Four months before the election, the Democrat Party has already divided into mutually suspicious warring factions. While the debate was without a doubt a disaster for Joe Biden revealing him as confused, ill, and lacking a rationale for his own campaign other than personal hostility to Donald Trump, what has turned the debate from a disaster to a cataclysm has been what followed the reaction.
A prime example was a Politico story about Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer “disavowing” a campaign to draft her to replace Biden. The story included claims that she had told the White House that Michigan was a lost cause if Biden remained in the race. That assertion was attributed to “someone close to a potential 2028 Whitmer rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.” Whitmer was also directly targeted by “unnamed” Biden campaign sources who, while dismissing rival candidates by saying “none of them are ready for this,” then added, “especially her.”
It does not matter whether the story is false. What matters is that the Biden team believes Whitmer is undermining them, and if by some chance Biden and Harris were to be forced out and Whitmer nominated, both would believe, along with their supporters, that Whitmer herself had a hand in their betrayal.
In turn, if Whitmer does not gain the nomination, but some other rival does, her team will believe that rival deliberately sabotaged her chances with the leak.
Since the debate, the Democratic Party and the wider liberal media ecosystem have discovered the secret to the British Conservative Party’s failure (a failure that has it facing annihilation later this week), and embraced that discovery with gusto. The secret is that the easiest way to remove a party leader who is in your way is not to present a positive vision of why you would be better, but to argue that the party is doomed under current management, and then do everything in your power to sabotage the party to ensure it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Leaks abound that foreign leaders have raised concerns for months that Biden cannot function in meetings. Reports suggest he is only coherent between 10 AM and 4 PM. Articles proliferate quoting angry donors and unnamed senior Democratic politicians.
Behind this campaign lies a fantasy. It has entered the minds of the entire political class, from the media, to “strategists,” to donors, to even some elected officials that it is possible not just to replace Biden, but to replace him with someone other than Vice President Kamala Harris.
This is a dangerous delusion because by contrasting Biden not with the possible, Harris, but with the imaginary, i.e. any other fantasy ticket that can be dreamed up, it makes such a replacement desirable. There would be realistic pros and cons to replacing Joe Biden with Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer, not least for supporters of the one who is not picked. But by allowing the alternative to Biden to be whoever a given critic wants, it ensures almost everyone has a preferred candidate. A preferred candidate that Joe Biden, by stubbornly remaining in the race, has become an obstacle to.
The result is the importation of a concept called a “negative majority.”
A negative majority occurs when a majority can agree on who or what they do not want, but not who or what they do want. But rather than be deterred from action, the negative majority postpones its disagreements until later.
Germany’s Weimar Republic was torn to pieces by a negative majority of communists and Nazis who not only refused to work with anyone else but often cooperated directly, including in a November 1932 transit strike in Berlin, in the hope that if they brought down the republic each would profit. As a result, after 1945, the German Constitution was changed to require “constructive votes of no confidence” to bring down a government. A chancellor could then not be removed by a parliamentary vote unless that motion also contained a positive vote in favor of someone else. A chancellor could be replaced, but the parliament could not, as in Weimar, vote to have no chancellor.
The wisdom of that approach has become apparent in the United Kingdom over the past decade. The British Conservative Party requires a majority vote to remove leaders, but starting with Theresa May, opponents realized a fundamental truth: a prime minister or leader who could not govern, raise money, or win elections would have no choice but to resign. Therefore, if they made it impossible to govern, sabotaged the party with negative media stories, and obstructed donations, they could present that party as being in existential peril as long as the leader remained – even if it was peril they themselves created.
Both Theresa May in December 2018 and Boris Johnson in May 2022 called votes of confidence in their leadership, winning with around 60 percent support. It did not matter, because the remaining 40 percent of elected officials proceeded to go on strike, sabotaging government and all but forcing leaders to resign despite retaining majority support.
While successful in the short run, this strategy proved disastrous long-term. Both sides could play the game, and those who used it to take power found themselves the victim of the same tactics, often wielded by members of a resentful majority who felt they had been cheated through undemocratic means. The effect was to make it impossible for anyone to govern.
Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party has been assailed from the left and even now-formerly Republican critics as authoritarian. The reality is Trump saved the party from the fate of the British Conservatives. Having demanded the nomination of moderates on immigration such as McCain and Romney who then went on to lose, many establishment “Republicans” argued in a post-2012 autopsy that only by ceding control of the party to themselves, a distinct minority within it, could the party win.
The post-2012 RNC Autopsy always carried an implicit threat that if the GOP refused to adopt the recommendations, the party would not only lose to Democrats, but would deserve to do so, and the authors themselves would help ensure it. The 2016 election drove the Mike Murphys, Stuart Stevens, and Michael Steeles of the world mad precisely because when they tried to make good on the threat, it backfired in their faces. Trump won without them.
The following four years were an exercise in internal sabotage as one faction within the GOP after another attempted to prove their indispensability by undermining Donald Trump, thereby showing that the party would lose without them. Leaks and eventually open support for Democrats became seen as patriotic by those who rationalized the party’s interests with their own. Their failure is one of Donald Trump’s crowning achievements, and it saved the Republican Party from the sort of toxic chaos that destroyed the British Conservatives and is now consuming the U.S. Democrats.
Those Democrats, by contrast, have enjoyed the worst of both worlds. Until the debate, any criticism of Biden, including concerns about his age or unpopularity, was seen as disloyal sabotage. Since the debate, the replacement of Joe Biden with “insert candidate” has become the imperative mission, and supporting the sabotage of Joe Biden, and anything that undermines Biden’s position, is now seen as an act of patriotism.
As this logic goes, since Joe Biden can only be forced out if he is convinced he cannot win, many liberals now believe it is in their best interests to drive down Biden’s polling with negative stories and to cut off his fundraising. Whatever damage is inflicted by newspaper headlines calling on Biden to withdraw, articles detailing speculation about his mental decline, or donors withholding funding, it is justified on that basis. If long-term damage occurs, that is Biden’s fault for not withdrawing, not the fault of those who are inflicting such damage on him by publicly calling for it.
The result has been for the Democratic Party and liberal media to turn their guns on each other, barely pausing, like Joe Biden himself, for longer than five minutes to address a Supreme Court ruling regarding a man they are all but ignoring, Donald Trump. As Donald Trump leads a unified party into his national convention, much of Joe Biden’s party believes they are engaged in a race against time to inflict enough damage on his campaign to force him out of the race before his own convention the following month.
The irony is that in doing so they have forgotten why the Biden administration is so unpopular, or why concerns about the president’s cognitive health are so politically biting. The American people dread chaos, whether on their streets, in their economy, or abroad.
When Donald Trump’s opponents took responsibility for the political chaos gripping the nation from 2017-2019, culminating in the first absurd impeachment campaign against him, they were the ones voters punished, as Trump’s poll numbers actually went up. Since 2021, Joe Biden has been seen as having presided over chaos at home and abroad, and voters are turning back to Trump because they do not believe Joe Biden is capable of controlling it.
The current implosion of the Democratic Party does not just confirm for many voters that Donald Trump was right about Joe Biden’s incapacity. It also makes clear that the Democratic Party itself is a force for chaos, and Democratic politicians, along with the media, have institutionalized chaos as a means of internal politicking.
The New York Times Editorial Board and former Obama staffers turned podcasters might believe that the fears of American voters will be assuaged if a donor boycott and campaign of sabotage forces the sitting president and vice president from office for the sin of threatening the job security of Democrat hacks. But in reality, why should they believe any Democrat, much less the Democrat Party, cares in the least about the border, China, crime, or the Middle East?
It is clear beyond a doubt that Gavin Newsom and Joe Biden care more about what Gretchen Whitmer is planning than any of the real issues Americans face, and Whitmer cares more about who among her “friends” is out to get her. Why should anyone expect this not to continue if any of them takes power, especially if Newsom and Whitmer were to end up on a ticket together, or were to suffer a forced marriage with Kamala?
While Democrats embrace chaos, their only attack on Donald Trump is that he may bring too much order, or that he is too prepared for a second term. While the voters will render a verdict in November, at the moment it seems difficult to think of a way Democrats could have misjudged the electorate more.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
