Mapping 46 - what should/will Biden do?

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I have no idea why anyone would expect any President to be able to create a fundamental shift in the system.

I have no idea why anyone would want that much power in the hands of one person.

Any change will have to be driven by the electorate,

A thousand times this.

 

[Spirits Rising]

Reality does not give two tin fucks what some here seem to believe is possible/needs to be done. There's a bit I'd like to see done as well but guess the fuck what? I don't expect it to be miraculously done over fucking night.

There's only one form of government that'll dance to your timetable and it isn't a Democracy. Welcome to Life.

 

[Cristalle]

President Biden is not going to do any of this. He has gone much further on many progressive issues than I thought he would, but he is a moderate on many issues and is conservative on many economic issues. No President is going to do anything like what I believe needs to be done to address the shocking inequities in the US economy. Any change will have to be driven by the electorate, and expecting the political class to make changes will not result in any changes. I have no idea why anyone would expect any President to be able to create a fundamental shift in the system. Pressure on politicians that results from broad based local support from an active community is far more important than waiting on the President to change everything. These are not problems because of the President. These are problems that are the result of a system designed to resist positive change.

He has done nothing that is permanent. What he's done is the bare minimum to keep the system afloat. We still have a massive housing crisis looming with no aid to the normal people and small landlords.

As for expecting change? You browbeat people to vote them into power to do what, exactly? When they don't turn out next time, people will cry and call them idiots. It's not about merely expecting the President to act, but his party which is in power, that he leads. He has power and influence, and it's not sufficient to NOT use it when we have serious crises on our hands and limited time in which to act before the savages get even more power. When people come with that vote blue no matter who bullshit again, it may not work.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Thanks for not answering the question.

You can't unfuck the country if you don't actually DO anything for the country. He doesn't have 4 years to act. Campaign season for the House and Senate begins in a couple of months. Lose either one next year, as is likely at this rate, and we will stay fucked. Running on no achievement is the way to lose. It's not lack of patience why we can't have nice things.

He's been in office for only four months. Are you seriously expecting him to snap his fingers and all of a sudden everything is better? He's smart enough to realize that he needs to pick and choose what stands a decent chance of getting passed, and hold off on what needs better Democratic representation in the Senate to even have a hope of passing. It doesn't do any good for him to propose legislation that stands no hope of passing. It just makes him look weak, makes the whole Democratic Party look weak, and further emboldens the GOP. I can live without M4A a while longer if it means we don't have to relive the last four years again.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Lean on the Senators who are out of line and threaten to cut off their money and support their primary challengers.

Wait... Lean on who? The Republicans? They're the ones who have been standing in his way! Do you really think they care what he thinks or says? They all march to the beat of Trump and don't give a single damn about what Biden says!

 

[Innula Zenovka]

From Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts.

They criticise the British (English) populist left -- Benn and Corbyn -- from a Marxist perspective but I think their remarks might apply more broadly.

Certainly they express some of my misgivings about parts of the anglophone left in general (and possibly the non-anglophone left, too, but I don't know enough about that).

What brings these two perhaps unlikely bedfellows together – the social democratic and ultra-left – with our perspective, and distinguishes them from the main Corbynist current, is the recognition (implicit or explicit) of the inherently contradictory and negative character of capitalist social relations. While the approach taken to those relations varies enormously between the two – with the libertarian ultra-left seeking to abolish them in their entirety, and the internationalist social-democratic wing resigned to working through the contradictions without resolution – both acknowledge in practice, if not always in theory, the extent to which the abstract forms of capitalist society (money, production, commodities, labour, value) dominate all aspects of life within it. In both cases, social conflict is understood as being a historical, rather than ontological, phenomena. Contradiction is treated as something running through capitalist society as a whole, rather than being imposed upon it from the outside. Mediation – by both political or economic forms – is viewed as an inescapable moment of social and political life, the only means through which we can currently exist, for good or ill.

