Thread by @OzKaterji

Biden fought a robustly centrist political campaign, and heavily defeated the left alternative in the process. He then used that victory to govern with a far more radical agenda than the electorate or his opponents on the left expected him to.

The parallels with Starmer’s approach are already there. I just don’t understand how people are retconning what Biden did to fit into their preferred Labour Party paradigm, the campaign was marked by some of the most hysterical attacks on Biden’s character from his left flank.

The people that need to learn the lessons from the Biden campaign are on the left flank of Labour, who treat every innocuous statement by the current LOTO as an act of war, especially considering that Johnson is nowhere near as unpopular as Trump was at the end of his term

The Labour Left don’t have a Bernie Sanders, because whatever your opinion of the man’s supporters and staffers, he did proactively and sincerely campaign for both Biden and Clinton after his two primary defeats, much to the chagrin of his own former campaigners.

Now, the Left may not want to learn those lessons, it would certainly involve supporting Starmer’s approach to winning over people who voted Tory in 2019, but they should stop pretending that Biden won by listening to rather than ignoring the advice of his left flank.

It’s telling enough that many of the people who have this take were writing off the Biden campaign as a failure before the votes were even counted, they were wrong then and they’re wrong now.

If you don’t believe me, just look back on Biden’s own remarks, during a catastrophic pandemic, about the Left’s biggest campaign issue: Universal Healthcare. Not only did he not campaign on it from the left, he publicly rejected that approach during the campaign.

Now Universal healthcare is something I and most Brits agree with Bernie over Biden, but if you need evidence that Biden won while actively rejecting campaigning on a more radical SocDem agenda - it’s right there!

If you want a Labour government - and if you want to look at Biden as an inspiration for that outcome, the starting point would be not completely missing the point of everything he said & did during the campaign trail. Or you can just keep screeching into the void & learn nothing

Disclaimer - I too misjudged Biden’s agenda - and I publicly endorsed a candidate running to the left of him in Elizabeth Warren. After he proved me wrong, I chose to reflect on how & why I was wrong rather than burying my head in the sand & doubling down on my false narrative.

Politics for me isn’t about cheering on a team - it’s about making difficult compromises to achieve a net positive impact on people’s lives.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans will be alive tomorrow because the Democrats won in 2020. Running on a left ticket might have satisfied more activists, but losing on that ticket would have been an unthinkable, irreversible catastrophe.