Say It Ain't So, Joe! (2020 At a Glance Revisited)

Echoes of History: the Biden allegations seem like deja vu to many Americans (image courtesy of The Atlantic)

Joe Biden, the apparent nominee for the Democratic ticket in the 2020 Presidential Election, has been credibly accused of sexual assault.

Tara Reade’s allegation could very well be the death knell of the campaign to unseat Trump. It has fractured whatever precarious semblance of party unity remained in the democratic party and has polarized it into seemingly irreconcilable factions. However, this is not Reade’s fault.

Obviously, the fact that we are in the depths of a global catastrophe cannot be ignored. The world has been irreversibly shaken by a pandemic that has permanently captured the national attention, and inflamed fear beyond all reason. 

Nevertheless, for reasons yet inadequately explained, the reaction to Reade’s allegations came much too late even when these extenuating circumstances are considered. Left-leaning mainstream media outlets waited over a month before anything made it to print, and democratic leaders remained silent longer still. These are quite troubling developments, as they seem to be markedly inconsistent with how previous allegations were treated.

But even if we assume that there were legitimate practical explanations for the delay in reaction, the delay greatly diminished the status of the #MeToo movement. The vacuum of Democratic silence has been overrun with speculation, conspiracy theories, rape apologism, and sheer frustration. Trump couldn’t be happier with this situation, as his vulturous pundits and propagandists now have no shortage of rotting carcasses to feed upon. Trust in the impartiality of the democratic establishment was already frayed, and now it has been demolished.   

The blame for this unmitigated political disaster can be laid squarely at the feet of Biden himself, and ultimately the entire democratic establishment is complicit. In effect, our chances at unseating Trump in 2020 have been sacrificed at the altar of partisan hackery. Truly, this entire scandal is emblematic of the corruption and ossification that has corroded the Democratic Party structure for the past quarter-century.

One after another, party leaders such as Speaker Pelosi, Senator Harris, Senator Warren, and other prominent democratic figures sided with Biden. The moral gymnastics employed to justify the establishment's decision were eerily like the arguments Republicans employed in response to Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations.

Ultimately, it is hard not feel that the values that the party claimed to be central to its mission have been tossed in the toilet without a second thought to the disastrous implications for the democratic party.

Summing it Up

Put simply, it looks like we’re gonna’ let Biden get away.

Before we proceed, understand that I am not here to engage in the diminutive relativist argument that so many of our leaders have allowed themselves to sink to. I am fully aware that Trump has many more allegations than Biden, and I am not here to minimize them. I just happen to believe – as I foolishly thought most did – that one allegation is one too many.

Being less bad than one of the worst presidents in American history does not exonerate Biden. It speaks volumes about the intractability of this accusation that the front runner's proponents have retreated to such a morally ambiguous line of defense.    

I don’t see Biden as a feminist candidate, and I never have. I will certainly give him credit for being one of the central architects of the Violence Against Women Act. Alas, one piece of pro-women legislation does not a feminist make. The fact that so many Biden bots seem determined to ship this false narrative is utterly absurd.    

To truly understand Biden’s views on women, one need only look at his long-term political record. Until quite recently, Biden was unreservedly in favor of the Hyde Amendment, the bill explicitly designed to make abortion legally unfeasible in direct defiance of the Supreme Court.

Biden was also the Senate Judiciary Committee chair during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy. He never apologized for the contemptible treatment Hill endured during the farcical hearing held by the Judiciary Committee. Never, that is, until it was time for Biden’s 2020 campaign to commence, at which point he phoned Hill and gave her a half-hearted non-apology that satisfied no one. Biden was perfectly happy to use Hill as a political prop in both instances, which is hardly feminist – nor humane – of the former Vice President.

Of course, it is no secret that Biden has racked up a series of bumbling non-apologies, such as those to the women whom he touched inappropriately. Based on the tone of those apologies, he evidently saw nothing wrong with his behavior whatsoever.

Say what you want about whether you think Biden was in the wrong in these incidents, but you cannot in good conscience say that any of this is what a ‘feminist candidate’ would do. You also cannot but have severe doubt for the prospects of gender equality under a Biden presidency.    

A Cynical Game

To some of my dear readers, this may all reek of moralistic talking points. “What’s the point of making all these cheap moral points?? Trump is worse, and we need to beat him!” I can almost hear the naysayers say...

But this for once isn’t about the orange man in the White House. This is about us as a party, and the values that we purport to stand for. If we give Biden a pass without any scrutiny whatsoever, and condemn his accuser as unreliable without fully investigating her story, we send a clear message about where we stand with regards to sexual harassment and assault within the workplace.

In the long term, this event will set a truly unenviable precedent for how we deal with future #MeToo scandals. Allegations of sexual assault will be lent credence solely when they can be utilized as cudgels against political enemies, but otherwise will be discounted and forgotten when they are politically inconvenient.

This scandal is a critical test of how seriously we take such allegations, and we are failing that test. Even if Biden is innocent of what he is accused, the intractable signal will be that powerful men taking advantage of their position to commit sexual assault with impunity are A-OK in the eyes of democratic leadership.

