Do the Democrats Really Think Trump Is an Emergency?

I predicted last weekend that the Democrats will find a way to jettison Joe Biden; that likelihood seems to fluctuate daily or even hourly, but for now my prediction stands. It seems clear from a week of intraparty maneuvers, however, that at least some Democrats are content to stick with their current nominee, notwithstanding the strong likelihood of a November defeat and a Trump restoration, viewing the alternative as too painful or high-risk or disruptive.

This has come as a bit of a shock to some anti-Trump observers. For instance, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, whom I did not regard as an especially starry-eyed idealist, expressed stark bafflement at the hesitations and trimming of Democratic leaders:

A similar outraged mystification afflicted The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, when he was informed by my colleague Ezra Klein in a podcast interview that some Democrats felt relatively non-apocalyptic about the prospect of a second Trump term: “That is crazy.”

It doesn’t seem crazy to me at all, but that’s because I think it’s always been clear that the Democratic Party in the age of Trump isn’t as NeverTrump as the truest NeverTrump believers, that it usually chooses “mundane imperatives” and self-interest over emergency measures geared to existential stakes.

I wrote about this in the context of Biden’s “save democracy, vote Democrat” rhetoric before the 2022 midterms, but clearly the point merits new elaboration. Time and again, from 2016 to the present, the Democratic Party has treated Trumpism not as a “civic emergency” but as a political opportunity, a golden chance to win over moderate and right-leaning voters with the language of anti-authoritarianism while avoiding substantive concessions to these voters and actually moving farther to the left.

This was true of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which attacked Trump on character and fitness while running to the left of prior Democratic presidential candidates. It was true of most of the party’s serious primary candidates in 2020, who competed with one another to prove their left-wing bona fides, and it was even true of Biden, who won the nomination on electability but then himself moved leftward for the general election (denouncing Trumpian authoritarianism all the while). It’s certainly been true of Biden’s administration, which has only lately made some halting attempts at triangulation, after mostly taking an ideologically aggressive, non-conciliatory approach to economic policy and cultural issues alike.

I’m not saying that you can’t find moments here and there where Democrats moderated on some issue or made a patriotic concession for the anti-Trump cause. But the overarching pattern is better represented by the various times when Democrats deliberately boosted MAGA candidates in Republican primaries on the theory that they’d be easier to beat — or for that matter by the fact that right now, as Biden teeters on the brink, his vice president and natural successor is a figure chosen entirely for the “mundane imperatives” of Democratic interest groups, rather for a scenario where she might be called upon to face Trump with democracy supposedly at stake.