Unlock the US Election Countdown newsletter for free
The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
There is no good solution now. We are in the realm of the least worst. If the US Democrats go with someone other than Joe Biden as their presidential nominee, think of the implicit message to voters. “We tried our utmost to sneak an untenable candidate past you but the scrutiny of a live television debate foiled us. Ah well, here’s his replacement.” This eleventh-hour capitulation to realities that have been obvious for several years looks both clumsy and slippery.
If Biden runs, however, that is worse. His glitches of speech and manner, which are glaring enough now, are likelier to multiply than to go away. Some 72 per cent of registered voters think he hasn’t the cognitive wherewithal to be president.
The Democrats have had over three years to prepare for this eventuality. The day after Biden was elected, the process of finding a successor for 2024 should have begun (at his instigation). Yet here we are. The party deserves electoral defeat as punishment for its fecklessness and dereliction, or at least it would if the alternative this November weren’t Donald Trump. The trouble is that swing voters might not bother with the second half of that sentence.
If fumbling the Biden succession were an isolated mistake, we might rue it, and draw no wider lesson. But it is of a piece with a pattern of behaviour on the Anglo-American left. Had the Democrats chosen a better candidate than Hillary Clinton in 2016, that close election would have tipped their way. Trump would now be filming The Apprentice season 23.
As for the Labour party in the UK, there are three counterfactuals that would have reduced the chances of Brexit: deposing Gordon Brown as leader before the 2010 election, which had the potential to avert a Conservative government; choosing the correct Miliband brother, who might have denied the Tories the outright majority in 2015 that led to the referendum; and rejecting Jeremy Corbyn for an unambiguous (and competent) Remainer.
This isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking on a historical scale. In each of these cases, it was plain at the time what had to be done. In each, the left found a way not to do it. At some point, this starts to look less like a series of mishaps than an underlying character flaw. It is a hard flaw to put a name to, but the essence of it is an aversion to conflict with like-minded people.
The test of seriousness in politics is an appetite to confront one’s own side. On that score, liberals are too absent, too often. Failing to say the obvious about Biden is just one example.
Another is the constant evasiveness about the woke movement. All sorts of lines have been tried: that woke-ism is just good manners; that rightwingers are making it up; that cancel culture often fails, so what’s the fuss; that Defund the Police means Let’s Think Hard About Constructive Reform of the Police. Supporting the cultural far left on its own terms is entirely legitimate. So is challenging it as an illiberal menace. But looking away, or reframing the movement as something it plainly isn’t, is craven, and remains the tactic of too many liberals. The overall effect is of people walking on eggshells around their own children.
Aware that he wasn’t a genius, George Orwell said that one thing he had going for him was the “power of facing unpleasant facts”. The more sumptuous talents on the left couldn’t see, or chose not to see, the malevolence of the Soviet project. Well, that denialism, that horror of having “enemies to the left”, lives on, and the recent history of Britain and America has turned on it.
Even now, after the debate fiasco, Democrats are couching their misgivings about Biden in ambiguous language. Searching questions have to be asked about him, I read. Alternative candidates are within their rights to sound out donors, apparently. The passive voice is getting a strenuous workout. As ever, the priority is a sort of Edwardian drawing-room etiquette. On the one hand, Trump is an existential threat to democracy, and all legitimate means must be used to stop him. At the same time: don’t let’s be beastly to each other.
Soon after the debate, Biden put in a solid showing at a campaign rally. Some Democrats talked this up as though it were a missing fragment from the Gettysburg Address. This is where liberal denialism ends up: the ignominious spectacle of Biden, a proud man, who served his nation and the world by defeating Trump, being commended for getting to the end of sentences. In its own way, it is a more poignant spectacle than the botched debate ever was.
