There’s no value in a protest vote. And in my opinion giving Trump the smallest popular vote count possible, even if he wins, has value for mobilization we’ll need to engage in after his victory or to put the nail in the coffin of his defeat,
Mobilization for... when they pull the football away again?
I think this line of thinking has worn thin. It's not compelling in any way, especially when you consider the people for whom we'd be mobilizing. They're the ones who have walked us into this cul-de-sac.
Or think of it more broadly such as in mobilization against his attempts to implement awful shit, like we did with the airport protests against the first Muslim ban in 2017.
But it’s all the citizenry doing the heavy lifting. We’re ostensibly voting in dem establishment so that they can take decisive action ‘next time?’ How did that work out for our reproductive rights? I think John’s article reads strong in this regard provided you drop the pretense that only one side is a problem. As much as toppling Trump won’t suddenly remake the right, providing the left a metaphorical ‘one last reprieve in the face of danger’ won’t make them introspective and more effective.
As someone not safely ensconced in a blue state, it's hard not to read your protest vote consideration as a lack of solidarity with those of us trying to grind out a win against long odds. I don't at all disagree with your criticisms of Biden and his enablers (I have no idea why AOC, for example, provided him cover this week). But we need to be very realistic that the difference between the options is not a matter of degrees if you're on the receiving end of a mass deportation campaign. I get that political philosophy is your bag, and I enjoy a Hegel deep cut as much as the next person, but I think this is a really problematic stance. I hope your protest vote feels very satisfying.
PS I was enjoying the book, but this post was a real bummer to read. What the hell, man.
The book is well done and an accomplishment you are right to be proud of, and no, I don't need to agree with everything. But you're flirting with some really dangerous shit here, in my opinion.
I agree with Sean -- I generally like John's writing a lot but this protest vote stance is really self-indulgent. The reason is because what happens in the blue states doesn't just stay in the blue states. Jill Stein voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and PA helped push Trump over the top in 2016. Nader voters in 2000 played a similar spoiler role. As Sean says, the consequences of a Trump election include mass deportation not to mention an increase of abortion bans on the more than 28 million women already facing them, dire rollbacks of our climate change policy. I recommend getting back in the fight with phone-banking, donations, and phone-banking -- not Hegelian fatalism.
Ganz lives in New York, which voted for Biden by 23% percentage points in 2020. If it doesn't stay blue Trump will have coasted to victory roughly 535 to 3. At that point it's not a matter of who wins, but the message you want to send.
I'm happy to have Trump run up the score by 1 (frankly, meaningless) if it means that the Democrats can have a "never again" moment. The vote doesn't matter the other way, either: it's all symbolic.
Let’s not be fatuous. This is not about one solitary vote carried out in the privacy of a voting both in NYC (which I would still disagree with, but which would be less harmful in terms of its reach).
Rather, this was a public and publicized post written by someone with not insignificant reach. This kind of discourse travels, and that’s where the harm occurs.
That's an utterly unworkable standard for discourse. Every time somebody criticizes Biden in any way, people read it as "vote for Trump." Does that mean that everyone with any kind of platform is ethically proscribed from reporting anything negative about Biden, lest he potentially lose some votes somewhere?
Given that the protest vote in a blue state has no effect on the outcome, why is demanding more from the party, by withholding that support where they don’t need it anyway, a lack of solidarity? If anything, a protest vote in a blue state is demonstrating greater solidarity to the cause of government by the people.
1. The net result of people on the left voting for third parties won't be the Democratic party chasing left voters. We ran that experiment in 2000 and 2004. What shifted portions of the party to the left was when the left started running effective primaries within the party.
2. Inevitably, the message of "I'm voting third party in a blue state" gets sloshed around to the point where it's simply heard by some as "I'm voting third party." I'm not saying there is direct causation there, but it's part of the same legitimating discourse and permission structure. Again, we know this from the Green Party experiments.
