How quickly things change! Three weeks ago, I published two columns here on Verdict exploring the then-unresolved situation regarding President Joe Biden’s viability as a presidential candidate. Because I continue to believe that Donald Trump and the Republicans who unquestioningly support him will find a way to deny, negate, and ultimately overturn a loss in the elections later this year, my take on the situation was necessarily fatalistic. Even so, I concluded that future peace (domestic and international) depended on the Democrats doing as well as possible at the polls in November.
Now that Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the Democrat who will almost surely be nominated for President later this month, it seems that nearly everything has changed in U.S. politics. Optimism has replaced pessimism among those who oppose Trump’s nakedly dictatorial ambitions, and confusion has replaced cockiness among Trump and his minions. Notwithstanding my prediction that Republicans will use nefarious means to undo a Harris win, it has indeed become possible (though just barely) to imagine a victory that could be too overwhelming to overturn.
As we move forward into this very uncertain new situation, which is very scary but no longer looks like guaranteed doom, it seems important to take a bit of time to learn some lessons from the events of recent weeks.
As an initial matter, we now can see more clearly than ever how easy it is for people who oppose democracy to make bad-faith arguments wrapped in the language of the very democracy that they would destroy. I will discuss below how one very bad argument was used both by some Democrats and many Republicans to make a very confused claim about what democracy means. I will then note how some dishonest commentators are even complaining about the particular way that Kamala Harris emerged as the likely nominee. Apparently, the process somehow went too well. I wish I were joking.
Finally, I do not want to allow the moment to pass without taking a renewed look at President Biden’s role in the situation today. As I will make clear, I have many positive thoughts about the man. Even so, it is essential not to allow the praise of Biden to become an exercise in rank hagiography, one definition of which is “a biography that treats the person with excessive or undue admiration.” As I will explain, when applauding a person at the end of a long career, we need to be clear-eyed about what he did wrong even as we thank him for what he did right.
Suddenly, the Definition of “Democracy” Has Been Drained of Substance
One of the worst things that came from the intramural battle among Democrats during the three-plus weeks that Biden clung to the nomination was the hijacking of the term “democracy.” Suddenly, we were being told that the only way to honor democratic values was to elevate above all else the votes of people who had gone to the polls in Democratic primaries and caucuses, even though those votes were cast when Biden had only token opposition from two fringe candidates – and before evidence of his cognitive decline had become impossible to downplay or ignore.
Despite how weak that argument is, a surprisingly large group of people vociferously insisted that Biden must be the nominee because he had received the vast majority of the 14 million votes that had been cast during the party’s primary season. In a Dorf on Law column that I published on July 10, I noted that “I laughed out loud” the first time I heard that argument. I assumed that it would quickly go away, simply because it would be too embarrassing for people to say aloud.
Instead, the Biden campaign leaned hard on this empty claim, with a spokesman saying at one point that “the voters have spoken.” One left-of-center columnist at The New York Times even wrote that it would be an “invalidation” of “an open, organized and democratic process” not to nominate Biden. To which one could only reply: “What exactly was ‘democratic’ about this, other than the voting?”
On one level, my reply might seem to be utterly strange. If democracy is not about voting, what is it? But voting is a necessary but insufficient condition to call something democratic. Vladimir Putin received more votes than any of his (not-yet-murdered) opponents every time he ran for President of Russia. The recent election in Venezuela is being challenged as not reflective of the true will of the people. Simply having a voting process is not enough.
This version of the defense of democracy was especially rich in the context of how the Democratic Party had set up the process to decide who should be its presidential nominee. Biden’s team had locked it down from the beginning, making it impossible for any serious opposition to emerge. That is neither unusual nor even necessarily bad for an incumbent who believes that he is the party’s best hope for winning, but it is not democracy at work. A party has the legal and moral right to nominate whomever it wants, and although the primary process emerged as the preferred way to do that over the last half-century or so, it is still a party’s duty to pick its strongest candidate in the context of the general election, which can be quite different from the situation in uncontested primaries earlier in the year.
