This Spot is Reserved for a Bad Person.
This November, America is expected to choose a leader from a pool of two men with extensive histories of putting themselves and their ambitions above the well-being of millions.
Many people may instantly jump to trying their best to justify individual atrocities on these men’s track records, or minimizing them because “that’s not as bad as what the other one has done.” If you’re one of those people, please stop that. You’re helping no one. You’re continuing the long-standing American tradition of accepting that the masochistic way we do things is the only way things can be done. Vote how you wish, but do not stoop so low as to further kick down the victims of these men’s deceits and decisions.
It’s important to note that this is far from the first election between unlikable candidates. It’s just the first in which one of the few genuine politicians with decades of prescient public service was shoved off the path to his party’s nomination in favor of someone who is proving to be the worst candidate in modern American history.
I only began following politics in 2016 for the sake of rooting on Bernie Sanders, and unfortunately then my support was solely from the sidelines. My family is conservative, and as a then-17 year-old, I had virtually no opportunity to volunteer for the candidate who stood for the best of America. Bernie represented clean politics and a culture of compassion, working tirelessly for the people left behind in America. It was crushing to see him lose the Democratic Party’s nomination, but I knew Hillary Clinton had name recognition, political experience, and the party establishment’s superdelegates on her side, and I had already been indoctrinated to believe that all elections come down to choosing the lesser of two evils. Even then, as I came of voting age for the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, everything felt like a cheap joke, but I dutifully wasted my first ballot on a woman who has continued to mock my support for Bernie after she had lost an election to a reality TV show host.
In 2019, I was excited to see Bernie announce his second candidacy, but I was hesitant to throw my full support behind a 78 year-old for the first few months of the primary. I waited with bated breath for another candidate in the packed field to effectively take up the progressive mantle that Bernie built in his 2016 run. It wasn’t until I attended a protest rally that Bernie led at the closure of Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital in July, where he spoke out against the greed of hedge fund multimillionaire Joel Freedman, who was shutting down the building for the sake of replacing hospital rooms with new condos, that I jumped fully onboard his team for 2020. Only Bernie would make such a stop for his campaign and then in the following week travel to Canada with diabetic Americans who cross the border for cheaper insulin. When I heard that the campaign was launching a “Students for Bernie” program over the summer, I signed up and pledged to be a student organizer at Temple University beginning in the fall.
This past year, Temple for Bernie’s organizing group chat grew to 140 student members, and we regularly phonebanked and textbanked to early voting states for the campaign. I even traveled to New Hampshire with 2 friends, and to South Carolina and North Carolina with a bus full of 17 students to knock doors. Students, and the youngest and most diverse generations, saw the unprecendented promise and hope of a Bernie presidency. He has been fighting on the right side of history since well before we were even born, in the Civil Rights Movement, the fight for LGBTQ+ equality, and against the decision to invade Iraq, and we knew he could very well be the first president of our lifetimes to fight tooth and nail for us.
The kneecapping of Bernie’s candidacy was a calculated effort, and it is gaslighting if you are told otherwise. It required shamelessly biased media coverage that no other candidate received, like an admission that he made their “skin crawl,” a presentation from a pseudoscientific “body language” expert to paint Bernie as a misogynist, and comparisons of his supporters to Nazi brownshirts or of Bernie himself to coronavirus. And this is just to name a few egregious examples of mainstream outlets peddling Bernie as a bogeyman to their audiences of millions, which skew in age toward mid-life and beyond. It must just be a coincidence that those were the demographics which came out in droves in the primaries to vote for candidates who were not Bernie Sanders.
