In past articles I’ve highlighted how dangerous former President Donald Trump, his sycophants and his politics are to American posterity. He is unabashedly fascist and American voters must decide whether such political ideologies have a place in the United States. But this question is not confined to Republican voters.

The 2020 Election was a decision between a Category 5 hurricane and a tropical storm — neither candidate was ideal, but one was clearly more tolerable than the other. However, Democrats must realize that President Biden is not the blueprint for success.

Biden represents everything wrong with pre-Trump politics. Politicians like Biden made Trump seem appealing despite his repulsive behavior. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Biden’s 2020 campaign had the same message: ‘I am not my opponent.’

Trump was something new and fresh in comparison to Hillary Clinton. Trump portrayed the counterpoint Americans desired following the series of disgraces in the 2000s, such as the Iraq War and the Great Recession of 2008.

This is not to say Trump was the solution, but he certainly painted himself as it. Biden did the same in 2020, positioning himself as the candidate who will turn the country away from its current madness. But Biden’s solution is to return to those failed pre-Trump politics.

Biden is undoubtedly an establishment politician. He was first elected to the Senate in 1972, a time in which Democrats began transitioning towards policies to establish deep corporate and government-coordinated capitalism while promoting a sense of American infallibility.

Starting in the early 1970s, Democrats heavily campaigned on a return to normalcy after the chaotic nature of politics in the 1960s. They were the party of reunification and reconciliation. Republicans, however, were devising plans to enact pre-Civil Rights policies under new, colorblind wording. 

Lee Atwater, a major Republican campaign strategist, all but confirmed this Southern strategy in a 1981 interview, noting that instead of attacking Black people directly, Republicans planned to use dog whistles like “states’ rights,” “welfare queens” or “forced busing.”

In the interest of bipartisanship and healing, Democrats ate this rhetoric up.

For example, in 1974 Biden supported desegregated busing in his first term as a senator, voting in favor of the plan twice. By 1981, Biden had shifted his view entirely, saying in a speech on the Senate floor, “No issue has consumed more of my time and energies. … We want to stop court-ordered busing.”

He wasn’t kidding. Between 1975 and 1982, Biden partnered with multiple staunch segregationist Republicans to write and propose amendments that undermined school integration, especially through busing.

This is just an early example of the kind of bipartisanship Biden pledges allegiance to. But bipartisanship, while important to a healthy democracy, is not the end-all and be-all to making good laws. 

In 1994, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden worked across the aisle to draft and pass the now-infamous crimes bill, which contributed significantly to the United States’ astronomical incarceration rates and harsher sentencing of minorities. 

The crimes bill, as Biden defended in an interview in 2016 but has since denounced, “put 100,000 cops in the street” and instituted harsher penalties for all sorts of crimes, including minor drug possession.

He has also acted in a bipartisan way to back congressional War Hawks, voting in favor of sending troops to Iraq in 2002, despite his vocal concerns over how then-President George H.W. Bush handled foreign policy up to then.

This takes us to the modern day. Despite promises to enact police reforms as president, he has resisted Democratic efforts to reallocate police funds to social work programs by siding with Republicans. 

In his 2022 State of the Union address he said, “The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police.” He followed this up with a $37 billion budget request to support law enforcement.

In negotiations for the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden allowed for funds to be used toward carbon capture and storage technology, something environmental experts have questioned the effectiveness of. He also expanded oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and approved Project Willow despite promising not to expand drilling on federal lands.

His bipartisanship led to the removal of provisions from his Build Back Better plan, such as funding for universal preschool education and guaranteed maternity leave. These substantial policies are gone because Biden conceded to congressional penny-pinchers during a time when the United States was in dire need of investment across the board.

Ultimately, Biden is not the blueprint, he’s the placeholder. Bipartisanship is not the solution to every problem — sometimes, bold action is required, but Biden has shown time and time again that he’s incapable of establishing a red line for negotiations. He’s conceded to segregationists, race-baiters, War Hawks, climate deniers and fascists. He might be the least painful option for 2024, but he and those like him cannot be relied on to push America forward.