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Notes -
(Hoo boy, here I go!)
Biden's debate and technocrats' Mandate of Heaven
The Democratic Party is in a pickle after last Thursday's debate: their presumptive nominee's performance appeared to confirm his opponents' claims that his age was harming his ability to carry out his duties - but it is almost too late to replace him on the ticket.
Doing so after primary season and so close to the election would be tumultuous. His Vice President is - so the conventional wisdom has gone - considered unpopular enough that switching over to her would be just to jump to another losing proposition. Anybody else would have a very short window to establish their legitimacy as successor - it would probably be pretty chaotic.
Some think that wouldn't be that bad, such as Eric Levitz in this Vox article:
https://www.vox.com/politics/358461/replace-joe-biden-drop-out-kamala-harris
As presented, that hypothetical sounds okay to me, but I think there's a major problem that its use reveals. Is he claiming the parties are symmetric? I don't think that's how the Democrats want people to see things:
Right now, the Democrats (and pretty much the Western center-ish left overall) present their claim to rule as being deserved because they're the best at it. They are certainly not just photonegative Trump. No, they are the party of experts, the adults in the room, the best-of-the-best, the credentialed, the institutions. You can count on the left to do things right, unlike their manchildren opponents. They can be counted upon to not blunder when it matters.
But that means they have more to lose from obvious mistakes. Experts aren't supposed to make mistakes. Technocrats aren't supposed to look chaotic.
If Trump were in Biden's position, but otherwise himself, well - the chaos of replacing him would probably (though never say never) not be much greater than the chaos of sticking with him (supposing for this hypothetical that Trump has only Biden's kind of personal support base - not so in our reality!) When the dust settles, any replacement would be hard-pressed to be more of a loose cannon (though again, never say never!) Chaos is kind of the baseline there, but since I don't think it's overall a selling point, having to pick some emergency successor may turn out to be a positive in the long run, in that Vox hypothetical.
But the adults in the room are supposed to have steered us clear of emergencies. Ending up in this situation at all is a pretty fracturing blow to the desired perception of the Democratic Party as the systematically competent option. For how could they have let this happen?
Now, with enough narrative control, this perception probably could have been maintained. If the desire was to keep Biden, perhaps publicize claims made by Experts that Biden's debate performance - despite what laymen might think - showed that he was actually in excellent health, while Trump's showed that he very much was not, and anyone who questions this is some kind of undesirable. If the desire was to replace him, perhaps click one's tongue and say oh well, that one man had his chance, but now it's time to effortlessly switch to the Plan B that everyone always knew was waiting in the wings and is totally normal, laudable, and precedented, and anyone who questions this is some other kind of undesirable.
Abject panic from the ruling class (as shown by the pre-Elon Bluecheck class this past weekend) is the last thing that a technocracy should show if it means to preserve its mandate to rule.
This may yet be turned around. Maybe (surprisingly soon) all decent human beings will know that concerns about Biden's age or discussion of the June debate are to be replied to with "ugh, why are you so obsessed?" or similar, and raw social force will be enough to get people to act like they forgot this crack in the mask. Or maybe not. But if not, then this isn't just one bad debate, or even one bad candidate: the Expert Class must then face the question of just how expert they are, and if they're not: what are they?
I think this needs to be said for the sake of those living in the US bubble - the American electoral cycle is very, very unusual. Unusually long and unusually structured. Note that in the past month, both the UK and France have held national elections, had full campaigns, and are now ready to vote. The months and months and months of campaigning and rallying and debating and convening are just not necessary to anything. And I tell you that four months is actually plenty of time for the Democrats to pick a candidate and sell them to the American population, that having the Democrats actually discuss who might be a good President will work better for them than just expecting everyone to get in line for Biden because his turn isn't over yet.
An open convention isn't chaos. It's exciting. It's drama. It's the antithesis of the top down process that gave us Hillary and Biden. It's the antithesis of the control mentality that tried to hide Biden's incapacity until it was too late.
