Do You Remember the Ecstasy of Electing Joe Biden?
How the coalition that defeated Donald Trump crumbled.
We danced in the streets when Joe Biden was elected. Do you remember? American cities staged the greatest spontaneous outpouring of joy since V-J Day with cars honking and strangers high-fiving one another on an unusually warm November weekend. When I ventured down to Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., on a Sunday night, a day and a half after the election had been called, the street party was still going. That was just three years ago.
I would estimate that a very tiny percentage of the joy was attributable to specific policy objectives of the incoming Biden administration and that virtually all of it reflected relief that the bad man was gone. The 81,268,924 voters who pulled the lever for Biden were united by the belief that Donald Trump’s presidency was a civic emergency.
The underlying basis for the belief — that Trump’s defeat mattered more than any other political question — has not changed. On the contrary, it has become only more obvious. The 2020 election took place before Trump tried to overturn the result, before he summoned a mob, before he started describing his opponents as “vermin.” But the conviction behind the idea has dissipated. “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the threat to democracy pitch is a bust,” Mitt Romney — who made that theme the core of his own Trump-era political identity — confessed to the New York Times. “Jan. 6 will be four years old by the election. People have processed it, one way or another.”
Despite countless op-eds and campaign ads warning of the threat that a second Trump term poses to the democratic order, the imperative to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has become tiresome. The signs of that exhaustion are everywhere in our politics today. It may be the most dominant attribute of our national mood.
Tragic though it may be, there is nothing that unique or surprising about this development. Exhaustion is a natural by-product of anti-authoritarian politics.
Authoritarianism both creates and feeds upon passion. It summons hatred and promises a decisive clash to resolve the great struggle between good and evil. Trump says things to his supporters like “Together, we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, globalists, and the Marxists — and that’s what they are — and we will restore our Republic as one nation under God with liberty and justice for all” and “This is the final battle. They know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”
The opponents of authoritarianism may try to match this zeal, an effort you can see in the attempts liberals have made to alert the public to the dangers Trump represents. “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day,” Robert Kagan warned in the Washington Post in November. “The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in his editor’s note for a special issue of The Atlantic devoted to Trump’s possible reelection. “A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.” But liberals can never promise victory will be final, nor that it will usher in a heaven on earth. In the face of a determined authoritarian movement, loyal democrats can only appeal to maintaining the system with all its flaws. And if they do hang on, they will come back and ask their supporters to hang on again and again.
The most classic example of this phenomenon is the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The consequences are certainly not equivalent — for all his dangers, Trump is not a genocidal warmonger — but the political dynamic has eerie parallels to our own. The Social Democrats had come to power during a debilitating inflationary rise after World War I. They managed to cling to a feeble coalition with centrist allies, bound together by a belief that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was too demagogic to be permitted to govern. The German Communists, their left-wing rivals, attacked the Social Democrats as tools of the capitalistic order, hoping the collapse of the system would open the door to revolution.
Unable to form durable governing majorities, the Reichstag held election after election — four at the federal level in a span of four years. Ultimately, the conservatives opposed to Hitler decided they could work with him and could even control the government and steer its policies. Hitler’s wild rhetoric and lack of qualifications never ceased to be serious concerns for other German political elites. It’s just that their determination to keep him out of the government slowly gave way to other, more parochial concerns. The Nazis thus gained power without ever having won anything close to a parliamentary majority.
Unlike Weimar Germany, the U.S. does not have a parliamentary system. Our presidential elections occur at four-year intervals and do not involve the cobbling together of majorities from coalitions of parties. The only way to stop an authoritarian-minded candidate from winning is for a coalition of anti-authoritarian voters to unify behind another presidential candidate.
That coalition very conspicuously failed to materialize in 2016 for a variety of reasons. Most people assumed Hillary Clinton would win and marinated in their grievances against her or the Democratic Party. Marginal votes drifted off to protest candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. In 2020, the dynamic changed. The central issue on the public’s mind was Trump, and Biden managed to assemble a majority against him, ranging all the way from Bernie Sanders supporters to disillusioned Republicans in the Atlanta suburbs.
