The other possibility is that the US system lost its democratic features in all but name some time ago, and is instead a straightforward plutocracy serving a wealth-elite. The two parties pretend to compete for votes only to make the electorate think it is still in charge.
If the US is a plutocracy, the political system will be largely indifferent as to whether the left is prepared to vote for Biden or not. Because in a two-party plutocracy, both parties represent the same interests - the corporate elite's. They are simply branded differently to delude voters into thinking the system is democratic.
Younger voters have increasing reasons to suspect that the latter assessment is right. They can, for instance, look across the Atlantic to the recent experience of the UK, which has a similar two-party system. @JonathanCook .
An internal report leaked last month revealed that Labour party bosses - Britain's version of the Democratic National Committee - intentionally threw the 2017 general election to stop the party's then leader, Jeremy Corbyn, winning power against an increasingly far-right Conservative party. The party bureaucrats felt compelled to sabotage their own candidate after they had failed two years earlier to prevent Labour members electing Corbyn - the UK's version of Sanders - as leader.
In other words, the permanent bureaucracy of the supposedly leftwing Labour party felt it had more in common with the ultra-rightwing Conservatives than with its own democratic socialist leader.
Is the Democratic party machine, which has now twice done everything in its power to stop Sanders, a democratic socialist, becoming the party's presidential candidate, really so different from the UK Labour party machine?
Bogus political fightsIf the US is really a two-party plutocracy, the Democratic party leadership will do everything it can to stop a candidate (Sanders) who might threaten plutocratic rule, even if that means installing a weak and incompetent candidate (Biden) who risks losing to an ostensible opponent (Trump). In this kind of system, voters' attention must be channeled into bogus political fights over barely distinguishable candidates rather than a real struggle over ideology.
Does that not sum up rather precisely what we have watched unfold over the last six months in the US.
So for young leftists, not voting for Biden may help to resolve their own uncertainty about whether the US system is redeemable or not. It is the step they feel they need to take to educate themselves and their peers on whether their energies should be directed chiefly at fighting the Democratic establishment or abandoning the system entirely and taking to the streets.
The problem with lesser evil voting for them is that rather than clarify the next course of action it simply obfuscates. It leaves it unclear whether the political pendulum can be made to swing back towards the left or whether the system needs to be destroyed entirely.
UPDATE:As I was about to hit the send button, a friend forwarded me this very interesting hour-long interview of Paul Jay, the leftist journalist and broadcaster. Jay makes a good case for lesser evil voting, though inevitably he cannot resist indulging in a little gaslighting, suggesting that the only reason the progressive left would refuse to vote for Biden is to feel ideologically pure or superior. That, he argues, simply isn't an option when faced with the apparently ultimate evil of Trump. Four more years of this incumbent president, he says, risks unleashing the very darkest forces of capital in the US, echoing the situation of Europe in the 1930s. He draws an analogy with Italy under Mussolini.
He rightly observes that the US is a plutocracy (though I don't think he uses that word). The choice at election time is between two parties representing different sections of capital, both with fairly fascistic leanings and both capable of destroying the planet. But, he adds, the section of capital represented by Biden is more willing to make political compromises - if only in an attempt to win legitimacy a little longer for the system from the American middle and working classes - than the more authoritarian, more aggressive section of capital represented by Trump. That is an analysis I can readily agree with.
The most interesting section of the interview begins at around the 30-minute mark. The interviewer asks Jay how he envisions the exit strategy from lesser evil voting. In other words, at what point does Jay imagine progressives can stop colluding with a system he readily acknowledges is evil? It is the one time Jay is clearly flummoxed. He has no obvious exit strategy.
His eventual response is revealing. At about 35 mins he says this: "We are in a new situation now. We may see the coming together of progressive sections of society into a broader, more unifying popular front that's independent of the Democratic party."
Hold up a second. Why are we in a new situation where progressives can unify and may be ready to seek political solutions independent of the Democratic party? Yes, the Covid-19 pandemic is leading to the collapse of the US economy, as Jay notes. But is the galvanising of the left, of the working and middle classes, of the unions, not happening precisely because Trump patently has no ability to handle the health and economic crises caused by the virus, or even to create the illusion that he can handle these crises? Is it not his very oafishness, his arrogance, his narcissism, his authoritarian instincts, his misreading of the situation, his detachment from the concerns of ordinary Americans at this pivotal moment that is creating the forces necessary to unify the left?
And equally is it not Biden's very clear deficiencies as an alternative, as well as the patent ideological and bureaucratic sclerosis of the Democratic party, that is reinforcing the first signs in the US of a trend towards organising politically outside of the formal party system?
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