Boring and Safe is Milquetoast
Lovers of U.S. Status Quo Arise For 2024
Centrist Americans abound and they are in our faces to remind us of their noble and oh so nonpartisan cause — to keep white supremacist Donald Trump out of the White House.
And that one cause is good but masks a treacherous political party.
Donald Trump is outlandishly terrible, and the world knew that before he beat up on Democratic Party powerhouse Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Of course it is hardly the only time a white supremacist has owned the White House. Regardless of what University of Virginia Board member Bert Ellis believes, Thomas Jefferson the country’s third president was most certainly a racist. Jefferson enslaved Black people and raped several of them to father children. Jefferson also peddled racist “medical” observations, writing in Notes on the State of Virginia that “they [Black people] secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands on the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.”
Then in the 1980s the White House was owned by the Republican Party’s Ronald Reagan, who won the office in part by peddling racist tropes about Black families in big cities. As president for eight years, Reagan fueled the so-called War on Drugs launched by a predecessor, and the building of private prisons, which Bill Clinton would continue during his two terms. Reagan may not have been as blatant about his racism as Jefferson or Trump, but that is not a compliment.
As good as keeping another white supremacist out of the country’s Oval Office is, the campaign gives cover to a Democratic Party of proud capitalists, law-and-order moralists, and apologists for the status quo.
For four years, the Democratic Party President Joe Biden has presided over lots of death due to covid19, inflation caused by rabid capitalists, a Federal Reserve campaign against workers, and continued gun violence fueled in part by racist policing in large cities from coast to coast.
Biden, a longtime law-and-order toughie and financier from Delaware, has lived his entire adult life in Washington, D.C.
First as a U.S. senator who palled around with white supremacist extraordinaire Strom Thurmond for South Carolina, two terms as Barack Obama’s goofy, but do-nothing vice president, and now almost four years in the White House.
Instead of retiring to Delaware beaches and alabaster gated communities, Biden like California’s Senator Diane Feinstein can’t let go of power and a cushy job.
Let’s be honest about Biden, who is far beyond retirement age — he’s an old-school capitalist who keeps bankers’ hours in the White House. He and Jill are essentially in their retirement and wielding way too much power, but not doing anything good.
Like where is universal health care? The Biden administration fumbled on covid19 in Trump-like fashion and instead of trying to right a wrong and fix a broken health care system, his administration has doubled down on opposition to universal health care and given more sustenance to the private health care setup.
The Lever reports that the American Hospital Association, a powerful lobbying outfit, relied on Democrats like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to ensure universal health care bills, such as “Medicare for All,” never reached Biden’s desk.
In the four years that Pelosi was speaker again — the first two with a Republican Senate and president, followed by two years where Democrats had a governing trifecta — the House never held a vote on Medicare for All legislation.
House Democrats additionally never voted on any legislation to create a ‘public option,’ or a government-run health insurance plan, as the party and President Joe Biden had pledged, they would do during the 2020 election, or on any bill to lower the Medicare age.
If health care is discussed in this election cycle it will be from Biden’s point-of-view and include declarations that the Affordable Care Act is a magnanimous success that will eventually correct a busted health care setup. (Know this, the ACA was created by neoliberal white guys in Washington, D.C. and keeps the private insurance industry fat and happy.)
Biden, a longtime advocate of aggressive law-and-order policy, is proving a weak advocate for policing reforms, though during his first presidential campaign he made bold promises to be a change-agent.
But Biden’s promises on police reform have gone nowhere and police violence against Black people from coast to coast has accelerated.
Indeed, Mapping Police Violence reports that police killed more people in 2022 “than any other year in the past decade,” and that the vast majority of “unarmed people killed by police were people of color.”
This is a status quo worth fighting for?
When it comes to the climate crisis the planet faces, Biden promised a lot, only to deliver for oil companies. Biden is proving to be like Tesla-Twitter-SpaceX owner Elon Musk, who terrorizes the Earth’s atmosphere and wildlife with SpaceX rocket launches.
For progressives in the nation the Biden reelection campaign does not look like a “good thing” as The Grio claims.
Instead as Jacobin notes:
Biden’s reelection pitch is, in short, a retread of his September speech about the threat to democracy from ‘MAGA Republicans,’ which itself was a retread of the stale, uninspiring Democratic campaign approach of the past decades: don’t promise to do anything positive for people, just point to how scary the other guys are.
No one except Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are thrilled with Donald Trump, but Biden’s middle-of-the-road schtick is tiring and keeps the nation mired in a dangerous spot.
