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Evo Morales's Party's Massive Victory in Bolivia Is a Rebuke to US Elites Who Hailed the Coup |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51228"><span class="small">Shawn Gude, Jacobin</span></a>
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Tuesday, 20 October 2020 12:26 |
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Gude writes: "Immediately after last year's right-wing coup in Bolivia, US elites, including many liberals, celebrated or excused the putsch against Evo Morales. Yesterday's resounding electoral win for Morales's party is a rebuke to all of their bloviating nonsense - and a massive triumph for democracy in Bolivia."
A man holds a poster during a rally in support of Bolivia's president Evo Morales in front of the Bolivian Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico, November 11, 2019. (photo: Edgard Garrido/Reuters)
Evo Morales's Party's Massive Victory in Bolivia Is a Rebuke to US Elites Who Hailed the Coup
By Shawn Gude, Jacobin
20 October 20
Immediately after last year’s right-wing coup in Bolivia, US elites, including many liberals, celebrated or excused the putsch against Evo Morales. Yesterday’s resounding electoral win for Morales’s party is a rebuke to all of their bloviating nonsense — and a massive triumph for democracy in Bolivia.
 ovember 10, 2019 was a day of celebration in the citadels of US punditry and elite policymaking. Evo Morales was gone. The populist dragon had been slain. No longer would the “pink tide” stalk their imaginations.
The US right, veterans of defining democracy as its opposite, hailed the coup against Morales as a popular victory. According to the Wall Street Journal, the putsch represented a “democratic breakout in Bolivia.” The Trump administration praised the military for “abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution” and confidently predicted that “we are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.
One of the most jubilant in the cheering crowd was Yascha Mounk — stenographer of the liberal center, doyen of populist studies. “Evo Morales’ resignation is not a coup,” Mounk said in a Twitter missive on November 11. “[I]t is one of the few big victories democracy has won in recent years.” He expanded on that bold claim in an Atlantic article the same day:
Like many populists on both the left and the right, Morales claimed to wield power in the name of the people. But after weeks of mass protests in La Paz and other Bolivian cities, and the rapid crumbling of his support both within law enforcement and his own political party, it was his loss of legitimacy among the majority of his own countrymen that forced Morales to resign yesterday.
Nowhere did Mounk mention the millions pulled out of extreme poverty, the raft of public services initiated, or, perhaps most impressively, the incorporation of indigenous people — for centuries scorned and hated by the ruling elite — into Bolivian politics as equal members. These, apparently, were incidental to the health of the country’s democracy. Morales, you see, was just like the right-winger Jair Bolsonaro (himself the beneficiary of a coup carried out against a pink-tide party that, in Mounk’s mind, was probably also a populist excrescence).
Nor did a couple weeks’ hindsight cause Mounk to change his tune. In a November 26 article, Mounk argued that Morales was trying to “incite civil war,” denounced right and left “populists” as different varieties of the same anti-democratic beast, and insisted that Morales’s removal was a boon for democracy. “The latest developments in La Paz should, whatever their result, inspire fear in the hearts of the world’s populist dictators.”
Elsewhere in the precincts of elite centrist and center-left opinion, handwringing and both-sides apologetics prevailed. The Washington Post editorial board acknowledged Morales’s successes while blaming him for the “anarchy” that had engulfed the country, and the New York Times editorial board, while declining to celebrate the coup, nevertheless solemnly concluded that Morales had to be deposed.
The forced ouster of an elected leader is by definition a setback to democracy, and so a moment of risk. But when a leader resorts to brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care by the electorate, as President Evo Morales did in Bolivia, it is he who sheds his legitimacy, and forcing him out often becomes the only remaining option.
All of this is worth remembering in light of what happened yesterday: Luis Arce, the presidential candidate for Morales’s MAS party, won 52 percent of the vote according to preliminary results, beating his opponents so handily that Jeanine Áñez, the leader of the right-wing coup government, was forced to concede defeat.
