Twenty-two observations about American politics

The last few weeks have been quite a decade

In no particular order of relevance or impact.

1. The GOP retreat from a national abortion ban in its party platform is one of the most predictable consequences of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Subjecting abortion restrictions to popular control was inevitably going to force conservatives (and perhaps, at some point, liberals) to moderate their unpopular position or lose elections, and this may be the beginning of larger tectonic movement toward the widely-legal-but-more-restricted-than-Roe centrist policies you see in many other countries.

2. As my friend James Wallner is fond of articulating, violence is the opposite of politics, and “political violence” is almost a misnomer. We should think of politics as the means by which we negotiate the non-negotiable, in a civilized manner. You can have group-decision making, or fistfights. That someone died simply by participating in a political rally for a candidate is among the most tragic things that can happen in a republic.

3. It is not 1968, and we are all very lucky that is the case. As scary and sad as the Trump assassination attempt was, an important reminder is that it can get much worse, and it has been much worse during many Americans lifetimes. Preventing a downward spiral is a collective responsibility, and the elite response from across the political spectrum was (with notable disheartening exceptions) productive to this end.

4. Biden is too old to be an effective president for four more years, and that is plainly obvious. His physical decline over the last four years is significant. Trump has aged a lot in the last four years as well; his decline is also evident when you watch speeches from 2020, but is better masked by the through line of rambling nonsense that has always characterized his speeches.

5. The ideal president is (much) younger than Biden/Trump, but more experienced than Vance. What I’m looking for is executive experience, and hopefully some foreign policy chops. Give me a governor or a mayor over a lifelong Senator any day. These skills/experiences are far more important to the actual job of POTUS than any position on taxes/guns/abortion. The Founders impulse that SecState would be the best training ground for POTUS was not wrong.

6. JD was a risky pick for Trump. He mostly won’t matter, VPs almost never do. But he won’t help deliver a state electorally. He’s young and inexperienced and might blow up on the campaign trail in a Palin-esque way. And his public persona doubles down on Trump and Trumpism in a way Pence did not (and other contenders for ‘24 would not). It’s not a olive branch to Biden Republicans. It might be a signal of a very confident candidate/campaign.

7. I would support a constitutional amendment to bar anyone from being elected, or becoming, president after age 72. It’s a blunt instrument, but on balance worthwhile. In all of US history, it would have prevented William Henry Harrison from running for reelection (he died in office); Reagan from running for a second term (his last years featured concerns about his mental acuity); Trump from running for reelection in 2020; and Biden from running beginning in ‘16.

8. The degree to which opinions about Biden’s age/health/acuity are being seen through an exclusively electoral lens and almost not at all through a governing lens is both inevitable in a democracy, and also still shocking to me. It’s perhaps the most important reason why a constitutional amendment such as the one above is necessary; voters (and candidates) are going to be cross-pressured about these sorts of things, and will often choose short-term electoral concerns over normative governance ones.

9. That said, many voters appear to be abandoning Biden over the age issue. The splits between Biden and Democratic Senate candidates in swing states is remarkable; it is reminiscent of the long-gone incumbency advantage of the low-polarization era a generation and a half ago.

10. I don’t think Biden can survive politically, and I think the WH knows it. The key questions now are (1) does he resign in addition to dropping out of the ‘24 race; and (2) what sort of nominating process does endorse.

11. This is very tricky politics, because the main danger I see for the Dems is not being able to put the full coalition back together under a new candidate. And that might occur if Biden puts his thumb strongly on the scale for Harris (resigning and endorsing her seems like the max version of that) or if he doesn’t do that, and instead promotes some sort of open-process where multiple candidates can campaign for a few weeks before a freewheeling convention starts. There’s no guaranteed safe way through, but it’s also not obvious which way is safer.