So even in CA or NY or wherever, voting 3rd party is not at all likely to actually register any sort of meaningful protest (i.e., no objective is achieved) and the calls to do so make it harder for those of us in the swing states who have to bat down even more shit as we engage in efforts to turn folks out.
Fringe candidates, fringe support. We don't need to go down that path again. It's a costsly dead end.
It’s been wild that we have a whole movement that’s been dedicated for the past two weeks who’ve been adamant that with enough spin and complete lockstep unity they can make people disbelieve what people saw with their own eyes, and their own ears. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence. Only made worse by other party members proclaiming how they’re also old and they’re still running things so quit talking about Biden’s age. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks this doesn’t look ridiculous to a lot of regular people.
When Jill Biden says her husband is "the only man for the job," the echoes of Trump saying "I alone" are deafening. The internecine war on the anti-Trump side has erupted, and it's not pretty.
Agree. I am so disillusioned with the Democratic party, which I have voted for since my first vote in 1968. Biden's blaming of "elites" was the last straw. I am dangerously ensconced in a red state, in a rural county, surrounded by men who love their arsenals and practice with them daily. My vote doesn't matter; the county and state always ends up voting red.
It's hard for liberals to live here; heck, it's hard for smart people to live here. I have been chased out of houses by people yelling at me that I was one of those elites. Never mind that my income was so low that I didn't even owe taxes this year: it's not about that. It's about education, or something. Guilty as charged: I'm educated. But I never thought that a Democrat, the leader of the party, would start slinging that insult around; here, being thought of as an elite is actually dangerous. I hide my education.
This essay names the problem: that we've become a nation where elderly elites are safely ensconced in their political offices, while they gas-light ordinary citizens and accuse these ordinary middle-income citizens of being dastardly elites, guilty of some sort of unnamed conspiracy. This is what psychopathic abusers do: they accuse you of the very thing they are doing to you.
But HOW did we get to this point? What are the real historical causes behind this gerontacracy? I guess Hegel would just say: it's the dialectic, stupid. But what is the thesis and the antithesis leading to this terrible synthesis?
Here is one possibility. The thesis is post-WWII prosperity and American hegemony in the world, and white male supremacy at home. The antithesis is the defeat in Vietnam, and all that followed. The supreme white American male now has a lot of problems. His wife won't do the dishes for him any more. He is compelled to treat black people with something like respect. He has to acknowledge that gay people exist. There was the helpless feeling of 9/11, followed by two stupid, expensive, lost wars. Then an economic crash, apparently caused by bankers. (Elites?) And a black president. He's not in control any more! Then he had to stay inside because of an invisible virus.
The synthesis is mass rage in the midst of prosperity, where fat men in huge expensive trucks costing a hundred thousand dollars, loaded with thousand-dollar rifles and pistols, rail against the "elites" who somehow stole their rightful place at the top of the social hierarchy. Now they can't even count on their wives doing their dishes and laundry. Sometimes they can't even get women to date them! Now THEY are the victims, the down-trodden ones. And so they claim that their avatar, Trump, is persecuted unfairly. They need "retribution."
Biden appears to think he can get in on this racket, as he now also presents himself as unfairly persecuted by the powerful elites. Right: the most powerful man in the world--ie the most elite--is now somehow the victim of elites. But he also presents himself as a slightly watered-down version of the macho man that Trump claims to be: "I alone can hold NATO together." Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Why Kamala won't cut it, unless enough people are sick enough of this white male machismo.
An absolute banger that I agree with in full, but just to drop it back down to quotidian MSNBC-core fare for a second, I think it's worth noting that a campaign of Joe Biden as the providential man of destiny is likely to be a blowout of a kind we're only beginning to fathom.
We're doing the farce when we're not finished with the tragedy yet.
I agree with the “lying eyes” bit. For the life of me, if our eyes don’t lie I can’t imagine why those close to Biden would go along with what could only result in an increasingly difficult deception. However, voting is not virtue signaling, nor is it performance art. It’s a choice, in this case, between two options that will have very different practical outcomes. So I don’t really buy the notion of a protest vote (though I get that it may be somewhat different in a blue state.) As always, though, I liked your thoughtful piece.