MAS’s crushing victory, if I can borrow a phrase from Mounk, is “one of the few big victories democracy has won in recent years.” Over the past year, Áñez’s government has persecuted MAS supporters and repeatedly pushed back elections. The US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) doggedly circulated the lie that Morales had engaged in election fraud. The Bolivian far right — an amalgamation of anti-indigenous racists and pro-business potentates — was given time to regroup and wrest back power.
They all failed. Bolivian workers and indigenous people braved the repression and restored democracy to the country.
Sunday’s election result is a rebuke to the coup-makers and right-wingers, to the Washington establishment and Western opponents of leftist governments, to the pundits and thinkers who equate democracy with liberal capitalism and excoriate deviations from that orthodoxy as populist hysteria.
And as for Yascha Mounk? We’ll have to wait with bated breath for his opinion. His pen and his Twitter account have gone conspicuously silent.
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RSN: Our Looming Referendum |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 20 October 2020 12:04 |
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Rosenblum writes: "I should be in the Mediterranean now tracking refugee flotillas and Mafia fleets poaching the last bluefin tuna. But my back porch, where the birds and the bees duke it out over drops of water, offers an alternate view of a world facing endgame."
Joe Biden. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP/Shutterstock)
Our Looming Referendum
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
20 October 20
 UCSON — I should be in the Mediterranean now tracking refugee flotillas and Mafia fleets poaching the last bluefin tuna. But my back porch, where the birds and the bees duke it out over drops of water, offers an alternate view of a world facing endgame.
America’s referendumb will determine soon whether sentient citizens can rescue democracy from an unhinged megalomaniac who ignores its Constitution, sides with its enemies, and encourages people to die in droves for his own political advantage.
Donald Trump praises terrorists who plotted to behead a governor and armed militias bent on civil war. He embraces QAnon candidates who believe Democrats torture and eat children in satanic rites. With Hitlerian tactics, he has assassinated truth in America.
Joe Biden, he thunders at rallies, should be jailed for running an “organized crime family.” And so, even now, should Hillary Clinton.
Yet that’s not the worst of it. If he thwarts global action against climate collapse for four years more, we will near the tipping point. As T.S. Eliot foresaw a century ago in “Hollow Men,” the world we know would end not with a bang but with a whimper.
This is not apocalyptic doomsaying, simply observable fact. Only the time frame is in doubt. Soaring temperatures shred Earth’s ecological web. Oceans rise, storms rage, forests burn, crops shrivel. Crocodiles and cockroaches will survive, but humans won’t.
Meantime, as the lone superpower committed to personal freedoms and human dignity cedes its dominant role to China, Russia, and despotic regional powers, Americans increasingly need survival training to venture out into much of the world.
Arizona, a crucial swing state, is a telling vantage point on how America got to be where it is today, ripe for a bombastic con man devoid of scruples or human empathy.
I bought this place in the 1980s to settle in eventually after roaming the world, rootless as a hydroponic tomato. Covid-19 planted me here for a while ahead of schedule in an altered state that has changed beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations.
Back then, Jacqueline Sharkey, as perspicacious as journalists get, sat on my porch and explained what she’d just seen taking root in Central America, where Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters” and rightwing generals were shaping corrupt, vicious societies that today force so many people to seek asylum at our border.
I saw that worsen in 1989, reporting on CIA recruits who sent cocaine to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida on the same aircraft that brought them arms. Mitch McConnell blocked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from holding anyone to account. I moved on, but Jacqueline kept watching the evolving process.
During the Reagan years, she saw David and Charles Koch set out to shape kids’ minds with a long-term strategy to reshape society. They targeted local school boards across America, then funded state legislators who appropriate funds and approve curricula.
“Rightwing thinkers and politicians developed a plan for getting as much control as possible of all levels of government,” Jacqueline told me. “By starting at the grassroots, they could control what young people learned — and did not learn.”
Civics and geography were distractions; critical thinking was dangerous. They wanted a work force with basic skills, while private schools and elite colleges shaped a ruling class. Later, they paid for libertarian philosophy departments in American universities.