At the moment, the state of the anti-Trump coalition looks far more grim than it did in 2020 or even 2016. Biden has an anemic approval rating, far worse than Trump, Barack Obama, or any other incumbent at this stage. One hopeful theory of the case has held that Biden is merely enduring a time lag and that public opinion would catch up as the pandemic and the economic and social dislocations it created during his first three years in office fade from memory.
Instead, his polling has grown even more dismal. By November, Biden’s approval rating fell below 40 percent with some polls showing it in the low 30s. We continue to assume every new all-time-low mark represents the bottom. But the floor keeps sinking.
The closer you look at this state of affairs, the harder it becomes to explain using normal terms of reference. The main reason political analysts have given for Biden’s abysmal public standing, besides his age, has been inflation. The administration had assumed that people would judge it by employment and wage levels and so passed a massive economic stimulus, only to discover surging inflation ate up all the rising wages. Higher prices are why people don’t care that unemployment is at ultralow levels, wages and productivity are increasing, inequality is falling, or the stock market is up.
But as the post-COVID inflation surge — the supposed cause of his unpopularity — has ended, the strange thing is that Biden’s approval rating hasn’t improved. There are other signs that public dismay is untethered from any material basis. Even as people continue to tell pollsters they consider the economy to be poor, they spend money like it’s a boom. Young voters, whose disaffection constitutes one of Biden’s most serious liabilities, overwhelmingly (70 percent to 28 percent) believe the economy is bad but admit by also very wide margins (65 percent to 33 percent) that their personal economic situation is good.
One model of public opinion found that consumer-confidence levels in France, Germany, and the U.K. closely tracked measures of economic performance over the past dozen years. In the U.S., the relationship also held — until Biden took office, at which point a gigantic chasm opened between perception and reality.
“American exceptionalism” traditionally describes the unusual resistance to class politics in the U.S., a state of affairs long attributed to our unique optimism — we Americans see no need for socialism when we expect to strike it rich. But now America seems to have developed an exceptional kind of pessimism, afflicting us with an immutable belief in economic decline that no real-world statistical improvement can dislodge.
The same disparity has appeared in other perceptions. In 2023, crime rates plummeted in almost every major category, including murder. But Gallup finds that more than three-quarters of the public believe crime is increasing.
Material factors go only so far in explaining the national mood. There seems to be a deeper unease at work. Assembling the coalition to defeat Trump required many different factions to set aside their priorities for the sake of staving off a crisis. Holding together that coalition required maintaining a level of focus and willpower that has simply given out.
The political left is the most obvious place where support for the anti-Trump coalition has evaporated. Leftists constitute a tiny portion of the electorate, but since they are disproportionately represented in both traditional and social media, this outsize voice serves as a force multiplier in public opinion.
One long-standing aspect of progressive thinking is a tendency to emphasize the negative. The left has a radical critique of American society and its economy and believes that emphasizing progress undercuts the urgency of necessary change. This tendency means progressive rhetoric works in tandem with the Democratic Party’s messaging when Democrats are in opposition — both progressives and Democrats alike are emphasizing how terrible everything is — but is very much in tension when Democrats hold power. (The dynamic works very differently in conservative media, which flips from doomsaying as the opposition to cheerleading when Republicans control government.)
The left likely has an especially important influence on the views of younger voters, who rely more heavily on social media than on traditional mainstream news. A Times survey found TikTok users, regardless of age, were especially scathing of Biden’s support for Israel during its invasion of Gaza. Worse, it found that younger voters may even prefer Trump over Biden because of the issue: “The young Biden ’20 voters with anti-Israel views are the likeliest to report switching to Mr. Trump.” The Times has also speculated that young voters are convinced Biden’s economy is a wasteland of despair, despite feeling satisfied about their personal economic prospects, in part because of the doomer and “vibecession” memes they absorb from Instagram and TikTok.
