I am not a drinker and have never been drunk, but now I know what a hangover must feel like.
Although I respect people with different perceptions, I awoke this morning observing the evidence of a wild bender. The metaphoric broken glass was strewn across the floor, plants were unearthed from their pots with dirt flung everywhere, the furniture was upside down and the house felt like it was spinning.
Liberal Americans like me who believe in the “more perfect union” and “arc of justice” version of America woke up to a dramatically new landscape and, if we are honest, a revised vision of ourselves. Our country has just elected a president who calls his personal opponents “enemies of the state,” regularly attacks the media, condones political violence, has a long and legally-proven record of assaulting women, does not appear to support the norms and structures of our democracy, roots for some of our greatest adversaries, depicts our global alliances as protection rackets, and has inspired so many of us to be our worst… and that’s not even the whole list.
America’s democracy may seem stable and enduring because we have buildings with doric columns as well as elections, parliaments, and courts, but democracy is a culture more than anything else. Democracy exists inside each of us as much as in the structures around us. If that culture is lost, everything else goes with it. Benjamin Franklin called our Democracy “a republic, if you can keep it.” If we do not continually strengthen our democracy, we will lose it.
As a Democrat, I could go on and on about the actions of the Republicans, and certainly there is a lot to criticize.
The party of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and John McCain did not have the courage to stand up for its own previously stated values. The party that had led efforts to oppose the USSR acquiesced to a leader seemingly supplicating himself to Putin. The party of fiscal responsibility became the party of economic populism. Republican congressional leaders said one thing about their values in private and the opposite in public. Even after the horrendous attack on our capitol on January 6, 2021, the Republicans who had been hiding under their seats cowering in fear as the aspiring lynch mob shouted “hang Mike Pence” soon found their way back to Trump. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnel had the chance to clear the way for a next generation of Republican leaders but didn’t have the guts.
If I were a staunchly pro-Trump Republican, I would have awoken this morning feeling vindicated. If I was a quiet centrist Republican, I might feel the same about my prior acquiescence or, perhaps, the first tinges of fear about what strongman-style rule might mean for our country. I might wonder if the vision being put forward by Donald Trump would have sounded familiar to what my grandparents believed they were fighting for in World War II.
But I am neither of those things. I am a Democrat. I’m an independently-minded, anti-woke liberal Democrat but a Democrat nonetheless. When I, hungover, look in the mirror after that bender, what I see is myself. I see the failure of my own party and the self-inflicted wound of this election. And no matter what the circumstances of the bender, no matter who else was involved and what may or may not have been their role, the only way I’ll avoid winding up in this situation again is by assessing myself with all the brutal honesty I can muster. If not, if I don’t look squarely in the mirror, if I solely blame others for my and our predicament, it is all but certain that even after I clean up the house and put everything away I’ll be right back here in no time at all.
If we Democrats don’t take a cold hard look at ourselves and how we lost this eminently winnable election, we’ll be right back here next time and then the time after that.
It’s hard to do that today, when the hangover is still so acute and our heads are still spinning, but every second counts. If we believe that our lives and our futures are bound to the state of our democracy, country, and world, we must start rebuilding now. Brutal honesty in the face of crushing defeat is double painful, but the alternative — dangerous delusion – is existentially threatening.
So here we go.
There will be some people who awoke this morning telling themselves that the story of this election is primarily one of racism and misogyny. They are wrong. Make no mistake, our country still harbors unacceptable levels of both, but that is not the story of this election. That is not who we are as a nation. We are the same nation that elected Barack Obama twice and would have likely have elected Nikki Haley, had she been the Republican candidate. Very many women and minorities voted for Trump. We need to look deeper.
There are lots of places to start, but one is with Joe Biden. I love and respect President Biden. He is my former boss. I was Deputy Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when then Senator Biden was Chairman and Tony Blinken was Staff Director. I am deeply aligned with him on issues of policy and in my conception of America’s best values. I believe he’s done an excellent job as president, even if he could and should have done better on border issues and Afghanistan. But like with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a single bad decision can sometimes outweigh a lifetime of spectacular service.
One year ago, when President Biden was 80 and the oldest serving President in US history, he had a choice. The right choice was to announce that his space cowboy mission had been completed, the madness of the Trump administration had been put to rest, and it was time to pass the torch to a new generation. Had he done that, he would have been a hero, even today. Instead, and for what may have seemed at the time like an investment in continuity, he made the opposite choice. That choice prevented the type of competitive Democratic primary that was so greatly needed to let our best possible candidates emerge, including, potentially, Kamala Harris.
