I should be excited about the Democratic Convention – but I’m disgusted about voting for Biden

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Democratic Party was supposed to have learned its lesson back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump amid a scandal within the Democratic Party Caucus. That was the first proverbial slap in the face for Democratic leaders that they needed to embrace progressive causes. The second was the elections of progressive women to the 2018 Congress. The third was the feverish resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in May of this year, when yet another unarmed black man, George Floyd, was slowly asphyxiated to death by a police officer as he managed to repeatedly gasp, “I can’t breathe.”

And then the pandemic hit. On top of issues such as access to quality healthcare, police brutality against African Americans, and corruption at the highest levels of government, there was now a whole new stake to consider in the upcoming elections. For minorities, especially black people, native Americans and the Latinx community, major socio-economic disparities already existed, and the pandemic simply put them on display for white Americans and the world to gawk at. But Trump’s massive mishandling of the crisis brought the entire economy to the brink of economic depression and put working-class families, working mothers and especially those groups within the black, native American and Latinx communities in further danger.

I spoke with my friend Anisa, a progressive woman of colour, small-business owner and activist. She asked that I not use her last name because business has been hard during the pandemic and she’s concerned that her political views might negatively influence her remaining clientele. Anisa chose not to vote in 2016 because she was opposed to her choices on the ballot, and told me that this year she will be doing the same thing, for the same reasons.

“The mechanism we have available to us is a sham – the candidates are chosen by the DNC or RNC despite popular opinion (we saw this with the DNC essentially staging a coup against Bernie), and with systems in place such as voter suppression, polling place closures, redlining; it isn’t a fair system to begin with, and it’s designed to give the illusion of democracy.” She went on to say, “I do vote – I vote for all the people and policies that consider human rights, not for corporate shills. So why participate in a sham?”

Yes, Trump’s claim that Joe Biden pushed out a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating his son’s involvement with a large private gas company was bogus. But that bogus claim doesn’t change the fact that, to me, it’s completely unacceptable that Biden helped get his son on the board of a company he had no business being on; it’s corruption, it’s nepotism, it’s elitism and it’s wrong. In my view, it’s unforgivable how Biden headed up the 1991 Anita Hill hearings; his authoring of the 1994 crime legislation is responsible for our wildly disproportionate population of incarcerated black and Latinx men, and his support for segregationists is just as inexcusable.

When I asked about whether she’d vote for Biden, Christina Abraham, a civil and human rights attorney in Chicago, told me: “I’m still on the fence about it because I don’t think the Democratic Party has fully taken seriously people of colour and people who are marginalised. It feels like they’re using them to pass their own elitist establishment agenda. We’re torn because we don’t want to keep being used as a facade in this constant competition between parties, neither of which are taking our interests into consideration. The only person who I thought did that was Bernie Sanders and he was completely treated unfairly. On the other hand, we see Trump and the pandemic as a threat to democracy in the US and our system of governance. That’s why the Democratic Party is struggling. Trump should be able to be beaten by any competent professional; it’s not because Trump is good that we run the risk of him actually winning again. It’s because people don’t have faith in the Democratic Party – they’re not listening to the things people actually need like economic and socio-economic equality. The Democratic Party doesn’t have my respect.”

You may be wondering whether Kamala Harris on Biden’s ticket convinced me more? It didn’t. Yes, I am happy to see a black and Asian American woman as a running mate for vice president because representation in government is very important. And I will admit I have enjoyed her grill Trump administration officials in Senate hearings. But Biden’s choice to make her his VP is a simple act of tokenism; it’s all for the sake of appearing progressive. I’ve written before about a Biden-Harris ticket and how she’s a centrist, establishment Democrat with a track record as attorney general of California that doesn’t substantively reflect most progressive values.

I feel backed into a corner. On one side, the fate of my country dangles in front of me with what I believe is a maniacal, traitorous, misogynistic, racist, incompetent, malignant narcissist at its helm. On the other, a vote for the same corrupt establishment politics that led us to the mass incarceration rates of minorities, public disregard for survivors of sexual assault, and the perpetuation of socio-economic disparities that have made communities of colour so vulnerable to the health and economic effects of the pandemic in the first place.

I am disgusted; I feel I have no choice but to vote for the lesser of the two evils this time, even though I know that this is not what progress looks like. A true democracy must offer more than the status quo, two-party candidates, at the presidential level; we need a viable, progressive third-party candidate and a chance for that person to actually win. The end does not justify the means in a real democracy.