An Argument for the Practical Application of Moral Certainty in the 2020 Election
OR
Why Joe Biden is an Impossible Burger
I want to make a suggestion to you. I want to make it in the form of a reasonable, well-thought-out, experienced argument that isn't based on loyalties or tribalism, but on evidence, strategy, and – dare I say – morality. I hesitate to use that word. I don't know your specific moral code, and you don't know mine. But, I'm going to postulate that if you're reading this – whether Athiest, Evangelical, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or anywhere on the religious and spiritual spectrum – you have a similar enough moral code to fall within the audience of this essay. If you want to see the world burn, you might want to step outside. Everyone else, please hang around.
The suggestion concerns a McDonalds that I'm hypothetically standing near right now. Imagine it, the McDonalds and me. (The McDonalds looks like a McDonalds. You can imagine me how you like, including choosing my outfit.)
I am near this McDonalds in a blue leotard and wool socks. (I assume that’s how you’ve chosen to dress me.) I'm a conscientious person who wants to do good in the world, and McDonald’s is McDonald’s, complete with its current corporate behaviors, sourcing chains, and treatment of its workers. Should I eat at McDonalds? The answer is obviously no, no matter how hungry I am or how you've dressed me. I'd be supporting a mountain of morally unctious Mordor. Except.
Let’s tweak McDonald’s. It is now paying people $17 an hour and offering vegan food. Do I eat there? Is that enough to win my support? The vegan food is served wrapped in plastic and cooked alongside tiger meat. Do I eat there? The workers are children saved from poverty and given a fair shot in life, including free health care. Do I eat there? The french fries are made from Monsanto-fed potatoes that are flown in individually at an absurd cost to the environment. The building is sustainable and actively cleans the air and water that pass through it. Do I eat there? The seats are uncomfortable. Now what?
Clearly, this essay and its McDonalds comprise an argument about compromise, about moral complexity, about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It's an advocacy piece that says you should hold your nose and vote for Joe Biden no matter who you support, because -- though he is clearly problematic and almost no one under fifty's first choice -- he would be better than the alternative. In a complex moral universe, he would do more good than harm. You should compromise your values. You should accept the reality that we face. Except.
This is not that piece. I would argue that, as a Bernie supporter especially, you can’t just vote for Joe Biden. You have to do two things instead.
Before I tell you those two things, you need to know where I’m coming from.
I'm a Bernie supporter, and a serious one. I've followed Sanders since I lived in New England, before he ever ran for president. I followed his 2010 filibuster with enthusiasm. I devoured the Rolling Stone article, Inside the Horror Show That Is Congress in which Bernie took the magazine through the process of trying to get a bill passed in a deeply partisan era; it was, indeed, a horror show, and Bernie stood out as a rational, ethical outlier. In the early 2000's, when Massachusetts adopted the model that would inspire Obamacare, I was so profoundly disappointed that I wrote a letter to all of my local representatives and changed my voting habits. I didn't vote for Obama in his second term because I felt he compromised too much on the issues I valued.
In short, I'm far from a mainstream Democrat, and when Bernie announced his candidacy for president in 2015, I followed him there, too, and how. I volunteered in text and phone banks and distributed campaign literature in Chicago. I shared my health care horror stories and fought with friends and partners over minimum wage, Wall Street regulation, free public universities, the electoral college, and, of course, what Hillary Clinton was all about. Bernie winning Michigan is up there with Barack Obama's “Yes We Can” speech in the ranks of the most inspiring political moments of my lifetime.
I love Bernie Sanders. I love what he fights for. I love how he fights for it. I love his dignity and integrity. I love that he yells. I love that he laughs. I love how he plays with his grandkids. I think his policies are essential and ahead of their time here. So.
Fellow Bernie supporters, what are we to do? Are you going to #DemExit and #NeverBiden? If so, let me ask you another question first. Just one question before you go.
What is wrong with you? And another.
What the hell do you think you're doing? And another.
Are you out of your mind?
I'm sorry if that got a little antagonistic. You can put me back in the wooly socks and leotard if it makes you feel better. But please, spend some time with the rational, moral, Bernie Sanders-esque argument I'm now ready to make. (Yes. That's right. This is an argument that I believe Bernie Sanders himself has made and would make again.)
Part One. Compromise. Voting for Joe Biden is something you should and, in fact, must do.
