Destroying the Democratic Party Won’t Defeat Trump
Tom Friedman’s proposed Biden-Cheney ticket is a bad idea
Joe Biden’s poll numbers have been in the doldrums since last summer, entering into the negative zone in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of the polls on August 24.
There are two possible responses to this: one could be rational and note that during the pandemic many national leaders have suffered in popularity and that Biden’s numbers are not unusual for the first year of a presidency. Or, one could be a pundit and immediately start advocating unlikely and even crackpot solutions.
Two major venues have gone the second route. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Douglas Schoen and Andrew Stein advocated the return of Hillary Clinton. Not to be undone, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested the Democrats imitate Israel and create a government of national unity, possibly by recruiting Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney as vice-president.
Friedman writes,
Is that what America needs in 2024 — a ticket of Joe Biden and Liz Cheney? Or Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski, or Kamala Harris and Mitt Romney, or Stacey Abrams and Liz Cheney, or Amy Klobuchar and Liz Cheney? Or any other such combination.
Friedman throws around many names but the recurring one is Liz Cheney. He really wants to have Liz Cheney in power. Friedman thinks such a move would help create a moderate governing coalition that could be an alternative to Trumpian authoritarianism. He turns to political scientist Steven Levitsky for quotes to corroborate:
Saving a democratic system requires huge political sacrifice, added Levitsky. “It means A.O.C. campaigning for Liz Cheney” and it means Liz Cheney “putting on the shelf” many policy goals she and other Republicans cherish.
Notice how asymmetrical the sacrifices are: A.O.C. is expected to sacrifice her political principle by holding her nose in order in order to empower Cheney. Cheney is expected to put some of her policy goals in abeyance in order to gain power. Only one side gains power.
Democrats are expected to make a unilateral surrender and a dilution of their brand in a scenario where at least one Republican (and possibly more) will gain a position of power. If Liz Cheney became vice president on such a unification ticket, the career of her father, Dick Cheney, illustrates the problem we’d have here: he was a famously powerful vice-president even though he wasn’t elevated to the presidency. Before agreeing to joining the ticket with George W. Bush in 2000, Dick Cheney got assurances he would have significant say over appointments. This was the basis of his power. Can anyone doubt his daughter would make similar demands?
Further, the elder Cheney was an advocate of the idea of “the unitary executive” which gave the president extraordinary, even monarchial, power. (A transfer of power is likely in the imagined Biden/Cheney ticket. Biden is after all 79 years old and would be 81 if re-elected in 2024.)
The idea of the “unitary executive” illustrates why the whole comparison with Israel that undergirds Friedman’s column doesn’t work. The United States has a strong presidency in a two-party system, Israel is a multi-party parliamentary democracy. It’s unclear how a Biden/Cheney administration would make decisions on binary issues that confront a president: say, whether to launch a military action or not. There’s not much room for coalition-building at that level. There might be room for coalition building in congress but its notable that to date anti-Republicans like Cheney haven’t been willing to cross party lines on specific measures like voting rights.
Democratic voters coalesced behind Biden and then supported a Biden/Harris ticket. Any replacement of either one for a Republican would dilute what voters supported. Not to mention that getting rid of Harris, an African-American woman who is a mainstream Democrat, and replacing her with Liz Cheney, a white Republican who is anti-choice and opposes efforts to strengthen voting rights, would be seen as a betrayal by many Democrats.
Friedman’s column is premised on the idea that politics is merely additive: bringing Cheney on board would only increase votes for Democrats. But there’s every reason to think it would cost more votes than it would bring in. Cheney is not even that popular among Republicans. If a Republican primary were held, polls show Trump getting nearly half of the votes: 48 per cent as against 1 per cent for Cheney. The 1 per cent of Republicans who support Cheney are not worth destroying the Democratic party.
A national unity ticket with Biden/Cheney or even Harris/Romney might even strengthen Trumpism by feeding into the Trumpian narrative that a bipartisan elite opposes the changes he is advocating. Trump could once again present himself as the only alternative to duopoly that is committed to shoring up the status quo.
Trump’s appeal rests in no small part on the feeling among many Americans that there is an entrenched elite that stifles change. Thomas Friedman is himself an embodiment of that elite and his proposal, if carried out, would be a major victory for Trumpism.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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My own crackpot theory also involves the destruction of the Democrats, because too much of the power of Republicans comes from being anti-Democrats, and too much of the inaction of the Democrats comes from knowing they're the only alternative to Republicans. If you split the Democrats into Neoliberals, Progressives, Socialists, Environmentalists, etc, then you get factions that are harder to hate as a whole (they stop all being sexually ambiguous socialist coastal elites that want to take away your guns to murder unborn babies), and whichever party doesn't play ball is easier to work around.
As I said, crackpot theory, but that's politics in healthier democracies.