Full Eeyore

From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch

From time to time I’ll run across a pre-war newsreel and wonder how theatergoers of the day felt watching it. Was there meaningful dread at seeing things unravel politically in Europe and the Far East or tedium in the expectation that chances of a disaster were remote?

I would have been in the “dread” group, not because I’m perspicacious but because I’m pessimistic. And I would have reproached myself for just that reason: Someone prone to dread usually ends up worrying over nothing.

Bear that in mind and discount my opinion accordingly when I say that this is the most discouraging moment conservatives of my bent have experienced since January 6, 2021.

Classical liberals had two opportunities to prevent a Donald Trump restoration, one in the Republican primary and the other in the general election. The first opportunity collapsed months ago, the second is in the process of collapsing right now. Trump’s illiberal ambitions have never been more glaring, yet he’s never looked more likely to return to power.

And if he does, chances are good that the left’s own illiberal wing will play an important part in making it happen.

The man most likely to be president in 2025 is reportedly hatching fascist plots to persecute his enemies while the activist vanguard of the other party agitates remorselessly on behalf of fanatics in Gaza who want a Final Solution to the Jewish question in Israel.

Illiberalism is on the march. We’re watching the newsreels every day.

Sunday morning’s newsreel was a keeper.

Within the span of a few hours we were gifted two new headlines. One: “Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term.” Two: “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds.”

The first came from a Washington Post story, the latest in a series of political reports on how consumed Trump and his team have become with using government power vengefully. “Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office,” the Post alleges, naming John Kelly, Bill Barr, and Mark Milley as likely targets. The think tanks he’s deputized to staff this project have supposedly also developed “a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act.”

This is happening in plain sight. The country’s most influential newspapers are running well-sourced stories about it, and Trump himself anointed revenge as the theme of his campaign in a now-famous speech to CPAC earlier this year, since dubbed by Steve Bannon as the “Come Retribution” address.

Yet according to the new New York Times poll mentioned above, he now leads Biden fairly comfortably in five out of six swing states polled, including by double digits in Nevada. His biggest gains since 2020 have come from nonwhite voters and voters under 30, two pillars of the liberal base whom you’d have expected to be bulwarks against a rising proto-fascist right.

He’s plotting government by vendetta and laying the ideological groundwork for invoking martial law—and his odds of becoming president are growing. America has never been here before.

The most charitable interpretation of how that’s possible isn’t very charitable. Perhaps Americans are so comprehensively checked out of what’s happening in their own politics that even coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post can’t break through. Things might be different six months from now, when they’re paying closer attention. But for the moment, rumblings of a fascist takeover of the executive branch with an election less than a year away rank far below, say, Taylor Swift in what’s occupying voters’ headspace.

The less charitable interpretation is that voters understand very well already that a second Trump term will get constitutionally hairy and don’t care. Biden’s too old, the price of eggs is too high, and there’s too much war abroad. What does it matter what happens to John Kelly or protesters in Lafayette Park if Trump can bring prices back down to where they were before the pandemic? (Spoiler: He cannot.) They might not be following the details of his latest post-liberal scheming in the Times or the Post but they surely all remember how his first term ended. They’ve heard about his criminal indictments. They know what they’d be signing up for by electing him again and seem ready to do so anyway.

Almost three years after January 6, one could plausibly argue that Trump has never been more likely to win a presidential election than he is right now. I find it impossible to chew on that fact and retain faith in this country. For a classical liberal, this is peak demoralization. So far.

Some Democratic strategists greeted the data from the Times poll with a stiff upper lip. It’s bad news to be sure, tweeted former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, but no cause for panic. Liberals simply must resolve to “do the work” of educating undecideds, especially the cohort that dislikes both party’s nominees, about Biden’s accomplishments in office. Some political junkies pointed back to the doomsaying that accompanied Barack Obama’s dismal polling circa 2011, a year before he won reelection easily.

That’s the sort of can-do attitude one might expect from people who’ve worked on campaigns and believe in their own persuasive power.

