How Should Biden Win?

No plea to return to ‘normality’ or the ‘everyday’ is now worthwhile. Only the extraordinary can save us.

Gregory Claeys

The real question is: How much truth can I stand?

Nietzsche

The 2024 presidential race is an unusual animal, in that there are really no On-the-Fence voters this time around. A recent Quinnipiac poll had Undecideds at 1%, the same number that refused to answer, and lagging behind the 2% who will not vote at all, as well as the 2% answering Other. Most everyone seems to have made their sour-stomached peace with the reality of a somewhat doddering old man versus an unhinged, tyrannical, slightly less-old man (and lest you think I’m thumbing the scale against Trump, plenty of his supporters view him as a corrupt-but-necessary tool of the Almighty, placed on earth to be the scourge of godless liberalism).

In this unusual situation, a couple questions come to mind: ‘What can Biden do to win?’, and ‘What should Biden do to win?’ Let’s take the easier question first. As I see it, there are a few tactics that Biden and his team can pursue to win, and they will certainly do all of them to try and achieve victory. The important variable is how much energy and how many resources get apportioned to each facet.

Get Out the Vote

Since there are so few true Undecideds, Biden could just go all-in on getting out his base. Don’t waste too much energy on trying to sway the views of committed Republicans and Independents. Just lean heavily on voter registration and mobilization, on combatting voter suppression schemes, and on flooding swing states with money and boots on the ground.

However, there are a couple ancillary concerns here that could thwart the GOTV approach. First is Gaza. If a lasting ceasefire doesn’t get brokered soon, and if the genocide is still ongoing come November, then there will be a huge protest vote (and/or non-vote) from liberals, especially younger ones. If Biden is counting on the “Where else are they gonna go?” factor, he could be in for a rude awakening. Anti-war and anti-capitalism are becoming more common amongst liberals (again, especially with the youth), so we could be looking at millions of people staying home and withdrawing support for a government they see as supporting the criminal carnage of innocents.

The other concern with getting out the vote is the perennially-overimportant swing states. How do you actually maximize turnout in these swing states to your advantage? Basically, there are six states that will likely determine the outcome: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. Do your pour your resources just into the urban areas in these states, or do you go after the moderates and independents to try to convince them to change camps? The latter approach is tricky, and could prove fruitless, considering that none of these people count themselves as Undecided. Spending time to sway these people could be futile, unless you believe they’re all lying when they say that they’ve already made up their minds. This leads us directly into the next major tactic that Biden will use to win.

Suasion

Despite only 1% identifying as Undecided, Biden and his team could basically ignore this self-reporting, or at least treat it with a lot of caveats. After all, people are fickle, and polls are often wrong. The numbers today could swing wildly over the next few months, as, you know, shit happens. One of the candidates could have a stroke, or could perform so erratically on the campaign trail that people jump ship. The economy could take a huge nosedive or experience a massive surge. Trump could grow a Hitler mustache.

A more substantive qualification on the lack of Undecideds is the swelling numbers of self-identified Independents and Moderates, which could be seen as a deeper current of perpetually undecided (and disgusted) voters. It is not reported very often, but Independents now outnumber the two mainstream parties for political affiliation. Recent Gallup polls show Independents at 40–45% of voters, with Republicans and Democrats basically splitting the difference at around 25–30% each. The key question with these Independents is, “Are they more Undecided and swayable than traditional party voters, or are they just as committed to their opinions as GOP and Dem supporters?”

Inside the Independent cohort itself, slightly more lean to voting Republican than Democrat, but it’s not as big a spread as you might expect (roughly 45% to 43%, Republican-leaning vs. Dem-leaning). WIth that close a split among Independents, the temptation is strong to go after these voters in a big way. But the difficulty for Biden would be how to pitch himself as NOT the typical Democrat, to try and appeal to the whole spectrum of Independents. This is a prickly path, as it would involve creating a double-identity, liberal self-denial for the Independent crowd and proud progressive for the liberal base. In essence, Independents would be pulling Biden to the right, and the young liberal bloc would be yanking him in the opposite direction.

This conundrum is reflected in the overall philosophical self-identification of Americans, beyond strictly political affiliation. Equal numbers identify themselves as Conservative or Moderate (36% each), while 25% identify as Liberal. Liberals will object here, maintaining that, if you look issue-by-issue, Americans are decidedly more liberal than conservative. That may be, but the fact remains that most people, in their overall self-description, call themselves Conservative or Moderate, and that creates a decidedly right-leaning current that any Democratic pol has to swim against. WIth that in mind, let’s continue on to the last main tactic that Biden can and will use to win.

