The Party Is Not Over. The Atlantic - Politics by Jonathan Rauch

Jul 24, 2024 at 2:04 AM//keep unread//hide

Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET on July 23, 2024.

The smoke-filled room is back! Praise the Lord—and pray the system works. To be technically accurate, there is no actual room, and if there were, it would not be smoky. Nonetheless, we have witnessed the extraordinary reassertion of a principle whose disappearance has been nothing short of calamitous for American politics. To wit: Nominations belong to parties, not to candidates.

If you have read a biography of Abraham Lincoln, you may recall that his entire record as a federal officeholder before the presidency was a single two-year term representing Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives. What you may not recall is: Why only two years? Did Lincoln lack ambition or talent? Face defeat by a stronger opponent? Retire in disgrace? None of the above. In Illinois, the Whig party machine had set up a rotation scheme in which party loyalists took turns occupying the party’s only safe House seat. When his turn ended, Lincoln went home.

Peculiar as this seems today, for most of U.S. history, it was taken for granted that nominations were party property. From the time of Martin Van Buren, who basically invented the modern U.S. political party, Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life. The parties identified, trained, and promoted qualified and reliable politicians; built political coalitions and brokered deals across diverse ideologies and constituencies; organized officeholders to work together in government; maintained institutional knowledge and ensured strategic continuity over time. All of those political tasks were, and still are, essential.

[Read: The Harris gamble]

To perform them, the parties used everything from torchlight parades to pork-barrel spending, but their most important tool, the sine qua non of party influence, was control over who would be on their ticket. That power, exercised in formal ways like ballot access and informal ways like jawboning, allowed the parties to act as traffic cops. Party chairs would advise a green candidate to run for county commissioner before aiming for the House. Party donors would open and close the money taps to help reliable players. Party bigwigs would offer and withhold endorsements and steer media attention. The apogee of the party-controlled process was the so-called smoke-filled room, the (somewhat metaphorical) site where party leaders, elected officials, and trusted delegates met at the national convention to choose a presidential ticket.

Contrary to popular belief, the decision makers did not and could not override or ignore public opinion; they wanted to win, after all. What they could and did do was blend public opinion with other considerations, such as who could unify the party, govern after the election, and advance the party’s interests. Although it is true that the parties were dominated by white, mostly Protestant men, that was a reflection of their era. Other institutions were also dominated by white, mostly Protestant men.

And here’s something else they did: choose qualified candidates. By offering careers and perks to loyalists, the parties were able to attract impressive talent. The political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts, in their 2013 book, Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time, found that the old party system’s congressional candidates were at least as experienced and well qualified as today’s. Although the machines of yore could be insular and corrupt—traits no one wants to go back to—they reliably screened out circus acts, incompetents, rogues, and sociopaths. Party insiders usually knew their candidates personally. They had worked with many of them, or had at least observed them, for years.

Donald Trump is not the first authoritarian-minded tycoon to put himself forward as a national savior. In the 1920s, a groundswell of popular support formed for a presidential run by the car magnate Henry Ford, a vicious anti-Semite who claimed that only a hard-driving businessman could solve the country’s problems. The parties were having none of it. As Collier’s magazine reported in 1923, “Almost without a single exception the men who constitute what is usually known as the ‘organization’ in every state are opposed to Ford.” Senator James Couzens said, “How can a man over sixty years old, who … has no training, no experience, aspire to such an office?,” adding, “It is most ridiculous.” Both parties shut their doors, and Ford’s presidential run was over before it began.

By the 1960s, however, the parties were under pressure to democratize their selection process. After Hubert Humphrey won the nomination in 1968 without entering a single primary, the Democratic Party put primary voters in charge. The new rules’ very first outing was disastrous: Left-leaning primary voters chose George McGovern (an architect of the new rules, as it happened), who lost 49 states in 1972.

What followed was an interim period in which the old system operated alongside the new. Primary voters had the main say, but party hacks clawed back influence in what became known as the invisible primary, a race for the support of party leaders, donors, and key constituencies such as unions and business. The hybrid system seemed to work—until, in 2016, it didn’t.