Progressive despondency is not totally constant. It becomes more pronounced when leftists find themselves ideologically alienated from the Democratic Party. When Biden won the nomination in the spring of 2020, he faced a white-hot backlash from enraged and shocked progressives, who had spent months assuming the nominee would be either Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
During that initial period of anger and denial, when many leftists refused to believe Biden’s triumph was real or irreversible, progressive media was filled with stories hyping up concerns about Biden’s mental fitness for the job and promoting accusations by Tara Reade, a former Biden Senate aide, that he had once sexually assaulted her. (Reade has largely been discredited and has since defected to Russia.)
As the campaign went on, Biden patched things up with the left with a series of gestures, adopting many of Warren’s policies and endorsing a “unity platform” co-written by Sanders, at which point progressives stopped calling him a senile rapist.
What this period of time shows is that the left’s relationship to Biden tends to spill beyond the boundaries of policy. When progressives feel invested in Biden’s success, they not only support his shared agenda but avoid attacking him generally. When they see him as an ideological rival or apostate, their opposition becomes sweeping and personal. And the depiction of Biden as a corrupt, doddering, and ineffectual warmonger has purchase both as an ideological critique from the far left and as a generalized attack that can easily be absorbed by cynical voters across the spectrum.
The alliance between Biden and the left has begun to fray. This is partly a matter of failure begetting failure. The president’s economic agenda initially fulfilled progressive wishes to emphasize full employment, robust support for unions, and skepticism of free trade. When that formula failed to yield public support, though, many progressives calculated they were best served by distancing themselves from the administration that produced it. If Biden is destined to founder, they are better off pointing the finger of blame rather than having it pointed at them.
“A faction of the fractured democratic-socialist left — those who were stung by Bernie Sanders’s defeats and his subsequent cooperation with Joe Biden — are also cynically invested in fomenting economic despair for much the same reason Republicans do: to beat the libs,” wrote liberal columnist Brian Beutler. Osita Nwanevu, a democratic socialist who contributes to The New Republic, wrote bluntly, “Events can wind up benefiting the right and the far left at once,” adding, “in a narrow political sense, I don’t think it’s obvious that the left winds up worse off if people are unhappy with Biden, even if he winds up losing.”
Many issues have strained the alliance of convenience between Biden and the left: immigration, student loans, the administration choosing cheap gasoline (the fastest way to mollify voters) over kneecapping the oil industry. But what has caused the schism between Biden and the left to crack wide open is the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Israel’s military response to the Hamas terrorist strike on October 7 has mobilized large segments of the progressive movement, which supports the Palestinian cause, into a state of war against the Democratic Party, which mostly supports Israel. Democratic staffers have endorsed a series of letters denouncing their bosses and even attended a protest rally in Congress. Pro-Palestinian organizations have announced plans to organize opposition to Biden in swing states.
Cornel West, who is running an independent campaign to the left of Biden, has focused his efforts in swing states in the belief that he will gain traction by helping Trump win. West likely won’t garner more than a percentage point or two of the national vote, but it could prove decisive. Ralph Nader’s 98,000 votes in Florida in 2000 pulled more than enough votes from Al Gore to supply George W. Bush with his 537-vote margin. Stein (who also plans to run a splinter campaign in 2024) came close to accounting for Trump’s margin in 2016.
The progressive habit of casting every issue in absolute moral terms makes compromise difficult. “It’s still just hard for young people to justify to themselves, morally, voting for someone after seeing these images, after seeing what’s been going on in the Middle East,” Anish Mohanty, the 22-year-old communications director of Gen-Z for Change, told ABC News. One Democratic voter told the Times, “If it’s Donald Trump, we can kiss our democracy good-bye,” before adding, “but I can’t support someone who supports genocide.” Even people who believe a Trump victory may be the last free and fair election of their lifetime want to use it to teach Biden a lesson rather than ensuring they will have future elections to participate in.
