Wayne O'Leary

Democrats Bite the Bullet

The word has come down from the Democratic establishment: It’s time for progressives and other party dissidents to stop grousing and get behind Joe Biden. This time, the stakes are too high; the autocratic Trump can’t be allowed within hailing distance of the White House or the trappings of power. Rallying around the president is the imperative of the hour.

Furthermore, all thoughts of challenging the incumbent, either from inside or outside the Democratic Party, must be set aside. After all (so the argument goes), Ralph Nader spoiled it for Al Gore, Bernie spoiled it for Hillary, and troublemakers like Marianne Williamson, Cornel West or RFK Jr. could spoil it for Biden.

The reason the alleged spoilers have traction, of course, is Biden’s performance on the job. I’m not referring to age here. The president’s verbal flubs, memory lapses, and physical appearance, while concerning, are not the real problem. His opponent Trump is nearly as old, and his public gaffes are as bad, if not worse. Moreover, if Biden is a candidate for a debilitating health incident — he had a near-fatal brain aneurism years ago — the obese Trump, with his lack of exercise and cheeseburger diet, is obviously headed for a major cardiac event at some point.

Biden’s real problem relates to his policies, not his health, and they in turn are an outgrowth of his supposed strong suit, governmental experience. He’s simply been inside the Beltway loop too long — 50 years and counting. He over-values archaic institutional customs and relationships that tend to block progress. He’s internalized a centrist Democratic issues playbook that’s out of date and ill-adapted to addressing the disruptive changes of the past two decades. He appears to believe the way things worked in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s is the ideal model — the way things should work and can be made to work again.

There’s no fundamental need, the president thinks, to challenge the existing order, no need to question the received wisdom. However, many Democrats beg to differ; they’ve shown their restiveness throughout the primary season, despite having no serious heavyweight standard-bearer to carry their flag.

The administration would have us believe it’s only the young and foolish who won’t happily jump aboard the Biden train, but the caucus of disaffected Democrats is much broader than that. It includes the progressive-populists who nearly seized the party’s presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020, writing much of its platform the latter year, but who have been marginalized for 2024. Anti-Trump Republicans have actually received more of a welcome into the Democratic fold than the party’s own progressive insurgents.

Lack of grassroots enthusiasm for the prospective Democratic ticket was evident in recent primary results. “Uncommitted” received 13% of the vote in Michigan, 19% in Minnesota, 10% in Washington State, and 29% in Hawaii’s caucuses, along with 7% for recent dropout Dean Phillips in Maine. Party dissidents in Michigan, especially motivated by the Gaza situation, kept an incumbent president from getting more than 81% of his party’s vote, adding 3% tallies each for Williamson and Phillips to the uncommitted column, thereby producing a 19% anti-Biden result — not exactly a ringing endorsement of the lackluster administration.

Part of the lagging intra-party support for the Biden-Harris team arises from the second half of the ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris, who registered a 36% positive rating in a March USA Today/Suffolk University poll (worse than the president at 41%), has become an obvious drag on the ticket. Joe Biden, whose energy and political skills have deteriorated with age, desperately needs a hard-charging, top-quality backup to take the fight to the GOP; Harris is not it. Her failings as a compelling speechmaker and message-carrier, plus the perception that she’s a policy lightweight, raise thoughts of replacing her.

The possible choosing of a new running mate by Biden has historical precedent. Franklin Roosevelt himself switched vice presidents twice during his time in office. From 1933 to 1940, his veep was John Nance Garner, an old-time Wilsonian budget-balancer who gradually turned against the expansive New Deal. In 1940, FDR replaced him with Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to solidify the farm vote. Wallace, a leftish New Dealer, was dropped in favor of the less radical Harry Truman in 1945 to appease party conservatives. Harris, who has become the Democratic Dan Quayle, would not, if similarly removed, be greatly missed by most of the country.

Of course, Biden would have a more complicated task in replacing Harris than FDR faced; the Democratic Party of today is an identity-politics party beset by the sociocultural demands of its multiple ethnic-gender constituencies. FDR’s vice presidents were White men. Kamala Harris is female and of mixed race; three groups, feminists, Blacks and Asian-Americans, would undoubtedly clamor for her retention on the ticket regardless of qualifications.

Thinkers within Democratic Party circles and liberal academia are slowly coming around to an understanding that the obstacles presently facing the party largely emanate from the problem Vice President Harris, chosen for who she is and not for what she’s done, personifies — the triumph of political identitarianism over economic populism. Two recent books, Michael Kazin’s “What it Took to Win” (2022) and John B. Judis’ and Ruy Teixeira’s “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” (2023), clearly explicate the Democratic predicament.

By refusing to jettison an overwrought preoccupation with racial and gender policies, these authors suggest, the party has foreclosed reconnecting with the lost blue-collar constituency critical to rebuilding a majority movement of working Americans. Indeed, a case can be made that, by rejecting the economic-populist crusade of Bernie Sanders (in some ways, the last genuine New Dealer), Democrats shut the door on broad-based electoral success for the foreseeable future.

The party can still win intermittent, short-term victories by relying on its new base of socially liberal, upper-middle-class suburban Whites, activist women, and aspiring urban minorities, but constructing a more permanent Roosevelt-style coalition revolving around economic class will be hard to achieve. For one thing, FDR’s eternal antagonist big business is an integral part of the Biden coalition, which extends through Silicon Valley. For another, as the president always stresses, he’s “a capitalist.”

For the immediate future, the Democrats should be able to survive through November. Lots of thoughtful Americans, including Democratic loyalists, would like to vote against Joe Biden for his mishandling of Gaza, immigration and inflation, but they can’t consider it because of what awaits on the other side of the political valley of death.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024

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