That year brought two insurgent candidacies. In no meaningful sense was Donald Trump a Republican or Bernie Sanders a Democrat. Trump had been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he had donated to both parties; he had shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. Sanders was an independent who had switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. Yet both insurgents saw that they could bypass the party gatekeepers by exploiting social media, raising money online, and belittling or skipping endorsements. The Democratic establishment barely fended off Sanders, and, of course, Trump seized the Republican nomination and then the party.

By that point, no Americans under age 65 had working experience of functional political parties. Instead, the public saw the parties as vehicles for candidates at best, and as useless or corrupt intermediaries at worst. When Russian email hacks revealed in 2016 that Democratic National Committee officials favored Hillary Clinton over Sanders, the public and media were scandalized and the party chair quit. In earlier times, the appropriate reaction would have seemed more like: “Of course the Democratic Party favors the candidate who is actually a Democrat. That’s why it exists!”

Today, the Republican Party can still do some minor gatekeeping. It maneuvered former Representative Madison Cawthorn out of his House seat after he accused (unnamed) colleagues of holding orgies and using cocaine. For the most part, however, the GOP is engineered to serve Trump. In 2020 and 2024, it did not even pretend to deliberate over a platform.

The Democratic Party, however, has not gone as far down the road to self-dissolution. It has maintained so-called superdelegates who give elected officials and party elders a voice at the convention, albeit more in theory than in practice. In 2020, the Democratic establishment, by rallying to Joe Biden, again succeeded in heading off Sanders.

And now—the stunner. In a head-on conflict with its incumbent president and nominal leader, the institutional Democratic Party has prevailed. It has reclaimed control over its nomination. The party’s elected leaders and donors fell in line and told Biden that the party could not accept his continued candidacy, effectively cutting off the support he needed to win.

This astonishing turn raises two fascinating questions: Why did it happen, and how much will it matter? The answer to the first is that the party is realistic about its situation and that Biden is, in the end, a party man. Both the man and the party deserve credit for putting the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work.

The second question depends on the outcome. If Democrats lose in November, the party’s intervention will be judged to have been desperate and pointless. But if the Democrats win, their gamble will vindicate the party as an independent actor. For the first time in two generations, the country will see why parties matter and how they can function independently in the public interest, doing what individual voters and politicians cannot.

Biden’s removal from the ticket also illuminates the single most important fact about American politics today, which is that the two parties are no longer the same kind of thing. As Brian Klaas and Tom Nichols have underscored in The Atlantic, one party is a coalitional party that maintains a sense of its identity and independence; the other is a personality cult projecting the will of one authoritarian-minded man. One party retains institutional guardrails; the other traffics in transgression. Both parties fielded dangerously unfit presidential candidates in 2024, but only one was able to muster the will and desire to correct itself. Until the GOP can be restored to its traditional role as a coalitional party, it will remain a source of hazardous instability.

[Brian Klaas: Calls for Biden’s withdrawal are a sign of a healthy Democratic party]

In his new book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—And Could Again, Yuval Levin writes, “It is now painfully obvious that the reforms that disempowered party professionals in both parties were a catastrophic mistake, which has sown bitter division throughout our political system and beyond it in the broader culture and done terrible harm to our country.” As Levin correctly notes, the weakening of the professional party organizations—along with the breakdown of Congress—is at the root of contemporary American political dysfunction. Our two parties cannot do what we need them to do if they are bystanders in their own nomination contests.

In principle, restoring more nominating power to party professionals is one of the easiest reforms out there. Whenever they choose, the parties can change their rules to provide for what Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution calls peer review. Surveys find that voters are open to giving parties and professionals a voice in the process.

In practice, however, Americans have lost their memory of parties that behave like institutions, not just platforms or brands. What’s needed is a reminder that a political party can act independently and wisely to serve the national interest at a crucial juncture. We’ve just seen one.

