An old joke explains the difference between normalcy, psychosis, and neurosis. A normal person believes that 2 + 2 = 4. A psychotic is sure that 2 + 2 = 5. A neurotic knows that 2 + 2 = 4 but just can’t stand it.
By that standard, I’m now a political neurotic. I said goodbye to Elizabeth Warren’s presidential run on Thursday. I gave a goodbye kiss to my dream of a truly progressive White House led by a woman. I let go my vision of a big party celebrating the inauguration of our first female president, just months after the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Now all that is on hold.
I’ve flirted with voting for Sanders, as I did in 2016. But I supported Warren for good reason. She’s smarter and more strategic. Among other things, she doesn’t call herself a “socialist” in a nation with a century-long induced allergy to anything smelling of “socialism.” Warren also carried the long-thwarted dreams of millions of women for empathetic leadership by one of their own. Or so I thought.
I’ll go to my grave believing that if Hillary Clinton had only picked Sanders as her Veep, rather than the anodyne and unknown Tim Kaine, she’d be in the White House right now. The past three years would have been little more than a fevered nightmare.
But that didn’t happen. Trump did. Facts are facts.
Now I have to practice what I preach: the art of democracy. I must receive the judgment and views of my fellow citizens with an open mind and heart. That duty’s especially incumbent on a reclusive blogger.
Professional pundits I admire, such as David Leonhardt and Charles Blow, all think Biden the best choice. They rely in part on their views of others’ views—a second-order analysis that I find hard to accept. But as they and others have refined the arguments over the last few weeks, they’ve become more and more persuasive.
The arguments boil down to head versus heart. Sanders is an ideologue. He claims to have all the answers, and his message doesn’t change much with circumstances.
Americans are suspicious of folks like that, and rightly so. They loved Dubya, with his vague talk of an “ownership society” and “compassionate conservatism,” even though his talk never produced results. Workers also loved Trump (and many still do!) in large measure because he lacks any discernible ideology; he just claims to be on their side. But he did everything for himself and his fellow oligarchs, and little or nothing for workers.
Joe is much more selfless and genuine. He’s likeable precisely because he doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Voters value his heart, not his head. I guess they figure good ideas and good plans will emerge from a good heart and wise advisers, rather than vice versa. Who’s to say they are wrong?
Then there are the down-ballot candidates. In order to get anything real done, a Democratic president has to keep the House and flip the Senate. He also needs to grab a few more governorships, so as to curb the gerrymandering and voter suppression that have become staples of the GOP’s money-fueled lust for power. Leonhardt in particular makes a strong case that Sanders can’t make all this happen as well as Biden, and that down-ballot wannabes themselves think so.
Finally, there are our African-Americans. No other group in our nation, perhaps in human history, has resisted unfairness, mistreatment and oppression as long, as persistently and as patiently as they. They trust Biden for a very good reason: for eight years he took orders from, and faithfully advised, one of their own.
Their trust was not in vain. Biden’s push for a policy of counter-terrorism, rather than counter-insurgency, in Afghanistan is the basis for our present hope of ending our longest war. And it didn’t hurt that the man he served, Barack Obama, has a good heart and fine judgment and was our best president since JFK, whose own cool judgment helped save the world from nuclear Armageddon.
So yes, I’ve argued that not all the returns are in. I still retain some hope that Sanders’ predicted “blue surge of youth” will materialize (although it hasn’t yet) in the swing states that vote before the end of April. There is still a theoretical path to Sanders’ victory.
But as Blow so well puts it, “voters are coalescing around an idea: While they admire the revolutionaries, they are more comfortable with slow and steady progress.” Indeed. That’s how people convalesce from disease or from surgery: slowly, step by step. And Trump bears every resemblance to a high and debilitating fever.
So consider me a convalescing political neurotic, recently bereaved. I’ve gone through the stages of rejection and denial and am nearly finished bargaining. I’m now ready to accept Joe Biden’s good heart but sometimes butchered English as the cure for our national ills.
After three years of unrelenting horror, I’m ready to believe in a slow but steady recovery from our age of greed and indifference to each other and our planet. I’m ready to vote for and support a man who doesn’t claim to have all the answers but plainly possesses a good heart, made empathetic like FDR’s—and so unlike Trump’s—by his own personal misfortune.
I’m ready to accept a slow but steady end to our nation’s relentless rightward march for two generations, since Reagan. Forty years of selfish, corrosive and corrupting nonsense will not vanish overnight. So now I prefer securing that slow end to betting the farm on a faster one and risking losing everything. As our national decline becomes a precipitous plunge, with a global pandemic looming, the safe choice seems the best.