Biden As a Return to Normalcy

Here is an editorial in today's Washington Post entitled "Why Joe Biden Is the Antidote to This Virus".

The writer says:

Biden is candidate as comfort food, calming and familiar. After flirtations with the new (Pete Buttigieg), the provocative (Bernie Sanders) and the planner (Elizabeth Warren), Biden is, it turns out, the one we’ve been waiting for. He is not the candidate, and would not be the president, of hope and change; he is the avatar of normalcy.

I have some opinioins of my own.

As a Sanders supporter in 2020, I am willing to "accept" Biden as president, but with many misgivings. This editorial presents a return to "normalcy" as a positive thing. To me it is a negative, just not as much of a negative as four more years of quasi-fascism. Indeed, the "normalcy" so many seem to be nostalgic about was partly responsible for giving us Trump in the first place. So let's elect Biden if that's what the country wants. But let's not have illusions about returning to the good old days. They never existed.

Super Tuesday Is Coming

It looks like there might finally be a moderate consensus forming around Biden, if you can use one southern state as evidence. I guess we will see tomorrow.

I am a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a Bernie Sanders supporter. But--maybe because I am much older than the average DSA member--I don't entirely dismiss candidates like Biden, unlike the typical DSA member (at least on Twitter).

I believe that a Sanders presidency would be transformative. I don't buy the argument that he has no chance of "passing" his agenda. That's not what I mean by transformative. There are at least two things that would result. One is that the whole center of gravity in political discussion both in the media and elsewhere would shift. That is not a trivial thing. To actually have a democratic socialist elected would force the establishment media to recognize that the "center" might be something other than what they thought. And related to that, it would change what the party "establishment" really is.

But the good news is that even if Bernie is not the nominee, he and his supporters have already moved the party's needle leftward. Every moderate in the field has moved left. I think that is permanent. The left flank of the party is finally being respected and, yes, feared.

The problem I have is that Biden might be a far weaker candidate than the Never-Trumpers, the Center for American Progress, and other conservative and centrist pundits are suggesting. If he becomes the nominee, I will be happy to be proved wrong.