I think this is a point at which theoretical analysis mostly fails. I think your observations are insightful, striking at the heart of yet another of the flaws in our broken system. But the solution offered in the form of a protest vote is worse than useless: the propagation of such rhetoric only increases the chances of the worse outcome. Even if we adopt the most pessimistic framing of the future direction of the American system, isn’t it still our responsibility to do everything in our power to reduce those chances even slightly? While I think Biden is being irresponsible, while I think that the system is clearly not working, I also hold to a notion of responsibility that falls on every one of us: we cannot control the actions of others, only react to them. And under the current circumstances the decision we must make remains unchanged, however much it might suck
This is basically the mindset that I operate from. I always vote, and I always vote for the least shitty one. That is, amazingly, somehow still Biden. But I am nonetheless still extremely angry at him and at his inner circle for bringing us to this point. As you say, irresponsible.
Voting is a collective action, not a personal action. Interestingly, the right seems to get this in ways that the left doesn't. The alleged party of rugged individualism are very good pack animals.
Anyone who read Rick Perlstein should know that the far right take over of the GOP has been a decades long project. You can possibly trace it back all the way to the 1950s with the John Birch Society thinking Eisenhower was a Communist agent somehow. The Federalist Society was formed in the early 1980s and waited decades before getting their Trump rush of appointees in 2016-2021.
I am not sure why but the left, at least parts of it, seem incapable of such long term thinking. It seems like every Presidential election of my adult lifetime (My first Presidential election as a voter was in 2000) brings a cohort of left-leaning voters who insist that their ballot is a special award which most be courted with utmost care. Or they seemingly refuse to understand that even getting just 10 percent of what you want is a lot better than getting 0 percent of what you want. Biden has probably been the most progressive President of my lifetime in more ways than not.
The issue with this view is that it gets political causation exactly ass backwards. Republican politicians started catering to far right voters because the far right voters voted for them again and again and again even when their ideas were considered loony tunes and it was far right voters holding their noses to vote for Rockefeller Republicans generally.
The left seems incapable of understanding this for some reason and insists that until a politician promises to deliver on their pet issue or cause, they will withhold the franchise. I am really perplexed as to why the left or at least parts of it seem incapable of understanding this and also insulted when you point it out.
So if the progressive left states it is withholding its vote for Biden and he wins anyway, they are essentially going to find themselves out in the cold.
In terms of Biden being indispensible, he is the only person to beat Trump in the popular college and the electoral vote. Could someone else theoretically do it? Yes. FWIW, Emerson College conducted a poll on July 7 and 8th and found that Trump was + 3 against Biden but much higher against all other potential replacements:
+3 is recoverable. The Economist also had Trump up + 3 compared to Biden.
I think it is interesting that the media went on a frenzy for Biden must go and the other people who joined in seriously were online writers, bloggers, media adhacent types. It seemed to absolutely bounce off ordinary Democrats. The polling on the issue of whether ordinary Democrats was all over the map according to Vox. Ispos found 2/3 of Biden voters wanted him to stay, another poll found the exact opposite, and the Times/Sienna poll split the difference down the middle.
At least two of the polls have to be incorrect or been corrupted.
Perhaps if asked *right now*, Trump would poll higher than potential replacements. After a chance to actually campaign against Trump - who I maintain is a paper tiger - I suspect those replacements' polls would rise significantly. That said, the Dems don't seem interested in cultivating the next generation of Dem legislators, so there may be no good potential candidates, either way
This is plausible but so is my scenario. I think the problem is that the polls are over the map as demonstrated above so everyone has some form of reasonable evidence that supports their side on the issue of whether Biden should stand down or not.
In general, I have found the cross-tabs in a lot of the polls really weird. I don't want to be an unskewed polls guy or Charlie Day in front of the board with string looking crazed but the cross tabs reveal some results which, if true, would essentially be huge paradigm shifts and I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Some examples:
1. Polls that have Trump ahead even by highish numbers, still have likely voters giving Biden comfortable leads over less likely voters or irregular voters;
2. There was a Times/Sienna poll which showed younger voters went from being D+30 in 2022 to Trump + 6 in 2024. The same poll had Boomers swing from R+12 in 2022 to Biden+15 in 2024.