The Emerging Bipartisan Wokeness. The Atlantic - Politics by Tyler Austin Harper

Jul 23, 2024 at 9:15 PM//keep unread//hide

Back in May, for the third time since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, a trio of university presidents was marched in front of Congress for a round of hearings on campus anti-Semitism. Congressional Republicans peppered the heads of Northwestern, Rutgers, and UCLA with queries: Is “From the river to the sea” not code for the slaughter of Jews? (Eric Burlison, Missouri). Why were universities’ anti-Semitism centers and Jewish faculty not more involved in decision making? (Elise Stefanik, New York). Why is anti-Semitism “institutionalized” in university policy? (Kevin Kiley, California). Why did universities abandon their mission of keeping students safe? (Aaron Bean, Florida). Listening to the hearing, I was struck not so much by what conservative representatives were saying, but by how they were saying it. They sounded a lot like those liberal “snowflakes” they love to castigate.

Underlying their questions was a set of assumptions that we normally associate with the progressive left: The slow and established mechanisms of institutional justice must give way to swift, righteous punishments for prejudice. Identity-based bureaucracies should dictate university policy. Opponents’ political slogans are thinly veiled messages of racial hatred. Bigotry is a near-mystical force that suffuses every nook and cranny of our institutions and can be ameliorated only through systematic overhaul. And emotional security is no less important than physical security and supersedes free speech.

Over the past six months or so, commentators have been engaged in an ongoing debate about whether we are past what’s been called “peak woke”—whether, that is, the worst excesses of post-2020 performative progressivism are now in the rearview. The consensus seems to be that we are lurching, if somewhat haltingly, to a world where American educational institutions, corporations, and media are less hemmed in by progressive niceties. And this may well be true: DEI offices are closing; diversity statements are going the way of the dodo. But if the “peak woke” conversation gets some things right, it also misses a more subtle yet ultimately more consequential transformation within the American political arena, one on vivid display in that congressional hearing. Wokeness did not disappear. Wokeness has become bipartisan.

Arguing that conservatives have become “woke,” given their vocal anti-wokeness, admittedly sounds strange. And if you define wokeness as a set of specific beliefs about anti-racism, gender, public masking, open borders, prison and police abolition, and so on, then Republicans don’t fit the type. But wokeness doesn’t just have readily identifiable content—a set of opinions that leave adherents in good progressive standing. It also has a readily identifiable form. Writing in Harper’s in 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter argued that the American political tradition was defined, particularly on the right, by a predilection for conspiracism. Hofstadter famously called this “the paranoid style in American politics,” which was also the title of his landmark essay. As the dust has cleared from the multiyear bout of hysteria that defined political life post-2020, it is now possible to see that wokeness is today the dominant style in American politics.

The conservative version is hiding in plain sight. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas spoke of an emerging “woke right” back in 2022, and the term has since kicked around the blogosphere. The writer Katherine Brodsky has argued that the hallmarks of the phenomenon are an embrace of cancel culture, white identity politics, and a victim mindset. Discussions of this trend took off last week when a conservative social-media account got a low-level Home Depot employee fired after she made a joke about Trump's assassination.

Right-wing wokeness is Elon Musk critiquing “heterophobia” and classifying the word cis as a slur on X. It is conservative social media melting down and calling a Navy Seal Facebook post about Pride month “a threat to national security.” It is Florida pushing to prevent teaching slavery in a way that might make white students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other forms of psychological distress.” It is the NYPD deputy commissioner asserting that a widely used textbook about terrorism is actually a terrorist manual, and that common bike locks—sold by Columbia University’s own public-safety department—are evidence that “professional” agitators had infiltrated recent campus protests. It is pretending that ChatGPT refusing to say a racial slur is a literal threat to the human race. It is crying crocodile tears over Jeopardy and Star Wars asking about pronouns. It is fomenting an airline-safety panic around “diversity hiring” of Black pilots. It is “canceling” the New York Times columnist David French, a lifelong Republican until Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene, because he’s not conservative enough. These culture-war installments, and the many others like them, share the same kind of emotional infirmity, hyperbolic invocations of violence, and punishment of wrongthink that characterizes left-wing wokeness at its most unhinged.

A recent book by Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, displays this emergent style. Titled The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, the book features a cover image showing Kill All Whits [sic] graffitied on a fence, and is endorsed by fellow firebrand Christopher Rufo. Despite its superficial similarities to earlier screeds about “reverse racism,” this new book is to a remarkable extent—whether its author realizes it or not—influenced by post-2020 wokeness. It onboards many of the rhetorical tricks and ideological assumptions of recent progressive discourse.

