Some Advice for the Democrats

Trump isn't invincible. But you guys are screwups. So please, pay attention.

For the past week, I’ve been writing and tossing out newsletters daily because the news has been breaking so fast that by the time I finish my thought, what I’ve written is obsolete. So I hereby announce that I will send this newsletter when it’s finished, even if Mars attacks.

I probably shouldn’t tempt fate by writing that.

When we founded CG, we decided that we wouldn’t chase breaking news. We would not strive to be first. We’d strive to be the best. We also decided that our focus wouldn’t be American politics, but the larger world that’s now ignored by the English-language media.

But I’ve been absolutely gripped—as you have, I’m sure, as has the entire world—by the drama unfolding in the United States. I haven’t been able to concentrate on much else. The presidential contest is not only the biggest story in the US, but the biggest global story—the one that will most profoundly shape the world in the years and decades to come. (If my American readers are watching this with alarm, imagine how my Ukrainian readers feel—and everyone who lives on Russia’s borders, for that matter. Or China’s. Or at missile distance from Iran. Or North Korea.)

Here’s the salvageable part of my memorandum to the Democrats. It seems I no longer need to explain the urgency of persuading Biden to drop out. But the rest of my advice is still good, and can be adapted to our new circumstances.

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Thanks, Joe

First, a word of appreciation for Biden’s decision. It’s easy to say that he had no choice: He was forced out. But you can only say this in retrospect. If I’d believed he had no choice, I wouldn’t have expended so much energy writing furious newsletters about him this past week. He had a choice. He could have taken the whole country down with him, and I very much feared that he would. Donald Trump, after all, is clearly prepared to do just that.

He took too long to drop out. It would have been far better had he made this decision two years ago, and failing that, it would have been far better if those around him had forced him to. But in the end, he did the right and the noble thing, and in doing so, he gave citizens of liberal democracies around the world, for the first time in many terrified weeks, a frisson of hope. The Democrats proved that yes, they are braver than their GOP counterparts—or better, at least, at saving their skins—and that the Democratic Party has not, like the GOP, become some kind of death cult.

I’m very glad I didn’t publish my excoriating attack on Biden’s character. It was premature.

I’m sure Joe Biden feels furious, bitter, and humiliated. I do feel sad for him. But I hope he also feels relief. It can’t have been enjoyable to face the entire world’s scrutiny in his condition. I don’t know if he fully appreciates the extent of his own deterioration. Illness may be interfering with his self-awareness.¹ But politicians live and breathe for the public’s adoration, and I’m sure he’s grasped all too well that everyone to whom he’s spoken, in recent months, has been contemplating him with dismay.

I hope he takes some comfort in all the editorials praising his sacrifice and comparing him to George Washington.

What he did really was a service to mankind.

I agree.

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Groupthink

I even have a (guardedly) generous thought or two for those around him who concealed his infirmity. Doing so was outrageously irresponsible. It may prove to have been fatally irresponsible. But I don’t believe, as so many people—even quite reasonable ones—seem to think, that it was a conspiracy or even a conscious decision.

My best guess is that it was the product of denial and groupthink. I say this because I can’t imagine why his circle of advisers would sit down with one another and say, out loud, “He’s too ill to do this. He’s getting worse rapidly. But let’s pretend otherwise.”

It makes no sense. The odds were overwhelming—one hundred percent, in fact—that it would end exactly as it has. You can’t keep the President of the United States concealed from the public for long. You’d have to be out of your mind to consciously reckon that you could.

Everyone knows what a presidential campaign involves. If they somehow convinced themselves that he’d be able to handle it, it can only be because they talked themselves into genuinely believing it. Why would they have encouraged Biden to debate Trump if they were consciously trying to conceal his debilitation? They could have said, had they been determined to keep him from view, that it was below the nation’s dignity for the president to debate a felon.

It’s not that unusual for people to behave the way the people around him behaved. Think about the children of alcoholics. They attempt to cover for their drunken parent. They take over his responsibilities when he can’t. They clean up the mess after he goes on a bender. They make excuses for him. They hide the empty bottles when friends come around. Usually, they’ll do so with little conscious awareness that Dad’s a hopeless drunk. If you’ve ever spoken to members of a family like this, and of course you have, you know that they’re all in denial. They don’t sit down with one another over the dinner table and say, “Dad’s a lush. He can’t be trusted with anything. Let’s cover for him and hide this from the world.”

