The Choices We Make for 2024-On Democracy:
The choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be about way more than just two men and two different ideological visions for our country.
2024 is an election cycle that Americans will remember for generations to come, regardless of what choice we make. But, either way, the choice could not any more consequential in determining the future course of our nation. This is an election year that will be more important than 1968, 1932, and even 1860.
First, as my loyal readers will know, I am a proud supporter of President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign. I am also a progressive Democrat. My family and I enthusiastically supported and voted for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. I had and continue to have great respect for the work of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has become a central figure in both the Democratic Party and the progressive movement with Sanders. I still believe they could have beaten Trump if they were nominated in 2020.
I also had great respect for then-Vice President Biden, and did what I possibly could to get him elected when he became the party nominee. If I had been born just a month earlier than I was, I would have proudly voted for him too. Still, I did doubt then whether he could have a productive team and a successful presidency in a national and world that had become so much more unstable, and in the eyes of many on both sides of the aisle (especially progressives), too unworkable to get anything done at all.
Fortunately, President Biden has proved many of his doubters wrong. It is hard to truly measure the legacy the Biden Presidency will garner with the successes he already has and can still get. And even rolling out a list of successes simply fails to capture the legacy his policies will have, if they are given a chance to carry over into a second Biden term.
The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, the PACT Act, the Electoral Count Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, bipartisan gun safety reforms, abortion rights advocacy, the appointment of the first African American woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, a record amount of judicial appointments, a diverse judicial branch, and historical midterm victories at the ballot box against all odds.
And despite not having a responsible Republican Congress to work with (it was in fact the most unproductive session since the Great Depression, a telling contrast to when both Senate Democrats & House Democrats had the helm), President Biden has continued to work on comprehensive measures to better the welfare of the American people. His administration has kept up the drumbeat of executive actions around important, and sometimes overlooked issues, like mental healthcare, maternal mortality, student loan relief, learning loss response, environmental justice efforts, drug sentence pardoning, and marijuana legalization.
No wonder we have moved on from the worst of the coronavirus pandemic and its peak under Donald Trump. No wonder we have moved on from the global alienation and skepticism we have received prior to Biden’s inauguration, and the far-right isolationism and domestic extremism that culminated in January 6, 2021. And now our lives have returned to a far greater degree of normalcy from the pandemic days, and we now see staggering job creation numbers, low unemployment, needed investments with long lasting ramifications, and market prices starting to come down. The record is apparently good enough for even a number of Biden’s GOP opponents to tout the results of it to their own constituents. And somehow pass it off as their own accomplishment when it’s actually the opposite.
To talk about the greatest investments in infrastructure and transportation since Dwight Eisenhower, the most substantive funding of climate action ever in our history, the largest expansion of the social safety net since Lyndon Johnson, and the fastest & fairest economic recovery of our times since Franklin Roosevelt is a testament in itself to the historical success of the Biden Presidency. The Build Back Better Agenda can leave a lasting imprint not seen in America since the days of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Not to say that the work of the White House is even nearly done. Not by any stretch. There is much more that needs to take place.
Although the past 3 years have been immensely successful, 3 years of President Joe Biden could never have fully repaired 30+ years of damage to the welfare of the American people. Whether it was through Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, and Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism, the failed conservative policies of the last few decades have greatly eroded the standing of the middle & working classes, and made government even more susceptible to outside special interests.
Today, because of those many blows to middle & working class Americans over the decades, we still have an economy unfair to working people, with inequality the greatest we have seen since the Gilded Age across income, geography, and race. The costs of healthcare and education have never been more expensive (the lasting legacy of a poor response to the Great Recession by President Bush, and not enough consumer protection and workers’ rights action or results by President Obama’s administration). There is still the greed of Corporate America and Wall Street continuing to suck on the common good of the people—even via ripping the Pentagon off and greatly over-bloating their budgets. There is the climate crisis of our time, set to become a semi-apocalyptic nightmare without urgent & aggressive action across the globe, and a looming threat to the habitability of the entire planet for human civilization as a whole.
There is still a desire for energy independence. There is still an extensive amount of work that needs to continue on infrastructure, transportation, affordable housing, veteran services, homelessness, and poverty. There is still a need to correct the mistakes of past globalization with fairer trade and sensible reforms to our industrial & agricultural policies.
We are in the middle of two major conflicts determining the fate of democracy and our own national security, not to mention the fate of our own republican institutions at home and the greatest rollback of individual rights going back decades.
President Biden has many issues he will need to address—and even more that he could not possibly anticipate. But here is what is clear: Donald Trump is not the antidote to our problems. He had 4 years to address them with his Loyalist Cabinet in place and a much larger Republican congressional majority. Yet Capitol Hill pursued little of anything beyond the same old conservative playbook of “tax cuts,” and a dismal effort to repeal Obamacare. How ironic he derided both Republican and Democratic opponents in 2016 for being “all talk and no action.” Like you yourself said, Donald, talk is cheap.
Unlike Congressional Democrats, Congressional Republicans offer very little to the American people beyond the carnival sideshows they have given us before with both Obama and Trump. In fact, they have already declared when they have full control of Congress, their main focus will be to pursue 100% pure government obstruction of everything and anything that comes out of the White House. Don’t take it from me: these are the words of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the actions of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Although the names may and/or will change, the GOP approach will always be the same. It will do nothing to address the concerns of working families in the South or the Midwest, Rural America, or Urban America, White America or Black America, Red America, or Blue America; and in short, the United States of America as a whole.
What is most dangerous is the far-right movement’s efforts to undermine democracy as we speak. President Biden and Vice President Harris have not spoken nearly enough even to these concerns. This isn’t just about relitigating 2020 or 2022, or cozying up to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro, or Kim Jong-Un.
It is about a far-right plan to overturn and topple the American Experiment. It is about what election denialism will lead us to.
Hundreds of voting restriction laws have been passed across the country since 2021. Local election boards have been taken over by Republican state governments. County positions are being filled in some areas with election deniers and conspiracy theorists. Archaic rules like the Senate filibuster have blocked the passage of national protections. And the key phrases for 2024 are partisan & racial gerrymandering. Look no further than to the Hofeller Files on that one, or the maps that are currently in place for 2024 in many Southern states (including in Georgia).
The choice between Biden v. Trump will not just be about a certain approach to political governance. It will be a choice between democracy and dictatorship. A republic or a banana republic. Legitimate authority or autocracy. There is no greater test for this country than what will come up shortly in 2024.
It is also not a hard choice between two different characters. Donald Trump is a moral disgrace and would be an absolute disaster for our country. Joe Biden is a fundamentally decent and empathetic man who lived a hard life (full of personal tragedies and suffering) to get to this moment. Biden—and not Trump—is the only candidate who cares enough about our country to lead it to new heights.
This is a necessary time to get involved in politics. Even though we have the oldest presidential nominees in history, it will be America’s young who will determine the fate of the country they will live in. Do everything you possibly can. Engage your communities. Ensure fair representation. Create more open dialogue. Organize. And vote.