D/democratic Failure
How Joe Biden and Democratic Leaders Failed to Rise to the Political Moment and Achieve the Singular Objective of Restoring Small-D Democratic Values
Four years ago this week, no one was in much of a mood to think political disaster was nigh. Joe Biden’s inauguration was colored with memes of Bernie in mittens. Donald Trump had been impeached in the House for a second time a week earlier, and his approval ratings had dipped to an all-time low of 34%. COVID vaccinations had begun to usher in the end of the pandemic. The reality, however, is that the seeds of political disaster had already been sown.
Biden had been elected in large part due to a surge of anti-Trump sentiment. Biden emerged out of a fractured Democratic primary disrupted by the pandemic with the prevailing sentiment that he was the most “normie” selection. He was someone who would appeal to the racists and sexists and anti-Trump conservatives who wouldn’t otherwise vote for Sanders or Warren or Booker or Castro or Klobuchar. He would bring back “normal” use of the presidency and restore small-D democratic values.[1]
The severity of Trump’s assault on democracy in the form of the attempted autocoup on January 6th presented Biden and Democrats with a perceived catch-22. They had long decried Trump’s threats to go after his political opponents on fabricated grounds; now they had renewed[2] legitimate grounds on which to prosecute Trump. And in fact, the norms they claimed to protect require violators to be held accountable for their perpetuation.
Unfortunately, Biden and Democratic leaders committed three categorical errors in their efforts to achieve the mandate Biden had earned to reestablish an era of good government.
Confusing substantive and performative democratic norms
Failing to accentuate Trump’s anti-democratic nature
Undervaluing the importance of speed in accountability
Confusing substantive and performative democratic norms
“Democratic norms” is a phrase that is confusingly used to describe both what we might call substantive values as well as what we might call performative values. On the substantive front, we’re talking about foundational liberal principles like due process, individual freedoms like those of speech and worship, and a commitment not to use the power of government for personal ends. On the performative end of things, we’re talking about norms like not insulting members of Congress on the House floor, showing up to the inauguration, shaking hands and having a brief chat at the funeral of a former president, not ripping up the state-of-the-union speech text while on live camera, etc.
Why these second set of performative things are considered norms at all is interesting to consider. The argument (with which I mostly don’t agree) is that shows of support for the institutions of government – a certain seriousness – reflects back to the people the importance of taking governance and government seriously.
I think it’s fairly obvious that when Donald Trump is the head of one of the two major political parties in the country that an awful lot of voters don’t very much care for these performative norms. This is because the performative norms don’t simply reflect a belief in the substantive norms; they reflect a belief in the institutions of government, and a lot of people think the government is a disaster.
As of this month, 61% of Republicans and 57% of Democrats said that they thought the nation’s political system had been broken for a long time. Less than 10% of Americans reported that the political system wasn’t broken.
So as Democrats became the party of protecting the norms, their inability to distinguish the largely performative from the meaningfully substantive[3] has led them to be the party simply associated with the status quo of the current political system. When 60% of Americans report that the political system has been broken for a long time, responding, “no, actually, it’s good,” just doesn’t cut it. Biden and Democrats needed to separate the wheat of what’s good and essential about our democracy from the chaff of what’s purely performative, and not only couldn’t they do it, they sometimes got confused about it themselves.
Failing to accentuate Trump’s anti-democratic nature
Many people hear “accentuate Trump’s anti-democratic nature” and think it means that Biden and Democrats should have dialed up “Trump is a threat democracy” language on the campaign trail. I’m really talking about something upstream from there. Rather than trying to prevent Trump from breaking substantive norms, Democrats should have forced him to do so. And they needed to have accentuated their difference from Trump by dialing up their own adherence to principles of good government. Unfortunately, they did neither.
Part of this failure stems (charitably) from a confusion about performative and substantive norms. Take, for example, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s decision to voluntarily wind down the investigation into Trump for inciting insurrection. That decision was to ensure that, per longstanding DOJ policy, the Department wasn’t investigating the current executive.
In general, it may make sense not to have these sorts of investigations because of a desire not to mix politics and the Justice Department, but Trump has already done this. He has promised to do it again! The investigation had merit and was being conducted independently from political appointees at DOJ – that’s what the Special Counsel is. It’s not obvious why someone who commits crimes should be immune from prosecution just because they’re elected president, but that’s what Smith’s decision suggests. Worse, to a low-information audience, the assumption will be that there simply wasn’t much to the investigation.
In contrast, if Smith had made Trump fire him, it would have been much clearer that Trump was the one violating democratic norms. The end results is that instead of insisting on the most important norm – that the rule of law applies equally to all – Smith’s decision half-protected a lesser norm – that DOJ doesn’t investigate presidents at the expense of this more important one.
If Democrats failed to accentuate Trump’s anti-democratic nature by leaving it up to him to take anti-democratic action[4], they also failed to highlight this contrast by just being more small-d democratic.
This includes things like:
Not even attempting to limit the power of the presidency. Instead of curtailing the use of executive orders, limiting the president’s ability to order armed engagements around the world without congressional approval, or any number of other things, Democrats made no moves at all to curtail the power of the presidency, presumably because Biden indicated he was not receptive to such measures.
Continuing to appoint political donors to official government positions. By continuing a longstanding tradition of appointing political donors to ambassadorial posts, Democrats made it harder to malign Trump’s appointees as patently unfit for office. Good governance shouldn’t apply to some positions but not others.
