Truthout Column: Biden Offered No Alternative to Trump’s Pro-Police Authoritarianism in Debate

By Yana Singhal

WASHINGTON, DC – In 2020, “the United States experienced some of the largest protests in its history, centered around police brutality and demands for a restructuring of public safety,” and knowing this, “CNN moderators during Thursday night’s presidential debate saw no need to directly question the candidates on these issues,” asserted an op-ed by Alex Vitale in Truthout this week.

Truthout, an independent nonprofit dedicated to commenting on various social justice crises, noted, via Vitale, “while some of these (issues) were raised in the context of the opioid crisis, border control, and the overall well-being of Black Americans, the responses offered by both candidates lacked a clear policy agenda.”

The article comments:Donald Trump’s dominant narrative during the debate was that Joe Biden had diminished the power of the United States by opening the border and allowing millions of “illegal immigrants” released “from prisons, detention centers and mental institutions” to enter the country to “take our jobs,” overwhelm our health and welfare systems, and rape and kill us.

“This narrative of the decline of American strength and security absolves corporations and Wall Street of poisoning themselves, creating massive inequality, and destroying the planet—the real sources of middle- and working-class insecurity. Trump’s solution is to pour ever more resources into policing, prisons, and the deportation state.”

But the editorial notes that “in response to this powerfully toxic narrative, Biden has touted that he has put more police on the streets and made some weak claims that the police and border patrol support him — hardly a progressive or convincing counterweight to Trump’s xenophobic and authoritarian tirades.”

In particular, the op-ed found that when asked about the fentanyl crisis, “Biden focused on interdiction issues, such as blocking precursor chemicals and machinery needed to process fentanyl entering Mexico” while “Trump failed to even answer the question, using his time to hammer home his core messages about migrants as threats and Biden’s general incompetence.”

“Despite being able to respond to Trump’s indifference to American citizens,” Truthout writes, Biden has attempted “to respond to Trump’s tirades, allowing the former president to control the agenda and tone of the debate,” which is seen again and again in various issues posed like racial disparities and police reform.

In light of the outcome of the debate, Truthout states in its editorial: “We need a completely different vision of the overdose crisis, one rooted in the values ​​of care and compassion and the science of drug treatment, harm reduction and safe supply that would save lives, restore families and communities and disempower violent international drug cartels.

“We must recognize the incredible value of immigration, legal and illegal, which has played a major role in revitalizing entire sectors of our economy and regions of our country. We must categorically reject the politics of xenophobia, express values ​​of solidarity and directly address our own role in creating the conditions that have driven people to leave their homes in desperation.”

The Truthout editorial concludes: “Trump’s debate responses reflect his allegiance to the most reactionary forces in our society—those who want to demonize immigrants, unleash unregulated corporate power, and “free the hands” of the police to use whatever forms of violence and humiliation are deemed necessary to restore a fanciful notion of order at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.

“Biden’s weak policies and inconsistent debate responses could give us four more years of Trump and his drive to turn the United States into a despotic kleptocracy.”