In addition to elevating progressive critiques of Biden’s economy, the most potent impact of West’s candidacy may be to raise the salience of the Israel-Hamas conflict, which puts Biden in a lose-lose position. Sixty-five percent of Americans, but only 46 percent of those under 30 years old, believe Hamas bears a lot of the blame for the conflict. In another poll, 42 percent of Americans sympathize more with Israelis, versus just 12 percent sympathizing more with Palestinians. Any steps Biden takes to placate his base risk forfeiting votes in the center and vice versa.
In West’s telling, not only are both parties rotten, but Trump deserves commendation as a critic of neoliberal capitalism. “When Trump was critical of the neoliberals, he was demonstrating that he understands people’s concerns about neoliberal arrogance, and neoliberal condescension, and neoliberal haughtiness that hides and conceals its own structures of domination, its own operations of power,” West told the socialist magazine Jacobin recently. “And that’s where the Left hasn’t intervened in the name of truth and justice.”
West argued that Black voters themselves are part of the problem because they have been captured by the neoliberal elite. “That Black neoliberal hegemony in the Black community cuts very deep, it really does. Because Black people are convinced that, like most Americans, there’s no alternative to neoliberal leadership other than the Republican Party. And so they remain captured and locked in over, and over, and over again.” The theory at work eerily echoes the reasoning of the Weimar Communists, who believed workers were attracted to the radical right because they were alienated from capitalists and would eventually attach themselves to the radical left if only the more moderate progressive options could first be discredited.
But it also reflects a broader sense among those in the progressive movement that compromising their principles by supporting Biden in one election was more than enough. Can they be expected to subsume their convictions for the sake of lesser-evilism forever? If Biden does happen to lose, they hope or tell themselves, at least the Democrats will never dare betray the progressive base again.
It would be possible, even logical, to imagine that the schism on the left would create an opening for Biden on the center right. Here is a Democratic president defying the demands of the progressive left by supporting Israel’s right to self-defense and denouncing antisemitism in all forms, including the left-wing variety. One might assume this would bring Biden sympathy and support among mainstream Republicans, especially given their own grim alternative.
Instead, the response on the mainstream right has been to see left-wing dissent as an exciting opportunity to upend the center left. “They’re taking votes out of the Biden column, and that’s going to help Republicans,” strategist Jason Roe, who in 2021 resigned as head of the Michigan Republican Party over criticism that he was insufficiently deferential to Trump, gloated to Semafor. “The natural back-and-forth between the parties is going to force some of these Democrats to say things that will alienate pro-Palestinian voters. They will not be able to help themselves; they are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.”
Even the Trump-skeptical conservative intelligentsia has seized gleefully upon the anti-Biden energy on the left. Citing an NBC poll that showed 70 percent of Democratic voters ages 18 to 34 disapproving of Biden’s handling of the war, conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt wrote, “This is a generational shift, and a dire one for Israel.” You might think Israel supporters would be alarmed at the revolt against the president and have some concerns that it might succeed in upending the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy commitments. But rather than conclude that Biden’s defeat would be catastrophic for supporters of Israel, Hewitt’s column proceeded to argue that the left’s opposition to Biden’s Israel policy makes it all the more important to defeat Biden.
Hewitt may be a committed partisan, but the same spirit has infused neoconservatives who had previously maintained the most distance from Trump of all the right’s factions. Bari Weiss’s the Free Press has written sympathetically about liberal Jews feeling “politically homeless” after 10/7 — as if their position were not receiving support from nearly the entire elected Democratic Party, including the president. Similar positions can be found at Commentary and among the Jews who are now getting their news from Fox, a trend the Times detected in November. Conservatives are so committed to making their war against the activist left the lodestar of their worldview that they cannot bring themselves to support any Democrat, even one their enemies are protesting.
And so, watching the far left set out to defeat Biden over his Israel support, conservatives have perversely decided to work toward the same outcome. As bizarre as it may be, disaffection with the Democratic Party’s support for Israel is simultaneously driving the most pro-Israel Republicans and the most anti-Israel Democrats into the arms of Trump.