I would like to see quicker elections, but I think the difference is that in European countries it's almost always known who will be running at any time for a given party, whereas that's not usually the case in America. This American election is very rare (definitely the first one in my lifetime) in that both of the candidates have been known since basically the last election: we have, in effect, two incumbents. Biden's whole term has felt like one long campaign since everyone knew what was on the horizon. We haven't had real primaries for either party, so this one feels particularly long.
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I don't think these are valid comparisons. When the EU starts having elections for the head of the executive - a single person leading the entire Union - and will be able to crack it in a month, then we can start acting smug. I'm pretty sure that would turn into a massive clusterfuck if they tried right now, which is why they don't.
Well, the EU President is not elected at all, so that's kind of a bad comparison.
Size of the country doesn't have much to do with why US elections take so long. It's the system for selecting candidates. A series of 50+ state by state elections to select delegates to attend a convention to nominate a candidate is just always going to take longer than a small number of party insiders deciding internally who it's going to be.
Yes, that would be my point
I think it's a great comparison, precisely for the reason you outline later on. The American system is a leftover from an era when the country was a lot more disjointed. If the executive of the EU was elected, you'd end up with something similar, for very similar reasons. Superficially the EU is a union, but different countries have different cultures and sometimes different interests. If you try to run a union-wide campaign, it's going to end up being either full of completely empty platitudes in the best case, or stoking ethnic tensions in the worst.
Given the size differentials between countries, you'd also inevitably end up with something like the electoral college, because "one man, one vote" just gives you "do what the Germans tell you", and that's not a particularly enticing system for anyone. Maybe instead of delegates they'd just give a vote multiplier to certain countries, and that would simplify things relative to the USA, but it's pretty clear they'd come up with some analogue.
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How about India, then?
As I understand it, the Indian general election cycle takes around six months, and India is over four times the size of the US. Its elections are much quicker.
My point isn't about the raw population sizes, but the amount of competing interests ,and their geographic distribution. I don't know much about India, but if they're also heterogenous in that regard than yeah, that's a good example.
My impression is that the US system is a leftover from another era, and America probably could pull off a simplification of their system at this point, but the interests boiling down to "NY+California vs everyone else" is still a bit of a sticking point... which might be another way of saying, "they can't pull it off, and the system is still serving it's purpose".
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With everyone focused on the election, little attention is being paid to what would otherwise be an obvious question in light of the new scrutiny on Biden's health: Is he even fit to continue being president for the remainder of his term? In a vacuum, I think most of us would prefer for a leader who is not capable of doing their job to step down -- or be made to step down by those with influence. As much as I might not like the replacement currently on-deck, I would prefer a gesture of civic responsibility over what is looking increasingly like a desperate grip on power.
If everyone now assumes that Biden -- if he remains upright -- will hand it over to his VP after his inauguration, then why persist with an obvious charade through the election? That's surely sapping voter enthusiasm. There would seem to be a greater upside to clearing the deck prior to the election, just for the refreshing honesty of it.
We've been very short on gestures of civic honesty and responsibility recently, and I will take what I can get.
It's amazing to see smart people who pride themselves on their rationality think around this
Ezra Klein - who actually called for Biden to step down, so he's already an outlier - started with the take that maybe Biden could do the Presidents job but not campaign for it.
Then he "admitted" that campaigning is part of the job.
Except the real epiphany would be to wonder whether someone who can't campaign (and is prone to sundowning, according to recent reporting) can do the job at all! I thought the criticism of Trump was whether he could handle the "midnight phone call"?
I can only assume that part of the reason for the refusal to truly consider if he's incompetent in daily life as well is how many people would be caught in the blowback, because someone had to be minimizing and hiding it. If Biden resigns because of the campaign then this problem is more likely to disappear. Otherwise we might have to ask about specific things that happened in the White House.
Wilson, FDR, Reagan weren't all there in the final stretches of their presidencies, but only the presidency of the first was followed by the other party seizing it. So the blowback of the two most recent cases couldn't have been that bad.
All three of those cases involved covering up the details from an unknowing public. (Although in Reagan's case there wasn't too much to cover up.) FDR was widely-recognized as being too old to run in 1944, but a great deal of self-willed delusion about how old he really was kept people from thinking about it too hard. (There was also a fairly open process for choosing a new VP that gave a lot of people confidence, Truman had a small national profile but was popular in 1944 for investigating army contractor waste.)
