An off-ramp from the endless highway of despair

A healthy political party takes action

For years, I’ve felt like American politics has been stuck. Forever moving to counter an authoritarian threat, never really seeming to go anywhere. 

Even with all the day-to-day chaos of the Trump Administration, and all that’s happened since then, it’s remarkable how little the overall contours have changed since Donald Trump first announced his presidential candidacy in June of 2015. Our politics have been defined above all by the looming threat of authoritarianism. Everything else had to be put aside as we all raced to fortify the system against a would-be autocrat openly aiming to consolidate power and — if he got his way — never let go. 

And, as our democracy traveled this endless highway, it felt like we were slowly losing something essential.

The sense that politics should be ever-changing and policies should be ever-evolving. That we are navigating history and building something together. That there's always the next election to change course and reimagine the future.

As months became years and years inched towards a decade, that sense of democracy being stuck, trapped by an existential threat, has been profoundly costly to so many of us. 

More than anything, it’s difficult to stay motivated, to do the hard work of resisting authoritarianism and imagining a better future — not just a less worse one — when it feels like you’re trapped forever on a road that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. There’s only so long we can all put aside everything else and just try to hold up the pillars of our institutions. I kept catching myself thinking that maybe our democracy would eventually die with a whimper. 

I don’t know about you, but suddenly it really doesn’t feel like that anymore.

And I’m not just talking about the fact that there’s now a presidential candidate who wasn’t born in the 1940s (the first time since 2012). If you’ve spent any time on social media this week, it feels like a decade of pent up energy is pouring out all at once. It’s remarkable. We’re seeing a mass yearning for politics to again be organic, dynamic, cathartic. Even fun. 

It feels like we’ve just shifted from one era of political history into another. Whatever that endless highway of despair was, I don’t think we’re on it anymore.

—

More in a second on the implications of this off-ramp in the vibes.

---

A political party that behaves like a party should behave

But first, let’s talk about the precipitating event for the shift. Between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday morning, President Biden announced he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination, and the party’s delegates consolidated around Vice President Harris instead. She is now the presumptive nominee. 

In a must-read article yesterday (seriously, if you didn’t read it, go do so), my colleagues Jennifer Dresden and Cerin Lindgrensavage look at how the Democratic Party has behaved as a party this week: A case study in why political parties matter.

Their conclusion? 

No political party would want to be in this position of changing its standard-bearer at this point in the election cycle. But what we’ve seen happen in the Democratic party is a case study of why political parties in democracies are not just high-profile candidates’ personal campaign vehicles. They are necessary institutions in their own right. 

As much as Americans love to disparage political parties, this week shows why we need them.

In some ways, what’s happening this week is — frankly — just the Democratic party behaving like a political party is supposed to in a democracy.

They argue that there are three big lessons in all this on how parties should behave.

First, parties need rules and processes to respond to unpredictable situations. In this case, that seems to be exactly what’s happening: 

The presumptive Democratic nominee has stepped aside, and the political party is turning to the procedures in place for what happens if a party needs to select a new candidate after the primaries have occurred. So far, it looks like those procedures are being followed. The Democratic convention hasn’t happened yet, so the party does not officially even have a nominee. Now that President Biden has withdrawn, the delegates he won in the primaries are freed to make a different choice at the convention (or its virtual component). So while this week’s events feel like a political car crash, it's actually more like a detour around some unexpected heavy construction. A surprise and a traffic jam to be sure, but everyone is still obeying the rules of the road. 

Second, it’s normal for the leaders of a party to be at odds with each other. (That’s actually why we need parties.)

[I]t’s a good thing for democracy that party leaders have ways of cooperating and competing at the same time. In a healthy party, this kind of push and pull leads to compromises that keep everyone in a party rowing in largely the same direction, without allowing any single person to unilaterally dictate what that direction is. The competition does not inhibit cooperation and even solidarity within a political party — it’s the process by which they’re achieved. 