Early on, they targeted the University of Arizona, where I returned each winter from Paris to teach international reporting. One year, I had to move my office in the Latin-American Studies Department. The Kochs’ Freedom Center colonized the whole floor.
Before David Koch died in 2019 with a fortune of $50.5 billion, he said his plan achieved more of its aims under Trump than in all the years since Reagan. He scorned Trump’s antics and isolationism but saw him as a useful tool for conservative control.
Dumbed-down schools, social media, and partisan broadcasters that blanket rural areas update Abraham Lincoln’s dictum: You can fool lots of people all of the time. When Trump says “socialism,” his cultists think Stalin, not Social Security or Sweden.
Long-time Arizonans are leery when Trump evokes herd immunity; they know what happens when crazed stupid beasts stampede. But they fear godless commies coming for their guns. Newcomers demonize “Mexicans” who have been here for centuries.
Polls show the state leans blue, but voters may be swayed by protests across America, which Trump’s zealots provoke into violence. Phoenix suburbs are rock-ribbed Republican. Biden-Harris signs prevail in Tucson. But there are plenty of others.
The other day, I drove out to a hilltop in the Tucson Mountains I sold long ago while in France. The realtor described the buyer as “a Border Patrol guy.” He had built an imposing home, gated and topped with an enormous American flag.
I couldn’t read the huge red banner beneath it, so I drove between two stone pillars for a closer look. It said, “Trump.” I slammed my jeep into reverse in case anyone opened fire. Unnecessary perhaps, but that’s the mood as our referendumb plays out.
Martha McSally’s fight to keep her appointed Senate seat epitomizes today’s politics. She is a fierce ally in Trump’s war on healthcare and preexisting conditions but claims the opposite. She touts her Air Force past while trying hard to cut veterans’ benefits.
Her preposterous assaults on Mark Kelly would be laughable in a society that deals in facts. Kelly, a combat pilot and astronaut, turned to successful business ventures to support his ex-congresswoman wife, Gabby Giffords, shot in 2011 by a deranged Tucsonan.
Transparent deception is the new norm. Long after Tony Fauci called out Trump for twisting his words in a campaign commercial, the ad still runs unchanged. Clumsy splicing has Fauci saying that Trump could not have done better against Covid-19.
With so much at stake, the national discourse mires in the weeds over domestic issues — healthcare, the Court, race relations, police reform — which all depend on a united opposition against legislators and governors who allow Trump to run amok.
But Democrats quarrel over where Biden stands on their specific issues. As all of this plays out on the TV indoors, the real world’s most pressing needs are plain to see from my back porch.
Those honeybees that dispute water rights at the hummingbird feeder are called Africanized or, unkindly, killer bees. They’re not a threat if you let them be. If you mess with them, they’ll chase you in a giant swarm for a half a mile.
One could make much of that metaphor: African-American bees brought across an ocean without being asked now asserting legitimate equal rights. But I’m not touching that. Look instead at the larger picture.
All species, Homo sapiens included, are interlinked with variations and overlaps. Nature pays no heed to manmade laws. This is the stuff of endless discussion. But as Americans cast the most crucial votes of our lives, this is no time for polemics.
Police who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis touched off pent-up righteous outrage across America against systemic brutality toward off-white Americans. Pro-Trump thugs turned peaceful protest into violent clashes, which Republicans now exploit.
That triggered a national focus on identity politics. Kamala Harris is a well-qualified candidate for vice president. But she is also pegged as an Indian-American black woman whose Jamaican father says his forebears owned slaves. Nothing is simple.
In Biden’s ABC Town Hall, a young man wanted evidence he wasn’t racist because of an online interview in May with a guy named Charlamagne tha God. “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump,” he said then, “then you ain’t black.” Most people missed the rest: “Look at my record, man.”
Was that a gaffe, an insult, or just Biden banter? That can be hashed out after November, along with all other domestic issues. If Trump is turned loose to add more heat in a world on the boil, nothing else will matter.