And then there was the Super Tuesday shutout. Despite Bernie winning the popular vote in each of the first three states to vote, the media chose to fixate on insignificant details in those contests, such as Amy Klobuchar’s 3rd place finish in New Hampshire. When Joe Biden won a resounding victory in South Carolina, a state which the Democrats have no chance of winning in November, the entire race flipped against Bernie. That weekend between South Carolina and Super Tuesday granted Biden an estimated $100 million in free media coverage. If that weren’t enough, then there were the drop outs of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and their endorsements of Biden. (These seismic shifts in the race were reportedly orchestrated by Barack Obama.) Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, whose campaign aligned most closely to Bernie’s and had so far proven to be less viable than Buttigieg’s or Klobuchar’s, remained in the race on shady SuperPAC money. In addition, Democratic darling Beto O’Rourke and establishment heavy-weights Terry McAuliffe and Harry Reid also came out of the woodwork to throw their weight behind Biden. When Biden won 10 of the 14 states voting on Super Tuesday after having done essentially no campaigning in most of them, Bernie’s campaign became a lost cause. After winning the first 3 states, Bernie had overcome the wretched “electability” argument used heavily against him, but his campaign ultimately no longer had any power once Biden had been pushed to unearned victory after unearned victory on Super Tuesday, supposedly making him the safest choice to run against Trump.
While painting Bernie as a uniquely antagonistic force within the Democratic primary, the media sparsely covered his legacy of compassion as a public servant. For example, there was his interaction with a suicidal veteran in severe medical debt at a town hall, with the vet returning to a later event and offering Bernie his flight jacket as a token of gratitude after getting his bills under control. There was Bernie’s tendency to share the mic at his rallies with audience members so they could speak about their personal struggles. And in the face of this pandemic, there was Bernie’s decision to redirect all campaign fundraising efforts toward collecting donations for organizations providing relief to those affected by the coronavirus virus.
On the other hand, we heard Biden out on the trail telling voters they were “fat,” “full of shit,” and that they should vote for Trump. We heard him reflecting fondly on his work with a virulently racist, segregationist senator. We heard him say that “poor kids are just as bright as white kids.” We heard him lie about being arrested while visiting Nelson Mandela during Apartheid and about his political involvement during the Civil Rights Movement. We heard him encourage voters to go vote in-person amidst a raging pandemic in Arizona, Illinois, Florida, and Wisconsin. We didn’t hear from him during the most critical week of the pandemic, supposedly because his house was being revamped for video and media purposes. These are just instances from his limited-exposure presidential campaign this year. Need I go on about his horribly destructive voting record and sexual abuse allegations?
Unfortunately, Biden’s opponent is even worse. We are all hopefully aware of Trump’s own extensive history of sexual abuse, his views on race, including his wavering condemnation of Neo-Nazis, his corruption, and his extremely short temper during crises, to rattle off a few of his trademarks. If you weren’t fully aware, allow this past sentence and the upcoming media coverage of this election to be a refresher.
With two villainous and inept choices for our next leader, it’s hard to imagine many of the disenfranchised Americans across the country making the trip to their polling locations in November without being promised substantial change. My generation will have lived through two recessions before we hit 30, climate change will bare down on us if we don’t implement substantial change within 10 years, and mental illness and drug addiction epidemics are at stunning heights. Will voting for either of two candidates heavily lobbied by numerous institutions built on greed save us? Of course not.
Instead, I will continue to mourn Bernie’s candidacy. We had a chance to elect a president who called for a society based on empathy. He gathered tens of thousands of people to rallies to chant “not me. Us.” and asked Americans whether they’re willing to fight for someone they don’t know. The culture of leaving others hanging out to dry while wistfully admiring billionaires is finally catching up to America as we wallow in debt, and we just lost our fast path to escape. Bernie was likely a once-in-a-lifetime candidate, and the successful effort to knock him down after our movement had defied so many odds was a reaffirming statement that we are only ever allowed to choose from the worst among us to preside over us.
To be blunt, I have lost a lot of my hope for the future. But for the sake of optimism, maybe the climate scientists are wrong and maybe my generation will miraculously stumble upon opportunities for affordable housing and stable careers, so I will maintain a shred of hope that it will be physically possible over the years for us to keep up the fight for the change we deserve. It is still essential for us to continue the momentum Bernie’s campaign(s) provided us, and we must organize our more local communities to demand we are granted dignified standards of living, and we must begin to take office with the goals of looking out for one another.
Years of settling for less have led us to this most evil “lesser of two evils” election. It will be sad to see where America lies in the near future, as we struggle through the disasters the ruling class has been crafting for us over the years of amoral leadership, but one certainty is that solidarity will be critical for survival through whatever lies ahead. We only have each other, and we must always be willing to fight for someone we don’t know.
