As the United States heads into the November election, an increasing sense of frenzy has permeated the news field with daily revelations of scandals, severe liberal critiques of the current administration, conservative bashings of Biden and an overwhelming amount of coverage dedicated to the multiple ongoing crises. Turning on the news right now is looking into a web of negativity and an obvious sense of widespread disorder and calamity. Thinking of an America that actually exists where Trump has won a second term is almost impossible, yet Biden’s candidacy is exactly what is wrong with this country’s political system.
Plainly, a Trump second term will surely signify a failure of America’s social and political cohesion and would act as an indicator of our democracy’s erosion. Ensuring he does not win a second term means clearly saying Trump’s actions and authoritarian behavior is where the line is drawn. It means that, perhaps, our electoral and political system is functioning in the direction of democracy and liberty and has not been corrupted to an acceptance of facism. However, Biden’s candidacy at its core highlights the underlying, and extremely loud, issue with America’s bipartisan political system, in which his position as a “moderate” Democrat serves only to show how disconnected political public opinion is at the moment.
Understanding Biden’s candidacy as the Democratic Party’s display of attempting to appeal to a larger base just goes to show how our two-party system has revealed a decay of true morals within both parties. Political ideology in this country is far too varied to fit into the scope of only two parties that cover the entire spectrum of liberal thought and conservatism. Regional public opinion exists to a high degree as well, meaning leniencies towards any one party could monopolize entire multi-state areas without accurately showing any political deviances. While the Republican Party has elected and subsequently supported the most extreme manifestation of its platform ideologies, the Democratic Party has chosen to put a front of support of radical ideas while solely focusing attention on centrist and establishment-like agendas.
Biden’s entire character in this presidential race is an attempt at appealing to those who voted for Trump, and who are still thinking of it. What this means, however, is that there is no real commitment to any radical policy that would actually help the Black population, people of color, the Indigenous population or other marginalized groups of this country. Essentially, the Democratic Party has reaffirmed, with this Biden candidacy and framing of a more “moderate” foundation, that while it’s consistently empowered by the votes of Blacks, Indigenous people and people of color, a commitment to ensuring systemic radical change is out of the question for the sake of appealing to white middle America. This reality is the product of the American political system and electoral system that pushes for this bipartisanship and that has been fueling recent rises in polarity and angst, which ultimately only results in the avoidance of minority rights.
When looking at Biden’s and other establishment Democrats in office and their criticisms of Black Lives Matter protests, their “pleas” to stop the violence and continued portrayal of false promises, it is clear to see that Biden’s candidacy only shows us how underrepresented and truly underprotected the concerns of Black people, indigenous people and people of color are in this country, as during a time where the gravity of it is finally being blasted, our Democratic Party is saying they still won’t fix it yet.
