Note: Despite the title of this post, I’m probably not going to continue with this series; I originally intended for Part II to involve the ongoing back-and-forth over the latest flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but when I sat down to prepare to write it I realized I was too far removed from some of the minutia of the debate from October and November. I now intend to rework some of what I originally intended to say into a larger project that might not see the light of day until closer to when it’s completed. This post will partly cover some of the same ground as Part I, but not so much so as to keep from justifying making it part of the series. Also note that this post was mostly written by Saturday morning/afternoon, before the shooting at the Trump rally.
Since Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance at last month’s debate, the Democrats have been in a state of simultaneous panic and paralysis. Initially, what few Democrats were willing to go on the record stood by Biden as the party’s candidate, but a steady drumbeat of anonymously sourced stories casting doubt on Biden’s ability to serve as President now, let alone the next four years, culminated last week in actor George Clooney writing an op-ed explaining his experience with Biden at a fundraiser and making the case to replace him. Despite Biden proclaiming that he’s not going anywhere, elected Democrats up to and including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have intimated that he still has a decision to make. More and more Democrats are convinced that Biden cannot possibly defeat Donald Trump in November if he’s the nominee, and are becoming desperate to nudge him out of the race.
But it’s not clear that they have any better alternatives. Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be both the most natural, straightforward choice to replace Biden and the one least likely to alienate the party’s key constituencies of Blacks, women, and Black women, is deeply unpopular in her own right, tremendously disappointed in her attempt at a presidential run in 2020 to the point of dropping out before any contests were held, and before the debate, was one of the loudest defenders of Biden’s mental acuity, raising concerns that nominating her would simply shift the nexus of controversy from “Biden isn’t mentally fit for the job” to “Harris tried to sell the American public on someone not mentally fit for the job”. (Indeed, if it weren’t for Harris’ baggage renominating Biden might not be so fraught – though by the same token, neither would replacing him with her.) Most other candidates that have been floated – Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer – are fairly milquetoast white-bread Democrats whose national appeal is relatively untested and that might not be able to overcome the extent to which their selection would alienate Blacks, and might still have to answer for the Democrats’ initially sticking with Biden. Any of them would have to overcome the fact that they weren’t selected in a traditional open primary process, regardless of what schemes the Democrats come up with to simulate one.
An attitude I’ve seen on Twitter is that Democratic politicians and celebrities like Clooney and Jon Stewart, and donors like Abigail Disney, are privileged enough to be relatively fine in a second Trump reign, so can afford to take the risk of replacing Biden, but ordinary people can’t. But there is no risk-free option here. Replacing Biden would expose the Democratic Party as weak and present a nominee that doesn’t necessarily have the confidence of the base, but not replacing Biden would not only mean sticking with a candidate that was already an underdog before the debate in large part because of people’s concerns about his age and mental acuity (concerns that now might not be completely surmountable no matter how well Biden does the rest of the way given what’s been reported and where he might be in four years), and hoping against hope that he doesn’t have any more “senior moments” between now and the election that would underscore those concerns (or even devolve to the point that they’d have to invoke the 25th Amendment and effectively run Harris anyway), but send the message that the Democratic Party doesn’t care what the people whose votes they need think about their nominee, that they will take what the party gives them and like it. Sometimes doing nothing is the riskiest path of all.
No matter what the Democrats do, they are staring at the prospect of, more likely than not, losing the election to Donald Trump, possibly even in the popular vote, allowing him to entrench his imperial, fascistic vision of the presidency and the GOP to enact their Project 2025 and Agenda 47 plans, potentially resulting in the last competitive presidential election for the United States as we know it. No matter where you are within the Democratic coalition, so long as you’re in it this is an unfathomable outcome. Democrats have loudly complained that the media is spending too much time on Biden’s age and not enough on Trump’s own mental deficiencies and destructive agenda. The idea that the American people would seemingly vote for fascism over democracy because democracy’s defender is too old seems outrageous.
