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It didn’t need to get to this point: Democrats didn’t need to find themselves in the middle of a crisis less than four months before the US presidential election, and scrambling to deal with the reality that their candidate won’t hold office for another four years.
There was another way, one that required facing hard truths, a little introspection, and above all, foresight. But that was not the path President Joe Biden, his staff, and his supporters were willing to take. And ironically, they became so obsessed with using every means to achieve the highest moral imperative in American politics: keeping Donald Trump from returning to the White House that they have now made it that much harder to stop him.
The tendency of intelligent, well-intentioned people to ignore the potential long-term consequences of abandoning deeply held principles for a cause they believe to be morally right is puzzling, and demonstrates both the power of internet-fueled groupthink and the utilitarian tendencies that have become dominant in the West. We tend to think in simple equations: doing x prevents y, and y is obviously terrible, so doing x is right. But what if doing x causes z, and z is worse than y? Too often this is not even considered.
But the problem with abandoning principles like objectivity and proper oversight of leaders is that, naturally, the public begins to lose trust that you have any real principles. The decision not to report the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election might have been a great idea for the left if it had been the last election. Given that it wasn’t, it only further eroded trust in the media, and the establishment more broadly, in its willingness to report the whole truth. And it only makes non-establishment figures, namely people like Trump, more popular.
And yet the short-term thinking continues: After a painfully painful presidential debate, Biden gave a 22-minute television interview last Friday in which he was asked how he would feel if he lost to Trump and “everything you’re warning about came true.”
“As long as you’ve done your best and done your best, [sic, though the White House has insisted he said the equally ungrammatical “good as”] “I’m going to do the best job I know I can, that’s what this job is about,” Biden responded.
In reality, as some have been quick to point out, this isn’t a problem. But even in their responses we see the same myopic thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. “The Democrats’ priority isn’t electing Joe Biden. It’s stopping Donald Trump…” posted political analyst Lakshya Jain.
I am often struck by the tension between apocalyptic warnings that Trump will “end democracy” and the reality that many of the people who deliver them believe that Trump “must be stopped” at all costs. If democracy is truly The highest good Now, shouldn’t voters be trusted to make their own decisions about who will govern their country?
And where do these people think that once Trump is “stopped,” all the Americans who support him will go? Will the MAGA base miraculously disappear and the polarization of the last decade or so disappear overnight, or are these voters simply being ignored? Is Trump really that bad? What if someone like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who many warned a year ago was worse than Trump, were to run for president again? Will the election be focused on “stopping DeSantis” at all costs?
This corner of the English-speaking world has a new Prime Minister who promises to put an end to “band-aid politics” and “short-term thinking” at Westminster. Time will tell whether Sir Keir Starmer’s new government can deliver. But if it really wants to do this, it must avoid the kind of short-sightedness that has led to public services being trapped in a “doom loop”, as the Institute for Government put it last year.
As both the Conservative Party debacle and the Biden crisis have made abundantly clear, short-termism breeds bad politics, and the backlash it provokes is often worse than the strategy it was trying to avoid in the first place.
It is now up to the American people to decide who leads the country, and they deserve to be told the whole truth. Trust in institutions is already at or near record lows, but it could fall even further if people feel they are being lied to. Another term for Trump may not be good, but it would be even worse in the long run if trust in American institutions were to be lost forever.
jemimakelly@ft.com