But not everyone could muster the same optimism. The Times’ numbers were so grim that Obama veteran David Axelrod essentially called on Biden to quit the race. I’ve resisted that argument in the past, believing that Kamala Harris would be weaker against Trump than the president would and that a contested primary would tear Democrats apart. But now I wonder if it’s the least bad of several terrible options, the equivalent of jerking the wheel in whichever direction when the car you’re in is speeding toward a cliff.

To stick with Biden, you need to believe that Democratic voters can be re-moralized over the next year following the current period of demoralization. I don’t think much can be done to achieve that affirmatively, Pfeiffer’s optimism notwithstanding. Axelrod identifies the reason: The president’s age casts a shadow over everything and his age can only become more of a liability as time passes.

If you worry that inflation and international upheaval are functions of the White House having lost control of events, Biden’s incremental enfeeblement will incrementally deepen those worries as Election Day approaches. Even if Pfeiffer’s campaign to “educate” the public on Biden’s achievements succeeded, swing voters might treat the information as cause to hand him a gold watch and send him into retirement with America’s thanks rather than reward him with another term he wouldn’t be up to serving.

That’s why the Obama comparison doesn’t work. He was all of 50 years old in 2011, had turned the corner on the Great Recession, and had nothing weighing on him as heavily as high prices, wars in Israel and Ukraine, and an opponent with a presidential pedigree and a personality cult behind him. He also had charisma to burn. Barack Obama circa 2011 would be a solid bet against Trump in 2024. Biden isn’t Obama.

I don’t believe the Democratic base can be reenergized by a senescent president. At this point, the party is gambling everything—everything—that Trump will prove so toxic under the spotlight next fall that he’ll reassemble Biden’s winning 2020 coalition singlehandedly himself. Either that or he’ll alienate what’s left of the conservative remnant of the GOP so thoroughly that he’ll inadvertently persuade them to vote for Biden, offsetting whatever losses the president may suffer among nonwhites and younger adults.

But how likely is that given the illiberal spectacle playing out in the other party?

If Biden’s presidency leads to a Trump restoration, historians will debate what his greatest error was. Some will point to the fiasco in how America withdrew from Afghanistan, a mistake from which his polling never recovered. Many will point to the COVID relief bill Democrats passed early in his term that ignited inflation and led to the interest-rate hikes that have made home-buying prohibitively expensive.

Most will point to his decision to run for reelection in the first place. Hindsight will never be as clear as it’ll be the day after a Trump victory next fall, when all the world will agree that it was insane for an 82-year-old whose mental acuity was in doubt to have been renominated for president.

But in the list of grand Biden miscalculations, don’t overlook his apparent belief that Democrats of all stripes would line up behind Israel after the October 7 pogrom in roughly the same way Americans rallied together after September 11. It wasn’t crazy on its face to think so, as both attacks were horrendous in scale and vividly macabre in their particulars. The president seems to have assumed that the vastness of the horror would quiet progressive Palestinian apologists and embolden liberal supporters of Israel, making his full-throated solidarity with the Jewish state unproblematic.

He was wrong. A few people showed up at his home this weekend to make sure he knew it.

The story of the past month is a story of Biden growing aware about how wrong he was. As Israelis geared up to invade Gaza, progressives galvanized behind the idea of a preemptive ceasefire in hopes of tamping down political support for the incursion in the West. The White House began hearing how unhappy Muslim voters were with Biden’s one-sided support for Israel and what the political consequences might be. Young Democratic apparatchiks who’ve been weaned politically on sympathizing with the “colonized” side of the conflict began to chafe at Biden’s position.

Soon his spokeswoman was answering questions about antisemitism by warning about Islamophobia instead. His vice president introduced a new “national strategy” to combat the practice. Democratic senators and House members took to demanding a humanitarian “pause” in Israel’s offensive, an idea the president himself soon echoed. On Friday, Antony Blinken brought the idea to the Israelis themselves.

On the same day, the most outspoken pro-Palestinian activist in Congress published a video accusing Joe Biden of nothing less than supporting genocide.

