In yet more proof that the radical-progressive wing of the Democratic Party refuses to get behind Joe Biden, the liberal online magazine Salon has now published an article that argues that a Biden win “could mean long-term trouble for Democrats.”
The author, Paul Rosenberg, disagrees with the campaign’s main theme of electability. Biden is supposedly the “safe” choice. Well, says Rosenberg, there’s not much to back that up. What’s more, he argues, “it’s unclear how safe being ‘safe’ really is. A ‘return to normalcy’ will do nothing to address the underlying problems that led to Trump’s election in the first place — neither the deep systemic problems of democratic decline around the world nor the specific problems of the American political system, driven by long-term forces described by Peter Turchin in ‘Ages of Discord’ (Salon review here).”
“Everything fundamental that made Trump possible in the first place is going to continue, unless something sweeping and extraordinary is done to counter it — and that’s precisely what Biden’s ‘return to normalcy’ argument assures us will not be done,” he sums up his criticism of Biden’s campaign.
What’s more — and this is, of course, the left’s real problem with Biden: he simply isn’t progressive enough in their eyes:
…Biden’s specific record is particularly bad. He’s done a great deal to contribute to the dysfunctions of our criminal justice system: mass incarceration, the militarization of local police, the perverse incentives of civil-asset forfeiture, disparate sentencing for crack cocaine. All these things reflect a mindset driven by political fears and right-wing agenda-setting, rather than facts or the values of the Democratic coalition he supposedly represents.
The same goes, Rosenberg writes, for Biden’s foreign policy views which have “become increasingly influenced by center-right conventional wisdom in Washington. This culminated in his support for the invasion of Iraq, one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history.”
In other words, Rosenberg’s problem with Biden — and that goes for the entire radical-progressive wing of the Democratic Party — is that Biden is a professional politician and therefore automatically not one of them. He is no Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, or even a Bernie Sanders.
This opposition to his campaign and his entire political career can cost Biden dearly. At the moment that he has to fight off one radically progressive candidate — who has united that entire wing of the party — he’s in big, big trouble.
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