On July 28, Heather Cox Richardson wrote:
Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.
Meanwhile, I’ve been struggling to figure out why she thought this was a “sudden revolution in our politics” and why she would struggle to understand what it means. She goes on to describe what happened with Biden dropping out and so forth, but doesn’t really address why she’s struggling to understand any of it.
The shock and demoralization caused by the DNC’s selection of Joe Biden as their nominee in 2020 was widespread. I say the DNC selected him because they used a pretty clear strategy to make him the winner of the primary: They had all the other clearly neoliberal candidates drop out while keeping Elizabeth Warren, thus successfully splitting the “progressive” (centrist) vote between Warren and Sanders, and guaranteeing a victory for Biden. Only Michael Bloomberg was a worse candidate than Biden.
As much as I would like voters to be well informed and vote based on their deep understanding of the issues and the candidates, as well as a strong background in political theory and a healthy dose of empathy, the fact of the matter is that most voters are not well-informed — most are misinformed — and they end up basing their votes on intuition. Intuition is a blurry representation of salient facts, so it isn’t complete trash, but it also tends to result in candidates winning due to fairly superficial traits. For example, that’s why taller candidates tend to win elections.
That being said, there are some things that most Americans who are not baby boomers understand:
- Politics are controlled by people with more money and that is harmful to the country as a whole and to people with less money in particular. Who those people are specifically, and how to stop them is a subject of much debate, but suggesting that nothing should fundamentally change is a completely out-of-touch sentiment.
- There’s a point where a person is too old to drive, much less run a country. Most voting-age people have experienced extremely elderly people trying to drive; many of us have been privy to conversations within our families about how to stop grandpa from driving because he is clearly no longer safe, and then how to help him get around town without a car. It’s a real problem rather than an expression of ageism, and we’re all familiar with it. It’s not because of a lack of respect, but rather practical concern.
- Older Americans (e.g., boomers) are not really in touch with modern realities and have a lot of bad ideas. Making fun of boomers is practically a national pastime at this point. Biden is older than that!
And for people who were slightly more well-informed:
- Joe Biden has a long history of conservative political choices (i.e., he’s very old fashioned). While people do certainly change over time, it’s also true that older people tend to revert to earlier ways of thinking. I’m aware of Biden’s record as President; it doesn’t strike me as being particularly “progressive”, but then again, what does that even mean? What does a neoliberal DNC think we should be progressing toward?
Like I said, Joe Biden was the worst candidate the DNC presented to voters at that time, with the exception of Michael Bloomberg. While Biden’s old-fashioned ways may have been very appealing to the donor class and boomers, who are old and relatively rich, it was repulsive to pretty much everyone else. The 2020 election was a contest about which old man you disliked the least. There’s literally a popular song about how much it sucked to have to vote for Joe Biden.
So, given all this, Biden’s presidency has left normal voters (i.e., non-MAGA, moderately informed) in a constant state of anxiety waiting for him to say some weird old-man shit, or forget an important name/word, or fall down….AGAIN. That Democratic party voters (i.e., not “Democrats” but people who typically vote for a Democrat) rebelled after his terrible debate against Trump should not be surprising at all. We were tired of his shit even before he got put on the ballot in 2020.
The idea that Joe Biden was the “most progressive President ever” (per Warmbo and people like him) was based on a combination of pure fantasy and the fact that Biden’s administration was mostly being run by much younger people who at least understood what Democratic party voters wanted Biden to be. It was not based on the reality of Biden or even his personal potential. As I’ve said before, the DNC is not capable (in its post-Reagan incarnation) of producing a candidate for President that progressives, centrists and leftists can get genuinely excited about. This is specifically because the donor class has had absolute control of the decision-making process within the DNC, but the average age of DNC leadership was certainly a secondary factor.
That Democratic party donors saw the writing on the wall in terms of Biden’s lack of ability to beat Trump or serve as the nation’s chief executive should not have been surprising, either. Replacing Biden with Harris, specifically, should not have been surprising. Harris is just another neoliberal. It wasn’t the political upheaval that HCR seems to think it was.
Today, however, they announced that Kamala Harris’s Vice Presidential candidate will be Tim Walz, the progressive governor of Minnesota and that is very surprising. I had assumed that she/they would choose Shapiro or someone similarly neoliberal. The only way I can make sense of the DNC doing the right thing with the VP pick is to blame it on the fact that they are terrified of Trump, and they’ve finally realized that leaning to the right doesn’t pay off, so they have decided to make an attempt to appeal to younger and further left voters. From the perspective of wealthy people, Walz is a particularly bad candidate; for example, he once said, “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” He’s right, but you aren’t supposed to say that where the rich people might hear you.
Usually, the Vice President candidate is chosen to placate powerful people; I say “placate” because the VP is not expected to actually do anything. The choice of Walz (ostensibly by Harris, but surely as part of a long discussion with DNC leadership) suggests either that the DNC is now considering younger and more left voters as a legitimate political force that must be addressed more seriously, or that Harris, in particular, has hidden depths of ethical rationality. I’m not ready to get optimistic about this — Harris and Walz are both technically boomers after all and they are DNC approved — but there’s reason to suggest the country could get back on track after the fiasco that started in 2016.
That note of slight optimism should not be interpreted to suggest that we will avoid political violence after the election. The odds of political violence from the far-right are extremely high, and we’re likely to see a lot of it regardless of how the election turns out. A Trump win will embolden them, but a Harris win will enrage and terrify them. There is no way out of political violence at this point. The important questions are: “How much violence will there be?”, “Who will be the targets of violence?” and “Will municipal, state and federal law enforcement counter that violence, or facilitate it?”
Related: How Bad Will Political Violence in the U.S. Get? (Bruce Hoffman, ForeignPolicy.com)
I’m also not suggesting that the DNC is going to become leftist or even centrist in a timely fashion. The DNC should not be trusted with our money. As I mentioned previously, creating a separation between the DNC and political donations from working class people would be extremely beneficial toward democratizing the DNC and moving US politics closer to the center.