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The Democrats keep telling us that Donald Trump poses a unique threat to democracy and global stability, so that even if you are disagree with almost all of their policies, you should still vote for the Democratic nominee to keep Trump out of the White House.
I agree with them. I was prepared to vote for Biden. I will vote for Harris. I will do this despite the fact that Biden and Harris represent ideologies I find appalling and support policies that I believe will leave the world a considerably worse place. There are in fact a few Democrats I think are even more dangerous than Trump (I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren) but none of them seems to be in the running.
But although they’ve convinced me, I doubt that the Democrats have actually convinced themselves. Because if they have — if they really believe that Trump is such a unique threat that we have to put most of our disagreements about policy aside in order to stop him — they wouldn’t be nominating Harris, or any other Democrat. Instead, they’d be drafting Liz Cheney. (I might have said Nikki Haley, but I think that ship sailed when she addressed the Republican convention.)
Yes, the average Democrat would have to swallow very hard to support Cheney, just as I’ll have to swallow very hard to support Harris. The difference is that Cheney’s probably got a better chance of beating Trump. In a Cheney/Trump race, I’d wager that about 100% of Democrats and 25% of Republicans choose Cheney. That’s a landslide.
You might argue that it would be hard to get the Democratic base out to the polls for Cheney. But after a few months of hammering home the message that the imperative is to stop Trump, I don’t think you’d have more trouble selling Cheney to Democrats than you’d have selling Harris to me — and I am already sold.
I rarely agree with Democrats on political matters. This time around, we’re all on the same side. Let’s do what it takes to win. I will do my part by putting a whole lot of disagreements aside and voting for Harris if I have to. The Democratic National Committee can do its part by also putting a whole lot of disagreements aside and nominating someone with a far better chance of success. The only difference between me and the DNC is nobody cares what I do, but the DNC can make a difference, and maybe save the world. If they mean the things they say, that’s what they’ll do.
I have gleaned, over the years, that you and I are generally on opposite sides of many things politically and economically. I continue to follow you because of that fantastic post you made about Alexander Grothendieck almost 10 years ago. From that, my feeling is that when you post something, it’s worth taking a glance to see if anything equally inspiring or interesting pops up.
This post fits that category. Nice job, and thanks.
Joe Manchin is thinking of going for the nomination. I think he’d beat Trump.
An excellent post.
I think that it might depend a little bit on how seriously you take the “unique” part of “unique threat”. If you view this as an iterated game then party A selecting a truly awful candidate and hoping that party B chooses a moderate member of party B to avoid catastrophe could land you in a world with two perfectly terrible candidates running against each other. I remember Steve writing about why throwing away your steering wheel is an optimal strategy in a game of chicken and this seems to reminiscent of that.
If you think Trump is absolutely unique then you might not worry about this kind of prescient. If you think he’s near-unique in the normal course of events but that it’s possible to engineer someone close enough down the line then you might worry about setting this situation repeating.
I am not voting – especially not now that I’ve moved to Tennessee. However, it’s not at all clear to me why Trump was, or is, any worse than Joe Biden. There are certainly differences in rhetoric, but that’s always been the case. Yes, I understand Trump is much more radical in his rhetoric, but we should look at evidence before rhetoric. We don’t always get an opportunity to do that with short-lived politicians, but we do here since Trump has been a President before.
1. His Supreme Court Justice nominations, while certainly Conservative, are clearly not serving him to the greatest extent they can. The majority of cases the SC have taken on since he’s nominated those Justices are 9-0. That means, despite being the “Conservative” wing, they’re still largely in agreement with their counterparts.
2. He did not cancel student loans, but he did suspend them at 0% interest. Biden has tried to cancel them and is implementing a plan that is similar to suspending them at 0%.
3. Trump and Biden have allowed (and are allowing) many, many immigrants in (thank goodness!) despite their “tough on immigration” rhetoric.
4. Both support Israel (I am not taking a specific stance on this but am pointing out there isn’t really a difference in who they support)
5. Both support Ukraine (see above)
6. Both wanted to leave Afghanistan.
7. Both supported large amounts of stimulus checks.
8. Both support protectionist trade policies.
9. Both spend money like crazy either through tax cuts + large spending or just simply through large amounts of spending.