But if it were to happen, it wouldn’t be because of Biden’s age and mental acuity alone. Rather, those things, and the way the Democrats have handled them, have ultimately underscored what it is that has made Trump so consistently popular in the first place.
Since 2016, support for Trump has been associated with a belief in a “deep state” running the government, picking the people that Americans can vote for and ensuring the resulting policies don’t change much regardless of who gets elected, working against Trump and his policies and ultimately responsible for every controversy associated with him, and trotting out Biden in 2020 as a stooge to restore their agenda after the Trump era. It’s a conspiratorial view of the situation, but it reflects a deep distrust and frustration with American politics that has been a throughline of the American fabric since Watergate but has been brought to a boil since the 2008 financial crisis and saw the lid blown off in 2016. It explains why Trump could end up in the White House after 2016 despite all the warnings and concerns about his authoritarian leanings, connections to Russia, general fitness for the office, and general repulsiveness; it explains why he could have come as close as he did to returning there in 2020 despite the mess of the previous four years and ensuing impeachment; and it explains why, despite adding “insurrectionist” and “convicted felon” to his resume in the meantime, he not only has a very real chance to do it again but may well be favored to do so.
That the Democrats are the only major party left in America committed to democracy is all the more distressing because they haven’t exactly presented a good image of it. Not only did they seemingly stack the deck in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders in 2016, but in doing so they badly misread the electorate and its desire for substantial, radical change, or just how deep Hillary’s negative image was and how it would torpedo her chances in the general election. The way the 2020 primary process played out similarly alienated Sanders supporters with Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out right before Super Tuesday despite seemingly not having much reason to, leaving Sandersites stewing over the establishment clearing the field for Biden, but at least that ultimately demonstrated how the Sanders wing of the party was still a decided minority compared to the bulk of the party being more moderate.
But now? Now someone who was already older when he was elected than Ronald Reagan was when he left office has somewhat selfishly decided to run for a second term to extend his record as the oldest president in history another four years. Despite polls already showing him to be an underdog before the debate in no small part due to concerns about his age, and – if the reports are to be believed – despite much of the party apparatus knowing about his mental deficiencies because they’d been covering for them, his party didn’t attempt to change his mind but instead cleared the field and didn’t give him any substantial primary opposition, with party surrogates loudly proclaiming his mental fitness and attacking those who dared question it until the debate exposed that the emperor had no clothes, some initially continuing to proclaim his mental fitness despite personal misgivings, and may end up scrambling to potentially replace him with someone who hasn’t been tested by the primary process at all.
The Democrats will either trot out Biden as their nominee despite numerous reports – and the evidence of voters’ lying eyes – of his inability to handle the rigors of the job, or replace him with someone who won’t even necessarily have the confidence of their base and can’t really have been selected in a fully transparent process. Oh, and part of what’s been reported since the debate is that part of how Biden’s mental deficiencies have been dealt with is by keeping certain elements of policy away from him entirely and in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. Do you see how all this might lead some voters to think that maybe those QAnon freaks have a point and maybe Biden, and/or whoever the Democrats nominate, really is being propped up by a “deep state”?
What the Democratic establishment hasn’t yet internalized is that a substantial chunk of the electorate is losing faith in democracy itself. The party that has positioned itself as the last defenders of democracy has responded to the Trump era by essentially declaring at least twice that the American people will take what they give them and like it despite glaring and obvious deficiencies in their chosen candidates, because what are you going to do, vote for the fascist? The Democratic establishment has fallen badly out of touch with the American people and too wrapped up in running an “old boys’ club” propping up those figures that have most ingratiated themselves in the party apparatus while working against those that might present unorthodox views. There simply aren’t enough voters who care enough about democracy for Trump’s fascism alone to disqualify him and ensure the Democrat’s election. That means democracy needs to beat fascism – and if it were doing that, we wouldn’t be in this spot to begin with.