That self-willed delusion about Biden's age just crumbled and could possibly never be restored.
I've always considered the MI-complex's fraud and corruption one of the things they are really careful to skip over in public school. America's wars are always cleanly fought with the best in equipment, and nobody makes a killing through back alley deals!
While reading about the small arms of WWII I was reminded that all these things cost money, and there were opportunities for grift in hundreds of different ways, even in our most "Righteous" war. Most people are totally ignorant about how much money was corruptly set on fire in WWI and the civil war.
Anyway, thanks for reminding me. I found this link to read about Truman's efforts, but am wondering if you have more?
I mean, my WWII lessons were ‘Germany did the Holocaust and that’s bad, ‘mericuh, fuck yeah!’ And my civil war lessons were ‘the civil war was inevitable, but Lincoln’s election was the trigger for, umm, well let’s not talk about it, and the confederacy had better generals and troops but they were outnumbered so they won the first three years until grant just took the casualties to win’. There was, quite literally, not much about industry or military supply at all- we learned about drafting Irishmen to provide canon fodder in the civil war and lend lease, but the narrative was more ‘Lee was the better general so that was necessary to win’ and ‘the Germans couldn’t bomb us like they did Britain’.
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The best account of Truman in the run-up to the 1944 convention, and the convention itself, is McCullough's biograohy of Truman. The relevant section here is about 30 pages and is extremely well-written. The gist of it is that Truman ended up in charge of a Senate committee to investigate wasteful spending by military contractors. (This was part maneuvering by Roosevelt, who wanted to avoid the House appointing its own committee which promised to be much more critical of the administration; Truman had politely floated the idea to Roosevelt previously.) The "Truman Commission" proved enormously popular so that, when negotiations began to replace FDR's VP on the 1944 ticket (Henry Wallace, whose radical left proclivities were spooking some), Truman was an acceptable dark horse compromise. It probably helped that Truman was connected to deep political bosses and the Missouri machine in a way that has never been satisfactorily elaborated.
Democratic politicians in 1944 knew what they were doing, and that FDR might not make it. But nobody really considered the gravity of what that meant, or it probably would not have gone to Truman. McCullough's section ends with the great anecdote of reoorters talking to Truman's mother on the news of his nomination, as she predicts that it's all a lot of hogwash and FDR will easily serve out his term.
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As opposed to the fraud and corruption in other parts of government drilled into every schoolchild?
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We also just have more video and it just lives for longer. Anyone can find it.
If anything it's a wonder it's gone on this long
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Biden is not going to hand it over to Harris after the election. He wants power, and he doesn't want to let it go now he has it.
All the talk of Biden stepping down is deluded. There's only two options on the table - election defeat or 25th amendment.
Hey now, there's definitely a third option.
If I were Biden, I'd keep an eye out for stray banana peels.
Like I said I don't think he'd get to the age he's at, if he didn't have a knack for that.
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I still can't get past the absence of human capital in one of the world's most demanding jobs, in one of the world's most demanding eras.
The 2024-2028 period is pivotal! AI, China, Ukraine, Israel, the consequences of the US running 5% deficits in a high-interest rates...
And who is running the country? Hunter Biden is apparently giving advice: https://x.com/njhochman/status/1808249717840924923
https://x.com/KenDilanianNBC/status/1808201096785007079
Alternately, the US has Donald Trump and Kamala Harris who are not exactly paragons of competence and leadership. I know that presidents don't actually draft legislation but their leadership is important, they make the big picture decisions. States need a strong central arbiter to keep things on track, to promote coherent strategy and deal with crises.
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I've been listening to Pod Save America and Ezra Klein in the same spirit in which I listen to Blogging the Boys after a devastating Cowboys playoff loss: schadenfreude watching arrogant people I hate fail. I also read the NYT sundayopninion section and some other reactions.