When a family system goes haywire like this, everyone participates in the denial, the children every bit as much as the parents. Dysfunction in the White House must be similar in its emotional dynamics. (In fact, I’d be curious to know how many of Biden’s handlers are children of alcoholics.)

We’ll know more about what they were thinking when the memoirs come out. But there’s a lesson to draw from this, if my theory is correct, and it should be drawn even if it isn’t: More should be done to mitigate the dangerous tendency toward groupthink in the White House. This would hardly be the first time—it’s plagued one administration after the other.

It’s a well-studied phenomenon. The psychologist Irving Janis published Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes in 1982, focusing on episodes like the Bay of Pigs. What he wrote was taken very seriously by managers of corporations, but the ideas never were never taken to heart, as far as I know, in the institution of the presidency itself.

The White House seems naturally to organize itself in such a way that its guiding assumptions fail to receive a sufficiently rigorous challenge. This leads, very often, to irrational and dysfunctional decision-making. If you spend time in the presidential archives, you’ll be struck by this. When we review the decisions that transformed “Vietnam” and “Iraq”into synonyms for “catastrophe,” we see that something prevented the people around the President from raising obvious objections. No one ever seems to have said to George Bush, for example, that the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction just wasn’t that good.

I assume this happens as often as it does, first, because everyone in the White House is awed by the presidency and desperately eager to please the president. It probably happens, too, because the group around the president feels besieged—by the press, Congress, the public, and foreign rivals—and when everyone on the outside is an enemy, psychologically speaking, it gives rise to an acute desire to maintain harmony within the group.

Janis’s research suggested three antecedent conditions to groupthink, in particular: High group cohesiveness, such that members of the group prize maintaining friendly relationships; structural flaws in the decision-making process (for example, telling the group what the leader thinks before soliciting its views); and “highly stressful external events.”

Janis had a series of practical, procedural suggestions for countermanding these tendencies. For example, he advised leaders to absent themselves from group meetings to avoid influencing the outcome. An organization should set up independent groups to work on the same problem. It should bring in outside experts. And it should always assign a member of the group to play the role of devil’s advocate.

Taking this advice should be mandatory in every White House.

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Kamala’s weakness

Democrats seem determined to anoint Kamala the heir. Perhaps they’re correct in this instinct: Perhaps an open convention would be so bitter and so chaotic that it would serve only to persuade the electorate that this group of bickering, leaderless, and headless chickens are a bunch of dangerous amateurs. I’d have preferred an open convention, and frankly, I’d have preferred someone else. But Kamala will have to do. Whether the nominee is Kamala or anyone else, the points below apply.

Democrats: Listen to me. You do not have this in the bag. Not by any stretch of the imagination. You are at grave risk of falling victim to groupthink again.

What’s more, you can’t afford to win this in a squeaker. Did you see the way Trump reacted to being shot in the face? If you think he’ll meekly accept defeat and shuffle away to spend the rest of his life in jail, you’re very mistaken. If he loses, he will violently contest the outcome of the election. He will do this even if you win an overwhelming, landslide victory. But should you win an overwhelming, landslide victory, you will have a much better shot at putting down the inevitable violent insurrection. If it ends up as a narrow victory, or if it’s not entirely clear who won, we are in deep trouble. That’s a straight shot to civil war.

You must win an overwhelming victory. That means putting aside all of your policy preferences and ridding yourself of everything that makes Americans dislike you.

This, in turn, means accepting something you’ve never shown any ability to accept: To wit, you must grasp that Trump’s criticism of your party has been successful because it is often correct. You are, indeed, out-of-touch elites who are prone to espousing policies that infuriate Americans. You speak in a way that drives them nuts. Your inability to read the room is a source of wonderment to me and the rest of the world.

These are problems that barely rank, compared to the alternative. But it is a fact that many Americans just can’t see the problem with Trump—yet they do see the problem with you. I don’t know why. The problem with Trump seems pretty damned obvious to me. In fact, I’ve never seen someone more obviously and dangerously off his rocker in my entire life. But just accept it: Many people just don’t see it. And you need at least some of those people to vote for you.