These are just what came to mind. I don’t like Trump. For a lack of a better term, he’s a dick. That being said, when it comes to policy, he’s really not any different than what we have in the current Democratic Party.
tyler (#4):
1. I absolutely agree that Trump is in many ways a lot closer to being a mainstream Democrat than a mainstream Republican.
2. I cut Trump a bit of slack on the student loan thing because it came at a time when, for all anyone knew, Covid was going to make people highly illiquid even though they were not insolvent, and those are reasonable conditions for suspending debt payments.
3. You can add to your list that neither wants to do much about entitlements.
4. I think that Trump’s federal court appointments were mostly pretty good, and far better than what I expect from Harris.
5. Trump was also far better than expected-Harris in a lot of other dimensions, especially regulation.
6. Trump gets some minor credit for the Ryan tax reform, but only minor because that bill had so much in it that was win-win that I believe Hilary Clinton would have signed something very similar (though dressed up in very different rhetoric).
7. But all of that pales before Trump’s incitement of political violence, his kowtowing to foreign dictators, and his habit of believing things for absolutely no reason. (Biden and Harris both believe a lot of things that are, I believe, very clearly wrong, and sometimes for no reason, but they at least periodically acknowledge that reasoning has some value.)
8. On balance, if I judge by policies alone, then on a scale where Harris is a zero, Trump is a one, the people I think of as mainstream Republicans tend to come in at about a six (and my ideal is a ten). So yes, Trump beats Harris on policy. But the points in paragraph 7 above dwarf all of that.
No, Liz Cheney would not win a single state.
I do not think that many voters view Trump as a “unique threat”. Trump was President for 4 years of peace and prosperity. He was less authoritarian than Pres. Obama and Biden. Biden just arranged for the Democrat nominee to be someone other than one collecting most of the primary votes. Trump never did anything so undemocratic.
There are people who hate Trump, but mostly for reasons of personality. By most accounts, Biden dropped out because of polling that most people considered Trump a better President.
Aaron Sorkin made a very similar point in the New York Times on Sunday: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/opinion/biden-west-wing-aaron-sorkin.html.
Your conclusion follows if the Democrats’ priority is victory at this election by as big a margin as possible. But if their priority is simply stopping Donald Trump winning this election, then there may exist a range of candidates who could do that — and if all of them meet their main criterion, then they can choose between them based on other reasons.
1. For instance, between two candidates who can both beat Donald Trump, the Democrats would presumably prefer the one that will implement the most Democratic policies. So they could reasonably prefer a more mainstream Democratic candidate (who they think will win a small victory over Donald Trump) than a more Republican-friendly candidate (who would win by a bigger margin).
(Note I’m not saying that they *have* chosen such a candidate. I’m not American and don’t know any of the potential candidates well enough to judge. Also, many politicians seem to overestimate their own chances of winning.)
2. There are also future elections to consider. If mainstream Republicans discover that they can pick a terrible Republican candidate and the Democrats will respond by putting up a better Republican-ish candidate, then they can keep doing that intentionally, ensuring that there’s never a typical Democratic on the ballot.
@tyler, et al,
You can argue similarities in policies and any number of other issues, and you might be right. But—related to what Steve said in his reply—it absolutely pales beside the fact that Trump lost the 2020 election and has absolutely refused to acknowledge that fact and accommodate the peaceful transfer of power. In short, he does not support the U.S. Constitution, and has no business being in a position to uphold it.
And lest there be any doubt that Trump lost the election, ask yourself this: Why, in the past two years, have Jim Jordan and James Comer not investigated the 2020 elections the way Bennie Thompson, Adam Schiff, and the Democrats investigated January 6th? Why has Trump not demanded that Congressional Republicans do that? Don’t bother trying to answer; those are rhetorical questions. The answer is that they all know full well that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but they persist in supporting the lie that strikes to the very heart of American democracy.
@vnsmith, that is incorrect. Trump acknowledged that he lost the election, and he peacefully transferred power on Jan. 20, 2021. He moved out of the White House, and Biden moved in.