So the fact that support coalesced quickly for Harris after a period of turmoil suggests that the Democratic party’s ability to achieve that level of teamwork isn’t totally broken. Polling from Monday indicated that three-quarters of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents support having Harris as the nominee. And while Biden endorsed Harris shortly after announcing his withdrawal, her status as likely standard-bearer was not cemented until many other leaders and groups offered their support and delegates themselves indicated their intentions.  

Third, political parties have to do a lot of things at once — it can be hard and imperfect, but that doesn’t mean they’re anti-democratic. Quite the opposite: 

When primaries were adopted, it was in response to the “smoke filled rooms” of the 19th and early 20th century that lacked transparency and put candidate selection squarely in the hands of a limited circle of party elites. Through successive reform efforts, these gave way to primaries in which nominations for various offices would depend on candidates’ popularity with voters. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became the principal method for choosing presidential nominees.  

But primaries can’t solve every problem that parties might face or do everything they need to do. Parties have an interest in fielding candidates who are likely to succeed in securing office and who will generally contribute to advancing the party’s policies once there. In a healthy democracy, parties have a role to play in ensuring that the candidates representing them on the ballot aren’t a danger to democracy itself. So parties have to be representative of their voters, responsive to voters’ preferences and needs once in office, and also resistant to takeover by authoritarian leaders who would pose a danger to the entire system. That’s a lot for one institution to do, which is precisely why having parties that are robust enough to navigate and adapt to unexpected and challenging circumstances is so important for democratic resilience.

In short, one of the reasons political parties exist is to coordinate behavior, resolve differences, and make decisions quickly that put higher principles above the interests of individual candidates. The Democratic Party, on these measures, has mostly proven itself to be up to the task. 

(No comment on how our other major political party has done on these dimensions.)

Read the whole piece here.

---

Suddenly, democracy won’t go down without a fight

Returning to sudden shift.

Here’s why I think it’s such a big deal that it feels like history is happening again, regardless of who wins or loses the election. 

A week ago, it not only felt like an autocrat was likely to return to power, it felt like he might win by default. I think we all feared that a badly hobbled anti-authoritarian coalition was going to sputter into a dispiriting election, risking a blowout. The despair and resignation felt almost palpable — and I have to believe that would have only gotten worse after the election. So, in that future, it seemed unlikely Congress, civil society, the courts, the private sector, or the media would have had the spine to resist the authoritarian playbook already prepared for 2025. So many would have simply hunkered down and acquiesced in advance. 

Put another way: the trajectory we were on a week ago probably doesn’t lead to five million Americans taking to the streets on January 21st, 2025.

But now everything feels different. Regardless of what happens, this will be a very different election than it was going to be last week. 

Now it’s not the same recurring grudge match. And so even if authoritarianism returns to the White House in January — which to be clear, is very much a possibility — the pro-democracy coalition can feel like we did everything we possibly could to resist it. And like we would be prepared to continue to do so. 

Not the same threat landscape but a new, evolved one. One we can get up and face with the renewed energy and resilience such a generational task demands. 

A new era, one way or the other. 

---

What else we’re tracking: 

• Lots of talk in recent weeks about inflammatory rhetoric. Brittany Williams and Mickey Desruisseaux look at some of the specific impacts of violent rhetoric: the everyday Americans harmed by election lies. 

• Yesterday, a bankruptcy judge in a Florida court dismissed a case filed by The Gateway Pundit, allowing Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea’ ArShaye (“Shaye”) Moss to continue their defamation litigation against The Gateway Pundit and Jim and Joe Hoft in Missouri.

• JD Vance has a bunch of weird views on gender, writes political theorist Laura Field in POLITICO. 

• Oscar Pocasangre and Maresa Strano, two of my favorite political reform thinkers, have a great new summary of “what we know about fusion voting” at New America. 

• Ian Bassin writes in Slate about some of the likely impacts of Biden’s decision to step down. “Removed from the battlefield, Biden is likely to become more politically powerful, as his rating climbs from a nostalgic effect and appreciation for his selfless move.”

• I loved this piece from Charlie Warzel on our currently “coconut-pilled” attention economy. I agree, I’m not sure these trends are great for democracy. But still, a very helpful reminder that the way things work in 2024 is very different from 2008 — or even 2016. 

Photo Credit: Sipa USA via AP