Do the Democrats Really Think Trump Is an Emergency?

I predicted last weekend that the Democrats will find a way to jettison Joe Biden; that likelihood seems to fluctuate daily or even hourly, but for now my prediction stands. It seems clear from a week of intraparty maneuvers, however, that at least some Democrats are content to stick with their current nominee, notwithstanding the strong likelihood of a November defeat and a Trump restoration, viewing the alternative as too painful or high-risk or disruptive.

This has come as a bit of a shock to some anti-Trump observers. For instance, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, whom I did not regard as an especially starry-eyed idealist, expressed stark bafflement at the hesitations and trimming of Democratic leaders:

It seems obvious to me that the threat of a second Donald Trump presidential term, with its authoritarian inclinations unchecked, poses a civic emergency that supersedes any other normal political consideration. Because it is so obvious to me, I had long assumed the Democratic Party would consider it equally obvious.

But it is no longer clear to me that the party’s elected officials actually share that assumption. They very much wish for Trump’s defeat. But to the extent that goal conflicts with other, more mundane imperatives, more than a few Democrats seem to view beating Trump as a secondary objective.

A similar outraged mystification afflicted The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, when he was informed by my colleague Ezra Klein in a podcast interview that some Democrats felt relatively non-apocalyptic about the prospect of a second Trump term: “That is crazy.”

It doesn’t seem crazy to me at all, but that’s because I think it’s always been clear that the Democratic Party in the age of Trump isn’t as NeverTrump as the truest NeverTrump believers, that it usually chooses “mundane imperatives” and self-interest over emergency measures geared to existential stakes.

I wrote about this in the context of Biden’s “save democracy, vote Democrat” rhetoric before the 2022 midterms, but clearly the point merits new elaboration. Time and again, from 2016 to the present, the Democratic Party has treated Trumpism not as a “civic emergency” but as a political opportunity, a golden chance to win over moderate and right-leaning voters with the language of anti-authoritarianism while avoiding substantive concessions to these voters and actually moving farther to the left.

This was true of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which attacked Trump on character and fitness while running to the left of prior Democratic presidential candidates. It was true of most of the party’s serious primary candidates in 2020, who competed with one another to prove their left-wing bona fides, and it was even true of Biden, who won the nomination on electability but then himself moved leftward for the general election (denouncing Trumpian authoritarianism all the while). It’s certainly been true of Biden’s administration, which has only lately made some halting attempts at triangulation, after mostly taking an ideologically aggressive, non-conciliatory approach to economic policy and cultural issues alike.

I’m not saying that you can’t find moments here and there where Democrats moderated on some issue or made a patriotic concession for the anti-Trump cause. But the overarching pattern is better represented by the various times when Democrats deliberately boosted MAGA candidates in Republican primaries on the theory that they’d be easier to beat — or for that matter by the fact that right now, as Biden teeters on the brink, his vice president and natural successor is a figure chosen entirely for the “mundane imperatives” of Democratic interest groups, rather for a scenario where she might be called upon to face Trump with democracy supposedly at stake.

America doesn’t have a parliamentary system, so it’s hard to say exactly what the American equivalent would be of European efforts (like the kind we just saw at work in the French elections) to build grand pan-ideological coalitions to keep far-right parties out of power. But it’s also hard to say what that would look like because Democrats just haven’t tried anything along those lines — no big policy concessions, no prominent Republicans brought into Democratic cabinets or onto Democratic tickets, no promises to call a truce on the country’s most contested issues.

The idea of an anti-Trump “coalition of all democratic forces” has been prominent in the media and the commentariat, and there you have seen big shifts and concessions. But these have mostly been made by anti-Trump conservatives and ex-conservatives moving leftward, not by the political coalition that they’re joining.

In this sense it’s understandable that someone like The Bulwark’s Miller would be especially outraged by Democratic politicians willing to risk a Trump restoration, since his publication, nominally conservative, has done a great deal of ideological accommodation in the name of an anti-Trump popular front. But I would have thought he would have noticed long before now that Democratic leaders mostly aren’t interested in offering serious accommodations to erstwhile conservatives in return.

In my midterm column on this subject, I made the Democratic Party’s approach to these issues seem cynical and somewhat deceptive, but reflecting further, I don’t think that’s entirely fair. First, there is a school of Democratic thought that quite sincerely regards lurching leftward as the best way to defeat Trumpism, on the theory that there’s more to gain by mobilizing (putatively) left-wing disaffected voters than by welcoming Republican-leaning moderates into Democratic ranks. This theory is mostly bunkum, but it is a genuine attempt at a serious response to Trumpism, not just an attempt to exploit the moment for partisan gain.

Second, for Democrats who recognize that moderation is usually the best path to victory, I think if they were hooked up to a lie detector machine and asked, “Is Trump really a threat to American democracy?,” most would say yes and be sincere.

Their failure to follow through on this sincere belief with drastic steps, their bias toward partisanship-as-usual, in part just reflects a very normal human weakness; we all take the path of least resistance most of the time. But in part, I suspect, it also reflects a balancing, a belief that Trump is a real threat but he isn’t such a threat that you have to subordinate everything to anti-Trumpism — at least not if that means passing up chances to enact policies you think are necessary or giving up on causes you hold dear, conceding territory to worldviews you vehemently reject or embracing emergency measures even knowing that they might end your career or blow up in your face.

And it’s hard for me to be especially angry at Democrats who think about Trump this way, even though as a conservative, I wish they would do more to woo right-leaning Americans and I really wish that neither Biden nor Kamala Harris was on the Democratic ticket, because it’s close to how I think about the Trump phenomenon as well. The presumptive Republican nominee is a dangerous and destabilizing figure, but he isn’t the only force threatening the American republic. Other “normal” ideologies and movements pose their own dangers, wrongheaded responses to Trumpism can be destabilizing as well, and it’s OK to still pursue normal political goals, liberal or conservative, in the shadow of his influence.

Perhaps this is realism; perhaps it’s fatal naïveté. But whatever choices the Democrats make now, it seems more likely than ever that we will get another four years that put this theory to the test.