Open Letter: Dump Trump, Then Battle Biden

Fifty-five progressive writers and activists with a message for 2020 voters.

Many people, both on the left and more mainstream, are now discussing preparations for the very real possibility that Donald Trump will dispute the results of the election after he has lost. Such concerns are well-founded. But such concerns should not obscure the most urgent task—defeating Trump in the election with as big an Electoral College margin as possible, to undermine his predictable efforts to steal the election.

“Ending the Trump presidency is, by far, the most important goal that can be achieved between now and January.”

How does Trump lose? Trump loses only if Biden, however distasteful he may be, wins.

And how does Biden win? Biden wins if he gets more votes than Trump in swing states so that his Electoral College count is higher than Trump’s.

The Electoral College should be gone. Electoral coercion, manipulation and misdirection should be gone. The need to purchase visibility should be gone. The Democratic Party candidate should be Bernie Sanders or whoever would inspire your positive support. But none of that will happen by Election Day.

So it undeniably comes down to this—help Biden or increase the risk that Trump wins.

And what helps elect Biden?

Voting for Biden all over helps ward off post-election Trumpian tactics. Voting for Biden in swing states is essential.

Protestations that Biden is beholden to elites are true but beside the point. The lesser evil is evil, but in this case, the greater evil is simply off the charts.

Claims that not voting sends a message are true. But the message that not voting in swing states sends in 2020 is that we are okay with Trump for four more years as long as we don’t have to sully our hands by voting for Biden.

Claims that more votes for the Green Party’s or any other third party’s presidential candidate are necessary to win long-term progressive goals ignore the many ways that Trump’s re-election—with his climate policies, his nuclear weapons policies, his undermining of democracy and the courts, and his racism and sexism—would obstruct all positive social change.

Imagine it is late November. The mail votes are finally all counted. Everything is tallied. And Trump has scored an Electoral College victory. That is what not voting for Biden in swing states risks. It is what not advocating we should vote for Biden in swing states risks.

“Protestations that Biden is beholden to elites are true but beside the point. The lesser evil is evil, but in this case, the greater evil is simply off the charts.”

Ending the Trump presidency is, by far, the most important goal that can be achieved between now and January.

Not voting for Biden in swing states won’t bring on a revolution. Not voting for Biden in swing states will not make anyone the slightest bit more progressive, radical, or revolutionary. Not voting for Biden in swing states will not grow or solidify the ranks of opposition. But not voting for Biden in swing states risks immeasurably enlarging the obstacles that opposition will thereafter face.

So, it comes down to this. Dump Trump, Then Battle Biden. Vote for Biden at least in swing states—and urge others to do so as well. And then get on with building grassroots movements for ongoing fundamental change.

Signed,

[Organizations listed for purposes of identification only.]

Aisha Jumaan, epidemiologist and health activist

Amar Shergill, chair Progressive Caucus of Calif. Dem. Party

Andrej Grubacic, anarchist writer, activist, CIIS, Collective 20

Ann Ferguson, women, gender, sexuality studies, activist

Avi Chomsky, writer, activist, Salem State

Barbara Ehrenreich, author, journalist

Bill Fletcher Jr., writer, TransAfrica Forum, trade unionist

Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, Ethics In Tech, SF Berniecrats, Collective 20

Charles Lenchner, digital media, People for Bernie

Cornel West, writer, activist, Harvard Divinity School

Cynthia Peters, The Change Agent, City Life/Vida Urbana, Collective 20

Dan La Botz, New Politics, DSA

David Barsamian, Alternative Radio

Doug Henwood, economic journalist, LBO, KPFK’s “Behind the News”

Doug Pagitt, Vote Common Good

Elena Herrada, Radio host “Beloved Detroit,” activist, Collective 20

Gar Alperovitz, writer, historian, Democracy Collaborative

Gregory Wilpert, writer, activist

Hassan El-Tayyab, peace activist, songwriter, author, FCNL lead lobbyist

Jeff Cohen, writer, RootsAction.org, FAIR founder

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Baptist preacher, moral activist

Joseph Gerson, writer, International Peace Bureau

Juliet Schor, sociology, Boston College

Karen Bernal, former chair Progressive Caucus of Calif. Dem. Party

Kathy Kelly, activist, author, Voices for Creative Nonviolence

Kim Scipes, professor, USMC veteran

Leslie Cagan, social justice organizer and writer

Linda Gordon, historian, author, “The Second Coming of the KKK”