You’re now convincing yourself—I can see you doing it—that Biden would have been an extremely popular president but for his age and infirmity. You’re telling yourself that the economy has been terrific, that he passed more legislation than anyone imagined possible, and he wasn’t Trump: Why wouldn’t people love an administration like that? But if you’re telling yourself that the only reason the electorate rejected Biden was his age—and the only reason it might reject Kamala is her race and her gender—you’re not grasping what you need to grasp to win.

For the sake of the exercise, let’s assume Kamala will be the candidate. She is not nearly as silly as people think, and she may very well be able to grasp what I’m saying. But she has already proven that she readily falls victim to groupthink.

She is doubtless terrified right now. Everyone who contemplates the presidency—and isn’t insane—would be. Everything is now riding on her. It isn’t just the future of the United States, either. It’s the future of the world. Her instinct will be to surround herself with people she trusts—people, that is, who will share her cognitive blind spots, and who will be reluctant to tell her the truth.

She can’t do that. It’s fatal.

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You must stop cackling

Kamala—if I may—here’s what you need to do.

First, you must believe what you’ve been saying. This is the most important election in our modern history, and perhaps in our history, period. You must behave as if this is true. The “existential threat to our democracy” slogan is not just a DNC talking point. It’s true. Trump has already so profoundly degraded our culture and our institutions that if we’re subjected to another four years of him, we’ll be transformed into something unrecognizable—something not one of us could be proud of.

The behavior of the Supreme Court and Justice Eileen Cannon are signs we’re at the mid-point of the process of authoritarian capture, not the beginning. By 2028, Trump and his family will be burrowed in so deep that we’ll never get rid of them.

Consider the way they’ve threatened to sue the states that put anyone but Biden on the ballot. By 2028, they’ll have enough of the judiciary in their hands that they will succeed in keeping the names of anyone who might threaten their power off the ballot. Don’t believe it? How much of what’s happened so far would you have believed? I’ve seen every bit of this before. I watched the whole thing take place in Turkey, beginning to end. Never, ever, underestimate men like him.

Trump has already transformed the United States in terrible ways. We are already an anocracy. It will take us years to recover. What’s happening to us now is exactly what it looks like when a democracy is transformed into an autocracy. People think it looks like something out of Der Untergang. It doesn’t. In the year 2024, it looks like this.

If you’re in any way unclear what that means, I’ve got a guide for you.

Please read that guide, too, because you need to be able to explain this to the electorate. It’s just not good enough to say, “Our democracy is at risk.” That’s already become a cliché, and like all clichés, it is irritating.

You need to be able to explain to the electorate that we are undergoing a known, specific process. It is a process that has been seen in recent decades throughout the world. It has been studied. We know a lot about it. You must be able to explain that this process has specific stages. You must be able to discuss other countries where this has happened. It will be up to you to explain all of this, because our media has largely failed to do so. You must be able to explain, too, where this leads. You must also be able to explain why that is undesirable.

To be clear, it is not, in fact, our democracy that’s at risk. I know what you mean by that, but the shorthand is confusing. You must explain that no, you don’t mean that we will no longer have elections. We probably will. But they will be denuded of everything that makes elections meaningful.

If you’re unable to communicate all of this clearly, without resorting to slogans and cliches that irritate rather than inform, you can’t be the candidate. Follow Joe Biden’s noble example and let someone else do it. We’ve already gone far too long without a leader who is capable of explaining this. Doing so is your first responsibility: You must explain all of this in the way Joe Biden never once managed to do.

For years, the bully pulpit has either been unoccupied or occupied by Donald Trump. Americans haven’t heard one single politician make the case against him competently. You’ve all been so hopeless that you’ve even managed to make the perfect truth—democracy is at stake—sound like a lie.

So if you mean to win, your days of the cliché are over. You must speak to Americans in a way that will shock them to their roots, because no one has spoken to them this way in generations: You must speak to them as if they’re adults.