3. There have been several post-debate shows which show Biden getting a big drop in support and putting safe states in play allegedly and other polls showing a to be expected or insignificant dip.
3a. I'm older enough to remember way back to (checks notes) 2016 when Missouri and Mississippi were allegedly in play.
All due respect, but what you say above is beyond disappointing. To address your argument directly, are you really contending that the normal defensiveness and secretiveness of any administration or presidential campaign over its principal's health, a defensiveness and secretiveness that goes back at least to the 1890's, is in any way equivalent to Donald Trump's open plans for as much dictatorship as he can get the system to give him? Honestly it sounds like a more historically oriented variant on the NY Times' both sides frame. Hell if you want to both sides the Democrats, there are much richer targets at hand for anyone of a historical bent, for instance the ultra-harsh policies against dissenters in Woodrow Wilson's second term, repressive policies adopted by the Roosevelt administration during WW II, and the anti-Communist repression that characterized the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Hell, if we want to get bipartisan about it we can look at the Lincoln administration's massive violations of civil liberties during its time in office. I'm afraid if one were truly and sincerely to accept your frame above, it would not be a stretch to conclude we've always been fash, and so what's the problem about Trump?
Ganz wrote: "assasinating Julius Caesar could never work: the world itself has changed . . . . The Hegelian repition has occurred. 'Trumpism' isn't confined to the person of Donald John any more than Caesarism was confined to the person of Gaius Julius."
That's a serious insight, even if a hugely depressing one.
Yet I never thought much of Hegel (or Marx, for that matter). And I do not believe 'Trumpism' with or without Donald John is now inevitable. The world is always changing. Contingencies are the rule. Adventitiousness may not be the best descriptor of our condition; but a myriad of possible outcomes are yet available. Trumpism is not inevitable, not even now, not even in the face of Biden's foolish stubbornness. No outcome or trend is guaranteed to overcome all other possible outcomes or trends.
Since 2000 we have had a "Bush Era" and an "Obama Era." Sure has felt as if we have still been living in the "Trump Era" during all of Biden's presidency.
Yes, I do have a sense in which the constitutional system is coming to an end. The US problem to my mind is that the Consititutional system upholds a semiethnostate mostly democratic order under a univeralist pretense. That can't come back any more than the Roman Republic's small city oligarchic order realized through tribal voting could in the mid first century BCE. It was Caesar though who first really broke it. It was Sulla, who was Caesar's enemy when he was young.
It's amazing how the transition from Roman Republic to Empire though casts this shadow throughout history from that time till more than 2000 years since. But it's not clear that what follows in the US is a new settlement in the form of one-person rule.
the farce of past revolutions is still the background noise of the current tragedy/farce transformation, and that farce is well put by your "semi-ethnostate... under universal pretense."
I like the formulation "the Consititutional system upholds a semiethnostate mostly democratic order under a univeralist pretense." I'm not sure it's absolutely 100% right, but it definitely hits a mark. But I wouldn't be so sanguine about whether a revanche of that system has no prospects. At least, I think an attempt to bring it back could create a lot of trouble and misery for, possibly, multiple decades.
I agree. I hoping for anyone but Trump and that this crotchety old system is able to make it through this crisis and hopefully reform itself out of the fatal position it's in. For example, England was able to move from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy with only one civil war. We of course already had ours. I hope we can make as radical a set of changes that the impossibility of continuing as we are resolves itself more favorably.
There’s no value in a protest vote. And in my opinion giving Trump the smallest popular vote count possible, even if he wins, has value for mobilization we’ll need to engage in after his victory or to put the nail in the coffin of his defeat,
Mobilization for... when they pull the football away again?
