Creaking

I didn't bother watching the debate between President Biden and Donald Trump the other day. I don't have enough faith in politicians to find listening to them worthwhile. Besides, it's the Congress that enacts laws, so that's where I consider it more important to place my attention. But the coverage of the event has been extensive, and fairly unanimous.

Now that people are convinced that President Biden has shown himself not to be up to the task of remaining in the Oval Office, the chatter about whether he should step aside ha started up again with renewed vigor. The problem is that it's four years too late. The Democratic Party believed its own "demography is destiny" hype, and I believe that it convinced them to take their eye off the ball. Convinced that the Republican Party was going to implode of its own volition, they stopped working to cultivate people who could carry their banner forward. I have nothing against Hillary Clinton, but she was a deeply unpopular person. Joe Biden only won in 2020 because Donald Trump's performance was poor when it counted, and obviously so.

Given that human beings grow old at the consistent rate of one year every year, the fact that President Biden would be 81 years old that this point was, basically, predictable. And he may have been the only person who could have defeated Donald Trump in 2020, but the grooming of replacements, and their introductions to the Democratic voter base should have started then, as well. If Joe Biden was going to be a "bridge President," the work should have started on preparing the opposite shore.

Donald Trump, for all that he was disinterested in the actual work of the Presidency, and tends to fuel, rather than smother, conflicts, was able to unify the Republican Party behind him by taking advantage of their shared disdain (hatred?) of Democrats. To a Republican, the difference between any given Democrat and a Socialist is purely a matter of semantics. Those Republicans closer to the political center may not like Donald Trump, but they don't see themselves as being in the crosshairs of his policies.

The Progressive and Centrist constituencies of the Democratic Party, on the other hand, are at odds with one another. And to most Progressives I've met, the difference between any given non-Progressive, no matter what their party affiliation, and a Fascist is a moot point. Accordingly, a Centrist Democrat sees a direct threat to them from Progressive policy preferences, and Progressives see Centrists as enabling the same old injustices that have gone on for far too long. And so they are disunified. Simple fear of Trump, or of the consequences of his being President was never enough to bridge that. Hillary Clinton was exactly right when she said the Supreme Court was at stake in 2016. For all the good it did her.

Columnist George Will once noted that the United States doesn't prevent disasters, it simply reacts to them. Congress, like the population at large ignores problems until they are directly impacted by a crisis, and then they respond with panic, rather than thoughtfulness. There's been a lot of hysteria over the threat to Democracy that Donald Trump is supposed to pose, but very little mention of the fact that he's only in the position to be a threat because he has the backing of people who don't believe that the recent practice of American Democracy have lived up to the promises made on its behalf. People complain about the workings of American government, but only when those workings are problems for them; there is widespread dissatisfaction with the Electoral College system, but the party in power has never seen fit to change it.

American Democracy, in my mind, is not broken, any more than saw is broken because it can't be used to hammer nails. The United States is not, and has never been a unified polity. There has always been cost shifting, broken promises and simple theft. And that history has eroded the trust that people had in the system, even when it worked in their favor, because they understood that it could turned against them. And this is the result.

And so, four years too late, certain people on the American Left are calling for the resumption of a process that should have started at least four years ago, if not sooner; that of looking for candidates that can united the Democratic Party for something, and really make the case for Democratic leadership. We'll see if they can somehow make up for lost time.