a tie in Iowa. Our progressive became the presumptive nominee and those of us who had hunkered down for the fight against the establishment in 2016 felt vindicated. Our champion for social justice had finally won.

Not only were we not going to have Donald Trump as President after November, but because of our candidate, we were going to rally through the 2020 campaign with vigor and enthusiasm.

Either of them would have fought tooth and nail for Medicare for All. They would fight to make it possible for normal people working 40 hours a week to actually make ends meet. No more healthcare premiums, deductibles, co-pays, or out-of-pocket maximums. No more going bankrupt or hungry trying to afford life-sustaining insulin. Cancer would no longer be a financial death sentence.

Unbelievably, the month of February ended with Bernie as the “presumptive nominee,” with 72 delegates to Biden’s 54. Warren was on his tail early on, but she was a VP hopeful. Pundits scrambled to discredit everything they aimed to do, even if he did win the primary.

As Super Tuesday approached, so did Covid-19. The impeachment encroached on and overshadowed Bernie’s rise and raised the prospect of the four Senators left in the race by this time being pulled off the campaign trail and into McConnell’s partisan sham-of-an-impeachment trial. Though California swung left for Bernie, 10 of the other Super Tuesday states followed South Carolina in choosing Biden.

Maybe it was simply the effectiveness of debate moderators’ anti-Medicare for All questions, it could have been the other top three candidate’s tag-team effort against the viability of the Green New Deal, or maybe it was just a visceral yearning for familiarity after three years of Trump’s painfully unprecedented Presidency.

Even as an ardent progressive, and former green, I can relate to the need for normalcy after three years of relentless attacks against immigrants, the environment, journalists, science, women’s rights, education, voting rights, Black athletes, foreign heads of state, European allies, human rights, and then circling his way back through the gamut to hit multiple issues per tweet.

Correcting course will take enormous effort and relentless vision for a better future. Reviving all of the above agencies, and revisiting all of the issues is now absolutely necessary. To simply go from DeVos running the US Dept. of Education, and Mnunchin running the Treasury, to having the next president appoint an everyday lobbyist who’s coming through the revolving door won’t go far enough in restructuring what’s been broken in our country.

That’s why 2020 was such a crucial year to pick a progressive to take charge. With a progressive vision guiding the fight against the inertia in Washington, we may have been able to return to a more palatable normal than we had under Obama. But we didn’t pick a progressive.

Biden’s was a message of aspiring to normalcy, and it landed. Biden got more voters on board with “we can’t do that-ism,” than Sanders picking up the torch of “Hope and Change.”

April’s primaries only solidified that conclusion. We pivoted to hoping for a palatable VP pick like Warren, or Abrams. He stuck with what worked. Sen. Kamala Harris at least supports Medicare for All. Rather than a champion leading the charge on all of the issues we have hoped for, at least Biden did come around on supporting a $15 federal minimum wage, and some other key issues. Yet, Sanders supporters felt like we had lost.

Perspectives change. The turnaround happened for me in these last few weeks. Endorsements rarely matter to many of us. Someone with a respected voice, or a significant following reaches out to their audience and says “I like Joe,” and that’s supposed to mean something to us as voters. I’ve rarely paid attention to them in the past and I was already committed to voting for Biden.

Some organizations endorse all the time, and did so quickly once the primary wrapped up. The national embarrassment over three years of relentless attacks on all liberal fronts made those endorsements predictable.

Our defiantly immoral response to the coronavirus pandemic triggered some organizations to break with their long tradition. From usually taking no political stance they stepped out and backed Biden. That jolted me out of the malaise our news cycle tends to keep me stuck in.

Scientific American’s endorsement was unusual. In their 175 years as a publication they have never weighed in on a presidential race. They’d never endorsed a candidate for anything until now. Their statement that it’s now or never for science struck me.

New England Journal of Medicine endorsed Biden. For 208 years they had never endorsed a candidate or a presidential contender. While he became his own guinea pig with every covid treatment -other than clorox, NEJM said enough. The unnecessary suffering and death caused by our President’s refusal to follow public health guidance forced their hand.

