This post originally appeared in Jonathan Chait’s &c. newsletter, which you can sign up for here.
This week, more than 100 Republican elected officials or national security advisers endorsed Kamala Harris. The argument that united these figures, many of whom worked directly for Donald Trump, is simple: Trump is a maniac. More specifically, Trump worships dictators, a fact with disturbing implications for his foreign policy, and even more disturbing implications for his use of domestic power (Trump has attempted a coup, promises to free the criminals who joined his coup attempt, and threatens regularly to imprison the media and opposition if he wins). In the face of the extraordinary threat to the system posed by a second Trump term, normal political disagreements over budgets, social policy, and the like simply don’t register.
Oddly, this logic has not won over two of the most prominent conservative columnists at the New York Times, whom you might expect would have an easier time supporting a Democrat than would, say, Dick Cheney.
Both Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens have written columns explaining why the choice between nakedly authoritarian, paranoid racist criminal Donald Trump and regular Democrat Kamala Harris leaves them flummoxed and, for now, undecided. I am not a conservative, so for me the choice is extremely obvious. Even granting that conservatives have different priorities and preferences, however, the case for indecision strikes me as feeble.
Stephens’s column begins with a series of specific policy questions he wishes Harris would answer. These are all perfectly valid questions, of course, but there’s something comical about demanding this level of specificity from one candidate — “Are there any regulations she’d like to get rid of in her initiative to build 3 million new homes in the next four years? What role, if any, does she see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans? If there were another pandemic similar to COVID-19, what might her administration do differently?” etc. — when the other candidate’s platform ranges from incoherent blather to promises or threats so outlandish his own party is reduced to hoping he is simply lying. Stephens sounds like a parent who is unsure about whether he should hire a serial killer to babysit his children because the only other candidate hasn’t supplied enough references.
After listing his questions that Harris must answer (and that Trump, of course, not only hasn’t answered but is mentally incapable of answering), Stephens addresses the obvious objection about the alternative:
“Yet Trump victory or no, the Republican Party isn’t likely to revert to its former ideological leanings. And the argument that Trump is our Mussolini, scheming with ever-greater malevolence and cunning to end the Republic, is getting a little long in the tooth.
Trump may be much the worse sinner, but Democrats aren’t blameless when it comes to weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters. Otherwise, what does it mean to try to kick a candidate off a state ballot, or use a nakedly politicized prosecution to turn an opponent into a convicted felon, or have powerful insiders anoint a presidential candidate without the benefit of a single primary vote?”
Begin with the second paragraph. Stephens is trying to equate Trump’s naked authoritarianism with various actions by “Democrats.” Two of those, the Manhattan prosecution (which I think is shaky) and a lawsuit to disqualify him in California, have nothing to do with either Harris or the national party. The third, the party’s quick coalescing around Harris rather than jury-rig a speed primary, is both an understandable response to an emergency and one that is perfectly normal party behavior. There are no rules in place for how a party responds to a medical emergency by its nominee. Speed elections aren’t realistic. In any case, parties used to anoint their candidates without voting at all. To even compare quibbles about the nominating process with Trump’s belief he is entitled to prevail whatever the voters say, and that all opposition to him is inherently criminal, is an insult to democracy.
I think the weakness of this argument is explained by the paragraph preceding it, in which Stephens laments that the old Republican Party is not returning, and that complaints about Trump’s unfitness are getting old. Obviously, the passage of time does not make concerns about an authoritarian president less compelling, especially when his authoritarianism is growing more blatant, while his party’s willingness to check it is faltering. But what does weaken with time is political willpower. Stephens’s thought process is laid bare by his fretting that the old party is not returning. His period of brief exile, which he first imagined would last months until Trump was defeated, and then four years until the party returned to sanity, is now stretching out indefinitely. And that is why his implied threshold of acceptability for Trump is now getting lower and lower.
Douthat’s argument for indecision is somewhat more frustrating. He argues that the Democratic Party lurched leftward during the Trump era. Douthat concedes that it has been chastened, both on substantive grounds (inflation rose surprisingly fast) and political grounds (the public turned out to be much less progressive than the Twitter-influenced bubble of 2019–2020 implied). Yet his complaint is that Democrats have failed to acknowledge and apologize for their leftward lurch:
“The ‘ask’ is to ratify a record of substantial policy failure and conspicuous ideological fanaticism, dressed up for the moment in a thin promise that we won’t make those mistakes again …
Then the bill comes due, the elites backpedal and obfuscate and conveniently forget (What do you mean, Kamala Harris endorsed publicly funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens? Sounds like Fox News nonsense!), and the unhappy swing voter is informed that no real price can be exacted for any of this folly, because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.”
It isn’t enough for Douthat that Harris has renounced nearly all her progressive stances from 2019 and is running a campaign far more centrist than the one Joe Biden ran in 2020. He demands a price be paid for the progressivism. An apology? A truth and reconciliation commission for the unjustly canceled? One can understand his impulse to desire these things without being able to fathom how they could amount to a rationale for electing Trump, the very lunatic who helped set off the excesses that he’s still so angry about.
Yes, the public-health experts overshot their certainty — but that was both more tempting for them to do, and easier for them to get away with, when the president was spinning absurd lies that the virus would go away on its own in a few days or could be cured with Ivermectin. Yes, the Robin DiAngelo / Ibram Kendi fad was embarrassing and even harmful, but racism sure seems like a more serious problem when the president of the United States says racist things constantly.
Douthat, like Stephens, manages to identify his own emotional processes without diagnosing them fully. For Douthat, it’s the lack of an option — he cannot take out his frustration on the Democrats “because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.”
It’s frustrating. I get it. If the Republicans were still in the hands of Bush-Romney types, and the Democratic Party fell into the thrall of, say, a Hugo Chavez, I would have to vote Republican. The give-and-take of normal policy disagreement can only proceed under a relatively healthy democracy. If the only party that could be trusted with democracy was only taking, and not giving, my policy priorities, I would feel growing frustration. The system is unfair. The elites must pay a price.
But it is not the system that has brought us to this unfortunate point. It is the Republican Party. I would very much like to have a world in which we had two parties to choose from that could be trusted not to destroy democracy. But until we do, small-d Democrats have only one choice. That their alternative is unsuitable for power is not the Democrats’ fault.
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