From my porch, I can see pines in the Catalinas, where we skied in winter and camped by mountain streams in summer. Lightning-sparked fires just burned 120,000 acres of forest, dried to tinder by 20 years of drought. We need to get our priorities straight.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Trump and Barrett's Threat to Abortion and LGBTQ Rights Is Simply Un-American |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 20 October 2020 10:56 |
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Reich writes: "Trump and many Republicans insist that whether to wear a mask or to go to work during a pandemic should be personal choices. Yet what a woman does with her own body, or whether same-sex couples can marry, should be decided by government."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Trump and Barrett's Threat to Abortion and LGBTQ Rights Is Simply Un-American
By Robert Reich, Guardian UK
20 October 20
Republicans won’t tell Americans to wear masks to beat Covid, but will say what women and gay people can and cannot do
rump and many Republicans insist that whether to wear a mask or to go to work during a pandemic should be personal choices. Yet what a woman does with her own body, or whether same-sex couples can marry, should be decided by government.
It’s a tortured, upside-down view of freedom. Yet it’s remarkably prevalent even as the pandemic resurges – America is back up to more than 60,000 new cases a day, the highest rate since July, and numbers continue to rise – and as the Senate considers Trump’s pick for the supreme court.
By contrast, Joe Biden has wisely declared he would do “whatever it takes” to stop the pandemic, including mandating masks and locking down the entire economy if scientists recommend it.
“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” he said.
Biden also wants to protect both abortion and same-sex marriage from government intrusion – in 2012 he memorably declared his support of the latter before even Barack Obama did so.
Trump’s opposite approaches, discouraging masks and other Covid restrictions while seeking government intrusion into the most intimate decisions anyone makes, have become the de facto centerpieces of his campaign.
At his “town hall” on Thursday night, Trump falsely claimed that most people who wear masks contract the virus.
He also criticized governors for ordering lockdowns, adding that the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, “wants to be a dictator”. He was speaking just one week after state and federal authorities announced they had thwarted an alleged plot to kidnap and possibly kill Whitmer.
The attorney general, William Barr – once again contesting Trump for the most wacky analogy – has called state lockdown orders the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history” since slavery.
Yet at the very same time Trump and his fellow-travelers defend people’s freedom to infect others or become infected with Covid-19, they’re inviting government to intrude into the most intimate aspects of personal life.
Trump has promised that the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision, establishing a federal right to abortion, will be reversed “because I am putting pro-life justices on the court”.
Much of the controversy over Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett hinges on her putative willingness to repeal Roe.
While an appeals court judge, Barrett ruled in favor of a law requiring doctors to inform the parents of any minor seeking an abortion, without exceptions, and also joined a dissent suggesting an Indiana law requiring burial or cremation of fetal remains was constitutional.
A Justice Barrett might also provide the deciding vote for reversing Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 supreme court decision protecting same-sex marriage. Only three members of the majority in that case remain on the court.
Barrett says her views are rooted in the “text” of the constitution. That’s a worrisome omen given that earlier this month justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito opined that the right to same-sex marriage “is found nowhere in the text” of the constitution.
What’s public, what’s private and where should government intervene? The question suffuses the impending election and much else in modern American life.
It is nonsensical to argue, as do Trump and his allies, that government cannot mandate masks or close businesses during a pandemic but can prevent women from having abortions and same-sex couples from marrying.
The underlying issue is the common good, what we owe each other as members of the same society.
During wartime, we expect government to intrude on our daily lives for the common good: drafting us into armies, converting our workplaces and businesses, demanding we sacrifice normal pleasures and conveniences. During a pandemic as grave as this one we should expect no less intrusion, in order that we not expose others to the risk of contracting the virus.
But we have no right to impose on others our moral or religious views about when life begins or the nature and meaning of marriage. The common good requires instead that we honor such profoundly personal decisions.
Public or private? We owe it to each other to understand the distinction.