I think this line of thinking has worn thin. It's not compelling in any way, especially when you consider the people for whom we'd be mobilizing. They're the ones who have walked us into this cul-de-sac.
Or think of it more broadly such as in mobilization against his attempts to implement awful shit, like we did with the airport protests against the first Muslim ban in 2017.
But it’s all the citizenry doing the heavy lifting. We’re ostensibly voting in dem establishment so that they can take decisive action ‘next time?’ How did that work out for our reproductive rights? I think John’s article reads strong in this regard provided you drop the pretense that only one side is a problem. As much as toppling Trump won’t suddenly remake the right, providing the left a metaphorical ‘one last reprieve in the face of danger’ won’t make them introspective and more effective.
It will make the weak left the meat of the strong right.
As someone not safely ensconced in a blue state, it's hard not to read your protest vote consideration as a lack of solidarity with those of us trying to grind out a win against long odds. I don't at all disagree with your criticisms of Biden and his enablers (I have no idea why AOC, for example, provided him cover this week). But we need to be very realistic that the difference between the options is not a matter of degrees if you're on the receiving end of a mass deportation campaign. I get that political philosophy is your bag, and I enjoy a Hegel deep cut as much as the next person, but I think this is a really problematic stance. I hope your protest vote feels very satisfying.
PS I was enjoying the book, but this post was a real bummer to read. What the hell, man.
Sorry, but you don't need to agree with everything
The book is well done and an accomplishment you are right to be proud of, and no, I don't need to agree with everything. But you're flirting with some really dangerous shit here, in my opinion.
I agree with Sean -- I generally like John's writing a lot but this protest vote stance is really self-indulgent. The reason is because what happens in the blue states doesn't just stay in the blue states. Jill Stein voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and PA helped push Trump over the top in 2016. Nader voters in 2000 played a similar spoiler role. As Sean says, the consequences of a Trump election include mass deportation not to mention an increase of abortion bans on the more than 28 million women already facing them, dire rollbacks of our climate change policy. I recommend getting back in the fight with phone-banking, donations, and phone-banking -- not Hegelian fatalism.
Ganz lives in New York, which voted for Biden by 23% percentage points in 2020. If it doesn't stay blue Trump will have coasted to victory roughly 535 to 3. At that point it's not a matter of who wins, but the message you want to send.
I'm happy to have Trump run up the score by 1 (frankly, meaningless) if it means that the Democrats can have a "never again" moment. The vote doesn't matter the other way, either: it's all symbolic.
Let’s not be fatuous. This is not about one solitary vote carried out in the privacy of a voting both in NYC (which I would still disagree with, but which would be less harmful in terms of its reach).
Rather, this was a public and publicized post written by someone with not insignificant reach. This kind of discourse travels, and that’s where the harm occurs.
That's an utterly unworkable standard for discourse. Every time somebody criticizes Biden in any way, people read it as "vote for Trump." Does that mean that everyone with any kind of platform is ethically proscribed from reporting anything negative about Biden, lest he potentially lose some votes somewhere?
That's no way to run a society.
Given that the protest vote in a blue state has no effect on the outcome, why is demanding more from the party, by withholding that support where they don’t need it anyway, a lack of solidarity? If anything, a protest vote in a blue state is demonstrating greater solidarity to the cause of government by the people.
1. The net result of people on the left voting for third parties won't be the Democratic party chasing left voters. We ran that experiment in 2000 and 2004. What shifted portions of the party to the left was when the left started running effective primaries within the party.
2. Inevitably, the message of "I'm voting third party in a blue state" gets sloshed around to the point where it's simply heard by some as "I'm voting third party." I'm not saying there is direct causation there, but it's part of the same legitimating discourse and permission structure. Again, we know this from the Green Party experiments.
So even in CA or NY or wherever, voting 3rd party is not at all likely to actually register any sort of meaningful protest (i.e., no objective is achieved) and the calls to do so make it harder for those of us in the swing states who have to bat down even more shit as we engage in efforts to turn folks out.
Fringe candidates, fringe support. We don't need to go down that path again. It's a costsly dead end.
