The Republican In Biden

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are both rather old, they're both set in their ways and won't change their morals, behavior or ideologies. This is just a fact of life; the older we get, the more difficult it becomes to learn new things, and it becomes even more difficult to unlearn old things.

_{Image by DonkeyHotey - source: Flickr}

That's biology and that's why almost all aspects of our personalities are formed during out youngest years and why a child's first 7 to 9 years are so pivotal in determining it's future potential. When we're still relatively young, our brain's connectome (the map of neural connections in the brain) is still quite malleable; neural connections are easily formed, broken down and reconfigured. For both Bernie and Joe those years are long gone. For their connectomes to be reconfigured it would take some dramatic personal event, like a near-death experience; there are beautiful, and not so beautiful accounts about individuals who changed drastically after such an event. Bar such an extraordinary event though, these gentlemen are set in their ways; what we have now is what we'll get when one of them tries to take on Trump in the general elections.

We all know how consistent Sanders has been with his ideological and political convictions, but the same can be said about Joe Biden as well; he has consistently shown himself to be on the extreme right wing of the Democratic party, to the point that he could easily pass as a Republican. There's a lot of talk about Joe Biden's mental decline, and rightfully so because this will be relentlessly exploited by the Trump campaign, but I'd like to point to the man's politics that have been unchanging during the past decades, and serve as a reliable indication of what to expect from a Biden candidacy and a Biden presidency; we can only hope it never comes that far... To do so, I'd like to take you back to last year, when Joe was but one of more than 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls, and was comfortably leading all polls. He had after all built up some serious name-recognition as Barack Obama's vice president. Obama was America's first black president, his second given name was Hussein, the Republicans started the "birther movement", demanding Obama to produce a birth certificate to prove he was even an American; it can be argued that voting for Obama back in 2008 was as scary and risky as voting for Sanders now. Biden was invited as VP as a message to all those who worried about Obama's electability; "Look here, Barack is nothing to be scared of... Meet his VP, uncle Joe, an old white man who's traditions and ideologies are safe and well known." Biden was a message to take away some of the fear of those who thought the "change" heralded by an Obama presidency was too much, too radical.

_{Joe Biden is Vulnerable on Mass Incarceration! Watch my Attack ad!}

Biden's 2020 campaign carries the exact same message of a "return to normalcy," a return to the time before Trump. In his early ads, Biden described Trump as an aberration, an anomalous phenomenon poisoning America's soul and damaging America's reputation in the world. From the beginning he promised no change, no proposals, no actual program to move forward; it was all about beating Trump, and nothing else, because removing the orange man would be enough to "save America's soul." Unfortunately many voters see these elections like a horse race, and they just want their horse to win. Combined with Trump's unpopularity among the Democratic voter base, and Biden's image as Obama's VP, made Biden the obvious choice to pit against Trump early on in the presidential primary elections. The Democratic party elite knew better though; even as Biden was leading all polls, even when he was a massive front-runner, they tried to stop him from participating in the elections. They knew, as we know, dear reader, that Biden's promise to return to the politics that gave us Trump, to run as Hillary Clinton 2.0, would lose miserably in the general elections. The people voted for radical change when they voted twice for Obama and didn't get any, they voted for radical change when they voted for Trump in 2016, and they got some, but not the kind of change they wanted. Running on "no change at all" is political suicide in such an atmosphere of public discontent and even hatred towards politics and politicians in general.

_{Krystal Ball: Why MSNBC is to blame for Joe Biden}

So, if Biden becomes the nominee and runs as the candidate who will usher in a return to decency, a return to normalcy, we need to know what "normal" is. And we know what it is. What many voters don't seem to know is how much and how enthusiastically Joe Biden contributed to the neoliberal policies that created the fertile ground from which Trump and many other nationalist demagogues sprouted. What's particularly mystifying to me is how well Biden's doing with the older black voters, granting him huge wins in the southern states. I know these states tend to be more conservative, but it's beyond me how anyone, and democrats in particular, can support the candidate responsible for the 1994 crime bill; a bill that garnered him much compliments from the Republicans and caused even more black young men to be incarcerated by the prison–industrial complex. Uncle Joe has always been on the forefront of the war against drugs, which is in many ways a war against poor Americans and poor black Americans especially; watch the first video of how an amateur is able to juxtapose Biden's rhetoric against Trump's on these issues, and imagine what the Trump campaign will do with this.

That's just the start though; Biden's whole political career has been one of "reaching out across the isle" and appease the Republicans, he's always moved further to the right, in lockstep with the neoliberalism-powered Overton window. He took away Americans' protection against bankruptcy, leaving millions of students with huge student loan debts, again disproportionately hurting black people. Biden is a Republican-light, and that's why I'd like to leave you with this video from last year's summer; it's funny and proposes Joe Biden to take on Trump, but as a Republican, not a Democrat, and you'll see how much sense that makes.

_{Joe Biden, Primary Donald Trump As A Republican}

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