About a week and a half ago, President Biden called into MSNBC’s Morning Joe, taking the opportunity to vent some steam regarding the push to have him step aside from the 2024 Democratic ticket.
“I’m getting so frustrated by the elites! Now, I’m not talking about you guys [the Morning Joe hosts], but about the elites in the party who [think] they know so much more.”
It’s taken a little while for the charge to find purchase in the political ecosystem — possibly because Biden himself is a political elite. So it seemed a little hard to make the label stick.
But Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a well-known figure in the Progressive caucus who recently threw her support behind Biden’s continued candidacy, picked up this theme in a video that’s since gone viral.
“This class of donors, decision makers, power players, etc., started to waver after the debate, and they’re looking at the polling and they’re looking at the performance and they’re saying all these things. And they’re saying, ‘We need to jump ship’ — what we all know, right? . . . Big donors, big donors, have been the ones driving this conversation.”
The situation we’re in, where there is no mechanism to force Biden to step aside except for the forcible drying up of funds by big-ticket donors, has exposed a flaw not just in the nomination process but in our current state of democracy — and that at a fundamental level.
At this moment, the next struggle in the offing is, if Biden is persuaded to give up his run, whether to “crown” or “anoint” Vice President Kamala Harris as his heir apparent or to throw the process to an open convention. Many commentators note that the donors tend to favor the former over the latter, mainly because Harris is a known commodity and has been “vetted.” Of course, all of the potentials, being governors of various states, have already undergone vetting, at least as far as security is concerned. What truly seems to be driving the donors is a need or desire to maintain control of determining the nominee.
I submit that that’s actually the crisis. And if we as a party allow the donors to dictate the process, the crisis will not actually resolve but will instead compound.
We need to allow for an open convention to even have a chance to begin to restore the average everyday citizen’s faith in the democratic process. As I see it, if we acquiesce and allow such heavy-handed machinations at this point, this would poison the well for perhaps a generation and may be the element that finally destroys the system, whereas this modicum of good faith of allowing a process to play out could serve as a promissory note of an acknowledgment of a need for reform. It’s not itself a first step but the bare minimum to get to a first step.
Donors began taking control of the democratic process around the time neoliberalism began to rise; and now that there is a crisis in neoliberalism — economically, around the world (generally speaking) — we see a concomitant crisis in the political structure here at home. The donors are the problem, and without this precipitant crisis we everyday people may not have been able to point this out.
So an open convention is the first step in a corrective and, as such, should be the resolution to the scenario of Biden stepping aside from the presidential race. Preemptively choosing Harris will perpetuate the crisis, and that presages even more chaos, perhaps even violence, down the road.
I am unenthusiastic about voting for Biden. But I think the switch at this late point would be a disaster. Chaos. I see people suggesting there would be excitement with an open convention. Maybe. Strange times.