Like any good woke writer, Carl castigates colorblindness for being insufficiently attuned to systemic racism. “The default Republican response to repeated racial insult,” he writes, “has been to say, ‘I don’t see race/color,’ even in the face of obvious anti-white animus.” He insists that after “decades of anti-white teachings in schools,” the educational system upholds institutionalized racism. He argues that “anti-white rhetoric can be found throughout the entertainment industry” and that this hidden bigotry must be weeded out of Hollywood. He claims that the media covers victims of crime differently on the basis of race. And this is all ratcheted up to a matter of life and death: “For middle-class and working-class whites, and even for an increasing number of upper-class whites,” he writes, “this anti-white discrimination and racism is deadly—we might even say the problems it causes are intersectional.” If you swapped white for Black, there are more than a few passages in The Unprotected Class that would sound like they could have been written by Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo.

My point here is not to roast Carl or his book. My point isn’t even that we should dismiss his arguments out of hand. For what it’s worth, I do think it’s bad that the media tends to ignore white victims of police brutality, and I agree that anti-white and anti-male sentiment sometimes flows freely in academia in ways that would be unacceptable if directed at any other demographic group. My point is simply to highlight the remarkable degree to which conservatives have taken to appropriating progressive rhetoric and strategies, giving them a reactionary reinterpretation. If many of the talking points we find in The Unprotected Class are warmed-over rehashings of decades’ worth of “reverse racism” discourse, the style in which these talking points are presented is resolutely new. And resolutely woke.

There’s nothing new about conservatives adopting left-wing rhetorical fashions. The right in general, and the far right in particular, has long indulged the same kind of crusading fragility—once more commonly called “political correctness”—that they accuse liberals of exhibiting, particularly in regards to race. As the popular Substack writer John Ganz notes in his new counter-history of the 1990s, When the Clock Broke, arguments about reverse racism, affirmative action, and institutionalized bigotry against white Americans were already firmly ensconced in the national discourse by that decade. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the KKK and a onetime closeted neo-Nazi, ran a disturbingly successful campaign during Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election on these very premises. Duke, who founded an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of White People—a white-supremacist version of the NAACP, ostensibly advocating civil rights for whites—ran on a platform promising to eradicate anti-white racism. “I just think white people should have equal rights too,” the not-so-reformed klansman said in one TV interview.   

It was a message that found purchase with voters. As Ganz notes, Duke was able to break “through to people who would not necessarily move in the Holocaust denial and KKK subcultures,” in part because he gave voice to roiling fears that minorities were being granted preferential treatment over Caucasians. Ganz quotes a retired schoolteacher who told The Boston Globe: “I like the fact that [Duke] thinks that everyone else should get an even break—white or black or Jewish or anything else. I think we have had a lot of antiwhite racism.” Today’s reactionary wokeness amplifies this long-running reverse-racism bugaboo. But it departs from earlier political-correctness panics by adapting these older talking points to both contemporary argumentative styles (emphasizing “safety” and emotional “violence” rather than the “fairness” of yesteryear) and institutional strategies that embrace straightforward white identitarianism (as Duke always dreamed) rather than limpid appeals to colorblindness.

In the post-Trump era, the right’s age-old appeals to reverse racism have careened headlong into progressive discourse about “systemic racism,” helping create a disturbing bastard child: a woke conservatism that champions anti-racism for whites, or, more precisely, anti–reverse racism. To see this new hybrid ideology at work, one need look no further than the reigning head of the Republican Party. Trump leans into the idea that pervasive structural racism exists against Caucasians, and suggests that Americans need to interrogate their implicit bias against white people. “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country,” Trump said in a recent interview. “I think the laws are very unfair right now.”

Underlying left-wing wokeness, even at its most performative and excessive, is a series of partial truths about American society: Even if die-hard progressives are wrong and anti-Black racism does not explain every problem in this country, it does explain quite a few of them. And 2020’s summer of reckoning did draw much-needed attention to entrenched and structurally reinforced racial inequalities in the United States, despite the movement quickly getting derailed by “elite capture”—the tendency of radical social movements to get co-opted by corporate and other rarefied interests.