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Joe Biden for President |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56698"><span class="small">Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Tuesday, 20 October 2020 08:16 |
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Excerpt: "We've lived for the past four years under a man categorically unfit to be president. Fortunately for America, Joe Biden is Donald Trump's opposite in nearly every category."
Joe Biden. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
Joe Biden for President
By Rolling Stone
20 October 20
Vice President Biden’s platform offers progressive solutions to every major problem facing the country, and he has the experience to put those principles into practice
 e’ve lived for the past four years under a man categorically unfit to be president. Fortunately for America, Joe Biden is Donald Trump’s opposite in nearly every category: The Democratic presidential nominee evinces competence, compassion, steadiness, integrity, and restraint. Perhaps most important in this moment, Biden holds a profound respect for the institutions of American democracy, as well as a deep knowledge about how our government — and our system of checks and balances — is meant to work; he aspires to lead the nation as its president, not its dictator. The 2020 election, then, offers the nation a chance to reboot and rebuild from the racist, authoritarian, know-nothing wreckage wrought by the 45th president. And there are few Americans better suited to the challenge than Joe Biden.
It is no exaggeration to say that the American experiment hangs in the balance in the November election. Four years of Trump have left 215,000 of us and counting dead from a serious but preventable public-health crisis, tens of millions out of work or underemployed, a cataclysmic climate crisis ignored, our democratic institutions in disrepair, and the public’s faith in its elected representatives at an all-time low.
Is America capable of stepping back from this precipice? Of turning away from the politics of resentment to rebuild our country based on a shared idea of American progress? That remains to be seen, but electing Biden is the first step. Despite the multiple crises at hand, Biden envisions a revival anchored in unity. “We have too bright a future to have it shipwrecked on the shoals of anger and hate and division,” Biden said in an October address near the battlefield at Gettysburg.
The Democrat has delivered more than just happy talk. Biden has been leading by example in his campaign. He showed confidence and bridge-building by tapping his harshest critic from the primary debates, California Sen. Kamala Harris, as his running mate. And Biden has won a diverse backing that would have been inconceivable outside of this 2020 moment. Think of it as a coalition of the decent, ranging from Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left, to “Never Trumpers” John Kasich, Cindy McCain, and Bill Kristol on the right. Biden has promised to be a president for all Americans, standing in contrast to Trump, who has only governed for his partisans and once mused aloud that the nation’s pandemic death toll didn’t look so bad “if you take the blue states out.”
Biden’s broad acceptability is his strength. But inside his big tent, Biden’s platform offers progressive solutions to every major problem facing the country. And the former vice president has the experience to put that platform into practice:
A Bold Plan for Climate Change
The danger of climate change is not a future concern. It is our deadly present. As the wildfires ravaging the West and the record number of named storms in the Atlantic this summer have made clear, we are already living with the dangerous results of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Trump and his party live in denial, rejecting basic climate science and pushing ahead with policies that permit the unfettered drilling of fossil fuels.
Biden, by contrast, believes in science, and names the “existential threat” we are facing in global warming. He has embraced the spirit of the Green New Deal, outlining a path to limit the catastrophic heating of the planet by achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. This would be realized through a $2 trillion investment in America — including clean-energy plants, solarized and weatherized homes, and carbon-free transportation networks — that would create millions of sustainable jobs. “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax,’?” Biden has said. “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs.’?”
Climate change is a global crisis. And Biden also has the foreign-policy chops, honed over decades of service, to not only reverse Trump’s course for America as a rogue nation on climate, but to also reassert U.S. leadership, moving the world toward equitable climate solutions.
A Path to Racial Justice
Biden recognizes America’s systemic racism, and is unabashed in denouncing the poisonous purveyors of white supremacy, including the current president — who praised the torch-carrying neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville as “very fine people” and who did not denounce violent groups like the Proud Boys when prompted in a debate, instructing them instead to “stand by.”
