The Weekly Sift

Democracies fall to fascism when the opposition fails to unite until it’s too late.
It’s getting late.

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Nothing sums up the psychological difference between the two major parties quite like this fact: In the week-and-a-half after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, it was the Democrats who fretted about whether they were nominating the right candidate.

Democracies fall to fascism when the opposition fails to unite until it’s too late. It’s getting late.

Big-name Republicans were quick to circle the wagons around their felonious leader: If a jury found him guilty, then the jury system must be to blame. Anybody and everybody — judges, prosecutors, witnesses, the Biden administration, the FBI, the jurors — must be corrupt, because Trump can’t possibly be corrupt. Only he can be trusted, and just wait until he’s back in power and can turn the power of government against Democrats!

Meanwhile, the latest collective Democratic shiver started, oddly enough, with an article in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping“. These “signs” of fading mental acuity had been noticed by such unbiased and reliable sources as Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, causing CNN to comment:

Republicans accusing their political foe of lacking the mental fitness to hold office is nothing surprising. Such accusations are made every night on Fox News. And Donald Trump, who at 77 years old has also shown plenty of signs of waning mental faculties, including repeatedly falling asleep at his own high-stakes hush money trial, has made the accusation a centerpiece of his campaign. In other words, these accusations from the right aren’t exactly news.

The WSJ article was followed by Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic making a headline out of an insult from cheap-shot artist Bill Maher: “Ruth Bader Biden“, “the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country.”

If my social media is typical, we then saw yet another round of young progressives suggesting Biden should withdraw and let the Democratic Convention choose someone else, or perhaps that left-of-center folks should all vote for Cornell West or Jill Stein in November.

It’s hard to know where to start. There are so many wrongheaded notions floating around that by addressing one in detail I can seem to covertly accept the others. So let’s keep this short and simple:

• Biden is fine. Yes, Joe Biden is 81, arthritis causes him to walk stiffly, and he’s never going to be an Obama-class orator. But whenever there’s a big test and he needs to be at the top of his game, he is. Watch either of the last two state of the union addresses, where he didn’t just deliver a good speech, he bantered with Republicans in the audience and ate their lunch. (If that seems like ancient history to you, watch his D-Day speech from this week.) He got the better of both McCarthy and Johnson in budget negotiations. He has brilliantly used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to stabilize the oil market. A debate with Trump is coming up two weeks from Thursday (if Trump doesn’t come up with some excuse to drop out). Watch it. If you’re expecting Biden to be a doddering old man, I think you’ll be surprised. (Also, if it’s so obvious that he’s fading into senility, why do his critics need to post doctored videos to make that point?)
• Whatever issue you have with Biden, Trump will be worse. What do you think will happen to inflation after Trump raises tariffs and deports millions of low-wage workers? And yes, Biden has not done nearly enough to rein in Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza. But Trump actively cheers Netanyahu on, and criticizes Biden for putting up any resistance at all.
• This would have been a worthwhile discussion to have a year ago, or maybe even six months ago. But not now. The Democratic Party held its ordinary primary process this year. If support had coalesced around some other candidate, that candidate could be the nominee. But none of the white knights people hope to nominate instead of Biden made that challenge then, and they’re still not making it. Maybe you should respect their judgment.
• A chaotic Democratic Convention is not going to help defeat Trump. Competitive conventions tend to get nasty, and people come out of them with hard feelings. (For example, I can easily picture Black voters getting miffed if the Convention passes over Kamala Harris to nominate a White candidate like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer.) That wonderful Biden-replacement nominee you’re imagining will have to spend most of the fall reuniting the base rather than reaching out to persuadable swing voters.
• Any Democratic nominee will have to run on the Biden record. Pushing Biden aside more-or-less ratifies Trump’s assertion that Biden has been a terrible president. Certainly most of the public will interpret it that way. I don’t see how we then turn around and convince them to vote for another Democrat.
• Whoever you imagine nominating to beat Trump, that candidate can be smeared too. Whenever the right-wing noise machine turns its power against someone, that candidate develops “baggage”. Before Biden’s supposed mental decline, it was Hillary’s emails and Obama’s birth certificate and Kerry’s swiftboat. There’s always some reason why this was the wrong person to nominate. We often picture our favorite alternative candidate remaining unsullied through November. But by election day, he or she would have baggage too. No one is so perfect that they can’t be lied about.
• Biden has been a good president and has a good story to tell. We need to stop wasting time and start telling that story. Biden didn’t inherit the rosy pre-Covid America Trumpists get nostalgic about. He inherited a mess — high unemployment, a stagnant economy, huge budget and trade deficits, a high murder rate, and thousands dying of Covid every day. He has done a remarkable job cleaning that up. Job-creation is off the charts. We’ve finally started the transition to a sustainable economy, even if there’s still a long way to go. Crime has fallen significantly. Looking ahead, Biden will protect your personal autonomy, your voting rights, and American democracy — all of which are threatened if Trump returns to power. The longer we compare Biden unfavorably to some ideal alternative, the less time we’ll have to make that case.

I know it’s frustrating that the polls remain close, and that so many Americans fail to see what Trump is or what Biden has accomplished. But believe me, bickering among ourselves is not going to solve that problem. In every democracy that falls to fascism, the story is always the same: The opposition fails to unite until it’s too late. Let’s not make that mistake here.