Biden is out, but American plutocracy carries on | US Election 2024

And so it has come to pass.

United States President Joe Biden has dropped out of this year’s presidential race, bowing to pressure from fellow Democrats who feared that his train wreck of a performance in the June presidential debate with Republican candidate Donald Trump – among other episodes – would render the octogenarian less than appealing to the US electorate.

So much for Biden’s decree that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to withdraw from the race. Or maybe the Lord had a hand in it, after all.

To be sure, Biden’s Democratic colleagues did have a point – not that Trump or any other option, Republican or Democrat, is preferable in a committed plutocracy where ballot choices generally range from the transparently sociopathic to the less transparently so.

But Biden’s recent verbal gaffes – including such assertions as that he is the “first Black woman to serve with a Black president” in the US – did suggest that he was perhaps not properly positioned to continue as the commander of the global superpower, linguistically or otherwise.

Objectively speaking, too, his function during the past nine months as abettor-in-chief of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip is decidedly less than charming. But in his July 21 presidential race withdrawal post on the social media platform X, Biden preferred to look on the bright side, assuring his “Fellow Americans” that the US had “made historic investments in rebuilding our Nation, in lowering prescription drug costs for seniors, and in expanding affordable health care to a record number of Americans”.

This may be news to many Americans still struggling with medical bills and overpriced prescription drugs. One of them would have been my own father, a Texas-born US citizen who died of prostate cancer in the nation’s capital Washington, DC, in August 2023 at the age of 72, after being lured into lucrative chemotherapy treatments by his doctors which did nothing but accelerate his demise.

My dad had additionally been prescribed the prostate cancer drug Xtandi, a medication that had been developed with US taxpayer money but not for the purpose of, um, “lowering prescription drug costs for seniors” – as was evident from my parents’ bill of no less than $14,579.01 for a single month’s supply of Xtandi.

Anyway, that’s US capitalism for you – which regrettably is not anything that can be cured via a democratic electoral charade.

Biden’s likely replacement in the presidential race is his current vice president, Kamala Harris. While pundits debate her merits on mainstream media, the one main question is precisely what will become of all of the money raised on behalf of one plutocrat rather than another.

As an Al Jazeera article published in the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal notes: “With no precedent for the current situation, questions have swirled over the fate of Biden’s war chest. In the US, after all, election spending can run into millions, if not billions, of dollars”.

With so many millions and billions swirling around, then, there is obviously not much chance for literal democracy. This despite Biden’s sentimental claim in his X post that “none of this could have been done without you, the American people. Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy”.

While Biden is retreating from his re-election bid, he is not stepping down from the office of the presidency. He has made clear that he considers serving the rest of his term to be “in the best interest of my party and the country” and that he will be focusing on his “duties as President”.

Among his top “duties” that presently require fulfilling is receiving on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House – since genocide is surely in the “best interest of my party and the country”.

As Americans process the whole electoral switcheroo, they would do well to contemplate the plutocratic panorama of their country.

In his goodbye missive, Biden signed off with the words: “I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can’t do – when we do it together. We just have to remember that we are the United States of America.”

And that’s what everyone should remember in the end: that the US is the US no matter who is at the helm and there is “nothing America can’t do” in terms of inflicting global agony.

Biden may be out of the race but American “democracy” – that is, plutocracy – carries on.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.