You know, he’s got a point there! If you shut your eyes very tightly, Donald Trump will go away! And so will everything else!
Like Josh, I wish that Joe Biden were more than minimally competent. I wish he didn’t sound like a 79-year-old man (I’m 77) who’s tired of all your back talk and wishes you would just damn well do what he told you to do, whether you’re the American voter or Xi Jinping. But Josh’s absurdly over-clever post The Problem With 'Pro-Democracy' Rhetoric, accusing Uncle Joe of denying that we live in a democracy by saying that if you believe in democracy you have to vote Democratic (because Uncle Joe is implying that you have “no choice”) is pathetic.
When Democrats talk about “democracy,” they’re talking about the importance of institutions that ensure the voters get a say among multiple choices and the one they most prefer gets to rule. But they are also saying voters do not get to do that in this election. The message is that there is only one party contesting this election that is committed to democracy — the Democrats — and therefore only one real choice available. If voters reject Democrats’ agenda or their record on issues including inflation, crime, and immigration (or abortion, for that matter), they have no recourse at the ballot box — they simply must vote for Democrats anyway, at least until such time as the Republican Party is run by the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
This amounts to telling voters that they have already lost their democracy.
No, it doesn’t, Josh. It amounts to telling the American people the truth: the Democratic Party, with all its faults and hypocrisies, still believes in democracy, in free elections, because it believes it can win them, most of the time. The Republican Party doesn’t. Donald Trump is hailed, over and over, by Republicans as a winner—a man who lost the popular vote to Hillary Fucking Clinton by almost three million votes and lost to Joe Fucking Biden by over seven million. This is their winner!
Barro—and others—have criticized the Democrats in particular for backing ultra-right Republican candidates instead of “moderates”. The thing is, there are no Republican “moderates”, unless you mean Liz Cheney. The handful of Republican senators and representatives who dared to support Trump’s second impeachment following the January 6 riot have almost all been run out of the party. Arch “traitor” Liz Cheney supported Donald Trump 93% of the time prior to Jan. 6. A majority of Republican representatives voted not to recognize Joe Biden as the president-elect.
There is “plenty” (and that’s putting it mildly) that is “wrong” with the Democratic Party, according to me, at least. I am very centrist in my thinking, and I wish the Democratic Party was too. I wish less of the domestic agenda were set by bi-coastal liberals and less of the foreign policy by revived, kick-ass, neo-Wilsonian militants. But if you believe in free elections, the Democratic Party really is the only game in town. Because the Republicans don’t believe in them any more.
The Democrats are likely to lose big in 2022, because they have followed the same pattern they “always” do—pushing hard left social policies that a majority of voters don’t want. Many of the people who will vote Republican this year won’t be voting for voter intimidation, for plenary power of government officials to overturn elections on the basis of vague charges of “corruption”. They’ll be voting Republican because they’re mad about inflation, about crime, and about immigration, three issues that Democrats, in their infatuation with their domestic agenda, let get away from and refused to take seriously until it was too late.
But the Republican candidates these folks will be voting for do believe in extra-legal, authoritarian rule, because the Republican electorate, the millions of ordinary Republican voters who vote in the Republican primaries, believe in it too. “Regular” Republicans didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and 2020 because they didn’t know how bad he was; they voted for him because they did know how bad he was, something I wrote about when he was first elected. They wanted a man who was without scruple or shame, and they got him, and the now-virtuous Liz Cheney backed him 93% of the time.
Afterwords
At his substack blog Unpopular Front, John Ganz offers a more extensive takedown of Josh’s willed blindness—Small-d Delusional.
