2024: A Guide to the Worst Year of our Lives
2024 is going to be extremely dispiriting for a variety of reasons, predominantly because the ongoing horrific genocide in Gaza will likely be continuing into the new year. A more mundane reason for those of us in the US will be that the 2024 Presidential Election and the discourse surrounding it are almost guaranteed to be perhaps the stupidest and most deranged ever. While this has been an easy prediction to make for at the very least every Presidential Election since 2016, the dynamics of an all but assured second matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump with Joe Biden’s all out embrace of Netanyahu’s genocide in the background make it so it’s likely the discourse from all sides will be uniquely unhinged and anything resembling a good outcome impossible.
One thing I’m surprised I’ve seen very little commentary on is the fact that it’s almost certainly going to be the same two elderly men running against each other as did in 2020. If seeing the exact same two major Party candidates for two Presidential Election cycles in a row seems strange it should. The last time this happened was 1956 when Adlai Stevenson had a rematch against Dwight Eisenhower (and lost again) nearly 70 years ago. All the other examples are from the 19th century when the Parties stood for different things and the nomination process was much less democratic.
It’s extremely depressing to think that the two major parties and the whole political system in the 21st century can (likely) think of nothing better or more creative to do than to nominate the same two old dudes who it nominated last time, including Biden who in his first term is already the oldest sitting President ever. It doesn’t have to be like this! During the 2020 campaign season Biden repeatedly suggested that he would step down after his first term owing to his age. This all seems to have been completely memory holed.
As for Trump I’m very surprised at how few people have noted how strange it is that a major Party would renominate someone who had already lost as an incumbent (whatever his deranged base may believe). The previous one term Republican President was George H.W. Bush. After he lost in 1992 he was not looked at as the leader of his Party anymore and there was never any thought that he should get a second chance against Bill Clinton in 1996. Similarly there was no thought that Jimmy Carter should get a chance at a rematch with Reagan in 1984.
Yet here we are, living some really shitty version of Eternal Return. But what makes everything so maddening is not merely the fact of almost certainly having the same two candidates, it’s the fact that it’s going to be the same discourse as ever about them, only stupider, worse, and more divorced from reality than ever. If you are any sort of centrist to liberal to left person you’re familiar with it: you will be encouraged or perhaps you will encourage others to vote for/volunteer for/publicly support (especially in battleground states) the Dem candidate, no matter how bad they are, due to a “lesser of two evils” or perhaps if people want to sound more contemporary a “harm reduction” argument.
The problem is, and what’s going to make having these discussions in 2024 particularly hard to take is, it’s hard to think of Biden as the lesser evil when he’s cosigned and aided the greatest evil imaginable in the Gaza Strip. If you don’t subscribe to the moral argument here for some weird reason look at it in purely electoral terms. Biden just barely won the Electoral College in 2020, only winning because of a few tens of thousands of key votes in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. This includes tens of thousands of Arab-American voters in places like Dearborn Michigan as well as one assumes thousands of others sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. If, as Biden seems to believe, defeating Donald Trump again is so important to preserving American democracy, why do something that is not just simply evil but also so damaging to the fragile coalition that brought you to power? Why make the “lesser of two evil” argument so much harder to make?
The best explanation I’ve seen of this effect is the brilliant Hamilton Nolan essay “Don’t Make Your Voters Step Over Dead Bodies”. He begins with this analogy:
Remember when Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose voters”? That was interpreted by those of us who dislike Trump as a shocking statement about his hypnotized fan base — a group of voters so worshipful and in thrall to his cult of personality that they would not even reassess their support if their candidate killed someone. What a pathetic, brainwashed crew! We tut-tutted in disgust.