What strikes me about where the libs are at right now:
-- They have taken zero responsibility for their role in getting us here. As our perhaps soon-to-be-president reminds us: you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree. And neither did president Biden. Biden's candidacy was the result of a concerted ratfucking campaign against Sanders in 2020, as Bernie seemed bound to win the nomination the centrist Dems all agreed to drop out and endorse Biden to keep Bernie out. This despite the seemingly obvious fact that Biden was going to be 80 when he ran for a second term, which many people pointed out at the time. The Pod Save America guys and the NYT editorial page and Vox and all the rest were united on the point: vote blue no matter who, Trump is a threat to democracy so we need to prioritize "electability" and get behind Biden, if you say Biden is too old you're working for Trump. Kamala became VP largely for idpol reasons.
When the Cowboys lose in the playoffs, their fans, despite their complete lack of involvement in the process, rapidly recognize that their team needs to change how they do things. Not just the decisions made in the game, but the decisions made constructing the roster months or years before. Not the #resistance libs. They're incapable of recognizing how blind party loyalty left them with a brain lesion on the top of the ticket backed up by a woman no one likes, but who probably can't get passed over for a better candidate because significant parts of the coalition would storm off if they refuse to pick the "qualified" black woman.
Democrats are horrified, but so far I have seen very little self-examination or talk about the process that got them here.
-- They do not yet understand the seriousness of their condition. The talk is all about, does doing a hot-swap deliver a better chance of beating Donald Trump. The reason not to do a hot swap from the beginning has been that the chaos would discredit Democratic arguments, as you say, and doom the candidate. I think we may be more or less past that point already, Democrats need to stop thinking about beating Trump and start thinking about how to salvage as much downballot as they can. Republicans in my state are already striking, I've gotten mass texts and emails from multiple candidates attacking their Dem opponents by pointing out their support for the old coot in the white house, they claim Biden is competent to be President even though they know he isn't. Biden isn't going to have coattails, he's going to be an anchor dragging other Dem candidates down. Democrats shouldn't be worrying about beating Trump, they should be worrying about what top of ticket pick gives them the best odds in the downballot races. Put a nice, responsible, competent, mediocre face on tv and give the undercard a chance.
A fresh candidate, or even what's left of Joe Biden, might still have a decent shot, call it 10-30%, just based on Donald being Donald. Trump could do something absolutely insane and lose the thing. But the reason to swap isn't to maximize that chance, which is small. It's to protect blue candidates up and down the ticket from being embarrassed by association.
I always seize an opportunity to use one of the greatest Cormac McCarthy quotes of all time here:
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
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I don't particularly have an interest in getting dragged into an argument where I'm forced to defend Biden or the DNC, but:
Ezra Klein is one of the few people on the left who publicly pushed for Biden to step aside and for an open Democratic convention since at least February. Of all the people who could be said to have failed...he must be pretty far down that list?
Bernie is and 82 year old who had a heart attack in the last 5 years. I haven't heard him speak lately, but I doubt the dems would be in much better shape were he their candidate.
Nobody is dragging you into anything, Chris.
An open Democratic convention strategy was always doomed. The people who say that an open convention would never work, that as Klein put it on his podcast it was Aaron Sorkin fanfiction, are correct. The D candidate chosen to replace Biden is probably doomed by the weird relationship they'd hold to Biden, both in the tension between running on the last four years of Democratic policy while not being an actual incumbent, and in the "they tried to foist a senile man on us as president" argument.
Part of the argument for Biden from the beginning, in the NYT opinion section et al, was that he could always be a one term president replaced by someone younger near the 2024 election. That turned out to be impossible, for all the reasons we're seeing now, chief among them Biden's choice in the matter.
And Klein remains optimistic! He acts as though the start date for all thought is today, we just found ourself here. There's no examination of the decision making process that got us here.
Bernie is old too, but they didn't have to pick Biden to rally behind. Klobuchar or even Liz Warren would have been fine choices. Even Kamala, for all her flaws, would still be upright at this point. It was their choice in putting Biden on the ticket that I'm criticizing, not endorsing Bernie as an alternative. And the fact that no one is grappling with this decision making process, and how we wound up here, is maddening to me.