The closest thing to actual genocide in that video is the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a bit of eliminationist jingoism lifted from Hamas reflecting the group’s ambition to render Israeli territory Judenrein. Numerous Democrats criticized Tlaib for her glib use of the term over the weekend, but she was unbowed, insisting unconvincingly that she meant nothing untoward. (This is a rare case in which progressives believe that a speaker’s innocent intentions should trump the hurtful impact their words might have on a vulnerable group.) Attend any anti-anti-Hamas rally in America—and there are many—and you’ll hear the same eliminationist refrain.

I don’t think Joe Biden had the faintest expectation that his most progressive constituents would react the way they have to wanton violence against Israeli civilians, watching a Nazi-esque atrocity play out in real time on social media and pivoting instantly to demanding restraint in punishing the perpetrators. He may have thought the shock of the cruelty would temper the zeal of their animus toward Israel, at least temporarily. Surely no one would rush to associate themselves with a group that had just committed a pogrom by opposing retribution for it.

In fact, the pro-Palestinian left seems to have interpreted October 7 as a moral test of its commitment to the cause. How serious are they about “decolonization”? Serious enough to stand with the Palestinian people amid a punishing Israeli onslaught even after the relevant authority in Gaza behaved like an S.S. death squad? Serious enough to look maximum depravity in the face and say, yes, we’re willing to pay that price for “liberation”?

They “passed” Hamas’ test. And now Biden and his administration, doubtless to their great surprise, are being forced to triangulate so that they don’t fail it any more than they already have.

All of which has led to profound demoralization on all sides.

Progressives are demoralized because they expected a more equivocal response initially from a Democratic president. They’ve never been devotees of Biden on the merits but they assumed, I’m sure, that he would react somewhat differently from a Republican at a moment like this. Mainstream liberals, on the other hand, are demoralized at having to make common cause politically with Jew-hating degenerates who plainly believe the perceived victimhood of their Palestinian allies gives them carte blanche morally.

And Biden-curious conservatives are doubtless demoralized at the thought of voting for a Democrat whose illiberal base can muscle him into something resembling a “third way” position between Israel and Hamas. One might counter that “river to the sea” progressivism is a small minority view in the Democratic Party—and one would be right—but centrist Republicans watching the dystopian leftist id make a spectacle of itself will recoil at this the same they did a few years ago on an issue closer to home. Few House Democrats supported defunding the police in 2020, I’m sure, but the fact that the noisy activist set agitated ostentatiously behind the idea was enough to ensure major Republican congressional gains down ballot.

The left seems to have lost what little faith it had in Biden and everyone else has lost what little faith it had in the left. No wonder the polls are what they are.

I would put the state of the presidential race this way. Whereas before I thought Biden could win a “choice” election against Trump, now I think he can win only if it’s a “referendum” election.

Typically a reelection campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, boding ill for a president who’s sitting just north of 40 percent in job approval. But because his opponent is so outlandish in so many ways—an accused felon, a proven coup-plotter, a de facto cult leader, and a former president himself—it remains possible that voters will go into the booth next fall thinking “Trump again? Really?” Biden can win that race.

I no longer think he can win if voters go into the booth considering their vote as a choice between the two. In the Times poll of swing states, Trump led Biden by more than 20 points when respondents were asked which candidate they trusted more on the economy. In another poll released over the weekend, many more Americans said they’d be better off financially if Trump won next year than said so of Biden, and many more thought a second Biden term would increase rather than decrease chances of the U.S. getting into a war. A plurality said the opposite of a second Trump term.

Not all disgruntled Biden 2020 voters will go to Trump. Relatively few will, in all likelihood. But all it’ll take for a restoration is a meaningful sliver to end up with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West or home on their sofas on Election Day.

The accumulated weight of it is all too much. If not for Biden’s age or for inflation or for major conflicts breaking out on his watch or for the suffocating sense that none of this is going to get appreciably better over the next year, he would likely defeat the least fit candidate for presidential office that a major American party has ever nominated. As it is, I think it’ll take an act of shocking self-sabotage by Trump like overtly calling for political violence to give the president the edge. (Entirely possible, by the way.) Ninety-one felony counts wasn’t enough self-sabotage to do it, it seems. Perhaps nothing is.

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