At this point, I think that Tara Reade’s accusation against Joe Biden is at least as likely to be true as not. I don’t have the means at my disposal to say definitively what happened, and I don’t think it’s on me to give an account of what “really” took place. Reade has given an account. We know Biden has a history of inappropriate touching, and we know that powerful men do these sorts of things with regularity. Without a thorough investigation, there’s already a high degree of plausibility.
And the thing that I’ve been really struggling with is, what to do about this information, since it is still overwhelmingly likely he will be Donald Trump’s only credible opponent in November. And Trump must go.
Does it matter that Trump has been credibly accused of worse and more? Does it matter that so has Bill Clinton? And does it matter that Trump is still the one who bragged about grabbing women, laughed it off as “locker room talk”, and has intimated more than once that it’s a real shame he can’t have his way with his own daughter? None of these things have any real bearing on holding Biden accountable for his actions. But this is a lot bigger than Biden.
Four more years of Donald Trump means more hard-right conservatives on the Supreme Court. It means the continuing dismantlement of whatever social welfare apparatuses this country has managed to cobble together. It means the pandemic will continue to be mishandled and so will every unknown crisis that may occur in that time. And it means more arbitrary attacks not only on the environment here, but the global climate.
It’s also entirely possible that Trump will consolidate power in such a way that he can put an end to any meaningful role for any organization in national politics, apart from the Republican party and the Trump Organization.
Those are all terrible outcomes that must be avoided. and there are two ways that can be accomplished: either we elect the Democratic nominee in November, or we dismantle the present constitutional order and put an end to the American presidency.
Yes, yes, the second one, I hear you chanting. Well you aren’t going to make it happen in the next four years without a civil war. This is not a thought experiment, it is a fact. There will be a president next year and it could be Trump. He will come down as hard on an insurrection as any dictator ever has. The power of the state will not be diminished because we have become disillusioned with the character of the men who wield it. And Trump will put the power of the state to work doing terrible, terrible things. We know this because he’s been doing it.
The United States, of course, has been doing terrible things with its power for centuries. But that does not mean that we, who are given some small power to direct the course of future events by electing our leadership, have no obligation to push against an outcome for the country and the world that is measurably and demonstrably worse.
Joe Biden may have committed a crime, and that would be a reason to oppose him. But there are much bigger issues than Biden’s sexual misconduct to consider when determining the ethics of this situation. If we only look at environmental issues, it is not a stretch to say that X number of people will die for every day that Trump continues to make climate policy. AND he’s a rapist.
Imagine these scenarios:
- Biden wins, and you have to live with having voted for some one who is guilty of sexual assault, but who has mitigated the climate disaster to some degree.
- Trump wins and continues to make the climate crisis worse solely to “own the libs”, while being definitely guilty of sexual assault on a wide scale, but you didn’t vote.
I can live with one of these scenarios. I’m not satisfied with it. But ethically speaking, there is a clear choice to be made.
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