It’s been wild that we have a whole movement that’s been dedicated for the past two weeks who’ve been adamant that with enough spin and complete lockstep unity they can make people disbelieve what people saw with their own eyes, and their own ears. It’s an insult to people’s intelligence. Only made worse by other party members proclaiming how they’re also old and they’re still running things so quit talking about Biden’s age. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks this doesn’t look ridiculous to a lot of regular people.
When Jill Biden says her husband is "the only man for the job," the echoes of Trump saying "I alone" are deafening. The internecine war on the anti-Trump side has erupted, and it's not pretty.
Agree. I am so disillusioned with the Democratic party, which I have voted for since my first vote in 1968. Biden's blaming of "elites" was the last straw. I am dangerously ensconced in a red state, in a rural county, surrounded by men who love their arsenals and practice with them daily. My vote doesn't matter; the county and state always ends up voting red.
It's hard for liberals to live here; heck, it's hard for smart people to live here. I have been chased out of houses by people yelling at me that I was one of those elites. Never mind that my income was so low that I didn't even owe taxes this year: it's not about that. It's about education, or something. Guilty as charged: I'm educated. But I never thought that a Democrat, the leader of the party, would start slinging that insult around; here, being thought of as an elite is actually dangerous. I hide my education.
This essay names the problem: that we've become a nation where elderly elites are safely ensconced in their political offices, while they gas-light ordinary citizens and accuse these ordinary middle-income citizens of being dastardly elites, guilty of some sort of unnamed conspiracy. This is what psychopathic abusers do: they accuse you of the very thing they are doing to you.
But HOW did we get to this point? What are the real historical causes behind this gerontacracy? I guess Hegel would just say: it's the dialectic, stupid. But what is the thesis and the antithesis leading to this terrible synthesis?
Here is one possibility. The thesis is post-WWII prosperity and American hegemony in the world, and white male supremacy at home. The antithesis is the defeat in Vietnam, and all that followed. The supreme white American male now has a lot of problems. His wife won't do the dishes for him any more. He is compelled to treat black people with something like respect. He has to acknowledge that gay people exist. There was the helpless feeling of 9/11, followed by two stupid, expensive, lost wars. Then an economic crash, apparently caused by bankers. (Elites?) And a black president. He's not in control any more! Then he had to stay inside because of an invisible virus.
The synthesis is mass rage in the midst of prosperity, where fat men in huge expensive trucks costing a hundred thousand dollars, loaded with thousand-dollar rifles and pistols, rail against the "elites" who somehow stole their rightful place at the top of the social hierarchy. Now they can't even count on their wives doing their dishes and laundry. Sometimes they can't even get women to date them! Now THEY are the victims, the down-trodden ones. And so they claim that their avatar, Trump, is persecuted unfairly. They need "retribution."
Biden appears to think he can get in on this racket, as he now also presents himself as unfairly persecuted by the powerful elites. Right: the most powerful man in the world--ie the most elite--is now somehow the victim of elites. But he also presents himself as a slightly watered-down version of the macho man that Trump claims to be: "I alone can hold NATO together." Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Why Kamala won't cut it, unless enough people are sick enough of this white male machismo.
Ha! I was going to respond, "Welcome to Arizona" but I understand we're now "purple".
Sympathies.
An absolute banger that I agree with in full, but just to drop it back down to quotidian MSNBC-core fare for a second, I think it's worth noting that a campaign of Joe Biden as the providential man of destiny is likely to be a blowout of a kind we're only beginning to fathom.
We're doing the farce when we're not finished with the tragedy yet.
I agree with the “lying eyes” bit. For the life of me, if our eyes don’t lie I can’t imagine why those close to Biden would go along with what could only result in an increasingly difficult deception. However, voting is not virtue signaling, nor is it performance art. It’s a choice, in this case, between two options that will have very different practical outcomes. So I don’t really buy the notion of a protest vote (though I get that it may be somewhat different in a blue state.) As always, though, I liked your thoughtful piece.