For the Bennite and postcapitalist wings of Corbynism by contrast, here betraying again their shared roots in orthodox Marxism, contradiction and social conflict are grasped as the result of external constraints imposed upon a social force itself regarded uncritically as innately ‘good’ – whether it is the ‘working class,’ the productive forces, or postcapitalist potentiality. The arrival of the good society therefore entails the eradication of contradiction through the removal of those ‘bad’ forces which hold it back – the capitalist class, international finance, or the relations of production – whether through the subsumption of the economy into the state, giving workers control of production, or full automation. Here there are again clear theoretical parallels with the populist insistence that social conflict can be immediately resolved through the formation of a unified ‘people,’ whose triumphant rise to ‘hegemony’ enables the expulsion of the ‘them’ held to be responsible for society’s troubles. In each case, the historical source of social contradiction is left untouched. As such, the path is laid for powerful narratives of betrayal and conspiratorial resentment when the impossible demands for resolution cannot be met within a set of social relations that remains essentially unchanged – if not increasingly authoritarian attempts to make a stubbornly unyielding reality fit the theory.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Wait... Lean on who? The Republicans? They're the ones who have been standing in his way! Do you really think they care what he thinks or says? They all march to the beat of Trump and don't give a single damn about what Biden says!

And I'm reminded why I ignore certain people. And I'd imagine lean on Manchin, who comes off sometimes as a last hold out of a Southern Democrat circa the 80s-90s....

 

[Grandma Bates]

He has done nothing that is permanent. What he's done is the bare minimum to keep the system afloat. We still have a massive housing crisis looming with no aid to the normal people and small landlords.

As for expecting change? You browbeat people to vote them into power to do what, exactly? When they don't turn out next time, people will cry and call them idiots. It's not about merely expecting the President to act, but his party which is in power, that he leads. He has power and influence, and it's not sufficient to NOT use it when we have serious crises on our hands and limited time in which to act before the savages get even more power. When people come with that vote blue no matter who bullshit again, it may not work.

I am not sure who the "you" is that you are referring to. I personally think people should vote for who they like and prefer that people just vote. I recognize that this is a minority view on this site. I live in Georgia where I have to keep checking my vote status to make sure it has not changed , and I have to wait in line for more than hour to vote while other people have their jobs threatened if they take time to vote. People have made incredible sacrifices to vote here especially in the not too distant past. To hear someone complain that they feel browbeaten because others do not like how they vote and conclude that they should not vote really does not carry much weight, and the logic being employed lacks intellectual heft. Having said that, I have made the argument that voting for Biden was a better option than a third party candidate and have challenged the logic of not voting, but that does not imply that people should vote blue no matter who.

I personally wish the President would hit the streets and work his base to generate enthusiasm for the kinds of change I want him to implement, and I wish he would start twisting arms in the legislature to do it. I would be pleasantly surprised if he did, but that is not who he is. He is not going to be the agent of change that I want. The impetus to make those changes will only arise from grass root efforts. The change we need will only result from long term efforts to put good people in local political offices and continue to do so until a foundation is laid for experienced progressives to grow and move forward. No one is going to arise out of the mist by themselves and be able to implement wide scale change. (My French friends have informed me that angry mobs and guillotines are another option, though.)

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

And I'm reminded why I ignore certain people. And I'd imagine lean on Manchin, who comes off sometimes as a last hold out of a Southern Democrat circa the 80s-90s....

Manchin is definitely a fly in the ointment. But our biggest problem by far are the Senate Republicans who, even though they are now technically in the minority, still manage to be a massive impediment to getting anything worthwhile done.

 

[Romana]

If Machin and Sinema go along,though, they could have a tie which VP Harris would then break.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

If Machin and Sinema go along,though, they could have a tie which VP Harris would then break.

I believe the issue is, all it takes is someone deciding to make it require 2/3rd instead of 51 votes - the filibuster needs to go.

 

[Cristalle]

He's been in office for only four months. Are you seriously expecting him to snap his fingers and all of a sudden everything is better? He's smart enough to realize that he needs to pick and choose what stands a decent chance of getting passed, and hold off on what needs better Democratic representation in the Senate to even have a hope of passing. It doesn't do any good for him to propose legislation that stands no hope of passing. It just makes him look weak, makes the whole Democratic Party look weak, and further emboldens the GOP. I can live without M4A a while longer if it means we don't have to relive the last four years again.

Tell me, Katheryne, what time frame do you think is acceptable to get anything done? Answer that question first.

Not every bill works like COVID, where the lobbyists have their wish lists lined up and it gets rammed down the throats of the elected officials in days. You do realize that there is an election NEXT YEAR, for which people have to campaign, right? If they think that they're going to win merely on scaring people because of January 6, I'd like to remind them that we got Trump because of that kind of thinking. Trump is part of Obama's legacy.