For both of these factions, Trump is doing nothing to actively win their support. He is merely a passive instrument to demonstrate their anger with other components of the anti-Trump coalition. If you probe beneath the surface of that dynamic, it reveals a deeper malady: the collapse of the idea that Trump represents an unusual and dangerous figure. That premise played a decisive role in 2020 by allowing Biden to win voters who had not traditionally backed the party. Many of those tell pollsters they are planning to revert to their traditional Republican leanings this year. The qualities that made Trump uniquely unacceptable have, for the moment, receded in their minds.
In a political world in which Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and desire to use the presidency as a tool of revenge against the media and his political rivals were seen as the most important stakes of the election — that is, a rational world, in my estimation — the concerns people have with Biden would seem comparatively trivial. Maybe you think he’s too old or too pro-Israel, or you really want to use your vote to express your hatred for the campus left, but that could hardly justify empowering a monster, right?
This is not the world in which we reside. In the U.S. at the outset of 2024, democracy and authoritarianism are, as a pure question of political advantage, essentially a draw. A recent survey by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg found Biden held a mere one-point advantage on “protecting democracy” and was tied on “making democracy more secure.” On “opposing extremism,” “getting beyond the chaos,” and “protecting the Constitution,” Trump held leads ranging from three to eight points.
It is not just the general public, with its teeming masses of low-information voters, that feels this way. Large segments of the political elite do too.
In 2016, Trump’s standing with his party was so precarious that his campaign had to actively plan to ensure convention delegates would not go behind his back to steal the nomination, and even such stalwart reactionaries as Ted Cruz refused to endorse him onstage. In 2020, scores of Republican officials, including several Trump appointees, publicly refused to endorse his reelection.
As Trump runs again, Republicans have succumbed to a strange fatalism about their own potential to send a signal of Trump’s unacceptability to wavering Republicans. Trump-administration officials wringing their hands about whether to publicize their concerns about their former boss have decided to “mute themselves, disagree on whether to go public with their fears about a restoration, or just not work in the coordinated, strategic, and relentless fashion that’s needed to get through to voters,” reported Politico’s Jonathan Martin recently.
Romney rationalized that it wouldn’t matter anyway. “If virtually all the GOP governors and senators were to say they would not support Trump, even in the general, I don’t think his poll numbers would be harmed, at all,” he told Martin. “They might even get better. I think the MAGA base dislikes our elected elites as much as or more than they dislike Democrats.” But the target of influence wouldn’t be “the MAGA base” — it would be the traditional Republicans who, like Romney, peeled away from the party in 2020.
Politico noted that Wall Street has clung to a hope that somehow it may nudge Trump aside for a more normal Republican, but in the overwhelmingly likely event of its failure, “many in the financial-services world expect GOP donors to fall in line behind Trump, even if they were repelled by his denial of the 2020 election results and alleged criminal activity.”
On the intellectual right, opposition to Trump has shrunk entirely to concerns about his electability and practical capacity to advance the conservative agenda. Any moral qualms about Trump’s lust for power have disappeared.
Even former Trump attorney general Bill Barr, who has described his ex-boss as dangerous and childlike, has put as much emphasis on Trump’s ineffectiveness as his “toxic persona,” writing in the Free Press, “While I think it is critical the Biden administration be beaten at the polls, Trump is not the answer. He is not capable of winning the decisive victory Republicans need to advance conservative principles.”
And what exactly are those principles? There was a time when one could draw a sharp distinction between movement conservatism, which was focused on policy goals like tax cuts and banning abortion, and Trump, who cared only about power. At first, the movement and the man worked together instrumentally. Now, they seem to share first principles. Even conservative intellectuals have come to see power itself as the ultimate end, convincing themselves that the Democratic Party embodies a terrifying cultural revolution. Lance Morrow wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal embodying this assumption with the astonishingly revealing headline “Trump vs. the Woke: Let the People Decide” — as if the alternative to Trump were not the decidedly un-woke Biden but instead the left-wing protesters who mostly hate him. Conservatives have talked themselves out of joining an anti-Trump center-left coalition by defining it out of existence, imagining that the only alternative to Trump is Students for Justice in Palestine.
