Why We Must Generate Enthusiasm for Joe Biden

We all have a responsibility to make sure that there’s a lot of excitement for a Joe Biden candidacy, or we will face the disastrous consequences of another four years of Trump.

As it becomes more and more obvious that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president, there’s a growing consensus among the left — particularly the intellectuals and the commentariat — that Biden can’t win in a face-off with Donald Trump. The reasons are as varied as the people offering them: he’s too old, he’s too unsure of his footing, he has too much of a record. The most consistent reason I’ve seen, however, is that he fails to generate the type of enthusiasm that has come, for better and worse, to be associated with the candidacies of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and thus, in the minds of many, with electoral victory.

Take, for example, this piece by Nathan Robinson in The Guardian. He spends the entirety of the article demolishing Joe Biden’s candidacy, pointing out every conceivable flaw and exaggerating them to such proportions that, reading it, one could be forgiven for thinking that Biden would never make it past Super Tuesday (the piece was, in fact, written in January 2020, but its arguments are still representative of…