Our politicians sound like phonies because they speak down to Americans, whom they believe to be extremely stupid. They have come to believe that the only way to speak to them is by means of short slogans— focus-grouped and polled, then repeated endlessly. This view of the electorate has been confirmed by Donald Trump’s success. If voters want stupid, you’ve clearly been thinking, we’d better give it to them, good and dumb.

Yes, many voters are stupid and childish. But they can nonetheless sense that you have two personalities: your real one, and the one you use when you’re speaking to them or your toddlers. So speak to them as if they’re the voters they ought to be: intelligent citizens who can handle the truth. People have a way of rising to the occasion when they sense that someone holds them to a higher standard.

That’s the first thing you must be able to communicate—that our ability to have meaningful elections really is at risk if Donald Trump wins.

The second thing you must explain is why the ramifications of a Trump presidency would be unimaginably grave: The world, too, is at risk. You must be the first president in decades who takes the time to explain American foreign policy to the Americans who pay for it. You cannot continue to allow lies like those that emerged from those repulsive Putin puppets at the Republican convention—Carlson, the lamentable Sacks, the odious Vance—to go unanswered.

Ignore anyone who tells you that voters don’t care about foreign policy. If you explain the stakes to them as you must, they will.

Do this in a serious, adult way. No soundbites. No cackling. Roosevelt was the master of this. Listen to him:

This is the tone you should aim for. If you respect the electorate enough to speak to them this way, it will respect you in turn.

Can you do it? You might be able to. I knew of you back when you were a terrifying prosecutor. I’ve seen you in the Senate. Back when you weren’t trying to win popularity contests. You’re not vapid and foolish. You’ve just been pretending to be.

Knock that off.

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A national unity ticket

Now is not the time to worry about your pet policy preferences. You must form a coalition of every force in America that’s horrified by the prospect of Trump returning to office. This means signaling, right away, that you’ll be running way, way, way to your natural right.

Consider what just happened in France. People who could barely stand to be in the same room with each other united under a single banner to keep the National Front out of power. It worked. You need to do the same thing.

But our electoral system works differently and our political demographics aren’t the same. You can’t do this by uniting only the forces of the left, because that doesn’t add up to enough people to win an election.

You already have the support of your left flank. You don’t need to worry about them. (What are they going to do? Vote for Trump?) You’ve got California sewn up. What you need to worry about are the swing voters in the Rust Belt. They’re going to decide our fate.

In the New York Times a few days ago Aaron Sorkin suggested that Democrats nominate Mitt Romney. That’s a non-starter, but the underlying idea isn’t wrong. Not only do you need to choose a reassuring centrist as your running mate—Josh Shapiro is the name everyone keeps mentioning, and I suppose he’d be fine—you need to announce that you’ll put Republicans in your cabinet.

You should aim for securing the enthusiastic endorsement of all of the former members of Trump’s cabinet (except for the handful of lifers who haven’t yet broken from him and denounced him as an idiot and a menace.) You especially need the endorsement—and the support on the campaign trail—of former Trump officials with national security responsibilities. You want John Bolton and Jim Mattis out stumping for you.

If you genuinely believe that democracy is on the ballot—and you damned well should—then prove it by saying whatever you need to say, promising whatever you need to promise, and doing whatever it takes to get all of the following people on the stage of the Democratic National Convention. You need them all standing by you and telling Americans that they’re endorsing you, despite your differences, because putting Trump back in office is just too damned dangerous—and they would know: John Bolton, Jim Mattis, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mark Milley, Ty Cobb, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Chris Christie, Stephanie Grisham, Sarah Matthews, Mick Mulvaney, Bill Barr, and extend the list as appropriate. Every Republican who endorses you is worth ten Democratic endorsements when it comes to those swing voters.

A huge pool of disaffected Republicans are yours for the taking. They’re the ones who vainly placed their hopes in Nikki Haley. (She will feel quite foolish when all of her former colleagues endorse you.) These disaffected Republicans are now looking at you and wondering if they could bring themselves to pull the lever for you. You have to convince them that the answer is, “Yes.”

