Bernie or Biden or Bust or Both

I’ve been a registered Democrat since April, 2002, shortly before I turned 28. A longtime Republican descended from a long line of Republicans, I suddenly, at that age, couldn’t reconcile Republican policies with basic fairness. The Democratic Party, though hardly perfect, better represented ideals of protecting the vulnerable, welcoming the oppressed, and holding the rich accountable. Ideals which, as a Christian, I grew up with every day.

So that’s who I am when you hear me say: this party needs to get its shit together and stop living in fear.

Watching the diverse Democratic primary field collapse into two aged White men with spotty histories, I’ve kept hearing one word: “Electable.” Is Bernie electable? What about Warren? America probably isn’t ready, some gadflies say, for its second Black President, or its first woman. I might like Candidate X’s principles, and they make a good speech, but is America ready for someone like this? Is my favorite candidate, or yours, really electable?

The concept of “Electable” indicates, not whether we agree with a candidate’s platform, but whether we think a hypothetical stranger will agree. The claims against serious candidates like Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker have focused on whether their concrete, actionable plans—or their very persons, as a woman and a Black man—might alienate our hypothetical stranger. We literally fear that a woman with a plan is too much for America now.

Thus, campaigning in a spirit of fear, we’re left with two candidates, the cowards’ choices. Bernie Sanders electrifies large crowds, but he does it by combining grandiose plans with vague strategies. He’s like if a late-night college bull session became a human being. Meanwhile, Democrats widely perceive Joe Biden as the inoffensive candidate. Assuming you can wallpaper over his touching women, his segregationist voting, and his tone-deaf “Epiphany” comment.

“Electability,” as a voting criterion, basically boils down to one of two options: either attracting the largest number of uncommitted voters, or driving the smallest number of those numbers away. However, as Maggie Koerth at FiveThirtyEight writes, electability is a nebulous target. The reasoning is always circular: I’ll vote for whomever everyone else will vote for, and they’ll vote for that person because everyone else will vote, because everyone else—

Yikes.

Put another way, “Electability” involves sacrificing principles to conform with a public consensus. But what is that consensus? As I’ve written before, polls repeatedly show a majority of Americans prefer proactive government leadership in protecting the poor, ensuring health care access, and cleaning the environment. They might reflexively side with Republican candidates, for abstruse reasons, but they favor Democratic planks.

Yet the punditocracy treats political discussions like striking balance between two sides. When the overwhelming preponderance of scientists say human activity is heating the planet, for instance, and paid endorsers say it isn’t, the pundits give both sides “equal time.” This creates the illusion that there’s something to debate, when the discussion should be functionally closed. Then a committed centrist like Biden promises the “middle ground” on Global Warming.

I appreciate the willingness to find compromise on actual controversies. For instance, it’s impossible to definitively say whether capitalism or communism is better, because both systems are responses to incomplete information. You have to make value judgments, which often means splitting the difference. But you can’t split the difference with human extinction, with letting the poor die, or with Nazis. Yet that’s what Democrats keep trying to do.

Some critics, including personal friends, will accuse me of applying “purity tests” to Democrats here. I can’t disagree. But Republicans have applied purity tests for years: I watched for years, initially as an insider, as Republicanism became increasingly intolerant, warlike, implicitly racist, and now explicitly racist. Admittedly, the Republican Presidential candidate has won the majority vote only once since 1988. But sometimes it’s the procedure that matters.

In nearly twenty years since I left the Republicans, they’ve gotten good at motivating True Believers of a certain stripe. Democrats, contrarily, have chosen to muddle their message, accepting everyone alienated by Republicanism’s drift. Yes, it makes for a big-tent party, which core Democratic leaders find desirable. But it also means one one party is more energized to actually participate and vote, leading to lopsided outcomes.

Democrats have essentially decided their abstract American is timid, averse to controversy, and centrist. And maybe they are, I don’t know—and neither do you. But the outcome is one side of the political spectrum more energized and motivated than the other. We’ve seen what that produces.