One thing that makes Biden & Harris’s respective political instincts & experiences such a liability right now is that “law and order lite” doesn’t work. You can’t thread the needle between confronting inequality & supporting police power. 1/

The liberal attempt to outflank Republicans or triangulate wealthy suburbanites on matters of crime may have won a few elections here and there, but mostly it’s emboldened an ever more brutal punitive state—& an ever more fascist GOP. 2/

Doubling down on punishment and repression comes at the expense of any effort to eliminate inequality in health care, education, etc. It shrinks the electorate, by alienating people from voting (what’s the point) & by stripping criminalized people’s right to vote. 3/

Law and order is an eliminationist program: it wants to exterminate “threats”—marked as Black, indigenous, immigrant, queer, trans, leftist. And when part of the population has been primed around an eliminationist agenda, they’re not gonna vote for the version that claims that 4/

The pandemic brings us to unprecedented times, and of course I don’t know what’s gonna happen in Nov. But I know for sure that having both parties run with a promise to better resource police and to put down popular uprisings is vile and dangerous support for authoritarianism 5/

Rightwing illiberalism remains the far greater danger than centrist liberalism. So, sigh, I hope Biden-Harris win. But what will they have won? 50+ years of law and order lite gave us Tr*mp. Who knows what monsters lie in furthering that agenda? /fin.