Part One’s argument isn't the most original, but it needs to be made again, and maybe in a slightly different way, because too many people are insulting us by trying to sell Joe Biden as a feasible alternative to Sanders. Biden is not an alternative to Sanders. When I suggest that you vote for him, I don't mean that you accept Joe Biden as a “close enough” Plan B. I don’t mean that you should settle for who he is and what he stands for. Even if the best stories about him are true and the worst false, he doesn't live up to the standards of integrity that Sanders set for his campaign, much less what we want in a president. He has caused harm, more than he needed to. I won't advocate that he’s not as bad as we think or should be a suitable alternative. But.
I will argue that we must elect him if we want progress, because we must. Electing Joe Biden is progress.
Disagreeing with that assertion is your right, but the definition of progress is rooted in from where we are progressing. We are in trouble. Serious trouble. We are in a dire, ugly, inhuman, perilous, near-apocalyptic DEFCON-5 fire swamp of trouble. The Trump administration’s current practices must not be allowed to continue, much less to be extended and emboldened by a second term. This is an administration that draws straight from the fascist playbook, belittling all critical press while praising outlets that spread its conspiracy theories and biased, self-serving misinformation. It is an administration that has challenged your fundamental rights in courts. Where those courts have ruled in your favor, they’re being dismantled and discredited; the administration is appointing more and more judges to them who are ruled unqualified by their peers but are ideologically in line with your president. And this administration has undermined the processes and precedents that protect not only you, but people far more vulnerable than you.
This is an administration that, within hours of Trump's inauguration, erased all mention of climate change from the EPA web site, the same EPA that will no longer be enforcing any environmental law. It is an administration that has mismanaged, equivocated on, and worsened the greatest health crisis of our time, so much so that it is being investigated by Congress . . . again. It is an administration that, during this health crisis, has continued to purge opposition and oversight within its ranks, including that of the biggest stimulus package in history. It is an administration propped up by a tacit and obstinate elephant party with members who still think women often lie about their rapes, that doctors should be killed for performing abortions, and that trans people are the equivalent of sexual predators.
Do I sound like an alarmist? If so, reread those two paragraphs and chew on the facts. They are not hyperbolic or hypothetical. In fact, they are only a meager sampling of what’s been happening the last four years, and despite the administration’s ongoing efforts to eliminate objective truth itself, they are real. You are in a McDonalds where you eat the meat whether you like it or not, where there's no food safety or inspection standards, where you can be killed for being brown without consequence, and where the seats are especially uncomfortable for anyone who isn’t a white male with money.
Remember all the people who warned you that Trump could win in 2016. Talk to those people now. They will warn you again of what's next. Fascism and white supremacy are happening here, and denying it is enabling it.
People are not safe. You are not safe. And you don’t have the luxury of four more years to make your point.
Joe Biden is progress. He will be more progress if he chooses a progressive running mate and is serious about his platform. Time will tell. Regardless, the moral equivalency argument between Trump and Biden is absurd.
I can hear people shutting the door. This essay is what I told you it isn’t. It’s just another one of those bullshit arguments that says that since Trump is so bad, we should take what we can get, swallow our pride and our values, and support things we don't truly believe in while the powers-that-be continue to ignore us. That is, in fact, my biggest fear in publishing this work: that I will sound like an advocate for moral compromise and watery moderation. That is not my stance, nor is it the stance of this essay. I recognize that the engines of progress are the John Adams, the Harriet Tubmans, the Mahatma Gandhis, the Martin Luther Kings, the people who fought as radicals and were silenced, mocked, and murdered. We should all aspire to their level of commitment to justice, and to their philosophies. If you haven't read the Letter From Birmingham Jail, do it today. Reaffirm the dangers “compromise” poses in the face of moral certainty, the molecular anti-progress of the white play-it-safer, the sneaky racism that poses as practicality in laws and ordinances. But.
Don't delude yourself that by not voting for Joe Biden, you are somehow taking a moral stand against the ethical queasiness of the wait-and-see moderate. You don't get a progressive trophy tied with an integrity ribbon for withholding your vote from him. Ignoring the fact that your protest vote will actively cause pain – by working to extend Trump's morally worse presidency and endanger all of us – it’s also a miserable and largely ineffective form of advocacy. You see injustice in the world, and your way of standing up to it is not voting, or voting for a third party candidate you know can't win? (An aside here: I'm a huge third party advocate, but do you honestly think you're furthering their agenda by voting for them in a national election and doing nothing on the ground to help them in places they can actually succeed?)