12. It’s also true that the convention is going to have the final say. People are so used to the primary system producing presumptive nominees that they forget the delegates do actually have to vote. No amount of political pressure or wiring things up can guarantee Harris gets the nomination. In the end, someone is going to have to get the votes of the delegates, while also trying to keep the big Dem coalition intact.

13. I dislike arguments that assert the primary system/voters are the only source of democratic legitimacy for a political party. It is a very thin view of both democracy and political parties. And it seems quite ignorant of both American history and virtually every other democracy in the world.

    

    The 1860 Democratic convention fracture the party, snapping one of the last major bisectional institutions left in the country

14. Almost everything happening in both our major parties right now is an excellent advertisement for the parliamentary system of democracy. Juan Linz said it best 35 years ago, and the perils of presidentialism are just dripping from our politics right now.

15. As a Congress guy, the most alarming thing I’ve heard in the entire campaign is the Trump assertion (evidently backed by House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole(!), of all people) that the president has constitutional authority to impound appropriations made under law. This would be a massive escalation in the ongoing presidential power grab over appropriations. I was not happy with the Obama actions on Medicaid, Trump transfer for the wall, or Biden student-loan forgiveness, all of which seemed to me naked presidential overreach into the core congressional purse power. But an attempt to legally revive impoundment is a frontal assault on Congress.

16. Trump’s acceptance speech last night was long and boring and low-energy and somehow lost a fair amount of the most friendly audience you could ever get. But no one will remember in three days and no one will care. The speech might have mattered as a signal—maybe Trump or his campaign aren’t going to be as good over the next few months as people thought—but the speech itself will have zero effect on anything.

17. The degree to which Trump has successfully convinced Republicans (and some Democrats) to engage in banana republic politics—where policy is less important than rewarding friends or punishing enemies and the psychic value of controlling government more important than any governing outcome—is striking.

18. The GOP policy evolution that is being contested underneath Trump’s banana republic politics is fascinating. Forget Sean O’Brien speaking at the convention. This Ezra Klein interview with Oren Cass—leading intellectual/policy proponent of an isolationist, protectionist, pro-union, sectoral bargaining, multiracial worker’s GOP—is truly fascinating. Whether Hawley, Vance, Rubio, Cotton and their likeminded young GOP allies actually will succeed in displacing (or even really take on, or even really care to fight) the still-dominant business-class, tax-cutting, orthodox free trader wing of the party remains to be seen. Trump, to date, talks a lot more than he does here.

19. We're now in the third consecutive presidential elections that I think I would describe as the most bizarre of my lifetime. Just wild.

20. The internet has the dual ability to both spread insane conspiracy theories and portray conspiracy theories as more popular than they actually are. I would guess that almost no one actually believes Trump staged his assassination attempt or that Biden ordered the assassination attempt. I would also guess that a significant number of partisan believe their counterparts do believe the conspiracy theories. And this is fueled by a vanishingly small number of online accounts (some of them elected officials, sigh), many/most of which are not even acting in good-faith.

21. That said, I think the Paranoid Style in American politics is alive and well. As much as people don’t actually believe insane theories of assassination attempts, they are more than willing to see American politics as a battle between righteous people and shadowy opposition forces illegitimately holding power. The good news is this is nothing new. Lincoln himself both believed/articulated the Slave Power conspiracy, and was seen by his opponents as the lynchpin of the abolitionist conspiracy.

22. If you are distraught about American politics, let me make my usual pitch: go participate in hyper-local politics. Show up at the PTA. Work your HOA. Go speak at Town Council. Join the neighborhood pool board. Fight it out in the church basement. Most public collective decision-making isn’t about red vs. blue, and actually participating in politics (rather than being a hobbyist) is an incredibly empowering feeling. It doesn’t suck any less—Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren are both waiting for you at the PTA, and you’re gonna lose a lot—but it delivers real, tangible results you can see, and the actual satisfaction of self-government, neither of which you can get by mailing $25 to Joe Biden and clicking like on a facebook post.