As someone who became a professor in August 2020, at the incandescent height of progressive wokeness, I have watched higher education around the country become ever more outwardly progressive. But the social-justice rhetoric that now suffuses academia has done absolutely nothing to stop the relentless pace of gigification. More and more academics every year are employed as contingent laborers rather than as tenure-track professors. In fact, a good case can be made that wokeness greases the skids for this trend by allowing universities to appear like benevolent actors, hiring greater numbers of women and people of color, even as they pull the rug out from under labor by placing those new hires in adjunct roles.  

It’s easy to argue that we should have known better, that the progressive ideas championed by CEOs and elite-university presidents were probably not that progressive after all, but the reckoning of 2020 happened for a reason. The Great Awokening was so galvanizing for so many precisely because it always had one foot in reality. The same can be said of conservative wokeness.

The right’s renewed focus on anti-white racism, its opportunistic seizing of the anti-Semitism debate, and the broader anti-DEI craze it has stirred up are also appealing to the masses precisely because they have some truth in them. For example, although it is not true that white men are unemployable in academia, the subject of a recent high-profile social-media culture-war battle, it is obviously the case that efforts to diversify the faculty at many universities mean that white candidates are viewed less favorably. The rise of racially themed cluster-hire initiatives—which allow universities to gerrymander diverse candidate pools by writing job ads for minority-majority subfields such as “decolonial theory”—are a way for academic institutions to skirt antidiscrimination laws. Likewise, although the right’s attempt to portray university students as hardened pro-Hamas, bike-lock-wielding terrorists is plainly ludicrous, it is just as plain that anti-Semitism within the progressive movement is real, however fringe these elements may be. If the ways the right characterizes these issues are often disingenuous and overexaggerated, they are not wholly fabricated either.

But as with left-wing wokeness, conservative wokeness preys on people moved by these legitimate issues to sell them on a hyperbolized politics. Woke conservatism leverages reasonable concerns about a range of issues—the plight of working-class white men, anti-Semitism, misandry, and the like—only to foment a hysteria that distracts from the fact that its principal champions are also the causes of many of the problems it allegedly seeks to solve. The primary threat to the job prospects of many working-class white men in America is not “reverse racism,” affirmative action, or pesky minorities, but accumulated decades of deindustrialization, market fundamentalism, and anti-union efforts that sent blue-collar jobs overseas and gutted the ones that remained. As for the loud warnings about left-wing anti-Semitism, the sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi has demonstrated that “liberals are consistently the least antisemitic ideological group in the US, and white liberals—the Americans most likely to embrace ‘woke’ ideology—are the least antisemitic people in the country by far.”

Wokeness is now the air we all breathe, a noxious miasma of bad faith, hysteria, and shameless opportunism that is animated by not ultimate principles but ultimate convenience. It has not peaked, and it is not peaking. Wokeness has become the status quo, a bipartisan lingua franca, the ruling style of American politics.

Elon Musk Is Winning - The Atlantic. By Charlie Warzel

Read time: 6 minutes

Twitter has always been in the doomscrolling business, and business is booming.

Photograph of Elon Musk

Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters / Redux

July 21, 2024, 10:22 PM ET

Let’s face it, Twitter isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The platform is a lot like a cockroach. It is ugly, skittering, repulsive, and incredibly difficult—despite many efforts—to kill. Elon Musk purchased the network in late 2022, treated its power users with disdain, haphazardly fired much of its workforce, alienated its advertisers, insisted on calling it X, and turned it into a vehicle for an edgelordian political project. People left in droves. And yet somehow, at this moment in 2024, X has the juice.

It’s still a rat’s nest of reckless speculation, angry partisans, and toxicity, but it’s also alive in a way that’s hard to quantify. Joe Biden’s shocking performance at the presidential debate in late June set my timeline ablaze in a way it hadn’t been since 2021. When a gunman shot at Donald Trump eight days ago, the platform did what it does best, offering a mix of conspiracy theorizing, up-to-the-second hard-news reporting, and, perhaps most crucial, a notion of communal spectating (which, despite the awfulness, is genuinely addictive). The past three weeks have been extraordinarily chaotic, full of the kind of infighting, violence, and spectacle that X was built to help document and even fuel. All of that culminated this afternoon when Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race with a series of posts on the platform. X has always been in the doomscrolling business, and business is booming.