Joe Biden has directly facilitated, and is continuing to facilitate, the violent deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza. These deaths, or most of them at least, would not have occurred without Joe Biden’s direct support, both politically, diplomatically, and in the form of arms and military aid. It has, for the past two months, been fully within Joe Biden’s power to bring this slaughter to an end. Israel’s political and military leaders, from Netanyahu on down, have publicly acknowledged the absolute necessity of U.S. support for Israel’s ability to continue carrying out its brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. The Biden administration may not shrug or plead ignorance or claim that they are not responsible. Their leverage over Israel’s actions is, in practical terms, absolute. Joe Biden bears responsibility for what is happening, and what continues to happen every day there. It is a policy choice. It is, on balance, his preference. When American diplomats say that they wish that fewer civilians were being killed, it means nothing; unstated is the fact that the civilian death toll has not yet risen to the level that would make the US government decide that things had gone too far. What has happened so far in Gaza is, in the judgment of Joe Biden, acceptable. Though it is difficult now to keep a daily tally of deaths, we know that thousands of Palestinian children have been killed by Israel so far.
If you are opposed to a president who shoots one person in the middle of Fifth Avenue, how do you feel about a president who facilitates the violent deaths of six or eight or ten thousand children? I imagine that such a line of children would stretch for miles up Fifth Avenue. Joe Biden could calmly walk down each block, shooting one child after another in the head, his body count far exceeding Trump’s little daydream. This is a grotesque vision to imagine. But it is, effectively, what Joe Biden has done with his policy choices. Thousands of dead children — crushed, maimed, blown up with bombs that we provided. Joe Biden did that. He did not have to shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue. The deaths are his just the same.
The issue isn’t just that this all morally grotesque. The issue is that Biden is apparently so cavalier about winning the next election, which he says is the last stand for American democracy, that he doesn’t mind forcing his potential voters to accept this grotesqueness:
We already know that countless thousands of Muslim voters in swing states will not vote for Biden now. (And understandably so. If I murdered your family members and then demanded that you vote for me because I am better than the other guy, would you find that persuasive?) We know that millions of young voters are now disgusted by the prospect of voting for Biden. It is a certainty that the Democratic National Convention, which happens next August in Chicago, will be the scene of vicious street protests rather than a tableau of party unity. In today’s America, where the red-and-blue party divide is so sharp, presidential elections are largely a function of voter enthusiasm. The side with more enthusiasm has more voter turnout, and the side where voters on the margins feel less enthusiastic has lower turnout, and loses. Divided parties are weak. Which party do you think is more divided now? This is the problem. The staggering irresponsibility of the Biden administration to risk what everyone agrees is a threat to our very democracy in order to prop up a humanitarian slaughter boggles the mind.
Biden’s support for Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza isn’t some aberration. Far right ultra-Zionism has been one of the through lines of his incredibly long career as a politician, but for some reason Biden’s extremely intense support for Israel was not something regularly brought up in the US media until this most recent crisis. Biden is to the right of Ronald Reagan on Israel/Palestine. In response to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982 Reagan said that what he was seeing was a “Holocaust” and it had to stop. Begin acted offended over Reagan’s choice of words but the bombing did stop. But Biden as a US Senator supported Israel’s invasion of Lebanon one hundred percent. Even going so far as to say at the time that:
if he were in charge, he’d “forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.” It was such an extreme statement that Begin himself tried to distance himself from it. Speaking to the Israeli press, he reassured them that he “disassociated [himself] from these remarks” and informed Biden that “it is forbidden to hurt women and children.”
Full context: Menachem Begin was a terrorist. Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary group he founded and led, committed horrific acts of ethnic cleansing, including wholesale massacres of civilians. That he, of all people, felt compelled to distance himself from Biden’s words speaks volumes.
I don’t remember the issue ever coming up during the 2020 Democratic Primary, which was 99 percent about domestic issues, nor even the general election campaigns, and would’ve assumed that Biden was a centrist. Instead, Biden is on the far right on Israel/Palestine and his stance is in keeping with what virtually any Republican President would support or worse. This complicates the “lesser of two evils” narrative quite a bit.