When democracy faced what was, until recently, its biggest crisis in history in the midst of the Great Depression, America – and through it, ultimately, the world – was kept from embracing fascism in large part because Franklin Roosevelt convinced the Democratic establishment that the system needed wide-ranging reform to work for the common man, resulting in the New Deal. But no FDR is coming down the pike today; the Democratic establishment is too well-set up to weed such a figure out, leaving it ill-equipped to even stand up to Trump, let alone to enact the sorts of reforms America badly needs that would prevent a Trump from coming within a thousand miles of the White House to begin with.
Obama seemed like he would be that kind of figure, but under his administration the response to the crisis was to bail out the big banks and do little to remedy the toll the crisis took on ordinary people, while Obama spent all his political capital on a health-care reform most people would hope not to need and that introduced upheavals that soured many on the whole thing, leaving the establishment to be blindsided by the rise of Trump and Sanders. Elizabeth Warren might have been that kind of figure, but failed to gain traction in 2020 due to debate performances that undermined her image of “having a plan for that” and being demonized among the most devoted and online Sandersites as a crypto-Republican out to undermine the Sanders movement despite everything she’d done to prove her bona fides since her conversion to the Democrats. Too many Americans have decided that the system is set up to prevent anyone who’d really work for them from getting anywhere – and in lieu of that, the next best thing is to blow the whole system up. If the establishment didn’t get the message in 2016 and aren’t getting the message now, the only alternative is the nuclear option. Never mind that Trump in reality would only further entrench America’s oligarchy and the power of his fellow billionaires; he’s the only lever desperate Americans have left, and if he does mark the end of American democracy, well, considering how Democrats have “defended” it, was it really worth saving?
Of course, for all their talk about saving democracy, the Democrats don’t tend to act like they want to save it either, at least if it requires doing anything that might alienate their donors. This was underscored when Biden told George Stephanopoulos that if he stayed in the race and Trump won, he would take heart that at least he tried his best, as though the election was just some kind of sporting event where winning or losing doesn’t matter as much as playing fair and with sportsmanship, not a fight for the fate of democracy. If Clooney and Stewart are privileged enough to be fine in a second Trump era, surely these comments mark Biden as all the more so. Surviving the Trump era with democracy intact, however much by the skin of its teeth, has already meant Democrats run the risk of crying wolf the more they paint Trump as an existential threat to democracy; comments like this compound that by making it look like the Democrats only paint themselves as the last defenders of democracy to bolster their own power. And if that continues, at some point, too many people will agree with this tweet that got over four thousand retweets: “Why do we have to save democracy every four years? Why can’t democracy save me for once.”
The threat to democracy that Trump represents will never be defeated, and democracy will never truly be saved, until wide-ranging reform is instituted that makes government more responsive to the people so that people don’t feel the need to vote for a Trump to begin with. If the Democrats are serious about the threat to democracy from a return of Trump to the White House, they must promise to institute such reform, make the necessity of it clear, and invite people from all parts of the political spectrum to work on what such reform might entail. Such reform might range from simple, stopgap steps like expanding the Supreme Court, to more controversial steps such as expanding the House, federal anti-gerrymandering legislation, and filibuster reform, to something as radical as examining the Constitution itself. Whatever it entails, reform must start with the Democratic Party itself, rebuilding its relationships with the people whose votes they need and understanding their views and values, recognizing when to push identity politics and when to ensure the in-group is doing well enough that they can, seriously standing up to and exposing the Republicans’ unpopular policies, and putting serving the people and the country ahead of protecting the well-connected within their ranks. But if all they’re offering is more of the same indifference and cronyism that have left people turning to Trump to begin with, they’ll deserve whatever they get.
It is said that, after finishing work on the Constitution, when Benjamin Franklin was asked whether America would be a monarchy or a republic, he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The Democrats have established themselves as keepers of the republic, and if it is lost, for all the talk about the Republicans’ turn to fascism or the media being in hock to billionaires and being obsessed with equivocating between both sides or the people taking democracy for granted, any examination of why must take a long, hard look at the Democratic Party and their cowardice, corruption, and ultimate failure to adequately stand up to Trump and the movement he represents.