Here’s How Joe Biden Channels Lincoln to Secure His Legacy

Fellow citizens: In the face of our current electoral crisis, revisit Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech. Breathe in the beautiful prose poetry of the first page, but also read the substance and argument of the next six pages. On June 16, 1858, from the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, the then-former one-term congressman announced his candidacy for the United States Senate against the incumbent Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, with whom he differed fundamentally on the future of slavery in America.

Let’s ask ourselves if we believe in the essential truth of Lincoln’s Bible-inspired claim: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

With urgency, we should be asking about the future of our own house divided. In this election, we are deciding whether the Union can endure half–MAGA neofascist and half–Democratic pluralistic under rule of law. Both Lincoln in 1858 and Justice Samuel Alito now recognize that in some struggles, only one side can prevail.

How shall we refashion Lincoln’s language for our own moment (we are hardly the first to do this)? “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it,” Lincoln continued, “and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.” The language needs little change: Either the opponents of MAGA-fascism will arrest its further spread throughout our institutions and our political life, and put it on a course of steady if slow extinction, or its advocates will push it forward throughout the laws and soul of the nation. Are the coming months and years to be the end of the American experiment or its renewal?

In most of the rest of Lincoln’s speech he made an overt case for how his new Republican Party should denounce and resist the Dred Scott decision, announced by the Supreme Court in March 1857. In that decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney argued for a 7–2 majority that the former slaves Dred and Harriet Scott had no right to sue in federal courts and that Black people had “no rights” under law in America because they were “inferior”; then took the third legal leap, declaring that the federal government had no authority to stop the presence or spread of slavery anywhere in the country because the human beings in question were legal property.

The decision sent shock waves through American political culture as never before in a society that had fiercely and dangerously contested the future of slavery for at least 37 years. In our own time we have experienced similar shocks from an increasingly right-wing Supreme Court, particularly in Shelby v. Holder in 2014 on voting rights, the Dobbs decision overthrowing the right to an abortion in 2022, the overturning of the Chevron doctrine for how government itself functions in 2024, and now the decision granting presidents the right to violate criminal law in their official capacities with immunity. More shocks are to come.

In his speech, Lincoln directly stated that there was in effect a Slave Power—a “legal combination,” a “design and concert of action among its chief bosses” to overthrow the United States government in the interest of a permanent future for slavery and all that would mean. In a brilliant, homespun metaphor about building a house with carefully “framed timbers,” he asserted that the Democrats and their slaveholding Southern overlords had fashioned “a common plan or draft drawn up [to preserve and spread slavery] before the first lick was struck” on the house. Lincoln argued in no uncertain terms that the Republican Party now needed to define itself and work with “the single impulse of resistance to a common danger,” to denounce the Dred Scott decision as its principal reason to be, no matter what “hostile elements … gathered from the four winds.”

In this spirit, I offer the following immodest proposal to resolve the current crisis of the Democratic Party. In a matter of days, President Joseph Biden should hold a news conference, surrounded not only by his family and staff but by the Obamas, the Clintons, his foreign policy team, and especially Vice President Kamala Harris. He should announce that, effective the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, he would step down from the presidency, having released all his delegates to vote for Harris and making Harris the incumbent president as she prepares to do battle against Donald Trump. At this impending news conference, Biden and Harris would appoint a team to research and vet numerous vice presidential candidates to be Harris’s running mate. I will hold off on those suggestions for now.

Over the following six to seven weeks, the Democrats will begin to show to the world that they have a talented “bench” of governors, senators, and House members, as well as mayors and former mayors. In this period not only do Harris and Biden hit the campaign trail together but so do many key surrogates, again showing that the Democratic Party has a powerful, hopeful, reviving agenda for the nation and the most pluralistic coalition ever assembled. And it has youth and experience.

This plan acknowledges that Harris is the one legitimate person at this particular moment who should succeed Biden. She is the vice president, and Joe Biden owes her and his party this act of both boldness and prudence. Making this choice gives Biden, admired by many of us, the chance to take a long bow in history, to go out with glory. It will still be his convention until the final day. And he will always be remembered not only for defeating Trump, reviving the economy, and saving NATO but for a humility and patriotism all too rare in American life.

I am more than aware that Harris has her detractors on the question of electability. But “folks!” as Biden would say, let’s be real. She is smart, extremely well versed in issues, experienced now on the foreign policy stage for more than three years, and the greatest voice in our politics on the issue of women’s reproductive freedom—which is about everyone’s freedom. Harris’s first run for the presidency failed, the border is still a nightmare issue, and she will have to find some distance from Biden on Israel-Gaza. But she has been in the room for every major decision, foreign and domestic, and that matters. She is brilliant on the issue of guns, and she now has a full grasp of the stakes of holding together the Western alliance in Europe and beyond. The country has not seen enough of Kamala Harris.

In her acceptance speech at the convention, I urge her writers to craft a rigorously positive, coalition-building, honest rethinking of the “House Divided” speech. “All one or all the other” is not likely the nonviolent outcome of our current crisis. But it captures the stakes in language all can understand. It is going to take a herculean effort to defeat MAGA and send it to the same dust bin of history where the Confederate Lost Cause may be finding a resting place.

Speechwriters can fashion newly energized arguments for at least three major goals: defeating MAGA-fascism with a new ethics regime in government; building a NATO-centered foreign policy that will give the world confidence and defeat Putin; and a public agenda for schools, infrastructure, and climate policy. Above all, run the campaign against this current Supreme Court and its disastrous decisions. Call the enemies by their names, and make a plan to replace them and reform the institution. Give people hope that these court decisions, like Dred Scott and some others that followed in the nineteenth century, did not last forever.

And finally, give the new generations plans and hopes that this deadly poison of the MAGA Power can be put on a course of ultimate extinction. Authoritarians thrive on demoralization and despair among those who believe in liberal democracy. During these coming weeks and months, Democrats can seize control of the news and the narrative with visions of hope. Harris, run against the equivalent of the 1850s Slave Power, and run against the Supreme Court as Lincoln did! And Democrats, borrowing from Lincoln, fight with a “single impulse of resistance to a common danger.” What an amazing legacy this would be for Joe Biden.