Among what used to be the anti-Trump right, it has become a settled fact that those who warned about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions have been proved wrong. The Journal famously published a column by Mick Mulvaney in November 2020 headlined “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.” Rather than be chastened by the extremely predictable failure of that prediction, it continues to invoke Trump’s first term as if this were actually correct. A recent Journal editorial sneered that Chris Christie’s “warnings that Mr. Trump is a threat to the republic won’t persuade GOP voters who remember Democrats saying the same in 2016.”
The Journal editorial page was obviously never going to support a Democratic presidential candidate. But the Republican elite’s attitude toward Trump filters into the political bloodstream. The reason a small but crucial sliver of voters in places like Phoenix and Atlanta abandoned its Republican voting habits to reluctantly cast a ballot for Biden is that it had absorbed the idea that traditional Republicans couldn’t abide Trump.
The collapse of the Republican primary into a Trump coronation, with Trump’s main opponents all pledging to back him in November and seemingly leaving the door wide open to serve as his running mate, likewise confirms the expiration of any serious reservations within the party over his fitness to serve. Where the notion that Trump is a bad person who shouldn’t be president was once declared boldly by the party’s leaders, it is now muttered by its oddballs. The once-revoked permission structure to support him has quietly returned.
One surprising aspect of Biden’s presidency is that while the partisan elements of his domestic agenda fell well short of liberal hopes, the bipartisan elements have exceeded all expectations. Biden successfully negotiated deals with Republicans on infrastructure, scientific research, critical domestic manufacturing, veterans benefits, and modest gun control. Yet he is facing the serious possibility that he will lose reelection because of a spoiler candidacy by the self-styled bipartisan movement No Labels.
The corny premise of No Labels is that partisanship is destroying America and that solutions can be found by listening respectfully to one another and compromising on common ground. To whatever extent you find this theory persuasive, it’s impossible to deny Biden has done more to make it a reality than any president in decades.
No Labels explains that its campaign to put a centrist candidate on the ballot is needed because “we see our two major political parties dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics rather than what’s best for our country. We hear reason and persuasion — the pillars of our democracy since its founding — being replaced by anger and intimidation.” This indictment might apply to one of the two major candidates but not to both of them.
The organization’s remedy is even more curious. It calls for a “common sense” platform of negotiating prescription-drug prices, stricter enforcement of immigration laws combined with higher legal immigration and amnesty for Dreamers who came to this country as children, universal background checks for gun purchases and closing the gun-show loophole, an all-of-the-above approach to energy, funding for localities to hire and train police, permitting reform, and strong support for NATO and other allies. What about abortion? The “common sense” solution No Labels embraces (“Abortion is too important and complicated an issue to say it’s common sense to pass a law — nationally or in the states — that draws a clear line at a certain stage of pregnancy”) is a gentle way of saying “pro-choice.”
Literally every item on this list is supported or has already been accomplished by Biden. When you consider this fact, the group’s refusal to endorse him is baffling, and it becomes obvious that No Labels’ approval of a presidential candidate would come mostly at Biden’s expense. Any scenario in which he wins the election would involve the race polarizing around Trump, which in turn would require Biden to pull together liberals and moderates. Running a candidate who promises moderation, compromise, and decency — let alone a platform that could be swiped from Biden’s own campaign page — can serve only to divide the anti-Trump coalition.
Joe Lieberman, the founding chairman of No Labels and a former Democratic senator who lost a 2006 primary to Ned Lamont over his staunch support for Bush’s leadership in the Iraq War, has led the group’s public messaging. Lieberman, who was Gore’s running mate in 2000, has repeatedly insisted that No Labels will not run a spoiler candidacy and has promised it has strict guardrails to ensure any campaign it backs does not help reelect Trump. The way this fail-safe system works, Lieberman has explained, is that the group will stand down unless “the polling is clear that we won’t be a spoiler.”
