The Looming Midterms—1

Joe Biden and his party are in danger of overdoing their warnings about the "threat to democracy"

Former U.S. President Donald Trump embraces Arizona Republican nominee for governor Kari Lake on October 09, 2022 in Mesa, Arizona. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

In the second part of this post, which will appear on Monday, the eve of the midterm elections, I will walk through a series of possible outcomes. That’s in lieu of me pretending to be a soothsayer and making predictions about events that will unfold on their own within 48 hours. Instead, I’ll offer a series of conditionals. If X happens, then this is what it will mean. But if Y happens, that will mean something else. And so forth. This seems like a much better use of everyone’s time than having me play guessing games.

A Global Challenge from the Anti-Liberal Right

But today, I want to think more broadly about the pending election, placing it in the broadest possible context. There have been two national elections this week that had a similar dynamic to the one coming in the U.S. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, a nationalist with close ties to Steve Bannon and other figures on the internationalist antiliberal right, lost his bid for re-election by just two percentage points. In Israel, meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu, currently on trial for corruption, appears on his way to serving once again as Prime Minister, this time at the head of a coalition in which his own center-right Likud Party will likely be governing in tandem with a pair of ultranationalist religious parties of the far right. This comes just a couple of months after right-wing nationalist parties were elected in Italy and Sweden.

What this tells us, I think, is that the anti-liberal right is here to stay, at least for now. Brexit wasn’t a one-off. Trump’s victory in 2016 wasn’t a one-off. Neither was Bolsonaro’s in 2018. Yet Bolsonaro just lost his bid for re-election, as Trump and Netanyahu did before him. What that means is that electorates within liberal democracies across the world now sometimes vote for parties of the anti-liberal right, and then they withdraw enough support that those parties later lose elections and leave office, after which they will presumably run again. What could be more normal than that?

The question facing liberal and progressive parties of the left is how they should respond to this new reality—one in which the political opposition isn’t a liberal (or neoliberal) party of the center-right but a more radical party that favors more dramatic changes to immigration policy, crime, trade, industrial policy, foreign policy, and other areas of governance.

The Best Response?

In a speech on Wednesday evening at Washington’s Union Station, President Biden gave his answer, and it’s the same one he gave in a widely covered speech in Philadelphia on September 1. The United States is embroiled in a battle for democracy itself, Biden insisted. Only one of its two parties supports democracy. That means well-meaning citizens have only one real option in casting ballots next week: They simply must vote for Democrats. To do otherwise is to support forces in American life that favor violence instead of the peaceful transfer of power, who want to impose authoritarian rule in place of democratic norms.

One reason this Substack exists is that I, too, worry about the rise of the anti-liberal right at home and abroad. Jewish Power and Religious Zionism, the two most right-wing parties in Netanyahu’s winning coalition, are genuinely extreme. Bringing them into the political mainstream of Israeli politics by inviting them to help form a government is bad. (A politically moderate Jewish friend of mine calls it a “catastrophe,” and I understand why.)

But another reason why this Substack exists is that the answer to the question of how liberals should respond to this upsurge in support for the anti-liberal right is unclear. That’s because it’s democracy that’s bringing these extremist forces into proximity to power. People are voting for these parties. The Biden approach amounts to saying, “If you really support democracy, you need to vote for the Democratic Party; if you vote for the Republicans, you are siding with the enemies of democracy.”

Now, I will grant that, with Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, his repetition of evidence-free lies about election fraud, and encouragement of a violent insurrection against the national legislature, the GOP did indeed cross over what should have been an inviolable line separating democracy from non-democratic forms of politics. Yet acknowledging this reality doesn’t tell us anything about how the other major party in American democracy should respond to the threat of something similar (or worse) happening again in the future. And I’m not at all convinced the Biden approach is the right one.

How Not to Respond to the Threat

In a short essay published a few hours before Biden’s speech, author Josh Barro explained with admirable power and clarity why the Biden approach is bad.

It’s bad, first of all, because it cannot help but come off as disingenuous when Democrats spent millions of dollars in this election cycle boosting the most extremist candidates in Republican primaries on the grounds that they would be easier for Democrats to beat in general election contests. This is a tried and true political strategy—but only if the Democrats are willing to accept the risk of losing some of these contests and watching some of these extremists take office. If the party really believed the stakes were as high as Biden indicated in his Wednesday remarks, its strategists wouldn’t be taking that risk.

It’s bad, in the second place, because voters react poorly to being told by the head of one party that they simply must vote for that same party, since it implies that democracy is already lost. After all, democracy is about making a choice between alternatives. But Biden is saying, in effect, that voters have no choice. Even if this were true, the guy running the party that would benefit politically from voters following this advice isn’t the right person to deliver the message, since it can’t help but appear self-serving.

And it’s bad, in the third and final place, because the Democrats haven’t behaved over the past two years like a party trying to broaden its appeal to disaffected Republicans. That’s what parties and cross-ideological coalitions of parties do when they seek to keep a uniquely threatening political force from winning or holding power. We’ve seen this recently in Israel and Hungary, to mixed effect.

Instead, the Democrats have pursued precisely the same policy agenda (on abortion, government spending, immigration, environmental regulation, and other issues) they would have pursued under normal conditions. That implies either that the Democrats don’t think the Republicans pose a genuine existential threat to democracy or that they think combatting the threat isn’t worth having to make any painful compromises. But why should disaffected Republicans be expected to bear the entire burden of making such compromises?   

(I find these arguments quite persuasive, but John Ganz does a good job of rebutting some of them here.)

A Better Response