I am trying to think if the commentators I’ve heard and read over the past 15 hours have understandings of the complexities of the present moment at the level of thought you are working with here…or are they obliged in their work spaces to seek simpler answers? And thereby, in the latter, constituting the discursive space that conditions the decisions that may be made? This is sort of structuralism within the episodic, maybe. In a different vein, if we or they believe that last night was a calamity, isn’t the question whether your deep, thoughtful, engaged commentary production can survive the results determined by last night’s debacle?
At least some of them are so obliged, I suppose, believing that simplicity is a stylistic requirement but more of them--say, almost all of the people who write opinion regularly for the New York Times--are operating as if they are courtiers involved in palace intrigue and are thus very much part of one of those institutional worlds where people spend a tremendous amount of energy not wanting to know what they plainly could know if they expended any effort. But faced with the impossibility of sustaining that non-knowing at around the fifteenth minute of the debate, all of them switched over as hard as possible in order to now appear that they knew that all along, indeed, that they have been leading the analysis.
Max Read's Substack this morning (https://maxread.substack.com/p/hawk-tuah-and-the-zynternet) puts it exactly right: "Where I think the Times columnists--and other elite pundits and close followers of political news--are wrong is in the idea that this debate was particularly bad for Biden in terms of his broad electoral support. The panic they are feeling is because they might be the only people in the country to have just now realized that Biden is too old to be running for president."
I don't think it's as monolithic as this. Ezra Klein, for instance, about six months ago was calling for Democrats to consider replacing Biden on the basis that his age and decline make him an electoral liability (even as he's done a very effective job of governing). Others stuck with the narrative that Biden is very sharp and engaged in policy discussions and decision making behind the scenes. I don't even think that's unlikely. Some of those people (Paul Krugman, for another Times example) saw the debate performance as a game changer and now are in the replace Biden camp.
Ultimately, it's all a political question that I'm not sure anyone has a real answer to. Biden has obvious vulnerabilities, but so does any feasible candidate. Kamala Harris is black and a woman and attacks on her tend to land with the electorate we have (as much as we might wish they didn't). Elizabeth Warren is a strongly left leaning woman. Bernie Sanders is a year older than Biden, doesn't do well among non-white voters, and chases away your suburbanites who ran kicking and screaming from Trump. Gavin Newsom comes across as smarmy. Gretchen Whitmer is fairly unproven nationally. The list goes on.
All of which is to say that there's a great desire to do lots of psychoanalysis of the electorate, and I kind of doubt much of anyone really has a better sense than anyone else. What I wish they'd do is spend the next two weeks intensively polling and focus grouping with their most accomplished people in those areas and figure out if the results point toward replacing Biden being a good idea, and if so, with whom.
"very much part of one of those institutional worlds where people spend a tremendous amount of energy not wanting to know what they plainly could know if they expended any effort." Love this.
I recently read that Mitt Romney book, and in it Romney writes about how in 2012 he was convinced that Obama would destroy America and that he alone was called to save America. In retrospect he recognizes this as complete nonsense, but there's something about the process of seeking to be president that distorts your thinking. In Biden's case, Trump is genuinely going to destroy America, and there's a strong case to be made that Biden _is_ the only person who can beat him. Given that even people who are not Biden find it hard to come up with a slam-dunk winner against Trump, it would be shocking if Biden himself didn't think he was uniquely called to serve in this moment. I don't think that's hubris on his part, just human nature. Also, look at his own history--everyone was certain he wouldn't even get the nomination in 2020, but he stayed in and eventually won the election.
Yes, though I think that was not by his own appeal alone--I think he mobilized the same highly institutional forces within the party's structure that greased the skids for him to run again this year. I think to some extent the Democratic Party's internal structure is a kind of phantom limb--it still has a lot of power to coordinate outcomes in primaries through mobilizations of client organizations/constituencies (non-profits, Black churches, unions, entertainers, etc.) but it is not meaningfully in touch with its actual grassroots base any longer. A good example of that might be the 2022 off-cycle elections, which Biden and the upper leadership completely expected to be a catastrophe (along with much of the punditry), where the good outcomes were actually secured by grassroots organizers and general mobilization of the base despite the fact that the leadership had written it off--and then the leadership clapped themselves on the back and gave themselves credit for the win. (Which, apparently, also fed into Biden thinking that his prospects for re-election were good.)