I firmly believe that we are either as good as the values we aspire to, or only as good as political expediency allows. I think most will agree that the latter is a contemptible standard. It may be acceptable to partisan hacks such as Pelosi, or self-serving fools such as Elizabeth Warren, but it’s not for me.

It a shit metric, and one that I refuse to accept. I cannot allow my vote to be a tool for the political agenda of an ossified democratic establishment. To do this would be to allow myself to be subsumed in the vile and cynical apathy of a corrupt and dysfunctional political system. And I know that many of my fellow Americans feel this way.

I refuse to excuse a mediocre, geriatric serial sexual harasser, who cozied up with segregationists and called it an example of civility in politics. I refuse to accept that this is the best the Democratic Party has to offer, that this is our best hope to unseat Trump, because it simply is not.

I will not vote for such a candidate, and I cannot support a party that supports him without any investigation. I cannot quantify the immense disappointment I feel about the fact that Biden will likely be the democratic nominee.

It is ludicrous that the best candidate the Democratic Party could produce to represent an increasingly young and diverse America is a 77-year-old white man. Truly, this is a prima facie example of what happens when the leadership of a political organization becomes reticent towards change and is unwilling to keep pace with the evolution of its constituency.

It might as well be 2008, 2012, or 2016 in Washington. Attitudes amongst veteran democrats have demonstrably evolved little during the past twelve years.  

Believe Women (terms and conditions may apply)

The sidelining, discrediting, and silencing of Tara Reade is abhorrent, and it makes a mockery of the “believe women” mantra that the democratic party has parroted since the rise of the grassroots #MeToo movement.

It is up to us as constituents and citizens to call for a higher standard in those we choose to lead this party. Either we unapologetically demand higher standards from our leaders and those we elect to represent us, or we content ourselves with swimming in the same old sludge.

 Powerful men who use their position to mistreat, harass, or assault subordinates – of which there seem to an alarming number – must be held to account. Moderate politicians who choose to ignore common decency in the service of the establishment need to be rejected. They must be called out for this moral duplicity.

They are complicit in rape apologism. Give these people a free pass, and nothing will change. We will be trapped in a vicious cycle of “garbage in, garbage out” for the foreseeable future, and this situation will do far more to weaken us in the long term than anything our imbecilic president could ever do.  

Leaders who justify siding with Biden as an exercise in ‘impartiality’ still have all their work ahead of them, since impartiality has been as lacking in this scandal as water in a desert. If there is to be any sense of transparency in this scandal, then it must come soon. To have any hope of salvaging our effort of replacing President Trump, the press must have the ability to conduct a thorough investigation of the allegations.

The most immediate way that can be effectuated is by releasing relevant files enclosed within Biden’s archive at the University of Delaware. I would think that if someone was truly innocent of such a heinous crime, they would do everything within their power to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.

Releasing these documents would be the bare minimum, and Biden has been called on to do so by mainstream liberal news agencies such as The Washington Post.

Otherwise, all we will have to go on is a he said-she said narrative, and that will get us nowhere. But if that is to be the case, I and millions of others will continue to hold true to the principles of the MeToo movement. It wasn’t a joke to us, and it wasn’t intended as a cynical ploy to rustle up political clout. We shall refrain from belittling the suffering of victims out of a misplaced sense of ‘vote blue no matter who’ absolutism.

#MeToo is a movement that grew from a few tiny grassroots efforts, and it will go on, even if some of its duplicitous leaders abdicate their moral responsibility.  

Reality Check

Ultimately, Biden should step down. I know that renders what I said above moot, but I consider the current situation as unsalvageable. It is highly unlikely that Biden will ever be able to capture a wide section of the progressive vote, and he cannot win a presidential election without it.

I fully expect that we shall find ourselves in a situation eerily similar to that which we confronted in 2016. I fear that large numbers of people may stay home on election day, or worse still will decide to vote for the village idiots known as “independents”.

Having said that, I am fully cognizant of the fact that for many feminists, an additional moral calculus is necessary. There is a legitimate concern that women’s rights in America will continue to deteriorate under a Trump presidency. For this reason, some feminist leaders are willing to accept Biden unconditionally as their candidate, since the alternative is unquestionably terrible.

However, I still think that this is a trade-off that won’t pay off in the long run. I won’t make any pretenses of knowing something others do not. We live in tumultuous times – an understatement if there ever was one – and it is impossible to know what comes next.

Nevertheless, I am certain in my conviction that the democratic party will suffer irreparable damage to its reputation and its integrity if it chooses – as it seems to have – to belittle and diminish a credible accusation of sexual assault against one of its most powerful figures.

I have no confidence in Biden's willingness to implement any radical structural changes. And radical changes are desperately needed if we are to have any hope of addressing the structural inequalities and deficiencies that plague this nation.

Even if the democratic frontrunner were to capture the presidency, it is perfectly conceivable that we could be in the same situation we are in today within less than a decade, if not an even worse scenario. In that case, we would have succeeded in doing nothing but kicking the can further down the road.

I want Trump out of the white house just as much as anyone else does, but as it is, we are conceding so much moral high ground to achieve that, and I am not convinced that the trade off is at all worth it.

It is far better to alter our course entirely, rather than to keep afloat a ship that is doomed to sink.  

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