Democrats have a very short window of time in which to achieve anything and they're already fucking around and negotiating against themselves with bad faith actors who aren't going to deliver any votes anyway. That's a recipe to lose and therefore really get nothing done.

 

[Cristalle]

Wait... Lean on who? The Republicans? They're the ones who have been standing in his way! Do you really think they care what he thinks or says? They all march to the beat of Trump and don't give a single damn about what Biden says!

That almost seems intentionally obtuse. Why would Biden have pressure points with money on Republicans? Lean on Manchin and Sinema, and anyone else getting in the way of the meager things that Biden campaigned on. But then, Biden lied about all that stuff. The only thing he's promised that is coming true is that nothing will fundamentally change.

 

[Cristalle]

I am not sure who the "you" is that you are referring to. I personally think people should vote for who they like and prefer that people just vote. I recognize that this is a minority view on this site. I live in Georgia where I have to keep checking my vote status to make sure it has not changed , and I have to wait in line for more than hour to vote while other people have their jobs threatened if they take time to vote. People have made incredible sacrifices to vote here especially in the not too distant past. To hear someone complain that they feel browbeaten because others do not like how they vote and conclude that they should not vote really does not carry much weight, and the logic being employed lacks intellectual heft. Having said that, I have made the argument that voting for Biden was a better option than a third party candidate and have challenged the logic of not voting, but that does not imply that people should vote blue no matter who.

I personally wish the President would hit the streets and work his base to generate enthusiasm for the kinds of change I want him to implement, and I wish he would start twisting arms in the legislature to do it. I would be pleasantly surprised if he did, but that is not who he is. He is not going to be the agent of change that I want. The impetus to make those changes will only arise from grass root efforts. The change we need will only result from long term efforts to put good people in local political offices and continue to do so until a foundation is laid for experienced progressives to grow and move forward. No one is going to arise out of the mist by themselves and be able to implement wide scale change. (My French friends have informed me that angry mobs and guillotines are another option, though.)

The "You" is Democrats, and especially Democrats here. People here berated anyone who didn't fall in line. If that doesn't fit YOU in particular Grandma, then great. But there are plenty of people here guilty of that. People blaming Jill Stein and shit like that, for having the temerity to participate in our democracy instead of demanding better from the candidate to actually earn the votes that would otherwise go to the third party or stay at home.

It's not enough to just "personally wish" he'd hit the streets. We have to make noise and put pressure on him if he's going to change his policy plans now. And shouting down people pressing for change, as lot of people here reflexively do, doesn't help. I agree that people shouldn't make their decisions based merely on what other people think, but it happens. YES, progressives need to cultivate candidates at the lower levels first before expecting a progressive president, a real one. That work is essential. But for those who used the excuse of "put Biden in office and then push him left," the push him left part has to actually happen if we want to avoid Republican control of one or both of the chambers of Congress next year and another Trump or Trump himself winning in 24.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Tell me, Katheryne, what time frame do you think is acceptable to get anything done? Answer that question first.

I answered that question: The acceptable timeframe is one that gives the bill the best possible chance of successfully passing both the House and Senate. Any less than that is a waste of time, resources, and possibly dooms the bill to never see the light of day again.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

As a reminder of Jill Stien's participation in the democratic process.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

We have to make noise and put pressure on him if he's going to change his policy plans now.

How? Serious question -- do you have any particular suggestions about how "make noise and put pressure on him" to do something specific in an achievable timescale?

And what, specifically, do you want him to do in that timescale and what specific actions do you say he must take to make it happen in order for you to stop making noise and putting pressure on him?

I'm not asking what you'd like him to do in an ideal world but what specific measures you think he can take that he's so far failed to and that you think he can reasonably be expected to persuade both houses of congress to pass in the time available.

 

[Free]

Not good.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Not good.

I do hope he's got a good game plan that we're just not seeing yet. Because, yeah, it's not looking good so far.

 

[Romana]

I was curious to see what law Twitter had to say about this :


And here's Maddow:


I don't k know how to evaluate the legal stuff. I may ask my lawyer brother what he thinks.
There's nothing I can do about it, so.....