I am trying to think if the commentators I’ve heard and read over the past 15 hours have understandings of the complexities of the present moment at the level of thought you are working with here…or are they obliged in their work spaces to seek simpler answers? And thereby, in the latter, constituting the discursive space that conditions the decisions that may be made? This is sort of structuralism within the episodic, maybe. In a different vein, if we or they believe that last night was a calamity, isn’t the question whether your deep, thoughtful, engaged commentary production can survive the results determined by last night’s debacle?
At least some of them are so obliged, I suppose, believing that simplicity is a stylistic requirement but more of them--say, almost all of the people who write opinion regularly for the New York Times--are operating as if they are courtiers involved in palace intrigue and are thus very much part of one of those institutional worlds where people spend a tremendous amount of energy not wanting to know what they plainly could know if they expended any effort. But faced with the impossibility of sustaining that non-knowing at around the fifteenth minute of the debate, all of them switched over as hard as possible in order to now appear that they knew that all along, indeed, that they have been leading the analysis.
Max Read's Substack this morning (https://maxread.substack.com/p/hawk-tuah-and-the-zynternet) puts it exactly right: "Where I think the Times columnists--and other elite pundits and close followers of political news--are wrong is in the idea that this debate was particularly bad for Biden in terms of his broad electoral support. The panic they are feeling is because they might be the only people in the country to have just now realized that Biden is too old to be running for president."
I don't think it's as monolithic as this. Ezra Klein, for instance, about six months ago was calling for Democrats to consider replacing Biden on the basis that his age and decline make him an electoral liability (even as he's done a very effective job of governing). Others stuck with the narrative that Biden is very sharp and engaged in policy discussions and decision making behind the scenes. I don't even think that's unlikely. Some of those people (Paul Krugman, for another Times example) saw the debate performance as a game changer and now are in the replace Biden camp.
Ultimately, it's all a political question that I'm not sure anyone has a real answer to. Biden has obvious vulnerabilities, but so does any feasible candidate. Kamala Harris is black and a woman and attacks on her tend to land with the electorate we have (as much as we might wish they didn't). Elizabeth Warren is a strongly left leaning woman. Bernie Sanders is a year older than Biden, doesn't do well among non-white voters, and chases away your suburbanites who ran kicking and screaming from Trump. Gavin Newsom comes across as smarmy. Gretchen Whitmer is fairly unproven nationally. The list goes on.
All of which is to say that there's a great desire to do lots of psychoanalysis of the electorate, and I kind of doubt much of anyone really has a better sense than anyone else. What I wish they'd do is spend the next two weeks intensively polling and focus grouping with their most accomplished people in those areas and figure out if the results point toward replacing Biden being a good idea, and if so, with whom.
"very much part of one of those institutional worlds where people spend a tremendous amount of energy not wanting to know what they plainly could know if they expended any effort." Love this.
I recently read that Mitt Romney book, and in it Romney writes about how in 2012 he was convinced that Obama would destroy America and that he alone was called to save America. In retrospect he recognizes this as complete nonsense, but there's something about the process of seeking to be president that distorts your thinking. In Biden's case, Trump is genuinely going to destroy America, and there's a strong case to be made that Biden _is_ the only person who can beat him. Given that even people who are not Biden find it hard to come up with a slam-dunk winner against Trump, it would be shocking if Biden himself didn't think he was uniquely called to serve in this moment. I don't think that's hubris on his part, just human nature. Also, look at his own history--everyone was certain he wouldn't even get the nomination in 2020, but he stayed in and eventually won the election.
Yes, though I think that was not by his own appeal alone--I think he mobilized the same highly institutional forces within the party's structure that greased the skids for him to run again this year. I think to some extent the Democratic Party's internal structure is a kind of phantom limb--it still has a lot of power to coordinate outcomes in primaries through mobilizations of client organizations/constituencies (non-profits, Black churches, unions, entertainers, etc.) but it is not meaningfully in touch with its actual grassroots base any longer. A good example of that might be the 2022 off-cycle elections, which Biden and the upper leadership completely expected to be a catastrophe (along with much of the punditry), where the good outcomes were actually secured by grassroots organizers and general mobilization of the base despite the fact that the leadership had written it off--and then the leadership clapped themselves on the back and gave themselves credit for the win. (Which, apparently, also fed into Biden thinking that his prospects for re-election were good.)