The Potted Plant Test

Assume the worst of both men. Is Biden preferable?

I’ve been seeing a lot of sentiment like that since last Thursday. The main lines of criticism about Biden’s decision (so far) to stay the course are first, that it’s a dereliction of his patriotic duty to run for president when he’s clearly not capable of discharging the responsibilities of the office (and will become less and less capable as time goes on), and, second, that regardless of how well a second Biden administration might perform, the people simply won’t vote for him now that they’ve seen his condition, so if Biden really thinks it’s important to win and keep Trump out of office then he must step aside for that reason. Nonetheless, the consensus among outraged Biden supporters seems to be, the people should vote for Biden over Trump, even in his current condition. They certainly will be. Biden may be a catastrophe, but Trump is a much bigger catastrophe. They’re furious at the choice, but when push comes to shove, they’ll vote for the corpse. It’s important.

Are they right about that, though?

Michael Brendan Dougherty’s cheery piece with that title ends with a question: if nobody can any longer pretend that Biden will truly be in charge of his administration, then what form of government are his supporters endorsing, in the name of saving democracy? “It’s not democratic republicanism, traditionally understood,” Doughterty says, and his point should indeed give the strongest anti-Trump voices some pause. But I think we can say that its advocates—and they have innumerable Republican counterparts supporting Trump despite their awareness of his manifest unfitness—seek something like government by the party, with the president as a symbol and figurehead. They got that, in fact, to some degree in Trump’s first term. Trump perforce staffed his administration with a variety of established Republican Party figures, and relied on the GOP leadership in Congress for his legislative priorities. In a host of policy areas, Trump’s presidency was relatively normal for a Republican: he appointed conservative judges, cut taxes, cut regulations, tried to cut people off from health insurance, etc. He yelled at and insulted our NATO allies, but he didn’t pull out of the alliance—in fact, he provided Ukraine with more military support than Obama did. He stayed on the reservation much more than many people expected, myself included, in part because, when all else failed, his most erratic instructions could simply be ignored.

That might not be how things go in a second Trump administration, now that he’s gotten wise (though it’s not clear to me the degree to which Trump actually cares about pushing any kind of policy agenda). But the common assumption about a second Biden administration is that it will be secured from going off the rails by Biden’s team. It will be run by mainstream Democrats who, though they themselves were never elected, came into power because of an election in which everybody understood which party they were voting for. Is that so undemocratic? Indeed, the case for Biden on this score is easier than the case for Trump since Biden has consistently been a party man who positioned himself toward the center of the party ideologically; while a moderate, he was never a leader in pulling the party to the right or in attacking the left, but rather someone who always tried to get along with party members on both ends of that spectrum, as well as with members of the other party who were willing to make deals. In a world of parties (which, to be fair, the Founders did not anticipate), there’s nothing obviously undemocratic or unrepublican about voting for a president from a particular party and getting leadership that tries to enact that party’s agenda. And that’s the basis on which Biden’s fiercest detractors from with the Democratic coalition can say they will still vote for him if they have no practical alternative.

As I asked, though, are they right about that? Can you run the executive branch by committee?

I don’t think you can, actually. One reason should be obvious: in a crisis someone has to be in charge and it needs to be clear both internally and externally who is in charge. That’s particularly true when the crisis involves a foreign country’s hostile actions, and because of that it’s true even before the foreign country takes action. Ross Douthat is more polite than I would have been when he describes the foreign policy dangers of a second Biden term, and the way they may already have been prefigured in our current foreign policy drift. I would argue that you simply cannot go to war without a functioning Commander in Chief, and that our allies and rivals alike know that, and will act accordingly. The same is true internally; in a crisis, the American people look to who is in charge, and there has to be an answer. Trump’s COVID response wasn't catastrophic primarily because he made uniquely terrible decisions (he made some humdingers, but he was hardly alone in that) but because he was manifestly feckless and disengaged, and inclined to seek short-term partisan political advantage rather than bring the country together. The Biden who showed up for the debate on Thursday night wouldn’t have precisely the same problems in a similar crisis, but they would be comparably catastrophic in effect.

But there are less-obvious reasons as well. If the head of the executive is effectively non-functional, then where is the locus of accountability for bad decisions? And if there is no such locus, and everyone’s individual incentive is to collude in avoiding that accountability, what forces a correction? If the non-functional executive is still formally in charge, but everyone understands he has to be manipulated into decisions (because he’s no longer capable of reliably assessing what’s being presented to him), then what happens when different advisors start to compete for an audience, and the opportunity to manipulate him? This is a dynamic that executives have to deal with all the time; it’s a different kind of problem when the executive is incapable of dealing with it. Even a committee with a high degree of internal cohesion will have some factions, as well as divergent individual interests; at a minimum, individuals won’t want to get the blame for bad decisions they pushed for. These inevitable conflicts are why you need someone specific in charge to resolve them. A vote for Biden is a vote for not having any such person. And no, you can’t have someone “unofficially” be president, not Vice President Kamala Harris, not First Lady Jill Biden—power that cannot constitutionally be delegated cannot be delegated practically as well except in situations of relative harmony. As soon as things go badly, the knives come out.

Do these kinds of concerns outweigh the obvious concerns about Trump—his authoritarian instincts, his malignant narcissism, his cruelty and cowardice, his utter lack of interest in actually governing, and so on and on and on? That’s a question that’s hard for most people who bloviate on the Internet to answer, because we tend to have strong views on the policy differences between the parties, and/or strong tribal identities with partisan corollaries. I, for example, would certainly rather have a Democratic president than a Democratic committee behind an ineffectual figurehead, but I’d also rather have a Democratic administration than a Republican one. That clear preference makes it hard for us to properly assess the relative risks of Biden or Trump as individuals.

But we need to make that assessment—all of us. We need to ask ourselves, leaving aside the two parties’ different policy preferences, whether the country is better off with someone like Biden or someone like Trump—assessing each of them in the most critical manner, not the most generous—as chief executive. Assume the one is in the process of a steep mental and physical decline, and will be largely unable to function as president right from the start of his next term, but will be resistant to resigning for medical reasons until the absolute last possible moment, leaving the country effectively leaderless for an unknown span of time. Assume further that his chief aides will frequently be consumed by palace intrigues during that effective interregnum, so that we are governed by something worse than just policy inertia. Now assume that the alternative is an utterly selfish, mentally unstable and corrupt person without a patriotic or civic-minded bone in his body, who will surround himself with a mix of sycophants and cranks. Which of these two do you want in charge?

The potted plant is clearly the right choice if you think that nothing terrible is going to happen, and that at worst the horticultural committee will run on an ineffectual autopilot. That’s probably even true if you have policy preferences that align modestly with the other party; the odds that Trump initiates something terrible strike me as much higher than the odds that Biden or his managers will. But what if something terrible just happens? How much worse will it go with nobody in charge? And how much do the odds of something terrible happening go up if you have a potted plant in charge, rather than a corrupt maniac?

I think that’s a lot more like a Hobson’s choice, and a lot less like a slam dunk, than mainstream Democrats seem to think.