Biden might be good for the left

He has no vision. He won’t accomplish anything. He’s perfect.

Justin Ward
6 min readOct 6, 2020
(Gage Skidmore / CC-BY-SA 2.0)

It seems like forever since Bernie Sanders dropped out of the primaries. The intervening months have brought an endless parade of op-eds and open letters from prominent leftists— Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, those ex-SDS Boomers, etc. — pleading for their comrades to suck it up and vote for Joe Biden. These aren’t really worth dwelling upon in any detail since they all can be boiled down to: Biden is bad but Trump is worse.

I’m not going to give you the same spiel about harm reduction or whatever nor am I going to spout a bunch of clichés about how Donald J. Trump is an “existential threat to the Republic.” Unlike a certain liberal historian with a large Twitter following, I won’t feed you a bunch of balderdash about how Biden hews to the center of the party, and as the party base moves left, so will he (he won’t).

And I most definitely won’t bullshit about the Biden platform, calling it the most “progressive in history.”

Biden is not a good man and he won’t be a good president.

However, his presidency will be good for the left. And by that I don’t mean he’ll be a vehicle for the left’s agenda. He won’t pass even watered-down versions of those policies that the left holds dear, such as…

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Justin Ward

Journalist and activist. Founder and co-chair of DivestSPD. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler, GEN, USA Today. Follow on Twitter: @justwardoctrine, @DivestSPD