It was 17 years ago that Joe Biden – having just launched a second, hopeless bid for the presidency, his first having been toppled, 20 years earlier, by his habit of talking nonsense – infamously offered Barack Obama a compliment he thought magnanimous: “You got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he told the New York Observer. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” It was the political gaffe as art form – at once a casually, shockingly ugly assessment of Black leaders and candidates like Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm and a condescending slight against the party’s fastest rising star, who was more than merely “articulate”. His many failures aside, Obama won that primary, and the presidency, on his extraordinary gifts as a communicator.
On Friday, Obama tried, rather wanly, to put those gifts to use on the behalf of his friend and former rival one more time. “Bad debate nights happen,” he posted on X after the debacle the night before. “Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.” It was more than a “bad debate night”, though, as all who tuned in saw for themselves. After months of speculation and argument about his condition and in what could be the final, gutting irony of his political career, Biden proved unprecedentedly and perhaps fatally inarticulate. Since he took office, Biden and his backers have labored mightily to convince the American people he’s well enough not only to take on the duties of the presidency but to save American democracy. As it stands today, it’s doubtful he can even save himself.
It’s been reported now that Obama and other party leaders, their initial displays of support aside, have been harboring doubts about Biden’s viability as a candidate; the Democratic omertà has only been broken within the last few days. The critical question is why there wasn’t movement to encourage Biden to drop out sooner. Leaks have been flooding out about the Biden team’s extraordinary insularity and insecurity, but what’s happened with Biden doesn’t outwardly seem terribly different from the way Hillary Clinton coasted to the nomination with only Bernie Sanders in opposition in 2016 or the inertia that kept Dianne Feinstein and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in their posts even as their age became a liability.
It’s clearly difficult for Democrats to dislodge their most important figures even when political realities suggest that they should; all told, the Democratic party is best understood less as a political party organized to enact or protect specific policies than as a professional association committed to protecting its most valued members.
Until now, that included Biden. Years of disdain from the party’s leadership were set aside after he beat Trump in 2020 – while there was open conversation that year about the unlikeliness of a second term, no one in the party wound up pushing seriously for a primary or a replacement even as his poll numbers slid and questions about his health emerged. It became clear that Democrats would only topple him in an emergency. After his debate performance, he finally presented them with one. And part of the alarm now gripping the party stems from the realization that Biden’s state might cost the seats of moderate Democrats in Congress, who may have to spend their campaigns parrying questions about his health. On Tuesday, Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat in a district Donald Trump won by seven points in 2020, published an op-ed in response to Biden’s debate performance saying he’d be fine with Trump winning the election. “Unlike Biden and many others, I refuse to participate in a campaign to scare voters with the idea that Trump will end our democratic system,” he wrote.
Golden will remain a Democrat in good standing. They need him, vital as candidates like him are to the Democratic task of securing safe, stable and comfortable majorities that achieve as little major policy change as moderates can manage to constrain them to. The Democratic party, in other words, tolerates figures like Golden because it’s governed less by vision than by fear. It was fear that put Biden over Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. It was fear that prevented a serious field of alternative candidates from mounting primary challenges against Biden. And it’s fear, swollen into a full-blown panic, that’s shaping the party’s harried actions and deliberations now.
There is, in fairness, much to be afraid of. Contrary to the slander of party moderates, serious progressive critiques of the Democratic establishment under Biden have been leveled precisely because the left gravely understands what another Trump term could mean for the country. Up until now, part of the Democratic party’s strategy for avoiding one has been to concede ground to the right – unable to alter perceptions on Biden’s age and inflation, it’s spent the last few months trying to look tough on undocumented immigration and student protests.
That hasn’t worked and neither have the hits against Trump. The debate was supposed to turn the tide. Instead, it clarified the risk the Democratic party now faces – not only that it might lose to Trump but that it might lose in a way that will damage the party and the country in the long run, bolstering the power of a right now indisputably tilting towards fascism. Democrats simply cannot spend the next four months insisting to the American people that Joe Biden is fit for another four years as president. Doing so would push Americans more deeply into the political nihilism that has made Trump an attractive prospect for so many and that has, rightly or wrongly, encouraged many more Americans to disengage from a political system they see as hopelessly tainted by dishonesty and corruption. It would, in sum, continue the corrosion of the faith in politics Biden promised to help restore in the first place.
Instead, the Democratic party should prove to justifiably cynical voters that it’s capable of leveling with them and making a thorny decision in the country’s best interests. That alone won’t inspire confidence, but offering more than a purely defensive vision for the party and the country’s future might help. As it stands, the major items on what may or may not be Biden’s second term agenda haven’t been defined. Meanwhile, on the right, the platforms released by the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation, along with the conservative supreme court’s rulings ending Chevron deference and bolstering presidential immunity, have offered up horrifying glimpses of the vision that will prevail in America if Democrats can’t develop and sell a better one.
The right knows where it wants to take the country in the next four years and the next 40; it’s willing to play the long game to get there. And there’s no reason whatsoever why the left shouldn’t take up a competing project at least as bold and ambitious: a plan not just to save the institutions of the republic we call “American democracy” by habit in the near term, but to make American democracy fully real at a moment in which we have every reason to doubt the American people – not just a subset of them, and not just the wealthy – truly rule.
But Democrats will be impotent and unconvincing messengers on democracy as long as they remain beholden to the feudal political culture this crisis has exposed for all to see. If the party that let Biden glide to this point is democracy’s last line of defense – a collection of now tottering and feuding fiefdoms and cliques united less by solid goals than by mutual self-interest and inertia – then democracy is done for, plain and simple. It is time for a new candidate, yes. But it is also time for a reckoning.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
