(Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
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The nightmare of a future in which anarchist rioters and critical race theorists conspire to destroy the very foundations of American society could soon be upon us — or at least according to warnings now delivered with increasing stridency by the party that currently controls the White House. Should these radicals be given power in November, so the warnings go, they will immediately move to close churches, teach schoolchildren to despise their own country, and perhaps even set about decapitating every remaining statue of George Washington. “He’s against God,” the incumbent president alleges of his rival.
Maybe there is some hypothetical revolutionary Left-wing candidate out there who could theoretically seek to carry out such a frightening agenda. But the candidate fielded by the Democratic Party in 2020 is not some wild-eyed Robespierre reincarnate. It’s Joe Biden. And the apocalyptic scenario prophesied by Republicans about a potential Biden presidency can only be seen as comical in the context of his actually-existing political record.
Unlike in 2016, when the personage of Hillary Clinton provided a boundless source of intense consternation, Donald Trump and the Republicans seem far less inclined to run against Biden as such. Instead, they’ve taken to portraying him as a walking corpse with severely limited cognition — and therefore it won’t be him pulling the strings once he’s wheeled into office, they contend, but a variety of other nefarious radical forces working behind the scenes. Fliers that declare “The Radical Left Has Taken Over Joe Biden” have been hitting mailboxes across the country, featuring grim images of Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez interposed domineeringly over a confused and oblivious Biden.
On the one hand, party coalitions are always going to have a role in setting the president’s agenda; Trump, for one, more-or-less outsourced his own legislative priorities to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for the first half of his tenure. And to the extent that Omar, Sanders, and “AOC” constitute a coherent ideological faction, certainly they would jockey for influence under a Biden administration.
But the casual castigation of Biden as a mere Trojan Horse for the “radical left” totally disregards the significance of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, which if nothing else were a direct repudiation of the “radical left” — insofar as such a thing exists within the constraints of US electoral politics. Biden’s victory resoundingly blunted the ascendance of left-wing activists who tried and failed to seize the reins of the Democratic Party, mainly by way of the five-year Bernie Sanders campaign. As Biden reminded an interviewer in Wisconsin this week: “I beat the socialist… That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”
It’s impossible to ever know what exactly a general election featuring Democratic nominee Sanders would have looked like, but a few things seem plausible. First, it wouldn’t have been necessary to “tie” Sanders to the activist Left, as they would have been the proud, unhidden core of his campaign operation. Figures like Shaun King, whom the Sanders campaign elevated as a top surrogate (King was even selected to introduce Sanders at his 2020 kickoff event) doubtless would have been the gift that kept on giving for Republicans. (Google him if you must.) And a fair number of the most ideologically adventurous twentysomething protesters who have run rampant for the past several months surely would also have been active Sanders supporters. Perhaps it’s possible that Sanders could have animated new segments of the general electorate and won against Trump regardless. But the project of “tying” him to the more excitable elements of the activist Left would not have been complicated. It just would have been a fact.
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