A week and a half after we published this text, the Democrats finally compelled Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. But our argument stands—not just because it took almost a month for Biden to withdraw, and not only because he simply passed the torch to Kamala Harris, who represents the same policies and the same ossified bureaucracy, but because all the problems we face remain as intractable as they were before he dropped out. A real solution would not change who the Democratic candidate for president is—it would render it irrelevant.
It would seem like a heavy-handed metaphor if it weren’t our actual reality. A doddering patriarch, representing a collapsing centrist political project, refuses to step aside even as it becomes certain that he faces defeat at the hands of an aspiring autocrat. This encapsulates the global prospects for democracy today.
It’s not a particular politician that has grown senile, but an entire political system.
In 2018, when we described centrist politics as a race to the bottom dooming its adherents to advocate for “the second worst of all possible evils,” it seemed like hyperbole. Now even the most faithful centrist journalists acknowledge that this is indeed occurring.
Joe Biden, admiral of a fleet of sinking ships.
A sclerotic power structure has made social change impossible, rendering disaster inevitable. By imposing unendurable disparities in wealth and power while crushing every response from grassroots movements, the centrists have created a situation in which fascists can masquerade as the only alternative.
Remember, it was Democratic politicians under Obama who coordinated the eviction of the Occupy camps around the United States to prevent anti-capitalism from gaining traction. It was Democrats who increased police funding in Minneapolis, New York, and elsewhere around the country after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, even as millions called for police abolition. It has largely been Democrats evicting the encampments that students at Columbia and other universities established in solidarity with Palestinians.
In 2016 and again in 2020, the Democratic Party machine forced Bernie Sanders aside in favor of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. A Sanders administration would surely have been just as disappointing as the leftist administrations in Spain and Greece proved to be; but the point is that the machinery of the Democratic Party has systematically suppressed every alternative, ultimately contributing to its own undoing. Donald Trump intentionally copied Bernie Sanders to formulate his deceitful rhetoric about “elites” and “globalism.” For a decade now, all around the world, the far right have won all of their gains by pretending to be rebels against the very same elite that they represent.
At the same time, centrist governments have focused on repressing the movements that would form the first line of defense against a fascist takeover, while strengthening the institutions that the fascists will use to impose their rule.
For years now, the entire Democratic establishment has supported Biden even as he doubled down on militarizing police departments, copied Trump’s border policies, and presided over genocide in Palestine. The question of Biden’s age should be beside the point—a politician like him is most dangerous when he is hale and hearty. His supporters have always argued that if Biden weren’t doing all those things, Trump would be the one doing them. Any criticism of Biden was rejected in favor of what his supporters considered a hard-nosed pragmatism.
Suddenly, in the midst of Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27, it became inescapably obvious that their pragmatism was about to lose them the 2024 election, their only alibi for all the atrocities they have endorsed up to this point. But although a chorus of pundits immediately began clamoring to replace Biden by any means, the vast majority of Democratic politicians have somehow remained united behind the president as he insists that he deserves to hold on to power into his late eighties. Every head of state always does this, no matter what the circumstances are, as Mikhail Bakunin pointed out a century and a half ago.
“Nothing is more dangerous for man’s [sic] private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade.” -Mikhail Bakunin
How can the Democrats blithely set about losing what they have vociferously insisted could be the last democratic election in the history of the United States? The party machinery must be so riddled with petty ambition, patronage systems, and clientelism that they can’t change course at any price. Having betrayed what passed as the “left” within the Democratic Party, the machine is now betraying the center—the one group it ostensibly exists to serve. It turns out that if your goal is to force inequality and oppression on people, eventually fascism becomes a more efficient contender for the contract than democracy.
Yes, it’s painful to watch, it’s embarrassing for everyone involved, the implications for the future are terrifying, but it should also be interesting to us that democracy, long touted as the political equivalent of the free market—which supposedly represents the most efficient model for producing solutions to human needs—has brought us to this. This situation should give pause to everyone who has defended electoral strategies on the grounds of pragmatism.
The arguments that many Democrats are advancing for replacing Biden now—in violation of party protocol, when the primaries have already conclusively delivered the nomination to him—have implications that they are not thinking through. If they are prepared to throw out their duly appointed candidate, why stop there? Why not throw out the party machine and party politics itself for good measure? Admitting that they have been living in a fool’s paradise until now should call into question the entire political system that made this fiasco possible.
