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Many American bombastic voices owe Congressman Dean Phillips an apology, including me.
Nine months ago, I ran a somewhat sarcastic column in this space about the Congressman from Minnesota’s 3rd District adding his name to the honor roll of long-forgotten Minnesota “losers.” Rep. Phillips had just announced a surprise run for president, pitching himself to his Democratic colleagues as an alternative to incumbent President Joe Biden, because a more well-known stalwart of the party would not risk such an uprising. Rep. Phillips worried that many “underestimated the danger that voter anxiety about Biden’s advanced age and frailty could dampen support and lead to the reelection of Donald Trump.”
I acknowledged that Phillips’ warning was plausible and that his motives seemed “sincere and selfless,” but I cautioned that there have been few instances in history where intraparty challenges to a presidential renomination have strengthened the incumbent party’s control of the White House.
But, ladies and gentlemen, as the president himself says, if Democratic insiders and their media allies are ultimately going to confront Biden’s inability to convey his physical and mental vitality to voters, it would surely have been more effective and more humane for them to have woken up when Phillips sounded the alarm last year, rather than when the president humiliated himself on the debate stage in late June.
Why did Phillips fail to muster a timely effort within the Democratic establishment to challenge Biden’s renomination? In part, no doubt, many simply expected that the president and those around him would be able to successfully hide Biden’s visible decline, or that voters would at least not be overly alarmed by it. This expectation was also likely partly supported by progressive America’s utter inability to understand, to this day, the powerful political appeal of Donald Trump. Indeed, many seemed to imagine that even a shambling, stumbling, blundering Joe Biden could easily defeat a thug, a fascist, a twice-impeached vile man.
But on a more practical level, Phillips was likely ignored because it would have been, as it is now, difficult to fire Biden, a result of what British weekly news magazine The Economist recently called “the dysfunction that plagues both major parties.”
Put more bluntly than the British would say, this existential threat to democracy lies in the fact that there is too much of it in our political system today.
“Leaders of both parties long ago abandoned any decisive role in selecting the nominee,” The Economist argues, suggesting that this abandonment explains both why Trump was able to accomplish a “hostile takeover of the Republican Party” and why key Democratic figures are so publicly infuriated that they are “coordinating various centers of power in Congress and state governments to deliver an explicit vote of no confidence in the nominee.”
Moreover, even if Democratic leaders had decided last year to begin coordinating their efforts, the outright dominant role of primaries in today’s nomination process would give an overwhelming advantage to incumbents with huge campaign funds.
It wasn’t always this way. In a 2019 column about these historical trends, I called Donald Trump’s initial victory over the Republican Party in 2016 (culminating vividly in Milwaukee last week) “the crowning achievement of more than a century of political reform aimed at stripping the power of loathsome party ‘bosses.'” But I may have been premature.
As The Economist put it, this summer’s “tumult” over Biden may mark the 2024 election campaign as a complete and final breakdown in party discipline in America. Both Republicans and Democrats appear to be heading to the polls with candidates who, in different ways, unsettle even many of their most loyal members.
All of this reflects the thinking of a school of contrarian scholars and commentators often called “political realists.” In a nutshell, political realists believe that reforms have gone too far and distorted our democracy. In a previous column, I pointed out that many realists argue that our politics were healthier before idealistic American reformers fixed everything, writing laws and changing party rules over the course of decades and steadily reducing the power of political experts.
The basic “realistic” view is that when candidates at all levels’ nominations and paths to the vote were heavily influenced by political bosses, insiders, cronies, hacks, and negotiators (a host of unfavourable names), their so-called backrooms were filled not only with smoke but also with practical, sober concerns about the long-term success of their parties in winning votes. This businesslike focus provided a healthy balance between the ideological frenzy and the charisma of political superstars. Moreover, as The Economist put it, the bosses “for all their faults…were particularly sharp judges of their fellow politicians.”
For party organizations, and particularly their moderate tendencies, to regain the ground they have ceded to personality politics over the past century, they may need to go through the sort of haphazard, ad hoc efforts that Phillips launched to knock Biden out of the race. After all, Biden only became president thanks to a fairly similar fight in 2020, when party leaders tried to change the direction of that election cycle’s nominating contest.
Recall that Biden finished fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire and a distant second in Nevada in early 2020. The most extreme candidate, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, was doing well, threatening to launch the kind of divide-and-rule insurrection that Trump used to win the Republican nomination in 2016.
But then suddenly, mainstream Democrats rallied, with Sens. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Pete Buttigieg lining up to support Biden, who was still seen as the leading moderate candidate, in a way that mainstream Republicans had never rallied against Trump before.
Could a hastily assembled group of leading Democrats be used in a similar bid to persuade Biden to field a new candidate to oppose a return of Trump?
Whatever the answers, and whatever the ultimate outcome of their success or failure, we may be witnessing the beginnings of a new approach to pragmatic party politics.
DJ Tice is a retired Star Tribune commentary editor.
