Metafilter has had one of its ugly circular firing squads about the Democratic convention, with some saying that they will not vote for Biden because of the neoliberal establishment nastiness. I wrote a comment making the argument from outside the US to vote for Biden, then decided not to post it: if there is one thing I don’t want it’s to get involved in political discussions on Metafilter. But since I do feel rather strongly about it, I copy it below for the edification of no one at all.
I feel I should not enter this conversation, because I’m not American and don’t have a vote. But hell, this is a fighty thread anyway, so here are my thoughts from outside the US, and from a country which has certainly felt a few of the sharp edges of Obama’s foreign policy. I agree that Biden is a pillar of an imperialist neoliberal establishment. I have worked on measles vaccination campaigns in Pakistan; I have lost colleagues in terrorist attacks; I have cowered in the reinforced basement of a bank because there is an angry mob outside protesting an American missile strike sent by Clinton on Afghanistan, and though my experiences are as nothing to those of countless others, believe me, I know something of the damage he and his ilk have caused.
But I think that voting out Trump, and helping to make it a decisive defeat, is the most important political action that any American can take in my lifetime.
If you care about America’s place in the world, you should vote for Biden to get Trump out. The historian Adam Tooze has written some compelling pieces about American power vs American influence. He argues that American power is as strong as ever, but its influence has been sapped by the Trump presidency, coming relatively soon after the Bush presidency. This is obvious to anyone outside the US – I don’t think I’ve met anyone outside America in the past few years with the slightest modicum of political awareness or interest who is not aware of this. I was astonished to see arguments on Metafilter, on another thread, that America is as powerful as it ever was so Trump hasn’t caused all that much damage – yes, that power is still there, but it is power in the sense of the emperor not having any clothes. He might still be surrounded by soldiers, but us commoners feel less and less inclination to heed him except at the point of a pike. Biden will help to slow that declining influence and perhaps even make the United States a respected international player again.
If you don’t care about America’s place in the world, and feel that it’s past time the empire came down, you should still vote for Biden. This is because, like it or not, the empire has been a force for a stability, however flawed, unjust and violent it is; there is a reason it is called the global order, and the US lies at the centre of it. That empire may be fading away, but Trump is ensuring that not only that collapse is not orderly, but that the collapse brings down global – not just American – institutions with it. Trump has killed fewer people in outright wars than Clinton, Bush or Obama, but he’s built on Bush’s legacy of devastating international institutions and hard-won agreements, whether it’s UNESCO (remember his administration defunded UNESCO?) or the Iran deal, or that clown show he pulled with North Korea — and gone a step further by even destroying those that America created and benefited from. This is leading to a world in which power has impunity. There was a time when the US and USSR were powers with relative impunity who were held in place by each other; then there was a time when the US had relative impunity but was held in place by a network of institutions, agreements, norms. Trump has gone a long way to destroying these norms, and as a result a whole host of powers – China, Russia, Turkey, the EU and, separately, France, Saudi Arabia, India and America itself, increasingly act with impunity to other countries and within their own borders. This process is far advanced, and another Trump presidency will accelerate it. A Biden presidency will not reverse or halt it, but it will have enough global goodwill that there is a chance of strengthening some institutions and mores in a way that the transition out of American hegemony is to a less brutal world than we are presently confronting.
So I guess I think, if you care about the dark shadow the United States casts upon the world, you should vote for Biden, simply because that shadow exists, and Trump is giving it a fearful edge that will devastate us all. You should vote for Biden even if you are in a blue state, because I think that given the noises from the administration about not accepting the results, you should try to make sure a Biden victory is as decisive as it can be, both in terms of the popular vote and in terms of the Electoral College. That victory must be decisive because if there is room for Trump and his lot to cast doubt on the electoral process, it will weaken legitimacy within the country and in the meantime render the incoming administration impotent and unconvincing externally. I honestly don’t see how anyone can profess to care for the world outside America’s borders and not see voting for Biden as an urgent necessity.