Black freedom matters more than black lives
Don’t vote for Joe Biden
Recently the Democratic Party revealed its policy platform, which didn’t contain almost anything progressives like Bernie Sanders, AOC and others have been fighting for. In the midst of a pandemic, no mention of medicare for all. In the midst of what’s turning out to be the worst economic crisis in generations, no UBI or federal jobs guarantee. Don’t forget climate change! No promises on that either. Yet they still all endorse Biden, giving up their only real leverage to actually negotiate a more progressive platform. Why?
Because Trump is worse.
Four more years of Trump would endanger what progressives patronizingly call “our most vulnerable communities”. Trump would make America less safe for trans people, queer people, black people, minorities, women, etc. For the woke left, anything that makes a minority feel “less safe” is automatically taboo, an act of violence. So even if you hate Biden, hate the two-party system, hate the whole establishment, you still have to vote for it. Doing otherwise would be white privilege!
So the Left can’t really challenge the establishment, our of fear of helping the Republicans, which means we will always lose. Even if the Democratic nominee is only marginally better than the Republican, the “Trump is worse” argument will always defeat us.
The only way to defeat this argument is to take a page out of the Republican playbook and assert that the choice between the Left and the Center is a choice between freedom and slavery. And that freedom is more important than safety and security. We have to speak the unspeakable and say that trans freedom matters more than trans lives. Black freedom matters more than black lives. Muslim freedom matters more than Muslim lives. These are the stakes. Because COVID has shown us that the Right is ready to die to protect its way of life, so if we don’t feel the same way, we’ve already lost.
So for the Left, too, it should be liberty or death. But of course our liberty is very different from the right-wing liberty. Their freedom is the freedom to oppress, our freedom is to be free from oppression. Oppression takes many forms; it can be debt, rent-seeking, predatory lending, segregated schools, homelessness, etc. It depends on the concrete conditions of people, not just on an abstract notion of equal rights in theory, like liberalism holds.
The truth is that liberalism has failed to protect the lives it so dearly wants to protect, and it has failed to do so for decades. Yes, Trump has fueled an ugly hatred towards minorities, sometimes leading to lethal violence. But it pales in comparison to how many black people died because they couldn’t afford insulin that month. How many young gays died because they got kicked out of their homes and had nowhere to go. How many farmers died from sheer despair.
Maybe what liberals are really trying to protect is their own worldview, their own ideology. The idea that they are the good guys, that the world can still be saved with more empathy, when actually it can only be saved by freedom and justice, which only a radical Left can provide.
