The letter that President Biden sent to Democratic members of Congress on Monday is an extraordinary artifact of the breakdown of the American party system. It should be studied in political science courses.
The most extraordinary part of it comes early, in the first argument that the president makes on behalf of the survival of his own candidacy for reelection.
That argument makes two related points. The first is that Democrats had a chance to challenge Biden during the primary and no serious candidate did that:
We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,000 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.
This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.
Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?
This presents itself as an argument from strength, but it is an argument that depends upon the notion that primary voters and potential challengers had the basic information they needed when they made their choices. The Democrats have found themselves in the mess they’re in this month because even many Democratic elected officials and political professionals have concluded they were misled about Biden’s physical and mental condition and that voters were, too. So this first argument begs the question that made a letter like this necessary in the first place.
This fact speaks of a kind of elite malfeasance in the party. Biden himself, and others in a position to know, chose to mask or ignore the seriousness of his decline by keeping him largely out of public view, and other party elites chose not to challenge him on this decision and generally speaking not to challenge him for the nomination either. Biden offers this as evidence of his legitimacy. That is, I suppose, one way to look it.
His second point proceeds directly from the first. Having asked if the will of primary voters should be denied, he answers forthrightly in the negative:
I decline to do that. I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year. It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters — and the voters alone — decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party? I cannot do that. I will not do that.
Here President Biden essentially argues that there is no role for the party as an institution, as a repository of political professionalism, in selecting its own nominee for president. That role, he says, belongs entirely to whoever chooses to vote in Democratic Party primaries around the country. The party essentially exists as a brand that gets bestowed on the winner of a set of primary elections it does not quite control.
Thus, the process of presidential-candidate selection is a function of elite arrogance and popular will. In both parties, party elites this year refused to be open with primary voters about their understandings of the strengths and weaknesses of their leading presidential contenders and then insisted that only those primary voters can have any say over the party’s nominee for the presidency.
In the Republican Party, essentially no elected official will say in public what he or she really thinks about Donald Trump. Even most of the candidates running against Trump in the primaries were not willing to speak plainly about him. They hoped he might just disappear without their having to defeat him. And in the Democratic Party, we are now learning there was a kind of implicit agreement not to share concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness and capacity. Then primary voters voted, and the results are taken to be the final word on whom the parties will nominate for president. In both cases, party elites have behaved as observers and not as actors. The Democrats may yet rescue themselves from the consequences of this recklessness, but they may not.
The deformation we are witnessing is in large part the result of a democratization of the internal operations of both parties, which has left party professionals unclear about what roles they are meant to play, and therefore eager to avoid responsibility. There have been some critics of this process on the right and left alike in recent years, but they are few and far between. For the most part, we have accepted the peculiar notion that the parties must be internally democratic in order to be legitimate facilitators of our democratic politics — a notion Biden’s letter states explicitly, without bothering to defend it.
Logically and practically, it would not be easy to defend. And it has done enormous damage to our political system. You would think that party elites would have grasped the error of their ways by now, since those ways have driven three decades of failure. We have had two minority parties in America since the middle of the 1990s, neither able to hold a meaningful majority coalition together for more than one election cycle. But the deadlock itself has kept the parties from seeing that they are failing by choice. They have abandoned their core purpose (which is to win general elections on behalf of their coalitions) and their core work (which is to select winning candidates for office).
Now we have arrived at an election in which one party’s candidate is psychologically unfit to be president, the other’s is physically and mentally unfit to be president, and both are intensely unpopular. Will that be enough to hammer home the lesson that what the parties are doing isn’t working?