Vacationing and hosting fundraisers with billionaire friends. Just as Trump benefited from favor-seekers staying at his hotel during his first presidency, Biden seemed to reap personal benefits from his office by vacationing in luxurious locations or spending Thanksgiving at David Rubenstein’s. The same? No. But close enough to make it seem like presidents are all just in bed with billionaires.
Pardoning family members for serious crimes. Pardoning Hunter is just totally unforgivable. It suggests that you get special treatment if you’re the family member of a president. This is a message directly opposed to one of good governance, which would be that anyone associated with officials in power will be held to a higher standard to prevent profiteering from access to political power which is what Hunter was doing to begin with (even if the charges were about other serious crimes).
In the abstract, while bad, these aren’t themselves massive threats to American democracy. But when confronted by someone who is (and who Biden claims is) a genuine threat to democracy, Biden needed to do more to call attention to the ways in which Trump violates substantive democratic norms. Instead, Biden continued to do many of the little things that erode them in ways that Trump does to a greater degree. That makes it easy for people to say, “well, they’re all in bed with the billionaires” or “all politicians pardon their associates for crimes,” or “what does it matter that Trump’s appointees aren’t qualified; neither were Biden’s.” If Biden genuinely believed Trump a threat to American democracy, he and Democrats needed to do more to demonstrate and accentuate this threat and their contrast over the course of his presidency.
Undervaluing the Importance of Speed
In the wake of Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, Democrats consistently moved too slowly to achieve any form of accountability. The first missed opportunity was on January 6th itself. Democrats could have impeached Trump immediately. While they did impeach Trump somewhat promptly, it took a week. It took another 12 days to bring the impeachment case to the Senate, and another three weeks to begin the impeachment proceedings in the Senate. This was enough time for most Republicans to mass ranks in opposition to any form of accountability.
In both 2019 and 2021, Democrats made their first piece of legislation in the House a bill focused on a laundry list of electoral reforms. These included:
Several voting rights provisions
Several election security provisions
Several campaign finance reforms
Mandatory disclosure of tax returns for presidents, vice presidents, and candidates for both positions
Support for DC statehood
A ban on gerrymandering
A restructuring of the FEC
I support all these things! But only the tax return disclosure and campaign finance reforms clearly addressed any of the most serious weaknesses Trump exposed in American democracy. And once again, speed was an issue. It didn’t pass the House until March 1, and it didn’t come up for a cloture vote in the Senate until late June. Faced with unified Republican opposition, Senators Manchin and Sinema refused to end the filibuster to ensure its passage, and the bill died.
The appointment of Merrick Garland also proved disastrous. Named publicly as Biden’s pick for Attorney General on January 6th, it was another case of Democrats fighting the previous battle rather than the next one. Garland, of course, was famously denied even a hearing when Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s death in February, 2016. But Obama nominated him at that time because he was considered at the moderate end of the kind of candidate a Democrat might pick – the kind of candidate Republicans in the Senate couldn’t possibly object to.
Garland fell afoul of the same catch-22 that plagued Democrats throughout the last four years. Rather than immediately initiate an investigation into Trump’s treasonous activity leading up to and upon January 6th, he waited over a year-and-a-half (head exploding emoji) to appoint Jack Smith as Special Counsel to investigate. That time ultimately cost the country any chance of understanding the full extent of Trump’s efforts to execute and autocoup. Jack Smith chose to wind down his investigation of Trump before Trump assumed office.
Conclusion
While there were notable achievements of the Biden Administration (the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill), the principal objective of the Biden presidency – restoring American democracy – was a total failure. The Biden Administration and Democrats on the Hill believed that a normal Democrat – which Biden was – would reinstall democratic norms in American government. What they failed to understand is that by Trump’s rise was possible only because he didn’t appear to lots of Americans as clearly deviant from American political norms as Democrats imagined.
Winning wasn’t enough. Biden and Democrats consistently failed to contend with upholding substantive democratic values while continuing to emphasize performative ones. They didn’t hold themselves to a higher standard or make Trump/Republicans violate yet more extreme norms. And they didn’t operate with speed at the points when it was necessary to hold Trump accountable.
The consequences are likely to be dire. Trump has been reinaugurated with many of the institutional checks from his first time wiped away. The world’s richest man is giving Nazi salutes on-stage to Trump supporters. Trump has promised sweeping pardons and commutations for those involved in his seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government.
Although he was president for four years before and we survived, we are in dangerous and uncharted waters. Will anyone show up to lead the resistance? Or are the superficial norms of democracy more important than the substantive ones for Democratic elected officials?
[1] Lest there be any doubt about how Biden himself viewed the situation, this is the first paragraph of his inaugural address: “This is democracy’s day. A day of history and hope of renewal and resolve through a crucible for the ages. America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The people, the will of the people, has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded.”
[2] Let’s not forget that Trump was previously impeached for threatening to withhold military aid for Ukraine unless President Zelenskyy did him a political favor.
[3] Democrats genuinely tried to act like it was significant that Trump didn’t show up to Biden’s inauguration after Trump had tried to overthrow the government. I literally can’t think of a great over-emphasis on the symbolic. Everyone knew he wasn’t serious about supporting the peaceful transition of power, so what was the point in him showing up to pretend like he did?
[4] Biden’s last-day pre-emptive presidential pardons of family members and high-profile Trump critics is another example. This is clear abuse of the pardon power. While it is nice for Dr. Fauci and Mark Milley and Liz Cheney, it sets a terrible democratic precedent. It makes them look guilty of something, even though they’re not. The better choice would have been to let Trump go after them and turn their legal defense into a national lightning rod for anti-Trump activism.