As a four-decade veteran of Washington, Biden has amends to make. The 1994 crime bill that he helped usher through the Senate expanded America’s prison-industrial complex. But Biden, despite his age, has retained agility in his thinking. The world has changed, and Biden is responsive to it. His selection of Harris made history, creating the chance that a black woman will be a heartbeat away from the presidency, and Biden has promised that Harris will be his partner in governing America. This decision kept faith with the key Democratic constituency that sealed Biden’s nomination. It also built on Biden’s promise to be a “transition president” who will pass the baton to what he calls “the most open, the least prejudiced” generation now coming of age in America. A key part of Trump’s political project has been to make white supremacy just another ideology in the American political spectrum. Biden promises an America where hate has no quarter. “I made a mistake about something,” Biden said recently. “I thought you could defeat hate.?.?.?.?It only hides. And when someone in authority breathes oxygen under that rock, it legitimizes those folks to come on out from under the rocks.”
Protecting LGBTQ Rights
Biden vows to reverse course on the Trump administration’s openly discriminatory actions and policies toward the LGBTQ community. Biden would enforce the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of employment discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, ending Trump’s sweeping efforts to the contrary. Biden would allow transgender Americans to serve openly in the armed forces again. He would revoke Trump’s federal permissions to discriminate against LGBTQ people in health care, and he would end the Trump administration’s threats to allow federally funded homeless shelters to turn away trans people and to let federally funded adoption agencies simply reject same-sex couples. Biden, who helped push the Obama administration forward on same-sex marriage, has also vowed to secure passage of the Equality Act, enshrining all these protections into law, thus guarding them from the whims of another administration.
A More Just Immigration Policy
Trump’s rancid anti-immigrant politics have blocked immigration from a wide swath of the Muslim world while forcing U.S. taxpayers to pay billions for “the wall.” The administration’s inhumane actions to separate migrant parents from their children at the border — including mothers from infants — has left a stain on our national character. “It makes a lie of who we are in front of the whole world,” Biden has said, offering policies to revive the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants. Biden promises to protect Dreamers, to process refugees as they arrive at the border (instead of stalling them in dangerous limbo in Mexican border towns), to end for-profit detention centers, and to stop terrorizing law-abiding residents with ICE raids. While insisting he’ll still “control our border,” Biden vows to pursue comprehensive reform that creates a “road map to citizenship” for the 11 million undocumented immigrants who call America home. “When immigrants succeed,” Biden has said, “we all succeed.”
A Fairer Tax Code
Biden seeks to raise trillions of dollars by taxing the nation’s highest incomes, cutting the estate-tax exemption in half, and undoing the most egregious giveaways of Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut. It’s important to be clear-eyed about what Biden offers on this plank. He’s not Sanders — and has bragged in the general election: “I beat the socialist.?.?.?.?Do I look like a socialist?” Biden’s line is that he’s not out to “punish” anyone. Fair enough. But in these punishing times — where hundreds of thousands of small businesses are shuttering through no fault of their own — it’s not punitive to demand that billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who’ve gotten massively richer since the coronavirus hit, pay a larger share to build an economy that works for American workers. Sanders, for example, has introduced a bill to levy a 60 percent tax on wealth gained by billionaires during the pandemic. Biden would be wise not to dismiss such policies out of hand.
Expanding Health Care
Biden — who famously touted the passage of Obamacare as a “big fucking deal” — has vowed to protect the Affordable Care Act from Republican assault, and to expand the program with a public option in the health care exchanges that his campaign insists is “like Medicare” in that it would negotiate with hospitals and doctors to contain costs. The Biden health plan would also make Obamacare’s insurance subsidies more generous and extend them to higher-earning middle-class workers, ensuring that no family pays more than 8.5 percent of their income on health coverage. The situation is critical. More than 5 million Americans have lost workplace insurance coverage in the pandemic — adding to more than 1.25 million who have fallen off the Obamacare rolls under Trump. Independent analysis of Biden’s plan suggests he could expand health coverage to 20 million Americans. If the Trump administration wins a lawsuit seeking to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court is expected to decide in 2021, as many as 23 million Americans could lose their health insurance.
