Just as Hillary Clinton positioned her run as a third term for Obama ("America is already great"), so did Biden (and then Harris) position their campaigns as a second Biden term. As Biden said (in 2019): "Nothing would fundamentally change":
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/11/postmortem/#house-divided
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So a vote for Biden would be a vote for another four years of forceful, material support for genocide; another four years of compromise with Democratic establishment on student debt and healthcare gouging; and another four years of a president who was obviously in mental decline.
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Harris's campaign was, "A vote for me is a vote for all of the above (minus the cognitive decline)." Actually, it was worse: by conspicuously failing to campaign on the Biden administration's record on reining in corporate power, a vote for Harris was "A vote for all of the above, minus the mental decline *and* the antitrust."
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Whereas a vote for Trump was a vote for change, a vote to give the establishment a black eye. It was also a vote for genocide and racist pogroms and gangster kleptocracy, which is why many voters stayed home, casting a ballot for America's all-time favorite candidate, "None of the above," while any number of furious people and/or vicious racists turned out for Trump.
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There's one book that crystallizes my thoughts on this better than any other: Naomi Klein's 2023 *Doppelganger*, which analyzes our politics in terms of (warped) "mirror images." One of the mirror world pairings that Klein analyzes is the progressive movement, a coalition of liberals and leftists (led by liberals).
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Like every coalition, the two main groups that constitute "the progressives" do not agree on many important issues, though they do have common goals. Both groups support equality for people of all genders and races, but for liberals, an equal world is one that fixes the problem that 150 straight white men own everything by replacing 75 of them with racialized people, women and queer people (whereas the leftist fix is abolishing the system in which 150 people own everything).
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Biden set himself up as a peacemaker for this coalition, and his "unity task force" divided up the appointments in his administration between the Warren-Sanders leftists and liberals, including those who clearly belonged to the Manchin-Sinematic universe. This meant that his administration worked at cross-purposes to itself, neutering its boldest initiatives, rendering them impotent.
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Take Biden's plan to finally allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharma companies, a move that was *very* long overdue. Before this, the way the system worked was: pharma companies named a price - any price! - and then Uncle Sucker paid it. No other country in the world operates this way, and, of course, the lion's share of pharma R&D costs are already borne by the American public (or they were, until Musk DOGEd the US research budget to death).
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So the American public pays more than anyone else in the world to develop these drugs, and then they pay more than anyone else in the world to buy these drugs. This is madness, and putting an end to it is an obvious political win.
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But Biden found a way to do it that "balanced" the leftist principle of protecting people from capitalist exploitation with the liberal principle of protecting businesses lest the essential function of developing life-saving drugs become a state activity (rather than a market one).
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Biden's solution? A "Build Back Better" plan that would allow the federal government to negotiate *up to* ten drug prices (and as few as *zero* drug prices), *but* the new prices would only kick in *after* the 2024 election, so no one would see the benefit of this in time for the next general election:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/18/bipartisan-consensus/#corruption
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This is a solution that pleases *no one* - and that's the point. Biden and his team viewed the presidency as an institution for making sure everyone was equally unhappy, a philosophy that Anat Shenker-Osorio calls "pizzaburger politics." This is named for a thought-experiment in which half your family wants pizza and the other half wants burgers, so you serve them "pizzaburgers" and make everyone miserable and declare yourself to have the fair-handed wisdom of Solomon.
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(Yes, I'm aware that this analogy has a fatal flaw in that pizzaburgers actually sound *delicious*, but work with me here.)
Biden prided himself on running a pizzaburger presidency, in which every move that satisfied the left of his party was neutralized by a concession to the party's right wing establishment:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change
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(Trump enacted mirror-world version of Biden's pharma price controls: TrumpRx, a program that *claims* to lower drug prices while those prices actually go *up*):
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Biden's pizzaburger compromises made everyone unhappy. He appointed generational talents like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra to run key agencies charged with crushing corporate power, and then gave lifetime appointments to corporate-friendly judges who blocked their rulemakings and penalties:
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Of course, it wasn't just Biden's own judicial appointees who stood in his way; from the Supreme Court on down, on issues from student debt cancellation to noncompetes, judges blocked the Biden administration.
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When this happened, Biden somehow couldn't find his way to his bully pulpit. Rather than working the refs - the way Trump does, in ways that energize his base, stiffens his legislators' resolve and intimidates other judges - Biden tinkered in the margins to find ways to advance half-measures and stayed mum in public.
This compromise-oriented meekness carried over into Biden's relationship with Democratic lawmakers who sold out the American people.
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Rather than campaigning for the primary opponents of monsters like Fetterman, Sinema and Manchin, Biden worked behind the scenes to broker compromises, delivering yet another inedible pizzaburger (and acting hurt and bewildered when no one thanked him for it). The alternative? Constitutional hardball:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/18/states-rights/#cold-civil-war
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It's not clear whether Harris's abbreviated campaign could have made the case that she'd govern in a more muscular fashion as befitted the polycrisis facing the nation, but she didn't even *try*. A couple Democratic Party insiders of my acquaintance tell me that Biden only agreed to step aside on the condition that Harris not criticize his record. I don't know if that's true, but even within that hypothetical constraint, Harris hardly presented herself as an avatar of change.
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She carried on Biden's tradition of conspicuously failing to campaign on the significant achievements of Biden's own trustbusters, and put her brother-in-law, the lawyer who helped Uber crush labor rights in California, in charge of her campaign:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/us/politics/kamala-harris-tony-west.html
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The point of all this is that the American people have, on two occasions, comprehensively rejected the "America is already great"/"Nothing would fundamentally change" politics of a liberal-dominated left/liberal progressive coalition. The senior partners in that coalition have driven the country into a ditch, letting Trump stage a fascist takeover that has us fighting not to *win* another election, but just to *have* another one.
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Americans are sick of being told that their politicians can't do anything because "they're not the Green Lantern:"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
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America isn't already great. If we are to have more elections - much less win them - we will need to mobilize millions of people. You don't do that by telling them to oppose Trumpismo - you get them out in the streets by giving them something to *support*. That was Mamdani's winning message: "I know what a politician can do, and I will *do it*":
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence
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Cory Doctorow
citizenAlex
Jay Peach