I wrote this much yesterday afternoon. Then I paused for dinner, expecting to finish before the debate. And then came the disaster. My postmortem follows.
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The dread and despair I feel these days aren’t anywhere near unique to me, but they are quite new to me. Until recently, my faith in the American people has been fortified by the study of American history: I always thought my patriotism was “evidence-based,” in the sense that when presented with adequate perceived choices, voters would do the right thing. That didn’t have to mean the electorate was consistently or completely rational, according to the political scientists inspired by E..E. Schattschneider and Walter Dean Burnham. No, Gerrard Winstanley’s dictum of 1650, which he offered in exhorting the comrades of the New Model Army, that’s what kept me thinking and hoping in equal measure: “A man knowes no more of righteousness than he hath power to act.” Until the last few months, it seemed to me that just in my lifetime, those powers to act had significantly broadened and deepened, to the point where genuine equity between white and black folk, and between males and females, was a realistic prospect.
No longer. These days, the majority’s power to act is a joke, and that impending equity is at risk. I’m not lamenting the obvious constitutional constraints on such power wielded by the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College, and I’ve never assumed that majority rule is the only meaningful measure of democracy—the exercise of state power can’t be justified by reference to power, whether of money, arms, intelligence, or numbers. I’m thinking instead of the Republican Party, which is unashamed to declare itself willing to rule on behalf of a minority composed of those who want to restore an irretrievable past. These people act as if the Soviet Politbureau is a model of governance: they know better than the majority, which suffers from false consciousness—an inability to grasp the objective truth on offer (or rather, command) from the sacred texts—and so they must rule on behalf of that benighted lot.
Even without the fascist energy, ornament, and purpose that now characterize the party, this belief in minority rule would represent a fundamental threat to the prospect of democracy in the US. I suppose that is why some observers think that the authoritarian impulse that so clearly motivates Trump’s base will outlast its familial superstructure, and why they think, accordingly, that the party system is resilient enough to withstand his destruction of its institutional apparatus. The results of his (re)election will be “horrible,” Damon Linker says, for example, but not catastrophic, with an unearned equanimity born of belief in institutions that almost no one trusts anymore.
He’s wrong, of course. When one party has no intention of persuading the majority because its leaders know there is no way to do so and thus no need to try—having been brain-washed by liberal elites and their educated minions (“Marxists, socialists, radicals, lesbians, queers,” et al.), the besotted majority is beyond the reach of reason—the party system is dead. So is any attempt at compromise with the Politbureau. In this situation, an emergency already exists, and it is not a phantom conjured by the paranoid style of the Left, of so-called “progressives”; nor is it a symptom of the Trump-induced hysteria that turns the prose of never-Trumpers purple. It is the last form of bipartisan consensus: it’s something we can all believe in.
That is the situation going into the debate tonight. If the Republican Party prevails in November, by whatever means, does anyone believe that they won’t repeal the filibuster and legislate their insane purposes, which include the abandonment of Ukraine and Taiwan, the suppression of the right to vote, the end of reproductive rights and birthright citizenship, the destruction of public education, Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, the SEC, the NLRB, and the Fed, not to mention America’s standing in the world, such as it is? Can Joe Biden convey that reality to the electorate? Has anyone in the leadership of the Democratic Party even tried? Robert Kagan and the authors of Project 2025 have told us exactly what will happen when Trump comes to power. Rick Perlstein has done his best to detail the origins of Republican bloodlust. Anybody else?
Well, no. Apart from Thomas Edsall and Jamelle Bouie, who’ve been sounding the alarm for two years now, the New York Times op-ed pages are given over to “moderate conservatives” like Bret Stephens, Pamela Paul, David Brooks, and Ross Douthat, or to solid “across-the-aisle” liberals like Michelle Cottle, Michelle Goldberg, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Kristof (although Goldberg has moved left, in keeping with her allegiance to Elizabeth Warren, and Paul Krugman is still around to cry wolf).
Meanwhile the CEOs have made their peace with the likelihood of Trump’s return to power. So we’re sleepwalking into . . .
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[I wrote this last night and posted it at Facebook just before the debate ended.]
Did Joe Biden have a stroke? The way he is destroying sentences makes Trump sound almost coherent. I have never seen such an awful debate performance in my life, and I'm old enough to remember watching the first one. Even when he's not speaking, Joe looks slightly slack-jawed. It's a disaster. And there is no leadership in the Democratic Party to repair this damage. How do we get Gretchen Witmer and Josh Shapiro to head the ticket come November?
[This I posted an hour ago at same.]
Joe Biden had a clear path to winning the debate last night, so clear that an average 8th-grader could have walked it. There were only 4 issues he had to address, and he could have turned every question into an answer to one of them: 1) the economy/inflation, 2) immigration/crime, 3) reproductive rights, 4) fitness for office. The short answers are (1) Covid, supply chains, corporate greed; (2) The border is a mess, Trump didn't want it fixed, I have done what I can without Congress, and crime is down; (3) Trump is proud to have revoked a constitutional right, turning abortion back to the states is like popular sovereignty ca. 1854, it actually makes things worse by endangering all forms of civil liberty and returning us to a moment when females were under male domination: it's the Slave Power, stupid; 4) Trump is unfit for office because (a) he won't cede power in a fair election, (b) he incited a violent insurrection, (c) he is a known rapist and a convicted felon who is willing to do anything to protect himself against the law.
[Just now (3:30 PM Eastern) at same]
Now the question is the practical one: how to get a new ticket on the state ballots? There's an answer already in the Zoom plans for Ohio, which were made to put Biden on the ballot before the convention in view of a state-specific deadline: get the ticket together everywhere in this manner so that the convention has the candidates in place for their big speeches in Chicago. To get this done, Joe has to step aside, free the delegates, open up the nominating process NOW, and hold a "primary" debate if necessary. Harris can participate with the President's blessing and/or endorsement, but sooner than later the Obamas must step up to endorse some combination of Witmer/Shapiro.
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10Wallace-Ignatiev Pekah Pamella, Tony Daniel and 8 others
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I don't know when I subscribed to your newsletters but now is the time to reverse it. Thanks for everything.
Note: I am not an American but if you think that a "thing" called Biden needs to get relected, even if for an argument sake vividly assuming the "majority", there is something wrong with you.