D emocratic congressman Richie Torres provided Politico with some revealing color commentary for the outlet’s story on the “full-blown ‘freakout’” over Joe Biden’s languorous reelection campaign. “The election is more competitive than it should be, given the wretchedness of who Donald Trump is,” he said. “In a properly functioning democracy, Donald Trump should have no viable path to the presidency. The fact of a competitive race is cause for concern.”
Torres wandered into an impolitic insight here — one that his co-partisans have been careful to avoid stating outright. Previously, Democrats could safely impugn the judgment of the Republican elected officials who set themselves to rehabilitating Trump’s image following his indecorous conduct in the wake of the 2020 election. They could even cast their scorn on the Republican primary voters who saw fit to nominate him to the White House for a third time. But Democrats cannot lament the present state of the general-election campaign without questioning the collective judgment of the American electorate — their own voters among them — and the virtue of the mechanisms of self-government.
Torres deserves points for his honesty. He reached the ineluctable logical conclusion to which progressive activism in the age of Trump has led so many of his allies on the American left, even if they are more circumspect in expressing their contempt for an electorate that seems poised to restore Trump to the presidency.
That was also the upshot of Mark Leibovich’s contribution, however coy in tone, to a winter symposium in the Atlantic in which pundits dwelled on the various nightmares they believe await us in a second Trump term in the White House. Leibovich dinged Biden for dismissing the January 6 riots as the work of malcontents who “do not reflect a true America” and “do not represent who we are.”
“One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists,” Leibovich remarked. But there’s increasingly scant evidence to support Biden’s view of “who we are.” “You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place,” Leibovich wrote. And if Trump wins, “his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here” — “here” being the “moral void” to which our fellow countrymen would consign the country and its citizens.
A similar theme emerges from other commenters who have tried to envision Trump’s return to the White House. Speaking with Washington Post reporters, Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, struck a funereal note when contemplating such a scenario. “Another four years of Donald Trump,” he speculated, would raise “a more permanent set of questions about America.” Elsewhere in that story, Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, executive vice president of Freedom House, lashed out at Trump for promoting the “narrative that if democracy doesn’t deliver what I want, then it must be a flaw in the democracy.” But that is precisely what her organization has already done by ranking America’s commitment to democracy “on par with” that of Romania and Panama, as the Post put it.
Biden insists it is his singular mission is to save “freedom and democracy” from the Republicans undermining both. But if you’re convinced that the fight for American democracy is already lost, Biden’s call to action lacks a certain urgency.
Indeed, Biden himself sometimes shares the fatalism overtaking his fellow Democrats. In the president’s address to this year’s graduating class at Morehouse College, Biden despaired over the state of American democracy. “What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street?” he lamented. “What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”
If they took him at his word, the African-American men in the ambit of Biden’s voice surely left the ceremony with fewer hopes for themselves and their futures. If even the sitting president is powerless to arrest the forces of aggression and bigotry, what’s the point of resistance? Presumably, a similar despondency is shared by the “experts” who believe that Biden has presided over the uninterrupted erosion of America’s democracy, which is “teetering.”
All this is prelude to a self-indulgent avalanche of cynicism, dejection, and hopelessness that will overtake the Democratic political class if voters reelect Donald Trump in November. Those among them who are inclined to externalize their despair will lash out at the parochial civic illiterates who didn’t vote against merely their own interests but the country’s as well. Should that be the outcome in November, this self-serving excuse for the failures of Democratic governance will have irresistible appeal. But it also risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only does that outlook suggest that participation in the political process is a waste of time; it also lays the intellectual foundations for a moral relativism that encourages antisocial conduct.
As the American Civil Liberties Union forecast, “if Trump does return to the Oval Office, the first ‘resistance’ will look tame by comparison” with what’s in store: “General strikes, economic boycotts, and worker walk-outs will be critical tools to demonstrate that Americans will not sit idly by while a constitutional crisis is perpetrated.” Such an approach, if pursued successfully, would mete out a punishment not just to Donald Trump and his allies but to every American who allowed this to happen. Who is to say they don’t deserve it? The voting public had a shot at redemption, and they passed it up. America’s voters gave up on democracy, despairing Democrats will tell themselves. Why shouldn’t they, therefore, respond in kind?