My reasons for voting for Biden — SCOTUS, slowing down environmental destruction, a minimal adherence to the Constitution, and an actual investigation into WTF has gone on the past four years. I don’t have faith that Biden will pick a *good* SCOTUS nominee. Neither do I think he will implement *good* environmental, health care, criminal justice, education, banking, consumer protection, etc policies. I think he will implement *less bad* ones.
It’s something I struggle with — Biden has a level of competency that Trump lacks. I could see Trump spending four more years issuing ludicrous EOs that even Republican-appointed judges have to strike down with specific instructions on what the exec office could have done within the system (and the Trump admin pretty routinely ignoring the court’s suggestions / dropping it to move onto the next ‘trigger the libs’ issues). The executive office will be staffed with people who have financial incentive to not enforce laws. Contracts steered towards friends. Million dollar purchases will materialize out of nowhere. Oval Office addresses will pause for a promo like the news anchors used to do.
I see not voting for Biden as the “burn it down” approach — which gives me a lot of appreciation for property destruction in the course of protests. Reagan told us how bad government could be, then spent eight years proving how bad you could make government if you just put a little effort into it. If we let Republicans make the government just as bad as they can, will it all self-destruct and some modern truly representative system could rise from its ashes. Or we’ll got the Greek city-state route and have 100’s of different authorities. Pretty much anything other than the current corporate-money driven non-representative system.
But then I tune in to one of Trump’s daily briefings and realize all over again how absurd he will get with the ‘proof’ that the country supports him (and that everything bad he’s encountered has really been some deep state conspiracy). I end up thinking not-as-bad-but-competent is probably better than the Trump alternative.
I’d love if Biden showed his love of compromise by compromising with progressives, or if centrists even approached this as an opportunity to make a sales pitch instead of threats. But it seems like it’s up to progressives to pitch Biden to other progressives. Because, seriously, what percentage of the country needs to support an idea before you can just accept it as-is? M4A is a great example — if 70% of Americans support an idea, why ensure no one is happy through compromise? Especially if the other party is negotiating in bad faith (they’re not going to vote for it with the concessions in place anyway, they’re going to manipulate the system to ensure their position is over-represented, etc).
It’d be great if some Biden supporters put effort into understanding what progressives want and articulated how Biden produces actual progress toward that goal (not ‘we will get back to where we were in 2010’). Because “you have to vote for him or fracking fluid will be dumped into the river” and “Trump is going to nominate reanimated Scalia and nominate the first zombie-American SCOTUS jutice”… probably enough to get me to check the box they want checked, I still want an “Any Competent Adult 2020” sign because *that’s* what I’m voting for. Not Biden. Literally whatever halfway competent >=35 year old native-born citizen the Dem’s put on the ballot.