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So close to being joever
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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I don't think it's pressure from the voter base that's doing this. Every primary voter that thinks he's an old racist piece of shit thought that in 2020. There's no grassroots campaign from party voters to back a specific alternative primary candidate; Obama and the DNC successfully killed off any possibility of grassroots party activism for a generation. I think the recent media "discovery" of Biden's longstanding medical issues is being driven by US capital worrying that he looks publicly weak, and a publicly weak president is the one thing they can't have when the president's primary role is to distract the public from the reality of bourgeois rule.
"Publicly weak" to whom?
The voters.
Yes, it's being driven by the donors and media, but they are still responding to voters. It's unfortunately spontaneous and disorganized, which is why I think he's going to be the nominee, but I don't think you can deny the public matters in this.
What are "the voters" going to do about it? "Voters" don't determine the party nominee or the president. The US isn't a democracy. The party bosses committed to going down with the ship aren't doing that because they believe Biden stands a better chance of keeping the presidency; they've all publicly resigned themselves to a second Trump term. The opportunists speculated for replacement as the party nominee all know they stand an even worse chance than Biden at being selected for the presidency. The current internal conflict among the party elite is people who don't expect the party to hold power, and are fighting over what they think will best advance their personal careers by 2028 after Trump leaves office and Biden's dead (from old age, Mr. FBI).
The media and donors suddenly pushing for replacement aren't doing that because they're afraid Biden's public deterioration might make voters vote Trump into office. They'll continue to profit whichever of the two is in office. They're pushing for replacement because they rely on the mythology of the two-party system of liberal democracy in order to keep consumers consuming, investors investing, and voters voting. Most of the country doesn't like Trump, and Biden is doing a bad job of both pretending to represent a meaningful alternative to Trump and pretending to actually be making any of the decisions nominally coming out of the white house. If Democrat voters lose immersion in the fantasy that they have influence and representation in the American system of government, they might start to become more inclined toward political activity outside the acceptable boundaries of "vote, consume, invest". As we saw in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd (among others), once people start engaging in political activity that strays outside those boundaries, capital will feel vulnerable and react with violent police and military crackdowns to protect property.
Not vote for him. The donors seem to be awfully concerned about that, for the reasons you mentioned.
Note that I'm not saying this actually demonstrates that the voters have representation. We're just being placated. What I'm saying is it creates the perception of rank-and-file influence, and that would be disastrous for the Democrats because they can't have voters thinking they matter or getting any ideas. This extends the illusion of so-called democracy, so it's not revolutionary, but it's also a disaster for the Party itself because it also makes voters feel empowered to take further actions in the future.
If they remove Biden it lessens the contradictions in the short term, but in the long term it will only raise them when voters realize they don't control the donor class.