Former Vice-President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders are the current front-runners to become the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential candidate. It is, as it happens, perfectly apt that these two septuagenarians represent the two factions of today’s party: the corrupt and the crazy. Biden is the Centre Left candidate, simultaneously reformist and moderate, idealistic and pragmatic, and recognisably corrupt after leveraging his later vice-presidential years for the advantage of his entrepreneurial son Hunter Biden. Peter Schweizer’s Secret Empires (2018) is a disturbing exposé of Hunter’s lucrative dealings in China and Ukraine while his father served in the Obama administration (from 2009 to 2017). Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is the far Left candidate, an unapologetic socialist and an unreconstructed radical. He said much about the merits of Really Existing Socialism during his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union and has recanted none of it. Biden and Sanders both fall under the category of “progressive” and yet their political histories are obviously disparate: together, however, they exemplify the sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory nature of what it means, in today’s administrative state, to be “progressive”.
Progressiveness, Joe Biden emphasised even before his campaign launch on April 25, was not the sole domain of Bernie Sanders and the other twenty-odd Democratic candidates. Biden has been around a long time (thirty-six years as a Delaware senator and eight years as vice-president) but progressive politics has been around a long time, too. On March 16, for instance, Biden told a Delaware audience that he possessed the most progressive credentials of anybody seeking the Democratic nomination: “I’m told I get criticised by the new Left. I have the most progressive record for anybody running.” Bernie Sanders immediately countered that he “didn’t think there’s much question” that he—that is, Sanders—was the “most progressive” Democratic candidate: “Joe voted for the war in Iraq, I led the effort against it. Joe voted for NAFTA and permanent trade relations, trade agreements with China. I led the effort against that. Joe voted for the deregulation of Wall Street. I voted against that.” Ouch.
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See Also:
(1) Biden: ‘I Got 150,000 Troops Out of Iraq.’ WaPo Fact-Checker: ‘Um, no.’
(3) Trump Intensifies War With the Squad: ‘Very Racist Group of Troublemakers’
(4) Mitt Romney: John McCain reprised
(5) Trump campaign’s plastic straws selling like hotcakes