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If you step back, though, you may notice how awkward this situation is: Joe Biden chose to make one of the biggest announcements in presidential history on a social-media site owned and operated by one of his opponent’s biggest donors and most vocal supporters. Musk reacted to the news by posting about how his “smartest friends” are voting for Trump and by compulsively replying “Trump/Vance LFG!!” to people on X.

Biden’s staff posted the news on X because they must have understood that, for better or worse, it is the quickest, least mediated way to inject information into the bloodstream of political and cultural discourse. (As Musk remarked about the mainstream media this afternoon: “They’re so slow.”) That X is back to its old ways means journalists, pundits, consultants, lawmakers, and hyper-engaged political hobbyists have all settled back into the familiar pattern of refreshing the app to consume news in the 24-second news cycle. “Among other things this should be the moment that brings all the liberal exiles back to Twitter/X,” the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posted shortly after Biden’s announcement. “Nobody’s ever escaping this platform now.”

Although I don’t imagine that Musk’s platform is going to see a historic influx of new users, Douthat’s point about inescapability feels right. For people who are addicted to political mayhem or need to monitor or report on it for the next four months, avoiding X is going to be extremely difficult.

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When Musk acquired Twitter, my favorite explanation for what he bought came from The Verge’s Nilay Patel, who argued that the platform’s greatest asset was not its technology, but the addled “politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway.” Nobody fit this description better than Musk, an inveterate poster. Patel, writing as if he was speaking to Musk, concluded: “You just bought yourself for $44 billion.”

This is still true, but with hindsight it’s also clear that he purchased the ability to remodel the platform fairly dramatically in his image. Arguably, he went too far. During the first 18 months of his tenure, the platform seemed to revolve around Musk’s own posts and personality. This was partly algorithmic—Musk reportedly asked engineers to boost his posts—and partly cultural. Musk became Twitter’s proprietor and perpetual main character. The platform’s “For You” recommendation feed felt, at times, almost curated by Musk, full of the same stale memes, Reddit-flavored viral slop, and edgelord humor that the billionaire shared via his own account.

But Musk’s stewardship may also have shifted the Overton window, especially among his peers in Silicon Valley—namely, venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen, who has flirted with the right by railing against “wokism” on the platform for years. Musk has used his account to help launch Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s failed presidential campaign as well as to reinstate the banned accounts of conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, trolls, and, of course, Trump himself; Musk’s decision to use X to explicitly advance the Trumpist political project has pushed the social network even more to the right, according to one Pew Research Center report. Among pundits who spend a lot of time on the platform, the vibe has clearly changed. It makes sense that, as Musk’s influence shifts the platform to the right, his contemporaries feel comfortable following suit. As the venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said on his podcast last week: “The future of our business, the future of technology, new technology, and the future of America is really at stake … We think Donald Trump is actually the right choice. Sorry, Mom.”

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Silicon Valley venture capitalists are not, outside fundraising, a key electoral demographic—and perhaps this “mask off” moment has merely revealed sentiments that were there all along. Still, any consideration of Musk’s role highlights the truth about what he really bought: a still-important communication channel that, while open to all, may be influenced by his own grudges and ideologies in both subtle and very direct ways.

Wealthy and powerful men have long owned influential media properties and used them in explicitly political ways, but Musk’s sole executorship of X is slightly different. The site has always felt more like an informational commons than an actual journalistic arm. Now reinvigorated users must wrestle with a difficult question: Should we continue to outsource the liveliest parts of our political conversation to a platform owned by a far-right activist?

In a perfect world, the answer would be a straightforward no. But those who oppose Musk and Trump have reasons to stay. There is the argument that ceding X’s political battleground to the right would be foolish—that staying and waging an ideological fight is both noble and politically savvy. Another line of thinking I’ve heard among journalist peers is that it’s unwise to give up the large audiences that many have built on the platform. If the goal is to inform, you want the largest megaphone.

But staying has its risks. It gives Musk that much more influence over the political discourse, to be conducted on a platform whose algorithms privilege the very rage-bait and reductive engagement that led Musk to become its most famous and well-followed user.

