Three Things Missing from the Big Biden Butt Kiss

I get it: in order to induce the declining, cognitively crippled Joe Biden to admit that he’s a catastrophic loser bringing down his party and greatly increasing the likelihood of full Republi-fascist takeover in 2025, Democrats have had to kiss the president’s ass. The only way to get Bernie Sanders’ “good friend” “Genocide Joe” Biden to give up his delegates and allow them to go to someone with (perhaps) a better shot at beating Adolph Trump (the man Trump’s 2024 vice presidential running mate JD Vance called “America’s Hitler” in 2016) was to praise the incumbent as “a man of great integrity with a long and noble record of service to America and humanity including his heroic defeat of Trump in the 2020 election.”

There are three key things missing from this big Biden butt smooch.

First, Biden’s career has not been remotely exemplary, honorable, and virtuous. It been a moral and humanitarian disgrace. Please read this 2019 CounterPunch exposé I wrote on then presidential candidate Biden’s long record of lying, cheating, and dutifully serving finance capital while pretending to be “Blue Collar Joe” and advancing the bloody US empire: “No Joe: On Character, Quality, and Authenticity,” CounterPunch, September 6, 2019.

Consistent with my warning, the Biden presidency has been a Weimar-like capitalist-imperialist nightmare. The Biden administration has:

+ intensified the climate catastrophe.

+ preserved the savage economic insecurity of masses of ordinary Americans living from paycheck to paycheck.

+ swung far to the nativist right on immigration.

+ made no serious effort to stem a horrible eviction crisis.

+ made no serious effort to stop the continuing plague of racist police killings.

+ cost tens of thousands of lives in Ukraine and Palestine.

+ pushed the world closer to nuclear war than it has been in decades.

+ backed horrific genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

+ appeased a women-hating Christian Fascist Supreme Court on abortion rights and more.

+ failed to prosecute Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump in a timely way for trying to overthrow previously normative American bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy.

+ failed to seriously address the nation on the homegrown white supremacist, sexist, nativist, and fascist menace that stalks and the land.

+ let Amerikaner Trumpism-fascism run rampant without calling it out or making any serious effort to seriously wield government power and mobilize masses against it.

Like his Democratic president predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton but without any of their telegenic eloquence and charisma, President Biden is a monument to the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s memorable description of the Democrats as “the inauthentic opposition…Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied in his book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, 2007), they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin wrote, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” The dismal, dollar-drenched Dems would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”

That was an apt characterization of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden presidencies. And since Wolin wrote those words, the Republican Party that Biden and his party have failed to authentically oppose has gone full-on MAGA – something Biden once haltingly described to wealthy donors as “like semi-fascism.” He could have dropped the “like” and the “semi-.” (Trump and the party of Trump check off one fascist box after another, as I have been arguing for years. For starters, see the first three chapters of my latest book).

A second problem with the big Biden butt kiss is that Biden did not heroically defeat Trump in 2020. He didn’t really defeat Trump at all. Covid-19, the racist Minneapolis cop who murdered George Floyd, and Trump himself defeated Trump in 2020. But for the coronavirus, the George Floyd Rebellion, and Trump’s terrible response to both, Biden would surely have lost the last presidential election.

Bear in mind that the only reason Biden has made it to the center stage of American and world history is Barack Obama’s cynical 2008 choice of him as a conservative old white male running mate who would help alleviate moderate voters’ fear of supposed Obama’s supposed (and mythical) Black radicalism. Biden’s two previous presidential campaigns were complete fiascos (kind of like Kamala Harris’s quickly aborted 2020 run). Obama helped rig the Democratic Party presidential nomination for Biden over Sanders in 2020. (For that unpleasant history see the fifth chapter, titled “Joe Biden? Thanks Obama” in my 2020 book Hollow Resistance: Obama Trump and the Politics of Appeasement [CounterPunch Books, 2020]).

Third, here’s something else you didn’t hear in the efforts to kiss Biden’s ass out of the 2024 race: a considerable number of establishment Democrats (and some non-Trump Republicans) were concerned not merely with Biden’s viability and “down ticket” drag on the party but also with his abject fecklessness atop the US American Empire. Consider:

+ The humiliating fiasco of how the US finally left Afghanistan under Biden, reminiscent of the America’s flight from Saigon in 1975 under the hapless toady Gerald Ford,

+ Biden’s pathetic oil-begging fist-bump with the Saudi crown prince MBS, head of an arch-reactionary absolutist state that Biden had in 2020 called a “pariah” nation – a meeting which hardly deterred Riyadh from continuing to sell oil to Washington’s geopolitical rivals.

+ Biden’s ongoing reckless and ridiculous refusal to negotiate some kind of humane settlement of the mass-murderous meatgrinder of an inter-imperialist war he helped spark in Ukraine. It’s a criminal war that never would have happened if a newly elected Biden could have picked up a telephone and told Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would never be invited to the US-led and imperialist North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

+ Biden can warmonger all he wants but Russia is not giving back the territory it has seized. He is by all accounts not even seriously involved in efforts to find a settlement, a telling sign of Washington’s waning power under Biden.

+ Biden’s sloppy and sickening post-October 7 embrace of the Zio-fascist Israeli tyrant Bibi Netanyahu and Biden’s continued funding and equipping of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The support continues as Biden lamely pretends to be concerned about Palestinian civilians. Netanyahu has brazenly thumbed his nose at Biden’s pretend “humanitarian concerns,” showing open contempt for the doddering US president and his calculation that Bibi’s fellow fascist Trump (who’d be happy with a million Gazan deaths by now) will be back in power next January. How pitiful.

The world sees both the weakening of US power and influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East under Biden and the grotesque hypocrisy inherent in the contradiction between (a) Biden’s outrage over the US Empire’s enemy Russia’s bloody invasion of the US imperial ally Ukraine and (b) Biden’s embrace of US imperial asset Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. (The racial dimension of this seeming double standard is not lost on the global South.)

Adam Schiff et al won’t say it in public but they see Biden not only as an electoral liability and as therefore likely to open the door to the white nationalist/neofascist takeover of the imperial homeland; they also see him as a badly failed steward and agent of the American Empire, which they think is best and most effectively managed and advanced by Council on Foreign Relations and Brookings Institution Democrats, not supposedly isolationist Heritage Foundation nationalists.

As Biden signs off to the nation later this week, he should think about one possible act of decency: tell Americans the truth about the fascism that he has helped near consolidation across all three branches of the US government early next year and call for Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump to join him in retiring from politics. After all, Noam Chomsky was on to something in January of 2020 when he told an interviewer that the orange menace was “the most dangerous criminal in human history.”

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).