Liza Featherstone, feminist journalist, “Divining Desire,” Nation contributing editor

Lydia Sargent, author, Z Communications

Marina Sitrin, writer, activist, Binghamton

Marjorie Cohn, activist, scholar

Medea Benjamin, author, CodePink, Collective 20

Michael Albert, writer, Z Communications, RevolutionZ, Collective 20

Nanette Funk, writer, Brooklyn College

Noam Chomsky, writer, Collective 20

Norman Solomon, author, “War Made Easy,” RootsAction.org

Oscar Chacon, Salvadoran immigrant, organizer, Collective 20

Paul Ortiz, historian, “Emancipation Betrayed,” Collective 20, University of Florida

Peter Bohmer, writer, activist, Evergreen, Economics for Everyone, Collective 20

Peter Kuznick, writer, historian, “Untold History of the United States,” American University

Robert McChesney, author on media and political economy

Robin Hahnel, author, activist, American University, Portland State University

Sandy Carter writer, activist

Savvina Chowdhury, political and feminist econ, Evergreen State College, Collective 20

Shane Claiborne, author, activist

Sherry Baron, DSA

Sonali Kolhatkar, writer, host of “Rising Up With Sonali” Radio/TV

Stephen Shalom, writer, activist, New Politics

Steve Early, writer, labor activist, NewsGuild/CWA

Suzanne Gordon, journalist, author, healthcare reform advocate

Ted Glick, climate activist, author “Burglar for Peace”

Victor Wallis, author, “Red-Green Revolution”

Vincent Emanuele, writer, activist, organizer, combat veteran, Collective 20

Winnie Wong, organizer, People for Bernie, former senior adviser Bernie 2020

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements. His most recent books include: “Who Rules the World?” (2017); “Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire” (2013 with interviewer David Barsamian); “Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance” (2012); “Hopes and Prospects” (2012); and “Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order” (1998). Previous books include: “Failed States” (2007), “What We Say Goes” (2007 with David Barsamian), “Hegemony or Survival” (2004), and the “Essential Chomsky” (2008).

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of “This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation.” She won the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. Her seventeenth book, “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” has just been published. Her bestselling book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10^th Anniversary Edition, has been released by Picador Books.
Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. She is the former founder, host and producer of KPFK Pacifica’s popular morning drive-time program “Uprising.“She is also the co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S.-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the social, political, and humanitarian projects of RAWA. She is the author, with James Ingalls, of”Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence" (2006).
Juliet Schor

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts. Her books include: “True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy” (2011). She is also author of the national best-seller, “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” (1993) and “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need” (1999). Her other writings are available on her website, Plenitude - the Blog.

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

• Common Dreams. Published on Wednesday, September 23, 2020:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/23/open-letter-dump-trump-then-battle-biden

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 Don’t Support Biden, Even Against Trump

By Six Members of the New Politics Board

We, members of the New Politics editorial board, wish to respond to the “Open Letter: Dump Trump, Then Battle Biden,” published in Common Dreams and signed by 55 progressives [see above], including two other members of the board. Given the horrendous nature of Trump and his regime, we understand why the signers have taken this position. Nevertheless, we reject the letter’s call for leftists to vote for Biden as a lesser evil.

The signers include writers and activists whom we respect and admire; all the more unfortunate, therefore, that their letter parodies arguments about refusing to support a candidate who stands firmly in favor of the disastrous status quo that preceded Trump. Take this sentence: “But the message that not voting in swing states sends in 2020 is that we are okay with Trump for four more years as long as we don’t have to sully our hands by voting for Biden.” To portray those who insist on the political independence of the left as fastidious purists who only want to keep their hands clean misrepresents what we have said and believe: We are not “okay” with four more years of Trump, and we are not claiming that the letter’s signers are okay with Biden for four years. After all, the letter acknowledges that Biden, the lesser evil, is evil. Our differences are not about “purity” but how to most effectively combat Trump and the right-wing forces he represents.

First, it is important to note that Joe Biden is a “lesser evil” who has used his power to do great harm. For 40 years, Biden has been an enthusiastic proponent, and often a leading architect, of neoliberal foreign and domestic policies: assaults on public education, bank deregulation, militarized police forces, mass incarceration, gargantuan military budgets, savage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, full support to Saudi aggression against Yemen and Israeli aggression against the Palestinians. Biden is a member in good standing of what Naomi Klein calls the “Davos class.” His entire career in Congress was bankrolled by the credit card industry. And now, running for president, he famously promised his donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” for them if he is elected. This is a promise that Biden can most assuredly be counted on to fulfill if he can. The neoliberal status quo ante, to which Biden was and is committed, together with a left that remains submerged within the Democratic Party, and therefore unable to make a broad appeal to the vast majority in this country, created the conditions that spawned Trump.