Whether you’re concerned about Musk’s ownership at this point probably depends on your ideology or your viewpoint on Twitter’s relevance. Today, as Trump supporters struggled to make sense of a new campaign landscape, one far-right influencer in my feed issued an all-caps plea: “GET TRUMP BACK ON X NOW!” It was yet another admission that this comparatively small platform still feels like it matters. But there’s another way to interpret right-wing shitposters begging for a Trump return: If X actually matters, if it moves the political needle, why is it that the biggest personality in American politics—the person who cemented the website’s status in the firmament of political discourse—doesn’t post? The answer is that Trump now has his own platform, Truth Social, which he began posting on after Twitter temporarily banned him after January 6. Trump’s account has technically been reactivated on X, but the only thing he’s posted since 2021 is his own mugshot to promote his website.

Musk bought a substantial amount of influence for $44 billion. But his political idol is, for now, still his competitor.

About the Author

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.

Campaign 2024: Don’t Let Trump Benefit From Biden's Economy - Bloomberg. By Matthew Yglesias

Read time: 5 minutes

Imagine you could put the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the various other tumult of the last half decade out of your head and just focus on the past year. In that period, wages have risen faster than prices.

That’s true even though nominal wage growth has itself been slowing down. The key is that the rate of inflation has fallen steadily and is now at the point where it is very close to the Federal Reserve’s target level of 2%. All this happened because of a mix of good luck and good policy — mostly interest-rate hikes that generated some softening of the labor market but nothing like the recession and rising unemployment that were widely predicted as a result of the Fed raising rates.

The policy has been so successful, in fact, that the Fed is now expected to begin cutting rates in September. The mythical “soft landing” has become reality: The US economy has low unemployment and falling inflation. By next year, as interest rates continue downward, America will have a true goldilocks economy to pair with its record stock market and falling crime.

Under ordinary circumstances, you might expect Democrats to be cheering this news. These are not, to state the obvious, ordinary circumstances.

Instead, much of the party is in a dark depression about the reality that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is likely to be the beneficiary. Polls show he is more likely than not to win the election this November, and many Democrats believe that if he does, the country’s sour economic mood will suddenly dissipate.

Making this an even more bitter pill for Democrats is that many of them believe Trump already receives undeserved credit for the placid economic circumstances of 2017-2019. The way they tell it, former President Barack Obama inherited an economy ravaged by the global financial crisis. He oversaw a painstakingly slow but extremely steady recovery. And then Trump took over — and basked in the glory of full employment. Now the very same scenario, with the pandemic replacing the global financial crisis, is poised to play out again with Trump and Joe Biden.

Of course a big part of the problem for Democrats is that most of the public simply doesn’t share their interpretation of the past few years. The way the electorate sees it, inflation may be low now, but it was even lower before Biden took office. It is apparently very difficult for a president to claim victory over a problem people believe to be of his own making. Prices may no longer be accelerating rapidly, or even rising faster than wages, but they certainly haven’t fallen, and the higher interest rates raise the cost of living in ways that aren’t captured by the Consumer Price Index.

Politics aside, the fundamentally sound US economy does raise the question of what exactly Trump plans to do if he wins.

On the one hand, one of the main talking points at last week’s Republican convention in Milwaukee was that things were pretty good in America on Trump’s watch. On the other, Trump keeps promising to do all kinds of stuff in his second term that he didn’t do in his first. In Thursday’s acceptance speech, for example, he promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” He wants not only a very expensive extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but also a large corporate income tax cut. And of course there’s his plan for a 10% across-the-board tariff plus a 60% (or higher) tariff on merchandise from China.

The tariffs and mass deportations would have no precedent from his first term. And doing an even larger tax cut in the face of much larger baseline deficits and higher interest rates seems … risky.

Given that actual economic conditions in the country are, in fact, fine, it’s not obvious why any president would want to rock the boat like this. If the voters want to still be angry at Biden about past inflation, that’s up to them — and it’s certainly fair game for Trump to try to exploit it. But whoever’s fault you think the inflation of 2022 and 2023 was, it genuinely is over. And even if it weren’t, shrinking the labor force, growing the deficit and cutting off foreign trade is a terrible way to fight inflation.

