The Kabuki Transition

Democrats owe the nation their honesty

If you were following the ebb and flow of the 2024 presidential campaign- and most Americans were not- you heard a consistent theme from both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: that the reelection of Donald Trump as president was absolutely unthinkable. They both frequently used the term existential in reference to the election. Prominent supporters expressed their fear that if Trump won it might be the last election in American history. Biden and Harris had no need to invent specious claims about Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Trump was happy to preview it himself, promising to use the military to round up his political opponents, to invoke the Insurrection Act, to surround himself with a coterie of “MAGA generals”, and to deport millions of U.S. residents.

The weeks leading up to the election resonated with dark warnings, not only from historians and political scientists but from military officers who had served under Trump, that the former president is a fascist. Vice President Harris agreed with that description (as do I). And yet, given what Democrats maintained was at stake in this election- no less than the survival of America- can you think of anything they actually did differently ? It feels like something should have been, well, different. Instead, the survival of American democracy became just another item to be checked off on Harris’s stump speech, along with changes in housing policy and student loan debt relief. But if you truly believed that one issue was existential, why would you ever speak of anything else ?

I cannot know what is in the minds of Democratic officeholders. But if Vice President Harris truly believed her own words on the campaign trail, she wouldn’t have delivered a stereotypical concession speech brimming with optimism for America’s future and pro forma promises to “keep fighting”. She would have told the voters that they had made a mistake, that they had elected a fascist. She would have made some attempt to prepare Americans for life under an authoritarian government. Harris could have mined the legal experience she has acquired over a long career to offer guidance on how to protect one’s civil liberties in the coming years.

During his own abortive reelection campaign Joe Biden was if anything even more emphatic about the threat Trump poses to the Republic. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory Biden could have addressed the nation and warned Americans to gird themselves for four years (at least) of vengeful, corrupt, and dysfunctional governance. Instead he invited the man whom he considers a mortal threat to American democracy- and who, by the way, refers to the president in private as “retarded Joe Biden”- to the White House for a friendly fireside chat. Then Biden traveled to the Amazon to give a speech on climate change (which his successor says is a hoax). At the conclusion of his remarks Biden rather fittingly wandered off into the jungle.

A friendly fireside chat

Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the Democrats. After all, as the historian Joanne Freeman noted this week, we’ve never been here before. The United States has never been on the cusp of a government takeover by an authoritarian movement. Maybe Democrats simply lack the vocabulary for such a moment (though they had four years to think about it). As Richard Evans observes in The Coming of the Third Reich, “Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights.” Democrats in Washington appear to be clinging to comforting norms and rituals while they await the inauguration of a man who holds those norms and rituals in utter contempt. In fact, they will be legitimizing his authoritarian project by playing their assigned roles at his inauguration on January 20th. They have the option of not pretending this is normal but lack the will to be unpredictable.

One hopeful sign is that Democratic governors do not seem to be afflicted by the same passivity, and are marshalling resources and coordinating among themselves in anticipation of an incoming government that considers itself to be at war with them. Their distance from the capital has insulated them from any reassuring illusions about the future.