The problem is not that a single elderly man has his wizened hands on the steering wheel and refuses to release it. Nor is it that a particular cadre within the Democratic Party has monopolized control. The problem is bigger than the loyal functionaries who were prepared to go along with whatever the Democratic leadership decided until two weeks ago. It’s bigger than the entire Democratic Party. It implicates every rank-and-file voter who has been hoping that it would be enough to cast a ballot every year or two and hope for the best, everyone who is looking for a leader to solve the problems of the world on our behalf.
The problem with Biden’s decrepit but apparently intractable grip on power is the same problem that is preventing us from addressing the causes of the heat waves and hurricanes that are buffeting North America right now. It’s the same problem that is preventing us from addressing the catastrophes wrought by capitalism and colonialism. Ultimately, it’s the problem with the state, with hierarchy itself.
Biden’s refusal to step aside is a microcosm of an entire civilization at an impasse. We all know that industrial capitalism is accelerating climate change along with mass extinctions and ecological collapse, but we keep delegating our agency to representatives who answer to the corporations and don’t give a damn about us. We know that entrusting our future to a ruling class that consists of some of the most self-serving people on the planet is not going to make us safe, but we keep voting for them and working for them and buying their wares. We know that burying our heads in the sand is not going to work out for us, but we’re terrified by the prospect of having to recognize ourselves as the ones who must bring about change through our own actions.
All of these are losing strategies that have been sold to us as pragmatism, as the only possible option. Now we are entering the late stages of disaster capitalism, in which wars, economic crises, and environmental disasters are displacing people by the million all around the planet—and it’s no longer possible to avoid recognizing the consequences of this approach, any more than it is possible to deny the fact of Biden’s age and dim prospects of beating Trump.
So don’t stop at pushing out Biden. They all must go. Either we are obliged to respect protocol and the authority of those that protocol raises to power, be they aspiring autocrats or senescent artichokes, or else our freedom and well-being are more important than any set of rules—in which case we could do a lot better than replacing Biden with some other unaccountable politician.
Democratic politics is part of what got us here. If democracy is so fragile that it could be abolished as the consequence of a single election, then it was already bankrupt—it was never a means by which to secure and defend the self-determination that everyone deserves. We need something more ambitious, something capable of facing down fascism as well as forcing out anyone else who tries to hold power. We need a set of values, organizing principles, and strategies that can keep us oriented through the nightmare that is undoubtedly ahead.
Ship of fools.
It’s still possible that the Democratic Party leadership will pull themselves together and change course. Even if they do, the fact that it has taken so long already shows how dangerous it is to depend on them—or on any politicians. A public process to pick a candidate to replace Biden, such as some of the shrewder Democrats have proposed, could re-energize the party, drawing back in some of those who have become alienated. That would just kick the can down the road a bit, ensuring that something like this will recur again. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will not stop it from sinking, not even if more passengers participate in doing so. Ahead of either outright fascism or a renewal of cosmetic reformism, we have to understand this as a window of opportunity, a teachable moment.
It’s eminently possible that, regardless of what the Democrats do over the next four months, Donald Trump will win the election. Then all the institutions that centrists have counted on to protect them—electoral politics, the court system, the police, ordinary citizens’ inclination to obey the law and respect the authorities—will become weapons in the hands of their enemies. Of course, many of us already experience these institutions as our adversaries. Biden’s supporters will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to work alongside us against them, or if, in fact, they prefer fascism to freedom.
Over the past two decades, it has proved easier to burn down police stations and overthrow governments than to achieve modest reforms. That should be instructive. If there is any hope for real change, it will not come of pragmatism, nor efforts at incremental improvements. In the words of Heraclitus, “The known way is an impasse.”
When Trump came to power in 2016, a relatively small number of anarchists immediately set out to demonstrate the sort of tactics via which grassroots movements could engage in decentralized resistance. What started out as a few hundred people on the first day of the Trump administration became millions by May 2020. Heading into another tumultuous period, we should think about what our strategic proposals are today, how they can address and empower the millions of people who will soon be forced to seek solutions outside electoral politics whether they wish to or not.
The centrists don’t deserve to remain in power—and we don’t deserve to live under fascism. It’s up to us to chart another course.
Stormy seas ahead.
Further Reading
- To Change Everything—An anarchist appeal
- Action Resources—How to prepare for the unrest to come
- The Insidious Workings of the Political Ratchet—”The US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back.”
- From Democracy to Freedom—Regarding the difference between government and self-determination
- Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom—How “Nobody is above the law” abets the rise of tyranny
- The Party’s Over—Beyond politics, beyond democracy