Defending Reproductive Rights
Over his long career, Biden, a Catholic, has equivocated on abortion, saying at times that Roe v. Wade went “too far” and voicing support for the Hyde Amendment, a measure banning federal funding for most abortions. But he has since made significant efforts to put any doubts to rest on his stance, publicly pledging, for example, to codify the protections of Roe into law if it is overturned by a conservative Supreme Court. Biden has further pledged to appoint judges who would support reproductive rights, to restore the birth-control coverage originally included in the Affordable Care Act, to restore funding for Planned Parenthood, and to repeal the gag rules the Trump administration has put in place prohibiting doctors from speaking with their patients about abortion. He’s also pledged he will work to reduce the high U.S. maternal-mortality rate, an epidemic that disproportionately impacts black women.
Navigating the Pandemic
America could hit 300,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic before the end of the year. Trump’s bungled response to the central crisis of his presidency also deepened the accompanying economic disaster that has seen tens of millions thrown out of work.
Biden has proven experience in addressing the intertwined health and economic crises posed by Covid-19. One of his top lieutenants, Ron Klain, was the “Ebola czar” and led the response that safeguarded America from that potentially devastating disease. In contrast to Trump, Biden has a plan for taming the spread of the virus, which would impose a national face-mask mandate and fund the mass deployment of personal protective equipment, testing, and contact tracing, so that schools and businesses might safely reopen.
The challenge of leading an economic recovery is also in Biden’s wheelhouse. As vice president under Obama, he led the implementation of the 2009 Recovery Act, steadily rebuilding the U.S. economy from what was then the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression — and doing so without the scandals and self-dealing that have defined the Trump presidency.
Rebuilding Democracy
Biden will be confronted with the challenge of rebuilding a government corrupted by Trump and his henchmen. The current administration, led by a president impeached for inviting foreign interference in our elections, has politicized pillars of our government that previously operated above the fray. Attorney General Bill Barr has acted as the president’s personal lawyer, telling U.S. attorneys that they work not for the people but for the president. Even the Postal Service has become complicit in Trump’s anti-democratic schemes, with Postmaster Louis DeJoy ripping out mail-sorting machines in blue districts to disrupt the election. “At the heart of DeJoy’s and the Postal Service’s actions,” a judge ruled in September, “is voter disenfranchisement.”
The daily functioning of our government could, under a Biden administration, be revived following a single Trump term. But if Trump gets another four years, the America as we know it will grow dark and unrecognizable. Corruption at our essential public agencies could take root, and our democracy might never truly recover.
Restoring Our National Character
As much as any specific policy, this election is a referendum on character — the character of the president and the character of the nation. America doesn’t need a saint in the Oval Office. But the country has been reeling with a broken man at the Resolute Desk. Trump is a narcissist and an egotist, a shameless liar and an open bigot, a man who simply cannot understand the notion of sacrifice for the greater good, even as he demands unthinking fealty from those in his service.
Biden’s lived experience and expansive empathy make him not just a good, but an outstanding candidate. His keen understanding of loss connects him emotionally to the honest struggles of Americans whom he seeks to serve. And it gives Biden the moral authority to ask the rest of us to sacrifice as well. Biden calls us to the responsibilities of citizenship — to think of ourselves as threads in the fabric of our society, of owing allegiance to one another, individually and as a whole, and of seeing ourselves connected to the values at the core of the American experiment. Trump has broken that creed, insisting such patriotism is for “suckers.” The 45th president preaches a doctrine of extreme individualism, of keeping what’s mine and to hell with my neighbor, even indulging in trollish satisfaction at the suffering of fellow Americans not part of his personality cult.
Every election presents a stark choice. The contrast between the 2020 candidates — and the coalitions behind them — could not be clearer. This is a fight between light and darkness. Rolling Stone is proud to stand in the light and endorse Joe Biden for president. Vote like your country — and perhaps even your life — depends on it.
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