Dear President-Elect, Sincerely Saudiel Benitez

By Saudiel Benitez

The Democratic Party is a Failure 

The Democratic Party needs to understand that in politics, all that matters is power and control of institutions. This liberal fantasy of unity and bipartisanship has stripped the Democratic party of its political influence and will doom the future of oppressed communities. You can look at some of their failures in contemporary history when Al Gore conceded the Presidency to Bush because “there is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party.” Instead of fighting for control, the Democrats cared more about civility even when Gore would have likely won the recount and become the 43rd President of the United States. The Congressional Black Caucus tried to block the 25 electoral votes that Bush needed to win. The signature of only one senator was needed to hear the objection, but not a single senator signed. Al Gore’s opponent, George W. Bush, along with the Republican party, took the White House and went on to start the Iraq War based on a lie, which was filled with corruption and war crimes. He failed to help during Hurricane Katrina and passed major tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. 

Fast forward to 2020, three of the lawyers that argued the Supreme Court case in defense of Bush, now sit on the Supreme Court. This is where bipartisanship has gotten us. Instead of protesting the nomination of Amy Coney Barret, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein praised Lindsey Graham who ran the confirmation hearing. A majority of Americans thought the confirmation hearings should wait, but after the Democrats played nice with the Republicans, support for ACB among Democrats went up. They legitimized the process by participating in, and we never saw Nancy Pelosi “use every arrow in our quiver” to create any procedural hurdle whatsoever. The Republican Party never concedes. Democrats concede constantly, resulting in Democrats being pushed right while Republicans gaining political power and influence. 

A Joe Biden Administration 

Under a Joe Biden Presidency, I understand that, in your own words “nothing will fundamentally change.” That’s the problem. Our institutions and economy are set up to continue oppressing people. So, here are my “realistic” demands. I do not want to entertain the idea of a Republican in your cabinet as an olive branch to Republicans. When someone votes for you, they are not voting for “the soul of the nation” or a republican, they are voting for democratic policy. Donald Trump may be a one term president, but his ideas and policy are rooted in the worst Republican presidents, such as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. These ideas will keep coming back and Donald Trump-like figures will continue to contest and compete in elections at all levels. 

I want the destruction of your 1994 Crime Bill, particularly to BIPOC communities, to be undone. If you are going to listen to the scientists, then ban fracking. For your Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I want someone who hasn’t worked consulting others on how to dodge EPA regulations, being the one leading the EPA. Joe Biden, “Are you really listening to the science or are you listening to an industry insider, who is controlling the message?” When the Senate panel proposes a $696,000,000,000 budget for the Pentagon during a pandemic, I want pushback and outrage. While millions of Americans fall to poverty, we should not be looking toward increasing defense spending. 

Zoe Lenoard in 1992 wrote a poem called “I Want A President” during the AIDS epidemic that summarizes my feelings:

I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they law down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air conditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. 

The president I want is a president who knows struggle, has experienced it, not just learned about it. Not only that I want the role of president to change. I want the president not just to be a symbolic face for foreign wars and predatory economic policy, but to organize and be the voice of the people. 

Youth and Collective Action 

So what can I do aside from spout my frustrations on twitter, President-Elect? In reality, nothing substianal that will affect the party at a national level. The Democratic Party has failed to listen to the demands of the youth during Occupy Wallstreet and continues to whitewash the radical demands of Black Lives Matter. If every time a corporate democrat gets propped up by the DNC, and young progressives vote for him, what good is my vote? What good is my vote if you’re going to pick Republicans to run your cabinet anyway? 

The only benefit of a Biden Presidency is that the public will be more willing and sympathetic to radical change. But even then I fear people will  become complacent, believing that Biden will solve our problems simply because he is not Trump. Joe Biden, I know you’re not going to be pushed to the left. So instead of relying on politics at the national level, I’m going to rely on my allies. The local community organizers, the people who are actually within the community, are the ones who will create the necessary change we need.