Biden Boasting & Trump Terror

Biden Boasting is the usual thing you get from an incumbent President. Have your team tally up your list of accomplishments over the last four years, and spread those all over the place. I don’t need to belabor the specifics here; just go check out the 2024 State of Union address to see the laundry list of ‘good stuff.’

But there are a couple problems with Biden Boasting. First, people are now somewhat numb to the use of statistics by government officials. Everyone now knows that numbers can usually be found to make anything look good or bad, depending on whose interests are being served at the moment. Second, and more dangerous, is that people usually go with their gut feeling on how things are going, and that feeling is fickle and fleeting. Solid accomplishments in a multitude of areas can be completely washed from memory if, say, gas prices and food prices stay too high. When times are tough (78% of US households reported living paycheck-to-paycheck in 2023), successful government ‘programs’ can be worth nothing to people who never see immediate benefits in their paycheck or tax bill. So the tricky balance for Biden is to come up with enough positive stuff that actually outweighs a hard-to-predict gut feeling, which is often negative.

But that brings up an even larger problem with Biden Boasting: planetary collapse. Our overall ecological situation is totally fucked, and that is impacting all other downstream systems, from agriculture to finance to immigration, and to political polarization itself. Even for those who deny or don’t fully understand the ecological polycrisis we are in the midst of, there is still a creeping sense that everything is collapsing, somehow. This spreading macro-angst infects and corrodes any system of authority that is trying to encourage optimism and hope. And that includes the Biden administration. In other words, it’s a tough case to make that we’re on the right track when everything around us feels like it’s melting away under our feet.

Trump himself doesn’t have this problem, because he whole-heartedly leans into the dualistic demonization of liberalism, and thus has no trouble saying that everything is fucked, and that only a strongman like himself (or Putin, Erdogan, Orban) can make things right. Instead of downplaying the general angst over collapse, he can leverage that malaise and blame the Dems and Rinos themselves as its source. By contrast, the Biden Boast has to put lipstick on the pig, while not demonizing the Other as intensely as Trump does (Trump himself excepted).

Considering the perils involved with the Biden Boast, the President can put more emphasis on Trump Terror, which is the general fear people have of an openly authoritarian megalomaniac taking control of the government again (and this time, it’s personal, as indicated by Trump’s desire for revenge and retribution). Fomenting Trump Terror is not a difficult thing, as it mainly involves just repeating back Trump’s actual words, and then set them over ominous music and throw in some Nazi symbols for effect. Not a hard sell, as the material is abundant and meaty. A key thing here would be whether Biden can actually do this in real time in a debate, as opposed to just relying on heavily-produced TV and social media ads. The debates in general remain a high point of uncertainty. Can Biden draw out Dictator Don on live TV, enough to scare huge swaths of Independents away from the Trump camp?

The shakiness of this whole setup (general collapse angst, conservative-leaning Independents, disgruntled anti-war libs, the low number of Undecideds) really necessitates a different approach, especially if voter suppression erases a lot of Dem votes in key swing states. We’ve seen what Biden can do to win, but what he do? And more broadly, what should he do to not just win the election, but to break Trumpism itself and put something on the table that could transcend political polarization itself and get us on the road to maybe save the planet?

The Howard Beale Moment [First things first: if you don’t know who Howard Beale is, just Google “Howard Beale rant” to see the applicable scene, and then watch the movie “Network” when you have time]

This section is predicated on the idea that we don’t have much time left to save the world. Recent studies suggest that, on top of regular anthropogenic global heating, we are now in the midst of an accelerated heat pulse that could warm the planet incredibly fast in the next five years. This pulse seems to be coming from the sharp reduction in shipping fuel sulphur in 2020, which reduced atmospheric aerosols. These aerosols are sun-reflecting, and thus helped to mitigate global heating. Now that the aerosols are reduced, the 2020 regulations designed to save millions of lives from air pollution have now ironically accelerated warming, probably for the next few years at least. So we’re in pretty deep trouble, much sooner than expected.

In that context, a close-shave Biden victory, maybe resulting in mixed government if the GOP controls part or all of Congress, is just not good enough. Even with Democrats in power, if the political polarization system remains unscathed, and the parties just continue to head back to their corners to demonize the other side for the next skirmish, then we truly are fucked. We really need nothing less than a paradigm-shifting election, not one that just installs one party in a dominant position over the other for a long time. We need something that cracks the foundation of polarization itself, so that both parties and the American people in general could unite behind a common goal of saving our country and our world from the real demons at the door. We’re not just talking about sweeping Trump into the golden dustbin. We need the dualistic spirit behind Trumpism and cultural polarization in general to be shattered, so that we can get on with a real project to meet the real threats.