To be fair, he may have not known a year ago how quickly his faculties would decline. But after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance, it was abundantly clear to everyone that Joe Biden, regardless of his many outstanding qualities, was not remotely in a position to serve another four and a half years as president of the United States. I posted and widely distributed my statement the following morning calling on the president to announce he would not seek reelection. To my surprise and chagrin, President Biden hunkered down. I and others launched an increasingly aggressive effort encouraging him to change course. Nothing. I organized a petition of former Biden staffers and signed an open letter of Democratic former foreign policy and national security officials. In my outreach, I called both for President Biden to announce he would not seek reelection and for a curtailed mini-primary to determine who should take his place.
Our need for some type of selection process should have been clear to everyone at the outset. Whoever would be the democratic candidate needed to go through some time of vetting process in which they could prove their mettle. We also needed to show the American people that the new candidate was not selected through some type of opaque backroom deal.
Others felt differently. They argued that Kamala Harris was already on the ticket and could easily inherit Biden’s war chest. They also feared Democratic infighting and the exposure of the rift in our party between centrists (like me) and the radical left. After the President waited nearly a month to make his decision and then endorsed Vice President Harris on the same day as he made that announcement, the goose was cooked from the start. Other potential contenders immediately fell in line. The Democratic base felt great that we’d pulled off a bloodless coup, particularly after the Republican convention had focused its firepower on Biden. This was a Pyrrhic victory. The undecided voters we needed to reach had legitimate questions about what Vice President Harris stood for and how she became the nominee. Our party did not have answers.
Vice President Harris ran a great campaign in many ways, but she was never fully able to answer the questions of these potentially reachable voters. We all liked the vibe of happiness and positivity, particularly in sharp contrast to Trump’s sinister darkness. Her debate performance was spectacular. Our feeling that we now at least had a chance was a refreshing rejoinder to our sense of doom watching Biden self-destruct in the June 27 debate. But the case for Kamala Harris was never made to these potentially swing voters.
Vice President Harris, despite her many great strengths, was never able to do as well in unscripted interviews as she’d done in the debates. She struggled to explain the significant differences between her progressive views expressed in her ill-fated 2020 presidential run and her centrist views now. When asked what she would do differently than President Biden, she wasn’t able to come up with anything. This was a tough look for a change candidate and a reminder of how impossible it was to be both an insider and an outsider at the same time. Perhaps even more significantly, many centrist and potentially swing voters feared she might be a Trojan horse candidate waiting to release her progressive instincts once in office.
This fear was exacerbated, and then some, by the Democratic party’s collective failure to distance ourselves from extreme views few of us actually held. Most Democrats, like most Americans, feared saying what they actually thought. All of us mourned the tragic death of George Floyd in 2020, for example, but most Americans did believe that America’s police were basically lynch mobs targeting ethnic minorities, we did not want to defund the same police so many of us had lovingly cheered after 9-11. We recognized the evils of slavery while not buying into the revisionist and historically manipulative 1619 Project. We supported full rights for all people but understood why some parents would want to ensure their children had access to gender-segregated bathrooms. Our hearts ached for the terrible suffering of civilians in both Israel and Gaza, but most of us did not support the lunatics in Hamas regalia burning American flags and destroying public property. Many of us liked seeing traditionally attractive models in lingerie ads. We wanted rights for everyone and secretly despised the woke cancellation mobs, speaking quietly about this to each other in protected settings. All of this felt to most Americans like a leftist version of the McCarthy trials or, for those of us with knowledge of Asian history, China’s Cultural Revolution. We acquiesced to the madness and the rest of the country watched us acquiescing to the madness.
To her credit, Vice President Harris recognized the need to move to the middle. She just couldn’t bring herself to make the type of strong statements that would have separated her from this lunacy (as did Governor Josh Shapiro and Congressman Ritchie Torres, for example). Democrats who had been so critical of Republicans for not standing up to Trump, were silent as unruly mobs rallied for global intifada and death to America or looted Sephora.