Chris Christie says the White House never called him to ask for his endorsement. That’s nuts. You need to be on the phone with him and all the rest of them, not only asking for their endorsement, but willing to make a deal. What position do they want in your cabinet? What promise do they need you to make? Give it to them. (Make an especially handsome offer to Liz Cheney. She’d be an especially fine asset to your cabinet.)

If you get all of those people on your side, you’ll win with safe margins. Doing so is the only way to defeat Trumpism, and until it’s defeated, permanently, it’s pointless to talk about policy. He will continue to blackmail us until we make it clear that neither he nor anyone like him will ever succeed. That may take many electoral cycles, by the way, because once that genie gets a taste of life outside the bottle, it rarely wants to go back.

Next, you need to find an actual swing voter from the Rust Belt—some disgruntled white guy who can’t stand Trump, but finds you deeply suspicious and painfully woke (which you are). You need to make him a senior policy advisor. You need him to sit in on every meeting between now and the election and be your devil’s advocate.

You desperately need someone like him in your inner circle. You’ve surrounded yourself with people who truly think it’s a good idea to say things like, “My name is Kamala Harris and my pronouns are ‘she/her.’” You need someone who will discourage you from doing things like that in no uncertain terms.

Say it after me. This must be your mantra from now on:

“I don’t need to shore up my left. I need to shore up my right.”

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Banish every hint of wokeness

If you won’t do that, then please, just trust me on this. Democrats just don’t seem to grasp how much the ideology emerging from our elite universities infuriates Americans and how much it harms them, electorally, to be even tangentially associated with it.

This is your biggest weakness. You’re not in California anymore. You cannot sound like anything that might have emerged from a faculty lounge. Don’t talk about “equity.” You’re going to be attacked— rightly—for every trace of far-left lunacy that’s permeated our institutions, and particularly the federal government. In fact, if it weren’t for the far greater lunacy on the right, no one would ever vote for you. So don’t talk about antiracism, microaggressions, social-emotional learning, or DEI. Don’t refer to people as folx. Don’t talk about environmental justice. Don’t refer to people as BIPOC. And don’t even mention transgenderism.

Get yourself a disgruntled white guy from the Rust Belt. Run everything you say past him. If he tells you it sounds woke, don’t say it. Not even if you believe it to be true. Remember: our democracy is at stake. You are creating an anti-Trump alliance, not a pro-Kamala alliance. If you’re as much of a patriot as your boss, you’ll sacrifice the wokeness—especially since you never actually believed in it. It’s been a huge miscalculation, on your part, to think that adopting it would help you. It’s done the very opposite.

Remember: Do not surround yourself with people just like you. Surround yourself with people who are just like the people whose votes you need. Surround yourself with young, mostly white guys in Pennsylvania and Michigan. If they don’t learn to like you, democracy dies.

Remember: It isn’t about advancing your policy agenda. No one cares about your policy agenda. It is about defeating Donald Trump. We can talk about your policy agenda after he’s been banished and we all feel confident that we’re not careening toward civil war.

If you need any more help, just give me a call. There’s more good advice where this came from. And I’m happy to share it with you. I want you to succeed.

After all: our democracy really is at stake.

1. If he has Parkinson’s, as I suspect, this is a known symptom. The disease affects awareness and perception, which makes it difficult for those afflicted to realize that their speech has become incomprehensible. From the Parkinson’s Foundation:

Voice and speech changes are often the earliest signs of Parkinson’s, but not everyone with PD will have the same issues. Common difficulties include speaking softly, using a monotone voice, slurring words, mumbling and stuttering. For some people, thinking changes can make it harder to find the right word, focus on conversations or get a sentence started. Sometimes limited facial expression or unintended body language can cause miscommunication.

Do I have a communication issue?

• Do others say or seem like they can’t hear or understand me?

• Do I avoid phone calls?

• Do I have to work extra hard to be heard or does my voice tire easily?

• Do I lose my train of thought often?

• Is it hard to find the right words in conversations?

• Do I feel left out of conversations?

All of this would of course be made worse by stress. I wouldn’t be surprised if, having at last made a decision, his fluency now improves markedly. He may well give a perfectly cogent address explaining his decision, which will add to the poignancy and perhaps make his friends wonder if they’ve made a mistake in defenestrating him. I hope he does. He deserves that much dignity.