That, however, is the least of the problems with this attempt to defend primary voting as the sine qua non of democracy. President Biden insisted – rightly – that this year’s election is all about the survival of democracy in the United States, yet his supporters were willing to fetishize votes that were cast in a non-democratic process while ignoring the fact that Biden was no longer the strongest person to stop Trump from truly ending democracy. There is a meaningful analogy here to Abraham Lincoln’s famous “all the laws but one” argument, which he offered at the beginning the Civil War to justify setting aside some laws in order to save the nation:
Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?
President Biden’s declining political viability required Democrats to pause and ask who was the best candidate to stop Trump. Even if the Democrats’ primary process this year had been fully contested and squeaky clean in every respect, it still was necessary for the party as a whole to say, “We can change this, if we need to.” The opinion polls showed that Biden was sinking, and many people who voted for him were hardly to be taken seriously if they had said something like this: “When I voted for him in February, I expected that the party would listen to me, no matter what might change in the following nine months.” That, to be blunt, would be nuts.
The Republicans Shed Crocodile Tears for Democratic Primary Voters
When Biden exited the race, people were right to expect Republicans to react in bizarre ways. Surely the most amusing was Trump’s claim that he should sue the Democrats for fraud, because they had fooled him into spending tens of millions of dollars attacking Biden, only to pull the rug out from underneath Trump with a mere 107 days to go before Election Day.
That was good comedy, but the other response we saw right away was the Republicans suddenly coming to the defense of those poor Biden primary voters who suddenly would “have their votes stolen from them.” Those votes, again, were not part of a general election but were merely votes for delegates to act as proxies at the party’s convention. Even so, Republicans from the Speaker of the House on down were suddenly offering the most obviously bad-faith argument that they could find to say that Biden had to be kept on the ballot. That they seized on the worst argument from Biden’s defenders tells us all that we need to know about those defenders.
Similarly, before Biden’s change of heart, in the Dorf on Law column that I cited above, I noted an argument from one pro-Biden political operative who said that Biden could not step aside because, if he were to do so, he would immediately have to resign from the presidency. Why? Because, she confidently averred, there would be “too much political pressure on Biden to resign,”meaning that he would not be able to stay in office.
That was silly then, and it is silly now. Again, however, Republicans were quick to pick up on this idea, which then took root in conspiracy theories that Biden had in fact died and that Democrats were hiding his death from the public. There is no way to know whether the Republicans would have come up with these dotty ideas on their own, but we know that they did not have to. The Democrats who were telling everyone to shut up about Biden did the Republicans’ work for them. In any event, Biden is still in office, notwithstanding any political pressure to resign, which dissipated almost immediately.
Was Vice President Harris’s Immediate Popularity Somehow Bad?
Before Biden’s exit, one of the true unknowns was what would happen as the party decided what to do next. People were earnestly talking about a messy process, an open convention, and so on. At the time, I viewed the possibility of a partywide meltdown as a serious enough threat to be at least a colorable argument for keeping Biden. In the end, however, his prospects were so dim that even that argument had to be set aside and the risk had to be run.
We now know that the post-Biden world has been the opposite of messy. Even so, has the party’s surprisingly uncontentious group decision to support Harris quieted the critics? Of course not. One notoriously dishonest rightwing pundit griped that the Democrats “deserved a contest, not a coronation,” warning darkly that the party would pay the price for “anointing” Harris too quickly. Another conservative columnist harrumphed about the “rush to Kamala Harris.”
To a certain extent, this is standard punditry of the navel-gazing kind. Whatever is happening must be criticized, and it is easy to imagine that if the Democrats had in fact taken more than a day to land on a replacement for Biden, these two guys and many more would have written longingly about how the Democrats should have been more disciplined and made a decision right away. That is to be expected from people whose view their role as being reflexively contrarian.