And that starts by telling the truth…all of it. It will be difficult for Biden to do this, as he has probably not heard the full truth himself anyway, at least not in the terms we’re about to lay out. And as Upton Sinclair noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But at this point in his career, what has Biden got to lose? He won’t want for anything materially for the rest of his life, so why not go out as something more than just a kick-the-can down the road type? I understand that losing to Trump and being a one-term President would be somewhat humiliating, but at this juncture in our history, he has to have a broader vision than just self-preservation. As coaches say, ‘you can’t play to not lose.’ Biden needs to go in for the kill, enacting a grand gesture that sweeps away division and puts us on a completely new path to the future.

Here are some talking points for Biden’s Howard Beale Moment:

• I know there’s a lot of you out there who feel like everything is going haywire, and that we’re on the wrong track. The whole world seems out of control, and there’s nothing solid left to stand on. Things just seem to happen too fast, with each day or week bringing a new kind of catastrophe: floods, droughts, earthquakes, wars, genocide, famine, shootings, corruption, crime. This is truly biblical stuff.
• Well, you’re right to feel that way, and I’m not gonna stand up here and tell you how great everything is going. Sure, we’ve done some good stuff over the last four years, but it’s not enough, not nearly enough. And in fact, things are, in many ways, just as bad, if not worse, than they were four years ago. We haven’t bent the long arc on any of the biggest threats to our country and our world. So yes, things are bad, and they will most likely get worse.
• And as bad as you might think things are, they’re actually worse. Much worse. But no one in our national leadership is telling the full truth about what we’re facing. And that includes me. It includes Donald Trump. It includes our Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle. And it also includes our mainstream media, our business leaders, and our main sources of religious and philosophical wisdom. No one has been on the level with you, the American people. And as a result, we are flying blind, and trying to lead others while traveling blind.
• Worse still, the two main political parties are leveraging your sense that the wheels are falling off the wagon to exploit you for votes, money, and their own power. You’re absolutely right in feeling that the system is rigged. It is rigged, and it’s being used by the wealthy and powerful to preserve their positions and to keep you down. This is not a coastal elite, or the deep state, or an international globalist conspiracy, or evil corporate CEOs, or liberal teachers of CRT, or trans-rights activists, or any other shady, nefarious entities with James Bond villains at the helm. It’s simply the owners of the consumer-industrial system itself, the wealthy and powerful who reap the benefits of every purchase, every financial transaction, every entrepreneurial breakthrough, every profitable quarter, every ad-click. They are the owners of the system that we all co-create. They just get the benefits, and you don’t. And it is this system itself that is collapsing.
• Your sense of foreboding and doom is correct. It is justified. But not for any of the reasons that your political leaders tell you. It’s not because we’re weak. It’s not because we don’t have enough electric cars. It’s not because we’re inundated with illegal aliens. It’s not because we don’t have enough free daycare and college. It’s not because we abort too many fetuses. It’s not because too many genitals are going into, onto, or next to, too many of the same kinds of other genitals. It’s not because we’re too woke, or not woke enough. It’s not because there’s too little or too much mention of God in our courts, schools, and town halls.
• No, what you’re felling is the slow-motion collapse of consumer-industrial civilization itself, the beginning of the end of a system that is, at its core, unsustainable. Our presence on the planet, as enacted through our current arrangements, is just too damaging. And this is not a US problem, or a China problem, or an India problem. It’s not a ‘first world’ vs. ‘third world’ problem. Apportioning out blame and culpability can come later. We don’t have time for that now. We’re facing a global collapse that needs some type of macro-solution. But this solution itself is not going to come from global agreement or international accord. There is just not enough common ground across countries and cultures to come up with global plans.
• Instead, I’m proposing that we kick start the next chapter of human history right here in the United States, building a working model of the next stage of civilization, which can then be imported and adapted to other countries to fit their own situations. But the work can start with us. We can not only immediately and significantly improve the economic, physical, and psychological health of our citizens, we can do it in a way that drastically reduces our ecological damage to the planet, while helping to repair the damage we’ve already done. And here is how we’re going to do it….
• At this point, if you’ve read this blog before, you know that the solution is tripartite: Universal Basic Income, applied in the new household format of Bigger Home Bases, facilitated by a Modern Money Theory understanding of national financing. I encourage you to check out earlier pieces on this blog for background on these ideas.

I know, I know. The chances of this happening are worse than the odds of the Miami Dolphins winning the Super Bowl next year. But a boy can dream. And even if this exact thing doesn’t happen, these important points remain, and should always stay in the forefront:

• We don’t have a lot of time to fix things
• We have to rapidly and massively reduce our ecological impact
• This can only be done by changing the basic unit of consumer-industrial civilization: the household (by building BHBs)
• That can only happen with UBI support
• UBI and BHB can only happen with an MMT backdrop
• Political polarization must be dismantled and transcended for any of this to happen

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on April 6, 2024.