World-renowned dissident and activist Noam Chomsky pleads with voters to unelect Trump by voting for Biden (of whom he is highly critical), saying that nothing less than the future of organized life on this planet hinges on this election. Trump is the world’s most dangerous person and, he argues, even the most dangerous person the world has ever seen. We must vote for Biden, if we are going to have any chance at surviving climate catastrophe and/or nuclear war.

Legendary activist Angela Davis, former Black Panther -imprisoned as a terrorist during the Civil Rights movement- advocates for voting for Biden because he is moveable. She believes that with BLM gaining global attention that we should elect Biden, and work tirelessly to influence him. If we continue to make our demands clear through activism, he may listen.

Scholar Cornel West, similar to Chomsky, does not hold out hope in Biden’s movability as much he sees resistance to Trump’s facism as absolutely necessary. He sees the unmitigated attacks against democracy and free speech as an absolute danger to the future of America. He specifically argues that a vote for Biden is not a vote for the continuation of neo-liberal policies, but that after we vote we must actively pressure Biden to divest from the war machine.

Ben Jealous argues, along with Davis, that not only is Trump the threat to organized life that Chomsky too is concerned about, not just the threat to free speech and democracy that West sees, but that since Biden has been moveable in the past, he will be moveable now. He finds hope in the strength of the movements that have come about in recent years, and especially in the resolve shown by protestors since George Floyd’s murder in June.

Voting for a green when the democrat is clearly going to win the presidency is a fine statement to make in a normal election. I only voted for Ralph Nader once it was clear that Obama had a solid lead in PA. Clinton’s grip on our state was far less certain, so she got my vote, but she did not want my support.

All that to say that holding progressive values and petitioning for change, protesting, organizing, campaigning for all of the political outcomes we desperately need will be fundamental. Tenaciously holding onto our values is necessary if we are to move forward. It is also necessary, given Trump’s ambitions, to ask: given the realities of electoral politics handing us two options, which of those choices will make realizing our values possible?

The biggest challenge I have for my progressive and green friends, here in 2020, especially those who are green is this: what good will our progressivism be if Trump’s fascist grip tightens around our first amendment even more? If he remains for another four years and the Supreme Court remains unwilling to reign in Trump’s abuses of power, what good will the Civil Rights Act, even the Bill of Rights, be then?

He has attacked the press since before he was elected or inaugurated. Trump’s attacks didn’t stop at verbal assaults, he would hint to his supporters (e.g. asking his “2nd amendment people”) to stop Sec. Clinton’s agenda. His thinly veiled threats and innuendo were understood. Told Michigan to “Liberate itself,” then, months later, the FBI uncovered a plot by right-wing terrorists to kidnap Gov. Whitmer.

Megyn Kelly received death threats from Trump supporters after he attacked her for being a mean and angry woman. It got to the point that she felt the need to beg him to publicly call of his dogs. Every Trump press secretary was compelled to lie, refuse to answer questions, back track, deny and twist what he said though what he said was said publicly. Finally, he canceled most press briefings except for ones with specific Fox News hosts due to everyone else being “unfair.”

His vehement attacks against CNN’s Jim Acosta, resulting in an attempt to revoke his press pass were only the beginning. Trump’s constant attacks directed against the New York Times hardly make the news any more. A Guardian reporter was body slammed in 2018 by a republican candidate for US Congress. Trump responded by saying the congressman-elect was his “kinda guy.”

Fast forward to the 2020 BLM protests against George Floyd’s murder (what seems like a decade or 3 later), and the exercise of the First Amendment was met with military intervention.

To Greens hoping to “hold out” for a pure presidential candidate: what do you believe will be left of our First Amendment if we don’t un-elect Trump? Sanders sees electing Biden as the only way to keep the right to free speech intact.

If Green Party members want to have the right to fight for progress, the right to continue to protest, the ability to organize around anything other than the second amendment, then they need to join Chomsky, Davis, West, Jealous, Scientific American, New England Journal of Medicine, Planned Parenthood etc., and freaking vote for Joe Biden. If he doesn’t win, we won’t get another shot at saving the planet. We will never achieve Medicare for All.

Democratic voters didn’t choose our platform this time, but more people are moving in our direction every day. If progress is ever going to have a chance again, that chance goes through electing Joe Biden and working tirelessly to convince America that our aim and intention as progressives is to build towards an ethical and functional government that is driven by an ethos of empathy.