In this situation, however, the “whatever it is, I’m against it” argument feels even more forced than usual. It is similar to the first impeachment of Donald Trump, where the Republicans’ sole witness during the House hearings argued that the case against Trump was “wafer thin.” As I retorted at the time:
There is nothing wrong with a thin record. If a prosecutor receives a one-page document, signed by a person saying, “I committed a murder,” providing the date, time, place, and forensic details, that prosecutor would … proceed quickly with the case. [D]evastating evidence is still devastating.
The argument back then was that the case against Trump must be defective because it was too tight, too clear, too simple. The argument now is that the emergence of Harris by acclamation was too tidy, too unified, too easy. Maybe, however, some people are simply looking for something – anything – to criticize.
A Quick Postmortem on President Biden’s Departure
Before concluding, I must add some thoughts about the response among Democrats to Biden’s decision not to stand as the nominee. Again, this is a tale of people who simply grab the first good-enough arguments they can find and run with them.
The people who tried to argue against Biden’s departure have mostly accepted reality, but there has been a notable amount of whining about how this all happened because of a “media feeding frenzy.” I take a back seat to no one when it comes to criticism of the press and its reinforcement of false conventional wisdom, but that is not what happened to Biden. There was a genuine story, something new that demanded answers, and the response for weeks from the Biden camp was evasive and weak. “But his record is so strong that he deserves another term” is not an argument for nominating him, because being on a presidential ticket is not a merit badge.
Similarly, the Biden holdouts claim that everyone was so busy obsessing about his situation that we were all letting Trump off easy. Should we not, they asked, get back to focusing on the real threat to the country? The answer to that, of course, is that Biden’s ongoing refusal to accept reality was the barrier to turning our attention back to Trump.
This was, it turns out, the rare instance in which everyone was paying attention to the right thing, and the only way to move forward was to continue talking about it until the dam broke. I am stunned to say that that part of the public conversation worked.
Finally, then, it is important to talk about the near-unanimity with which center- and left-leaning commentators have lavished praise on Biden for his “selfless” and “brave” decision to serve only one term. Name a positive adjective – heroic, statesmanlike, historic – and it has been applied to Biden in the past eleven days.
We need a reality check. I concede that I was never much of a fan of Biden among the Democratic possibilities in 2020. When he was nominated, I saw a yard sign in a neighbor’s yard in the style of the official Biden-for-President signs, but the words had been changed to: “Fine, Biden. But this is Bullshit.” He was not “the only one who can beat Trump,” as the argument went at the time, and indeed his margins in the key swing states were frighteningly small.
I was especially disheartened when he decided to run for a second term. By then, I had actually come around and was honestly delighted by how good he was as President. Even so, it seemed selfish for him to run again, knowing that his age was already an issue and that his decision to run would not be contested by anyone in the party, due both to personal loyalty and fear of retribution. Like everyone else who opposes Trump, I slumped my shoulders but hoped that voters would turn out against Trump on Election Day.
That is not how it worked out. When Biden finally stepped down, his decision was surely “personally difficult,” as many commentators suggested. It was not, however, as though he was voluntarily denying himself a second term in the most powerful office in the world, because it was obvious that the voters were going to do that for him. In an interview shortly after things began to unravel, Biden said that if he were to lose to Trump, “as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” That is not a brave stance. That is deluded nonsense.
We can be relieved that Biden finally saw reality, and we can thank him for his service and for not making all of this even more difficult. He did not, however, act bravely. Even from a purely personal standpoint, he made the only decision that could protect his legacy. I have no problem when a person’s self-interest coincides with doing the right thing overall, but it is very clear that Biden did what was best for him. That might have been personally painful, but he avoided being judged harshly by history.
In the end, this volatile chapter in U.S. political history is a reminder of just how inane the public conversation can become. Some people seem almost eager to confuse themselves, others knowingly argue in bad faith, and all of them speak with great conviction about things that they clearly do not understand. We should all hope that there will be a notable decrease in that kind of business as usual over the next weeks and months. Too much is riding on getting this right.