Clearly you haven't met my in-laws...
...and yet here I am, defending Klein and the DNC.
That's utterly beside the point.
So you single out Klein (I'll reiterate, one of the only voices on the left who called for Biden to step down), and then give examples of three other organizations (unless 'NYT editorial page' is a stand-in for 'Ezra Klein wrote an editorial' or 'Ezra Klein works for the NYT and is guilty by association').
'Vote blue no matter who' - so what, people were supposed to abstain or vote for Trump in 2020? How is that in any way advantageous to the party?
'Trump is a threat to democracy so we need to prioritize "electability" and get behind Biden' - so in your hypothetical, it's a given that any candidate could have beaten Trump? Not to mention you assume that a handful of news organizations could coordinate to tank Biden's candidacy after he won nearly a dozen primaries on Super Tuesday to Bernie's four. He beat Warren 48% to 7% in South Carolina! The idea that Vox and the NYT editorial section have that much power is ludicrous. You, and most everybody else here, engage in these absurd contradictions where mainstream media is failing (go woke go broke, fox news viewership compared to CNN, clearly The People hate the product the media is selling) while simultaneously crediting them with godlike powers over elections and public opinion. You take it as a given that anyone holding a ballot on the left is some moronic, sheep-NPC milling about waiting for Ezra Klein to gently shepherd them towards the Uniparty's chosen puppet.
Not to mention that even if this had happened, I guarantee you there would be a firestorm in the media (conservative, liberal and the motte) about the subversion of democracy, the people wanted Biden and the party machine intervened to foist a woman/gay/black/Jew/communist/whatever candidate on the country, because idpol.
Biden was popular because people cared about electability more than anything else in 2020, and because he crushed the black vote. Who's more electable, the Jewish communist from Vermont, or the centrist former Vice-president in a popular (on the left) administration?
And the fact that Biden is choosing to cling to power due to ego rather than follow in the footsteps of his betters and step aside when his time has come is entirely his own fault. I am disappointed in the president and his family, not Ezra Klein.
Whose choice, the voters? Are you even confident that Klein was shilling for Biden prior to his wins on Super Tuesday? The list of episodes of his podcast has two episodes on Biden after Super Tuesday, after which Biden already had a commanding lead of the field. Perhaps his coverage of the debate on January 16th was slanted towards Biden, I don't know, but that's a pretty deep cut to be holding him responsible for. Or do you think he should have been putting out attack pieces on Biden for being too old after he was the frontrunner?
It's easy to act smart and opine on how glaringly stupid the establishment is with the benefit of hindsight. Actually running a newspaper, or a political party, or a company is orders of magnitude harder.
I think we have a misunderstanding in terms here. I don't think I was very clear.
I don't really care if Ezra or the PSA guys or any particular Dem personally did or advocated for this or that. In their work, they refer to Democrats/Liberals/#Resistance/People of Good Will/Etc. types under the rubric of "We." What will we do? What should we make of this?
In the same way that a Cowboys fan speaks of we. We beat the Eagles, what a thrill. We lost to the Bears, this is embarrassing for us.
It's not particularly important which person did what. It's important to take a look at the process and how Democrats got here. If one is a Democrat, that's a we issue. That's something you have to figure out how you avoid next time.
I don't want to get into the weeds here, but you're doing the same thing I'm accusing them of here: you're starting the clock very late in the day. The endorsements poured into Biden well before Super Tuesday, the election might have gone very differently if they hadn't done so. We might have gotten to a different outcome. We can argue about coordination versus a sort of stochastic chance and follow the leader, but what we can't do is start with a fait accompli, start the story in medias res and say "Ok what should we do right now?" without ever discussing all the past prologue that got us here. That's a recipe for repeating one's mistakes.
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What's wrong with the dem party, do they literally have no-one younger to push up there? Any senators perhaps? No? Is AOC too unelectable? Do they consider Mommy Tulsi Gabbard too much of a problem for the war machine?
I would be slightly more surprised at Gabbard being the Democrat candidate than Mitt Romney.
