Shawn Fain Is the President We Deserve. Yes, Really.

Brooks and Dintersmith’s memo imagines a process whereby Biden would step down in
mid-July and open the race to other candidates who would compete in a “primary
sprint” that would involve viral outreach with the help of figures like
Michelle Obama and Taylor Swift. Delegates would then select a candidate
through ranked-choice voting at the convention in August, where the final
nominee would be presented by Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. Brooks and
Dintersmith write that “Democrats can make this Our Finest Hour” or “limp to
shameful, avoidable democracy-ending defeat.” 

When I got into the booth in 2016 and saw Hillary Clinton’s
name on the ticket, I felt a knot in my stomach and did something I thought I
had talked myself out of: I voted for Jill Stein. In the days following the
election, I agonized over my decision, particularly since I made it with the
expectation that Clinton would lose the race. In deep blue Brooklyn (I was
living in Hakeem Jeffries’s congressional district at the time), I rationalized
my choice by telling myself that it would likely come down to the Electoral
College, and if the voters in those crucial margins were not convinced, it was
no one’s fault but her own. The party ran a losing candidate because they felt
it was “her time,” and chose to listen to the polls over the disgruntled voices
of their own base. Today, we don’t even have a lead in the polls. Today,
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, a Democrat, is calling New York a “battleground state.”

I voted for Stein because I believed, as I still do, that we
always need a few strong outside voices who demand that we collectively dream
bigger. To chart a path to a future where we have something to vote for, and
not against. “As long as I gave it my all,” as Biden put it to George Stephanopoulos, is not an
answer to the very real threat of
fascism
we now face. Similarly, you cannot run as the democracy candidate and then hand
the nomination off at the very last minute and expect voters to feel like their
voices have been heard.