Trump and his supporters had an assortment of complaints about how the 2020 votes were cast and counted. There were many irregularities. You can read about some of them here.
These arguments did not persuade the courts and Congress, and that is why Biden is in the White House today. Many investigations were done, but that is all water under the bridge now. Election rules were changed to what had never been done before, and much of what was done cannot be verified.
You can argue that Trump should have conceded earlier, or that he should not have contested the counts, or that he should not say that the election was stolen. But that was all within his rights, and nothing was against the US Constitution.
Trump is accused of violating the Enron Act and of keeping some obscure White House papers, but Biden-Harris’s prosecution of him has been almost entirely unlawful and unconstitutional, according to some judicial opinions.
I’ll simply leave the refutation of the bullsh*t being slung above to the following linked essays:
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/single-bullet-theory (published July 16, 2024)
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/the-dnc-euphoria-wave-strategy (published July 19, 2024)
“Representative democracy is an absurd system. I have dedicated this publication to underthrowing that system and the sociopaths who perpetuate it. Otherwise, I could write a thick volume called ‘Why Our System of Government is Effing Absurd’.”
I told my wife something similar (her a democrat and me a “small-L libertarian”). I laid out a list of candidates that would actually make me vote for the Democratic nominee. But if/when it is Harris, unlike you Steven, I’m going to stick with my third party vote.
There’s a 95% chance that Trump is probably fine as a big mouthed sometimes-disappointing Republican (which is fine from my conservative perspective). The 5% chance that he does something crazy is still an issue for me even though his first 4 years were fine.
However, Biden’s mental condition was just as risky to me, if not more, and cancelled out my concern about the risk of Trump.
Now that Biden’s out, that risk aversion shifts me further from Trump. If I could vote for gridlock, I would. The checks and balances limit the damage any normal misguided politician can do.
There’s one thing that I don’t quite understand about your analysis (or maybe simply one you’ve overlooked). You’re all in against Trump because you’re [presumably] worried about his upending democracy. But for the past 4 years the current administration has been doing just that. During its primary season it rearranged the order of Primaries to benefit the incumbent President (moving South Carolina up ahead of New Hampshire so that there’s no chance of RFK Jr defeating Biden the way Bernie had 4 years ago) and cancelled the Florida primary altogether. It colluded with the large media apparatus to hide how senile Biden is, only pulling him out for a different candidate when that secret came out. It has on multiple occasions tried to circumvent Supreme Court decisions. It waited right up to the moment when it was clear who its political rival would be, and then immediately attempted to bankrupt him and imprison him (the later including for crimes that the President of the current administration himself committed).
Your analysis of voting for Biden or Kamala makes sense in a void, but certainly not with the current state of affairs. At least against Trump the system of checks and balances worked. At the end of the day, he had left office.
Arture (#14): My problem with Trump is not that he threatens to upend democracy. In many ways, I think we already have far too much democracy, and some of it needs to be upended.
My first problem with Trump is that he threatens to upend capitalism. Of course so do the Democrats, so that’s sort of a wash, except for one thing: If you defeat Biden and Harris, they are almost sure to be succeeded by equally ardent anti-capitalists. If you defeat Trump, there’s at least a reasonable chance he’ll be succeeded by somebody who, while quite imperfect, is at least generally well disposed to free markets.
My second problem with Trump is that he is anti-intellectual in the sense that he thinks it’s perfectly okay to believe things for no reason at all. I am sure that Biden and Harris share a lot of this trait, but not to the same extent that Trump has it.
But that’s all small potatoes compared to my major problem with Trump, which is that he seeks to upend democracy through violence and through upending the impartiality of the justice system. That is beyond tolerable, and almost anything is better.
Too cute by half, @Roger Shlafly. Yes, Trump left office. But he’s been undermining the legitimacy of the election ever since. Consider this post he made in Dec 2022 on Truth Social:
“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
The man has no regard for the Constitution, and has no business taking an oath of office to defend it.
And again, if he believed (or believes) that there was fraud of such magnitude to render the election illegitimate, why hasn’t he insisted that the Republicans who control the House investigate it?
He’s the fraud, pure and simple.