To Biden’s conservative and destructive record, the letter merely comments: “Protestations that Biden is beholden to elites are true but beside the point.” On the contrary, they are very much to the point, because they have everything to do with successfully fighting Trumpism and the extreme right. We have come to this miserable state of affairs in large part because the left has failed to create an alternative to “lesser evils” who, along with the greater evils, have devastated lives and imperiled the planet.

Biden is indeed different from Trump in ways that are important to recognize. Unlike Trump, he does not openly espouse racism and xenophobia and acknowledges the reality of global warming. Yet he stands for a return to the Obama-era status quo, in which millions of migrants were deported, people of color were at the mercy of the police, the prisons were full to bursting, economic inequality grew to immense proportions, and the globe was hurtling toward climate catastrophe. Despite the mostly meaningless promises of the Democratic platform, designed to convince the left to support him at the polls, Biden has made it clear that he rejects such progressive goals as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and defunding the police. He has not even pretended that he would heavily tax the rich, make massive reductions in military spending (he plans in fact to increase it), restore civil liberties, stop foreign military interventions, or identify legislation he will support to defend workers’ rights on the job, including unionization. Effective solutions to the climate crisis, which threatens life itself on the planet, require a major, sustained attack on the corporate “rights” and privileges which Biden has always fervently defended. Bernie Sanders’s claim that Biden would be the most progressive president in recent history is, at best, wishful thinking. Instead, a vote for Biden in any state is not just a vote to get rid of Trump, but also a vote for a corporate military agenda and a vote to do next to nothing about the climate crisis.

The past few years have seen the biggest, most interracial mass protest movements in U.S. history. Most of the protest has been against conditions that Trump has exploited and exacerbated but were in place before his stunning ascension to power—systemic racism; militarized police departments; public services from medical care to education ravaged by privatization and cuts targeted at the most vulnerable in our society. In the face of this upheaval, leftists are both morally and strategically wrong to advocate voting for a candidate and party that have countenanced and deepened inequality and injustice.

There is no lack of outrage at the rank injustices of the system under which we live. What is in short supply is the vision and hope that something can be done about them. One of the biggest obstacles to radical change is the misplaced loyalty that millions feel for the Democratic Party, despite the lack of enthusiasm that most have for its current leader.

Some of the letter’s signers have opposed voting for Democrats as lesser evils in the past, and they will admit that lesser evil voting has brought us worse and worse evils. But they will insist that the extreme danger posed by Trump means that 2020 is exceptional. We ask what they think will change four years from now, or eight, or twelve, that would prevent them from making the same choice. Even without a raving sociopath like Trump, even with Biden in the White House, the threat from the far right will intensify. That threat can be met only by mobilizing a militant, democratic, independent left, both in the street and at the polls. This is a daunting task, but it is made much more difficult by again rallying the bulk of the existing left in support of the Democrats.

To bar the way to an authoritarian coup or a nascent fascist movement, we advocate direct action, confrontation and civil disobedience on a massive scale, and the formation of an independent political party of the left. “Dump Trump, Then Battle Biden,” says the letter, in effect calling on the left to “stand back and stand by” during the election, and then re-emerge to continue the fight. But this fight will continue to be undermined by the stubborn, irrational belief that the Democrats are the only possible alternative to the right, a belief reinforced by supporting Biden in this election.

The society that spawned Trump and his followers is a society of monstrous class, racial, and gender inequality, a shredded welfare state, rampant brutality by police forces now known to be infiltrated by organized white supremacists, and the glorification of military violence. Its bombs and missiles, armed forces, corporations, and financial institutions enable it to confront the world as a tyrannical overlord. The Democratic Party shares with the Republicans, if not equal responsibility, then a great deal of it for this abomination. Trump is certainly far worse than Biden, but Biden is no alternative.

Thomas Harrison

Lois Weiner

Aaron Amaral

Phil Gasper

Scott McLemee

Emma Wilde Botta

• New Politics. October 10, 2020:
https://newpol.org/dont-support-biden-even-against-trump/

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