A highly relevant fact here is that No Labels relies on polling by Mark Penn, who happens to be the husband of the group’s chief executive, Nancy Jacobson. Penn is a former Democratic pollster who was a prominent adviser to Bill Clinton and then the lead strategist for Hillary Clinton’s Senate candidacy in 2000 and presidential campaign in 2008. That campaign was a career-incinerating humiliation for Penn. Clinton entered the race as the favorite, only to find herself overtaken by upstart Barack Obama. Penn notoriously insisted Obama was unelectable and pushed Clinton to attack him as culturally foreign. (“I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values,” he wrote in one memo.)
Clinton did not hire Penn for her next campaign eight years later. After she lost in 2016, Penn took an increasingly reactionary turn, writing op-eds with headlines like “The Dishonesty of the Deep State” and even meeting with Trump in the Oval Office to advise him on how to beat back impeachment. His polls frequently test novel questions that tend to support his narrative — most recently, they have purported to find shocking levels of antisemitism among young voters — and his survey methods have drawn criticism from other pollsters. So when Lieberman swears up and down his group won’t help reelect Trump but bases that conclusion on Penn’s say-so, his assurances should not be taken at face value.
Lieberman and Penn have in common an alienation from the Democratic Party that has ideological and professional dimensions. Both men came tantalizingly close to the apogee of professional success — Lieberman as vice-presidential nominee who fell short of winning by a few hundred votes in Florida and Penn as Svengali to the party’s heir apparent. After very nearly reaching the mountaintop, both found themselves shunted aside.
So when Penn and Lieberman dismiss the Democratic Party as “dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics” while calling for policies eerily similar to those advocated by its current leadership, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are transposing their own career humiliations onto the national debate.
One paradox of American politics is that it is very difficult to rise to the top within the party system but that destabilizing the system from the outside through a spoiler candidacy is almost trivially easy. In a closely balanced electorate, a third party can decide the outcome by pulling even a tiny number of votes away from one of the other parties, and the amount of money and fame required to receive a potentially decisive number of votes is low enough that anybody even slightly famous can do it. Stein is not exactly a giant of the left.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who by virtue of his family name is a giant of a sort, has a similarly antagonistic relationship to the two-party system as No Labels and Stein, though polling has shown he appears to be drawing more support from Trump’s coalition than Biden’s. Still, his presence in the race, running on a platform that is a bizarre mix of anti-vaxx conspiracizing and pox-on-both-houses populism, is a testament to the degree that certain voters are prioritizing issues that have little to do with the real and present dangers of Trump’s return.
A number of third-tier figures may be tempted to disrupt the election if they can’t see beyond their personal frustrations to grasp the larger stakes. One notable dynamic of this moment is how many political elites, both major and minor, are too wrapped up in their own microdramas to understand the enormity of the decision facing the country. A combination of unresolved grudges against the likes of Lamont, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and other esoteric targets appears to be an important reason the U.S. is poised to hand leadership of the free world to an authoritarian criminal.
But the spoiler candidates and their supporters are not the only people suffering from this particular brand of myopia. It is, at least for now, endemic.
Three years ago, Biden promised a return to something like political normalcy. As president, he would try to represent all Americans, not just those who voted for him; he would deliver speeches with coherent sentences rather than ranting off the cuff for hours; he would not routinely be described by his own appointees as deranged or slaver publicly over dictators who had flattered him or paid him through his business.
That promise worked. The lesson of the 2020 election and the 2022 midterm was “Normal beats crazy.” The Trumpiest candidates who seemed to be trying to replicate Trump’s unnerving style — Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, Herschel Walker — lost a series of elections. The pattern appeared to reveal something comforting and sustainable about the character of the electorate.
And whatever his shortcomings, Biden has delivered normalcy. He has visited heavily Republican areas and both promised and delivered aid without extortive demands, supported American allies against attacks by American enemies, and produced the soft landing economists had deemed unlikely a year ago.
But now the political passion is all on the side of extremism. Normalcy feels spent, enervating, and this has encouraged former members of the anti-Trump coalition to gravitate toward other concerns that animate them. An important number of Americans who once found Trump intolerable have either forgotten how awful he is or have some strange craving for his return.
Biden is often described as lacking energy. But it is not the president who is exhausted; it is us.
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