What’s remarkable is, while he’s generally portrayed as some sort of genial centrist, there are several major policy areas where Biden isn’t merely a conservative Democrat, but an outright conservative as far right as any Republican including Trump. The most salient issue is immigration, where, in order to keep giving billions in military funding to both Ukraine and Israel, Biden has made clear that he is willing to make a deal with Congressional Republicans and enact a harsh, far right Trump-like regime of immigration policies. This is an especially illustrative and ironic example because it directly shows how support for war abroad directly results in right wing policies domestically. But also it’s especially striking given how central the “kids in cages!” at the border have been to the rhetoric of the “vote blue no matter who” crowd. The fact that Israel arrests and detains thousands of children without trial doesn’t appear to be a concern for most of them however.
Though his far right Zionist views are somewhat extreme even in comparison to other conservative politicians, they are in keeping with a 50 year career of foreign policy hawkishness. In fact this is a big part of the reason Obama picked Biden as his running mate. He needed an old “foreign policy hand,” meaning someone who reflected the pro-war Washington consensus, to balance out Obama’s relative youth, the fact that he was talking about Closing Guantanamo Bay etc. While Obama’s victory in 2008 was seen broadly as a repudiation of George W Bush’s foreign policy, Biden had been an cheerleader for what was seen as Bush’s signature failure: the Iraq War. Biden didn’t merely vote for the war, as did Hillary Clinton and many other prominent Democratic Senators. He Chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and so played a Major role in promoting the war in the US Senate.
It’s not just foreign policy where Biden has had a career of promoting right wing views. Perhaps the most famous example is his career of promoting pro-cop, pro-mass incarceration “tough on crime” policy. The centerpiece of this of course is the “1994 Crime Bill.” Biden did as much or perhaps more to set up and promulgate the era of mass incarceration and the war on drugs than perhaps any single other person. With a series of Bills he pushed through the Senate in the 80s and 90s leading up to the 94 Crime Bill he moved Democratic criminal justice policy far to the right, giving conservative Republicans a policy win they’d dreamed of since the 60s.
These are just some of the most obvious ones but on a host of issues and throughout his career Joe Biden has displayed policy preferences and views that aren’t merely those of a middle of the road or even conservative Democrat, he is essentially a Republican, a DINO. Joe Biden is basically Joe Manchin. There are a few areas in which Biden isn’t as bad as the Senator from West Virginia. Though Biden is an unreliable ally to labor, seeing as how he crushed the railroad strike, he at least seems not as psychotically opposed to labor unions as virtually every Republican politician is. Biden seems to now be against cuts to Social Security, though he was vociferously for such schemes throughout his Senate career.
The fact is that, while both sides will no doubt frame the coming campaign as if it’s an existential struggle or a Civil War, there is a remarkable amount of policy similarity between Trump’s term and Biden’s term as President, culminating in this moment now where Biden is willing to enact Trump’s immigration policies in order to keep bombing children in Gaza. This is normally the point at which Democrats start talking about Roe and Supreme Court picks which, well . . .
So with the lack of any concrete or popular achievement to point to the Dem argument has had to resort to abstraction: you have to vote for Biden to “defend democracy.” What’s maddening about this argument is that there is a lot of truth to it: I have no doubt that if Trump does become President again he will enact a scary agenda with much more chance of success than the first time around when he didn’t really expect to become President and wasn’t prepared. I even have the imagination to think that if Trump is still President in 2028 he may take another ago at stealing the Presidential election or worse.
But “defending democracy,” if by that you mean the current system, is a tough sell when the current system is delivering these results. You’re asking people to defend a rule, basically, and “if the rule you followed brought you this, of what use was the rule?” If democracy means tens of thousands of children massacred and starved to death in Palestine with the full enthusiastic support of the upholder of democracy, Joe Biden, then what use is democracy? Of course the answer is this isn’t real democracy. A system where something like 60% of the people and 80% of the President’s own Party all favor and immediate cease fire but the bombs keep dropping and tank shells keep firing and the summary point blank executions keep happening and people are being starved to death as a weapon of war isn’t democracy.
I have no great advice on how to get through the coming Presidential Election discourse. But just know that if you’re feeling unusually depressed about it you’re not alone. And there is no actually good outcome. Just keep your attention on the things that matter and don’t be browbeaten or shamed into caring about the things that don’t. Free Palestine!