Voting matters, yes. Getting people elected matters. Protest voting in a presidential election is wildly ineffective as a form of social change. (Ask Bill Clinton how much he felt the national Democratic Party needed to move on its platform after voters sent him a “clear message” in the form of Ross Perot. None at all? Weird. Donkeys can be as stubborn as elephants.)
Do Part One. Vote Biden. But you must –you simply must – you can not proceed without Part Two. It would be immoral and impractical to vote for Joe Biden without Part Two.
Part Two. Don’t compromise. You must do more than vote for Joe Biden. You must.
Your eventual vote for Joe Biden, in fact, would be a mere bumper sticker on the vehicle of progress. If all you did was vote for Joe Biden as a Bernie supporter, you would be a sell-out. You would be doing all the things you're afraid of: emboldening the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, compromising your values, undermining the #metoo movement. Your vote for Joe Biden with no other action attached would be a subscription to one of the most harmful misunderstandings in American politics: the belief that your civic duty begins and ends on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November every four years.
Which is to say that you can't wrap all of your civic obligations up into a candidate, put him in the White House, and expect it to drive the country in a radically different direction. Take the counterexample: our Vermontian socialist cult leader.
I understand – because I am of the cult, too – the appeal of Bernie Sanders as president, and he would probably have been more than a bumper sticker toward progress – a steering wheel and a windshield, perhaps. But.
He wouldn't have fixed the country. For example.
Do you think that the same Democratic Party mechanisms that actively opposed Sanders' campaigns (twice) wouldn't have ground against his presidency? Would Democrats in Congress have had a come-to-Jesus moment and begun to pass his policies through? They've been uncompromisingly clear on the fact that they would not. Look at the impact a handful of “centrist” Democratic senators had on the Affordable Care Act. There was a public option in the initial text of that bill. A few senators – centrist Democrats – killed it. The danger of the white moderate. They did that to Obama. Imagine what they'd do to socialist Sanders. If you picture a Sanders presidency bringing dramatic and immediate progress to the United States, you're being naive. It was never about that. Says who? Our messy-haired Larry David impersonator himself.
What Uncle Socialist gets, and we should, too, is that on November 3, the world will need powerful moral advocates to move it forward, not only as voters, but as volunteers at polls, as truth tellers, as compassionate helpers, as shoppers making buying decisions that support their values. He gets that it will need the same kinds of advocates on November 2; and November 4; and on January 20, 2021; and throughout the entire year of 2023. It will need people to call for that investigation into Tara Reade's accusations against Joe Biden, and Christine Blasey Ford's against Brett Kavanaugh, and Kristin Anderson's against Donald Trump, and Karen Johnson's against Donald Trump, and Jill Harth's against Donald Trump (etc etc), and every woman's at every college campus, high school, and workplace in America. It will need advocates to stand in front of tractors to protect the rainforests, to reduce their own global emissions through their purchasing decisions, to march on Washington for racial equality, to demand a carbon tax and student loan forgiveness and free higher education policies from their senators and representatives, both national and local. It will need people who sit in and stand up for universal health care and continue to trumpet its value forward. It will need boots on the ground. It will need you, it needs you now, and it needs you loud. It will need you long after Bernie is gone.
For now, do everything you can to put the candidate who will less stand in your way in power, then fight like hell using every tool you have to make sure that candidate listens. Make sure he is held accountable for whatever harm he causes. Make sure he knows you are still here. Fight for progressive legislators to do the same on the state and local level. Keep people like Bernie in the House and Senate. You have powerful social tools to take the fights you care about to power. If you don't use them because you only see one way forward (i.e., electing Bernie), you're not being morally certain; you're being unwise and short-sighted. Your vote is a weapon; it is not your armada. November 3 is an opportunity; it is not an end point for your action. Also.
Change doesn't happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up, so start there, stay there, and finish there. You know who would say the same?
Our Jewish war god.
You are at McDonalds in a booty-shorts-onesie. Joe Biden is an overprocessed, still-bad-for-you Impossible Burger cooked on the same grill where they cook the meat; Donald Trump is ebola. Pick your meal as you like, but those are your options, and why in the hell would you pick ebola? #EbolaExit. Seriously. What good do you think that is doing anyone?
Speaking of which, this McDonalds could really use some changes, and like it or not, we’re going to be here forever. Let's start with these uncomfortable seats.