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With Trump's huge unfavorables, it does seem like Generic Democrat™ would do very well. Someone like Jack Johnson or John Jackson. Swing state. Nice looking family. Good hair, but not too good like Gavin Newsom.
The problem is that how do the Democrats actually get this person on the ballot when it involves stepping over so many obvious front-runners? The Republicans were able to do it in 1920 with Warren Harding, but dark horse successes are rare. It's also a problem that Democrats (with rare exceptions) are so in the upper class bubble that they can't talk to proles anymore. So, to be acceptable to the Democrat elite, the magical Generic candidate has to act a certain way that makes them maybe not so generic to the average voter.
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Gabbard is no longer even a Democrat.
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Ezra Klein is just a representative of the podcasting liberal smug class. This particular example isn't perfect, as you say, but to his outgroup he's identical to all of the others of the reporter priestly caste.
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Some of the Democrats clearly think if they hot-swap out Biden, they can put in a tailored Trump-beating "Generic Democrat" who Trump isn't ready to face since he doesn't have the track record for Trump to attack, nor (obviously) the personal attributes, who will automatically get the votes of Democrats, and who will get the votes of the people who "just want a responsible adult in office". This candidate has the advantage that they don't have to win the Democratic primaries; they can be chosen solely for Trump-beating characteristics.
It might work; the Democrats are really good at this game, and being able to swap out your candidate when he looks like he's losing is a big advantage. Their biggest problem is that Kamala Harris definitely is not that candidate, and seems unlikely to go gently into that good night.
Any hot-swap is going to leave some part of the Democratic party unsatisfied: they're a year behind in the game of buy-in and consensus. "Your guy? What about my guy?" It takes more than a generic Democratic to drive turn-out and excitement, it takes someone who can actually convince voters that they are the right person at the right moment. Otherwise, people will quickly capsize and donors, voters, officials, and orgs will quickly abandon the national efforts and focus on whatever local efforts they can salvage.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans aren't just standing by rolling the dice to see if they'll decide to implode too. They're attacking, they're on the offensive. "Look at these people, they've been lying about Biden for four years, what else have they been lying about?" The new guy will have some controversies (they always do), and they'll be fresh and untested and hard to counter. (The party is circulating its talking points on the media, but in the fast-moving chaos the main story became something else, and nobody internalizes the response.)
Kamala might have a lot of problems, and might be historically unpopular -- but at least she doesn't come with these problems, and that may look attractive right now.
I think she actually does have a bunch of controversies. Nobody really cared to bring them up or make a big deal out of them before when she was just the VP, but there's no way Trump and his team are going to just leave all that ammunition on the floor. Right now the left have thoroughly demotivated their base with their support of Israel and what's happening there - appointing someone who fought to make sure non-violent and innocent prisoners stayed behind bars so they could be used for prison labour/fire camps as the representative of the left is going to be a huge demotivating factor for a lot of left-wingers as well... and I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump won't be too polite and gentlemanly to bring those up.
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Without the primary process, they don't need consensus. They need to not anger the black caucus (so they can keep the "get-out-the-vote" stuff in the cities), but what are the Democrats going to do? They're going to vote against Trump. So a new candidate without the problems for the squishies in the middle who WANT to vote against Trump (because that's the Thing to Do) but actually care about things like senility should be a winner for them.
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I wonder if they could mollify her with a spot in the historical record books as the "first woman president" by pushing Biden out early in exchange for selecting a different ballot replacement? She can dine out on that for the rest of her life, and even run again in 4 years if she wants to as "former president Harris."
It's a really good idea but I think this gets dangerously close to exposing how sausage is made to the general public. People will ask why the democratic party picked someone else over President Harris for the upcoming election, how would they respond to that?
"President Harris would like to spend more time with her family."
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Manufactured family (or health) crisis, need time to xyz, etc. As long as she's on board you just tap into whatever is left of a societal ethos about personal ethics and responsibility as more (or at least equally) important relative to public. To really mess with hearts and minds they could double bluff the "woman's role" and have her otherwise committed to something coded masculine (though admittedly being the fucking president is sort of heavily weighted for that )
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Hillary would be fuming, I love it.
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