I think this is a point at which theoretical analysis mostly fails. I think your observations are insightful, striking at the heart of yet another of the flaws in our broken system. But the solution offered in the form of a protest vote is worse than useless: the propagation of such rhetoric only increases the chances of the worse outcome. Even if we adopt the most pessimistic framing of the future direction of the American system, isn’t it still our responsibility to do everything in our power to reduce those chances even slightly? While I think Biden is being irresponsible, while I think that the system is clearly not working, I also hold to a notion of responsibility that falls on every one of us: we cannot control the actions of others, only react to them. And under the current circumstances the decision we must make remains unchanged, however much it might suck
This is basically the mindset that I operate from. I always vote, and I always vote for the least shitty one. That is, amazingly, somehow still Biden. But I am nonetheless still extremely angry at him and at his inner circle for bringing us to this point. As you say, irresponsible.
The flaw in the “flirt” idea is that there is no “safe” state under extreme Trumpism just as there was no safe Vienna or Paris with the last Hitler.
Voting is a collective action, not a personal action. Interestingly, the right seems to get this in ways that the left doesn't. The alleged party of rugged individualism are very good pack animals.
Anyone who read Rick Perlstein should know that the far right take over of the GOP has been a decades long project. You can possibly trace it back all the way to the 1950s with the John Birch Society thinking Eisenhower was a Communist agent somehow. The Federalist Society was formed in the early 1980s and waited decades before getting their Trump rush of appointees in 2016-2021.
I am not sure why but the left, at least parts of it, seem incapable of such long term thinking. It seems like every Presidential election of my adult lifetime (My first Presidential election as a voter was in 2000) brings a cohort of left-leaning voters who insist that their ballot is a special award which most be courted with utmost care. Or they seemingly refuse to understand that even getting just 10 percent of what you want is a lot better than getting 0 percent of what you want. Biden has probably been the most progressive President of my lifetime in more ways than not.
The issue with this view is that it gets political causation exactly ass backwards. Republican politicians started catering to far right voters because the far right voters voted for them again and again and again even when their ideas were considered loony tunes and it was far right voters holding their noses to vote for Rockefeller Republicans generally.
The left seems incapable of understanding this for some reason and insists that until a politician promises to deliver on their pet issue or cause, they will withhold the franchise. I am really perplexed as to why the left or at least parts of it seem incapable of understanding this and also insulted when you point it out.
So if the progressive left states it is withholding its vote for Biden and he wins anyway, they are essentially going to find themselves out in the cold.
Must be courted
In terms of Biden being indispensible, he is the only person to beat Trump in the popular college and the electoral vote. Could someone else theoretically do it? Yes. FWIW, Emerson College conducted a poll on July 7 and 8th and found that Trump was + 3 against Biden but much higher against all other potential replacements:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
+3 is recoverable. The Economist also had Trump up + 3 compared to Biden.
I think it is interesting that the media went on a frenzy for Biden must go and the other people who joined in seriously were online writers, bloggers, media adhacent types. It seemed to absolutely bounce off ordinary Democrats. The polling on the issue of whether ordinary Democrats was all over the map according to Vox. Ispos found 2/3 of Biden voters wanted him to stay, another poll found the exact opposite, and the Times/Sienna poll split the difference down the middle.
At least two of the polls have to be incorrect or been corrupted.
Perhaps if asked *right now*, Trump would poll higher than potential replacements. After a chance to actually campaign against Trump - who I maintain is a paper tiger - I suspect those replacements' polls would rise significantly. That said, the Dems don't seem interested in cultivating the next generation of Dem legislators, so there may be no good potential candidates, either way
This is plausible but so is my scenario. I think the problem is that the polls are over the map as demonstrated above so everyone has some form of reasonable evidence that supports their side on the issue of whether Biden should stand down or not.
