The Party Decides Wrap
The Party Decides Wrap
DeSantis drops out and endorses Trump; this is democracy in action
Ron DeSantis’s unsuccessful pitch to donors describing how he will beat Donald Trump after South Carolina
Only hours after his campaign explained his ludicrous plan to wait for Donald Trump to clobber Nikki Haley in her home state and then pounce on the unsuspecting former president, Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the Republican primaries . . . and endorsed Trump. Which is only reasonable; after all, she’s potentially the most dangerous president. (I should clarify that Ross Douthat’s column is very good and very worth engaging with, notwithstanding the mockably click-baity headline.) Haley’s donors may be more gullible than DeSantis’s are—and they haven’t yet seen her blow anything resembling a real chance—but even if they are, I have a hard time understanding why they’d continue financing her if, as expected, she loses New Hampshire by a huge margin, and she will likely lose it by even more after DeSantis’s endorsement of Trump today.
DeSantis’s decision comes in the wake of endorsements by Trump’s 2016 rivals like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, as well as 2024 rivals like Senator Tim Scott. I will be very surprised if Haley doesn’t do the same before too long. This is how the party decides. Ever since it was clear he wasn’t going away, the Republican Party has been closing ranks behind Trump because it’s pointless to drag out the charade of a primary any longer than necessary—just like any normal party would.
That normalcy should be instructive. Yes, the movers and shakers in the GOP know that Trump is a weak nominee (if not necessarily as weak as Biden), and they’re not thrilled about having him as their standard-bearer again; but the normal thing to do when you have a weak nominee is get behind him and hope for the best. You don’t weaken him further. If it seems weird to say that this is just normal behavior by a political party, it’s only because for the past two years we’ve been acting as if the GOP primary were normal, whereas in fact it was just an absurd theatrical simulacrum of normalcy. The other candidates were auditioning to be the heir apparent, whereas in fact they were, or needed to be, insurgents.
It’s certainly for the best for the GOP that they get the charade over with, but it’s probably for the best for the country as well. A substantial number of voters seem unwilling to believe that 2024 is going to be a Biden-Trump rematch. They might as well know sooner than later, and with as little drama as possible, since any drama would be artificial and only delay the day of reckoning or obfuscate the fact that the parties have, in fact, decided. Now President Biden has the opportunity to present the election as a choice between alternatives rather than a referendum on his performance. We’ll see how the people respond.
The only real downside is that everyone will be so sick of the prospect that by the summer reporters will be desperate to hype any and every third-party scenario they can possibly dream up. Mark Cuban will have to put his phone on airplane mode until November.
A bit of home news, also democracy-related, justifies calling this post a wrap. Yesterday I had a guest essay in The New York Times arguing that regardless of what legal theory one might deploy to justify removing Trump from the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds, trying to save democracy that way is profoundly undemocratic. The arguments therein should be familiar to readers who’ve heard me opine on this subject before (here and here); they are very much in harmony with the arguments made by Samuel Moyn in the Times’ pages a month ago.
As I pointed out yesterday on Elon Musk’s social media platform, I feel like my line of argument is usually rejected by commentators who feel it is obvious that the events of January 6th were just what they looked like—a violent attempt to retain power—and who understand the dire consequences of not accepting the obvious. Jamelle Bouie had a piece in the Times a few days ago, for example, arguing that the reality of January 6th has been amply documented, and if we don’t want to see and remember that reality, then the fomenters of violence will effectively have won, and David Frum had a pessimistic piece in The Atlantic arguing that the issue on the ballot in November is January 6th. But that can be completely true—I think it is—without at all implying that it would be wise or even possible for the courts to try to save the voters from themselves. I don’t know whether Bouie or Frum would agree, but I know that Bouie at least has made a point generally of arguing that the constitution belongs to the people, not to legal clerics. I think there’s a straight line from that view to mine and Moyn’s about the 14th amendment gambit.
Finally, my colleague Damon Linker, who loathes Trump but has nonetheless strongly opposed the 14th amendment gambit, had a very smart piece last week that really gets to the heart of the matter. Yes, democracy may be on the ballot in November, but democracy may lose, and if it is it isn’t just because people have short memories or don’t appreciate the stakes. The surge in support for Trump reflects, in Linker’s apt and deftly-turned phrase, “is "an authoritarian temptation driven by self-government’s disgust with itself.” No court can save a republic from that temptation; on the contrary, turning to courts represents another version of the same temptation. It must be rejected by the people themselves for the republic to endure.
Anyway, I hope you’ll read my piece, and all these others as well.
Two questions, one theoretical, one practical.
First: Where's the limiting principle in your argument that we can't use the courts to save the people from their own wickedness or folly in this case? In practice, we already have lots of ways in which courts can and do restrain the will of popular majorities. Why doesn't your argument imply that those are all bad too?
Bouie I think would bite this bullet. He has long argued that SCOTUS, for example, is not actually on net a friend to the freedoms he most values, and that the country would be better off if its power to declare laws unconstitutional were just stripped entirely. Would you take his side on that? If not, where is the distinction? Is it just that the right to choose which candidate gets to be President is somehow more fundamental to popular sovereignty than, say, the right to choose which speech can be censored, or what protections criminal defendants must have, or even what the decision procedures for future elections will be?
Second: if indeed the endurance of the republic depends on a majority of voters rejecting the authoritarian temptation this November... well, the prediction markets say we have on the order of a 40% chance that the republic will not in fact endure. For those of us who highly value living in a liberal-democratic polity, this seems like a contingency worth planning for. What might that contingency planning look like?
The "move to Canada or someplace similar" strategy, so often bandied about, seems inadequate for several reasons:
1. ructions elsewhere have demonstrated that there is no truly safe place anymore;
2. that will become even more true if US democracy fails, given its historic role as an anchor of democracy elsewhere in the developed world;
3. most of all, the thought of flight feels dishonorable for one privileged enough to seriously consider it. Someone has to stay and fight, and who will/should it be if not us?
But then you have to try and lay out what staying and fighting concretely looks like. IMO one plausible mechanism is going to be supporting legal actions against the possible future Trump administration: that is, using the courts to restrain popularly-elected authoritarian officials. Does your belief in popular sovereignty mean you'd abjure that strategy? If so, what to do instead? I don't have a clear answer yet, but I do think this is worth considering carefully while we have the leisure and temporary security to do so with somewhat cool heads, rather than in a despairing panic on November 6th or January 21st.