Choosing Governor Tim Walz as her running mate played into the perception that Kamala Harris was secretly pandering to the far left and made the candidate identity problem even worse. Pennsylvania governor Shapiro was clearly a more talented politician and had done extremely well in the electorally essential state of Pennsylvania. Instead of choosing Shapiro, Harris chose Walz, who had quietly pushed against the type of open mini-primary for which some of us had been advocating. As opposed to Harris, who had recently switched from being a progressive to being a centrist, Walz had shifted the other way. A blue dog centrist as a congressman, he became a left-leaning progressive as governor. There’s nothing wrong with being either, but it was tough to have two candidates running together who’d both recently gone through political makeovers.
The idea that Walz was the everyman white guy football coach teacher dad who might balance the political novelty of a multi-ethnic woman was preposterous from the start. People didn’t want a white guy DEI candidate. We wanted a great candidate. Just like on June 27, many of us were shaken by Walz’s halting performance in the Vice Presidential debate against the slippery JD Vance. Now we had not one, but two candidates less than fully able to face the gauntlet of hard-hitting interviews.
If that wasn’t hard enough, Elon Musk jumped in once he smelled blood in the water.
If a Chinese government company bought the dominant television station in Zimbabwe for well above market rates, then manipulated all coverage to highlight Chinese interests, then did a deal with a budding autocrat in which the media company would fully endorse the candidate in exchange for being given authority over the government and access to major natural resources in the country, we’d go nuts. That would be the epitome of corruption. But that’s basically what happened with Musk. He bought Twitter for a seemingly crazy price but will end up getting a massive return on his investment. He’s now been promised the ability to oversee his own regulators. I know lots of people love Elon Musk, but this is no way to run a country. It’s also dangerous.
We Democrats may have our favorite billionaires like Reig Hoffman, Bill Gates, and Mark Cuban, but all Americans should be saying that a “clash of the titans” political system of over-empowered billionaires battling it out is not safe, desirable, or sustainable. We had a similar problem in the Gilded Age until Teddy Roosevelt stepped forward to help even the playing field for the rest of us. We need that now. We’re not going to get it.
We also need common sense structural reforms, based on a Rawlsian conception of original position. This would help all of us regardless of our party affiliations. We should make the electoral college proportional within states so candidates will be encouraged to campaign nationally, we should reform our Supreme Court so each justice serves for a single, 18 year term and a new justice is selected biannually. We should have more ranked choice voting and work harder to ensure all Americans are able to vote and have their voices heard.
Our party will need to decide who we are and what we stand for. The Democrats are an open tent party, but we don’t want skunks and snakes inside. There should be no place for unpatriotic flag burners, Hamas supporters, and woke cancellation mobs in our party. We should reject the insanity of identity and grievance politics and embrace the politics of inclusion. We should eschew purity tests and focus our efforts on big picture goals designed to help everyone. We already have our models for how we can do this: FDR, Clinton, even Obama. Biden, tragically, would be on that list if he’d made a different reelection decision or had the outcome of this election been different.
The essential point is that we Americans are all on the same boat. We are all beneficiaries of a strong democracy with robust and constructive political parties. Our Democratic party has shot ourselves in the foot but it’s not too late to realign our course. The Republican party has also lost its way, at least in my view, and I fear the next four years will be chaotic, dangerous, and destructive. I worry for us and for our allies and friends across the globe who rely on us.
All of us have the obligation to improve ourselves, our parties, our country, and our world. We must strive to overcome the dead end of tribalism and mutual distrust and rediscover our common humanity. We need to restart educating our young people in civics and reject the politics of madness at both ends of the political spectrum. This will be harder than ever over the coming years but we’ve got to keep striving toward the future we want. The alternative is losing everything we and previous generations of American patriots have built.
“People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable,” President Eisenhower said in 1963, “[but] the middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.” Most Americans are not extremists but sensible centrists. The sooner we can find a road we can all travel together, the better off we will all be.
As painful as it is to say and as deeply concerned I am about what’s next, Donald Trump is now set to be my and our president. I wish it weren’t so but it is. I am part of a democracy and we have collectively made that decision. I will continue fighting for what I believe is right but will in no way challenge the credibility of the election — because peaceful succession is among the core reasons for democracy’s existence. The illogic of protecting a system of peaceful succession that benefits America’s greatest threat to that very principle is not lost on me. I am making a choice. I am quite confident I will be aggressively opposing future positions which may be taken by the Trump administration.
But now is the time for all of us to take a deep look in the mirror. If we don’t like what we see, we can’t wait another nanosecond to change course.