Vote for the Corpse, It’s Important

B ack in 1991, the Louisiana governor’s race came down to Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and convicted criminal Edwin Edwards. The black-humor slogan of the campaign: “Vote for the crook, it’s important.”

Don’t envy the Democratic pollsters who have to interpret what happened to Joe Biden after the debate and decide whether he is too damaged to continue on as the Democratic nominee. Huge numbers of Democrats over the past two years have been telling pollsters that Joe Biden is too old to be president of the United States. But huge numbers of those very same Democrats report that they would crawl over broken glass to vote for a man they believe is goo-brained and senile, if only to avoid Donald Trump.

A similar dynamic has been at play on the right. Everyone knows Trump’s downsides. His gnat-like attention span. His bad leadership. His impetuosity, and his propensity to let subordinates undermine him while he watches television coverage of himself obsessively. There are millions of voters on the right who believe that Trump is — in theological terms — a reprobate; not among those whom God will call the blessed when the final trumpet blows from heaven. Nevertheless, they believe he is the very thing Providence has granted them to avoid rule by their enemies.

There are now other similarities. Just as conservative-media and -movement figures like Senator Mike Lee opposed Trump’s nomination in 2016 only to discover that he was unstoppable, so the liberal media have now weighed in, with the New York Times’ and other newspapers’ editorial boards announcing, one by one, that for the good of the country Joe Biden should give up his party’s nomination. They may prove as impotent as the Right’s gatekeeping institutions did.

What do you think is going to happen? All those who said he was too infirm to handle Trumpian provocations on the campaign trail will turn around and endorse him for president anyway. Vote for the corpse! It’s important!

American democracy is heading towards its final parody, in which lesser-of-two-evils thinking brings millions of people, and their leading institutions, to actively support candidates they believe are unfit for office.

This leads to uncomfortable questions: Do Americans now trust the federal bureaucracy to run as a headless horseman? Do Americans trust Washington’s permanent courtier class, the president’s aides in the White House, and the second level of administrative staff to judiciously impose the proper form of government, as their partisan team interprets it, on whatever man or woman is formally elected?

We’ve been told by our betters that any election involving Donald Trump is really about our democracy’s survival. But if his opponents — the champions of democracy — have been willing to hide the extent of the current president’s mental and physical decline, if they and the nation’s leading sense-making institutions are willing to vote for a known incompetent no matter what, then what exactly is the form of government they are endorsing?

It’s not democratic republicanism, traditionally understood.