Repercussions of the Biden-Trump Debate
Sam Seder or one of his analysts in The Majority Report’s team recently made an important point about having the liberal-democracy-vs.-authoritarianism theme as the central framing. When you make that such a central theme without connecting it clearly to more specific issues, it emphasizes the importance of Biden’s ability to defeat Trump. Obviously, that’s always a central concern in elections whether this candidate has the campaign skills to beat the other.
And when you literally make the survival of democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution the definition of the stakes, it makes it dicey to argue that Biden with his obvious cognitive decline should remain as the Democrats’ Presidential candidate.
The German historian and political analyst Annika Brockschmidt summed up the results of the debate:
Particularly fatal: Trump is the easiest opponent a Democratic politician could wish for. He is a would-be dictator, a convicted felon, with a horrible record and political positions that are deeply unpopular with a solid majority of the US population. That Biden looked so weak against him is, to say the least, a disaster.1
Chris Hayes interviewed Ezra Klein on the replacement issue2:
Le Monde reports on Biden’s early recovery attempt on Friday:
It was a completely different man. A reinvigorated doppelgänger. It was impossible not to be stunned watching Joe Biden, on Friday, June 28, speaking in front of overexcited activists in Raleigh, North Carolina. "I know I'm not a young man, that's a given..." Clamors interrupted him. "I don't walk as easily as I used to. I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. I don't debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job."
These words were spoken in a voice that was finally clear and firm, but that emerged 16 hours too late.3
I would have much preferred to see him give a presentation Friday that instead of focusing on his own frailty would have had the press quoting him saying things like: “The convicted felon Trump lied blatantly about abortion and his own abortion policy! The Republicans want to outlaw abortion and contraceptives nationwide and Trump will support them! And a reckless and dishonest character like Trump can never handle crises like the Ukraine war or the Gaza War or even a possible war with Iran!”
But that wasn’t what happened.
The for-and-against liberal democracy framing
Progressives have warned that an abstract focus on the democracy issue was risky. And it’s true that many Democrats would prefer to run on this kind of very broad theme and downplay more specific issues.
My view is that the liberal-democracy-vs.-authoritarianism framing is accurate and necessary. When it’s obvious that democracy and the rule of law are at stake, it would be absurd to avoid talking about it! As Harold Meyerson puts it, “Losing the White House to Donald Trump isn’t like losing it to Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush. It means losing a crucial share of American democracy. The party must nominate somebody else for president, or else it has no raison d’être.”4
The problem is that in most liberal democracies today, everybody nominally supports democracy. The origin of the term “conservatism” was opposition to the French Revolution by people like Edmund Burke. In the 1790s, “conservative” did mean opposition to democracy. But not anymore. Regular people who are conservative generally understand themselves as supporters of democracy who want to “make haste slowly.” So even wannabe dictators have to make some pretense of being for “democracy” in trying to take power.
Trump’s bizarre and ludicrous charge that the Democrats have imported 20 million Mexicans and registered them to vote is one of his more inspired (?) pieces of demagoguery. It uses the far-right xenophobic Great Replacement theory, puts a ready-made excuse out there for the next round of Stop the Steal insurrectionary rhetoric, and promotes an ethnonationalist concept of who “the people” are, i.e., not people of color. Rightwing populists generally promote a Herrenvolk concept of who constitutes The People. In this rightwing populist framing, only those who support the true leader of The People (Trump in the current US version) are the real democracy on whose behalf the Leader is acting.
What comes next?
At this particular moment, the Democratic Party establishment is clearly scrambling for possible alternatives to Biden as the candidate. But it’s clearly a bad situation for the Democratic Presidential campaign.
At the moment, this feels like some kind of major turning point. In six months, it could look like a bump in the road. Maybe, but not likely.
Seeing Thursday’s debate, it’s hard not to think that it was a major display of a real breakdown in the American political system.
It also makes me seriously wonder whether some of Biden’s more puzzling moves in the Russo-Ukraine War and the Gaza War – the latter apparently to be expanded to an new Israeli war on Lebanon any day now – may be a result of his apparently seriously diminishing personal capacity. I have no doubt that Biden is more qualified and competent to run US foreign policy than convicted felon Trump, whose only real concerns are his personal fame, financial benefits to himself, and staying out of prison. But “more qualified than Trump” is nearly the lowest imaginable standard.
With both Ukraine and especially Israel, US policy seems to be running on unexamined old assumptions. It’s been clear since summer of 2023 that it was not going to be possible for Ukraine to militarily defeat Russia and take back all of its occupied territory. But the policy seems to be running on some weird mix of threat inflation (on the part of the NATO countries), blowhard Western triumphalism, and a bitterly cynical approach to using the war to do damage to Russia no matter how badly Ukraine is damaged and how many Ukrainians are killed. The absence of any kind of half-plausible public diplomatic peace initiatives looks like trying to drive a car until it runs out of gas.
And Biden’s downright strange deference to the reckless Benjamin Netanyahu, and ignoring Israel’s repeated crossing of what the Biden Administration has declared to be US “red lines” is certainly more easily explained if we assumed that Biden’s cognitive decline has him hopelessly locked into his career-long assumption that backing what Israel wants to do at the moment is always the best policy. The fact that Biden let things get to the point where Netanyahu is scheduled to give what will effectively be a campaign speech for Trump before Congress next month is really astonishing.
Brockschmidt, Annika (2024): USAUpdate: Das erste (und letzte?) TV-Duell – eine Katastrophe für Joe Biden. Patreon 06/28/2024. <https://www.patreon.com/posts/usaupdate-das-tv-107077943> (Accessed: 2024-29-06). My translation from German.
Could Biden be replaced as the nominee? An open convention, explained. MSNBC YouTube channel 06/29/2024. (Accessed: 2024-29-06).
Smolar, Piotr (2024): Biden tries to calm serious panic as calls to withdraw increase after disastrous debate. Le Monde 06/29/2024. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/06/29/biden-tries-to-calm-serious-panic-as-calls-to-withdraw-increase-after-disastrous-debate_6676119_4.html> (Accessed: 2024-29-06).
Meyerson, Harold (2024): The American Prospect 06/28/2024. <https://prospect.org/politics/2024-06-28-democrats-must-dump-biden-heres-how-debate/> (Accessed: 2024-29-06).
Yes, breakdown. It's almost as if everything potentially flawed about our whole system has suddenly come to light. We cannot get rid of a criminal president, we cannot protect ourselves against wildly overreaching judges, we cannot prevent minority rule, we cannot address political extremism at every level, we no longer have an 'overlapping consensus' on fundamental political values, we do not have a healthy media, with ideas coming from a wide variety of people concerned about the citizenry, the public has stopped conceiving of themselves as citizens, we now have open political corruption in the judiciary which cannot be addressed, some states are one party fiefdoms, run for corporate and religious interests, political instruments no longer have authority over wide swathes of the coercive apparatus of the state--police forces and some portions of homeland security. We are seeing the freedom of speech wildly attacked by the state. The most law-disrespecting citizens are armed to the teeth, threatening the lives and rights of expression of other citizens. We have gradually lost many rights.
The constitutional crisis people feared had turned into 'the constitution means nothing.'