In general, I have found the cross-tabs in a lot of the polls really weird. I don't want to be an unskewed polls guy or Charlie Day in front of the board with string looking crazed but the cross tabs reveal some results which, if true, would essentially be huge paradigm shifts and I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Some examples:
1. Polls that have Trump ahead even by highish numbers, still have likely voters giving Biden comfortable leads over less likely voters or irregular voters;
2. There was a Times/Sienna poll which showed younger voters went from being D+30 in 2022 to Trump + 6 in 2024. The same poll had Boomers swing from R+12 in 2022 to Biden+15 in 2024.
3. There have been several post-debate shows which show Biden getting a big drop in support and putting safe states in play allegedly and other polls showing a to be expected or insignificant dip.
3a. I'm older enough to remember way back to (checks notes) 2016 when Missouri and Mississippi were allegedly in play.
“Who you gonna believe? Me or your own lying eyes?” What I’ve been thinking since the day after you know what
All due respect, but what you say above is beyond disappointing. To address your argument directly, are you really contending that the normal defensiveness and secretiveness of any administration or presidential campaign over its principal's health, a defensiveness and secretiveness that goes back at least to the 1890's, is in any way equivalent to Donald Trump's open plans for as much dictatorship as he can get the system to give him? Honestly it sounds like a more historically oriented variant on the NY Times' both sides frame. Hell if you want to both sides the Democrats, there are much richer targets at hand for anyone of a historical bent, for instance the ultra-harsh policies against dissenters in Woodrow Wilson's second term, repressive policies adopted by the Roosevelt administration during WW II, and the anti-Communist repression that characterized the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Hell, if we want to get bipartisan about it we can look at the Lincoln administration's massive violations of civil liberties during its time in office. I'm afraid if one were truly and sincerely to accept your frame above, it would not be a stretch to conclude we've always been fash, and so what's the problem about Trump?
Ganz wrote: "assasinating Julius Caesar could never work: the world itself has changed . . . . The Hegelian repition has occurred. 'Trumpism' isn't confined to the person of Donald John any more than Caesarism was confined to the person of Gaius Julius."
That's a serious insight, even if a hugely depressing one.
Yet I never thought much of Hegel (or Marx, for that matter). And I do not believe 'Trumpism' with or without Donald John is now inevitable. The world is always changing. Contingencies are the rule. Adventitiousness may not be the best descriptor of our condition; but a myriad of possible outcomes are yet available. Trumpism is not inevitable, not even now, not even in the face of Biden's foolish stubbornness. No outcome or trend is guaranteed to overcome all other possible outcomes or trends.
Keep the faith. Remain strong in the fight.
Since 2000 we have had a "Bush Era" and an "Obama Era." Sure has felt as if we have still been living in the "Trump Era" during all of Biden's presidency.
Yes, I do have a sense in which the constitutional system is coming to an end. The US problem to my mind is that the Consititutional system upholds a semiethnostate mostly democratic order under a univeralist pretense. That can't come back any more than the Roman Republic's small city oligarchic order realized through tribal voting could in the mid first century BCE. It was Caesar though who first really broke it. It was Sulla, who was Caesar's enemy when he was young.
It's amazing how the transition from Roman Republic to Empire though casts this shadow throughout history from that time till more than 2000 years since. But it's not clear that what follows in the US is a new settlement in the form of one-person rule.
the farce of past revolutions is still the background noise of the current tragedy/farce transformation, and that farce is well put by your "semi-ethnostate... under universal pretense."
Enjoyed the challenge of understanding the meaning of "semiethnostate"
I like the formulation "the Consititutional system upholds a semiethnostate mostly democratic order under a univeralist pretense." I'm not sure it's absolutely 100% right, but it definitely hits a mark. But I wouldn't be so sanguine about whether a revanche of that system has no prospects. At least, I think an attempt to bring it back could create a lot of trouble and misery for, possibly, multiple decades.
I agree. I hoping for anyone but Trump and that this crotchety old system is able to make it through this crisis and hopefully reform itself out of the fatal position it's in. For example, England was able to move from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy with only one civil war. We of course already had ours. I hope we can make as radical a set of changes that the impossibility of continuing as we are resolves itself more favorably.