-by Patrick Toomey
There is a famous quote from Ben Franklin at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention that has never been more relevant than it is today:
--Benjamin Franklin's response to Elizabeth Willing Powel's question: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
There have been various times since 1787 (e.g., 1861-65) in which the keeping of the republic was an open question. In my lifetime, the fabric of republic visibly frayed in the late 1960’s and during the Watergate Scandal. I will go to my grave retaining my doubts about the ultimate resolution of the 2000 presidential election. In my three score and five years as a citizen of this republic, however, I have never witnessed a more severe challenge to its continued existence than we currently have.
The threat to representative government posed by Trump (and the party that stands behind him) at this stage cannot and should not be understated. Regardless of how seriously one takes his stated desire to be Dictator for a Day or his “bloodbath” promises, he views our constitutional system with the same level of respect that he views his marriage vows. He apparently doesn’t want to create a Hitler’s Germany or even a Mussolini’s Italy, but he apparently does want to recreate an Orban’s Hungary on these shores.
Our electoral system only places one barrier between Trump and his goals. For all we know, Trump could be convicted of at least 1 felony by this November, but our legal system has failed to thwart his ambitions to date. Like it or not, re-electing Biden is the one sure-fire means of preserving our republic.
Biden’s re-election isn’t about which party will control the vast federal bureaucracy, nor is it even about likely resulting public policy outcomes from 2025-29. It’s about whether, for the foreseeable future, we will still have a system that affords popular sovereignty to have a say in our governance. Since last October 7, the odds of Biden’s re-election have visibly declined due to his resolute pursuit of a morally dubious and politically suicidal approach to the ongoing IDF-Hamas conflict.
[I]n 2020 Biden was able to win over the so-called “Obama voters,” namely young voters, voters of color (black, Latino, and Asian), and college-educated women voters. Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, however, all these demographics have become increasingly critical of Biden’s one-sided support for Israel. According to an NBC poll conducted in November, 70 percent of voters aged eighteen to thirty-four said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of the conflict. Similarly, a New York Times poll published in December found that 46 percent of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine strongly disapproved of his Israel-Palestine policy. In consequence, whereas exit polls in 2020 indicated that Biden won among voters under thirty by more than 20 percentage points, recent surveys show the president competitive with or in some cases trailing Trump among young people. Polls among people of color show a similar declining trend.
Regarding the second, Biden is rapidly losing support in precisely those swing states that were crucial to his victory in 2020. In Michigan, a three-week grassroots campaign urging voters to mark “uncommitted” on the ballot was an unexpected success. “Uncommitted” came second in the Michigan primary with 13 percent of the vote, totaling over one hundred thousand votes in a near-unprecedented repudiation of a sitting president by those who were meant to be some of his most committed supporters.
Barring a major change in course by this White House soon, Trump will likely attain 270 electoral votes this fall. At minimum, he will likely come close enough to send his supporters out into the streets to finish the job that they started on 1/6/21. One doesn’t need a Poli Sci PhD to understand the likely consequences of continuing to subcontract foreign policy to Likud. The danger is painfully obvious.
As per this photo taken on the House floor in March 2015, it’s also worth noting with which party Netanyahu’s sympathies clearly lie:
Biden and Blinken are taking incalculable risks enabling the internal political ambitions of someone whose clear external political ambition is to help drive them from office. In layman’s terms, this White House is bringing a rope to its own hanging. Not only does Netanyahu's continued intransigence undercut Biden's standing with voting blocs he desperately needs— it also reinforces the meme that Biden is ineffective and that we need a strong man to set things right again.
This sorry excuse for a policy is a classic lose/lose proposition that endangers us all. As per the conclusion of the Jacobin piece:
"This is a very big gamble on the outcome of which the future of democracy in the United States and indeed the wider world may well depend."
God help us all if this gamble is not abandoned soon.