Of course, maybe Trump is not serious about the sweeping changes he talks about on the campaign trail — to say nothing of the even more sweeping Project 2025 changes that Democrats like to warn about. But in general, and despite the widespread cynicism about politics, elected officials try to carry out the promises they make as candidates.

For Democrats, meanwhile, the economic situation may provide a reason over and above the president’s age to think about a new candidate.

Because the truth is that any Democratic presidential campaign is going to be stronger by making the case against Trump — on character and ethics, on abortion rights, on his dangerous economic policy ideas — than by making the case for Biden. The cleanest way to do that is not to have Biden on the ticket at all. Then his chosen successor, rather than a Republican, might be able to reap the rewards of Biden’s policies.

Elsewhere in Bloomberg Opinion:

This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared. The Atlantic - Politics by Tim Alberta

Jul 22, 2024 at 12:24 PM//keep unread//hide

On the evening of Super Tuesday, March 5, shortly before Donald Trump effectively ended the Republican primary and earned a general-election rematch with President Joe Biden, I asked the co-managers of Trump’s presidential campaign what they feared most about Biden.

“Honestly, it’s less him,” Chris LaCivita told me. “And more—”

“Institutional Democrats,” Susie Wiles said, finishing her partner’s thought.

It was a revealing exchange, and a theme we would revisit frequently. The Democratic Party, Wiles and LaCivita would tell me in conversations over the coming months, was a machine—well organized and well financed, with a record of support from the low-propensity voters who turn out every four years in presidential contests. Ordinarily, they explained, Democrats would have structural superiority in a race like this one. But something was holding the party back: Biden.

LaCivita and Wiles expected the campaign’s narrative to be controlled by Democrats from the beginning: Trump, after all, had sabotaged the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election, incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and, more recently, faced numerous criminal prosecutions and the possibility of jail time. And yet Biden offered an opening. Already the oldest president in American history, he began to show signs of rapid deterioration in 2023. This would make the campaign a game of survival more than skill, each candidate needing to convince voters that he was less disqualified than his opponent.

[Read: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

In the race to clear historically low hurdles, Trump began pulling ahead. Polls showed him making unprecedented gains with those low-propensity demographics, specifically Black and Hispanic voters—not because of anything he was doing particularly well, but because of apathy and disillusionment within the Democratic base. As far back as springtime, the numbers told a straightforward story: Biden was not going to win. Democrats could only look on, powerless, as the president denied the party’s young bench—and its organizational machine—a chance to change the narrative.

“I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” Wiles told me on Super Tuesday. “But I do think Democrats do.”

She and LaCivita were right to worry.

Biden’s departure from the presidential race this afternoon—hours after his top surrogates had insisted that he would carry on—is the culmination of a remarkable pressure campaign, launched after his calamitous June 27 debate performance and aimed at pushing the president into retirement. On the Republican side, it caps a frenetic four-month stretch in which Trump’s campaign went from cocky about Biden’s deficiencies to fearful of his ouster to stunned at the sudden letter from Biden doing the thing Republicans thought he’d never do.

Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”

For months, in talking with Wiles and LaCivita, I was struck by their concern about the potential of a dramatic switch—Democratic leaders pushing out Biden in favor of a younger nominee. They told me that Trump’s campaign was readying contingency plans and studying the weaknesses of would-be alternatives, beginning with Vice President Kamala Harris. By the time of the debate, however, they believed that Democrats’ window had all but closed. Even in the immediate aftermath—as Democratic officials openly called for Biden to quit—Wiles and LaCivita were betting on the status quo. More than anything, Trump’s allies believed that the president’s stubborn Irish ego wouldn’t let him back out of a fight with a man he despised.

But they couldn’t take any chances. Two weeks ago, according to a campaign source who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio went into the field to begin testing the outcomes of a Harris-versus-Trump matchup. These surveys, conducted across several battleground states, represented the most concrete step taken to prepare for the possibility of a new adversary. Still, with the polling a tightly held secret—I couldn’t verify the results—there were no outward signs of Trump’s operation expecting a reset. When convention speakers reached out to the GOP nominee’s campaign, gauging whether to hedge their speeches with attacks on Harris, they were told to keep the focus on Biden.

[Read: Biden’s greatest strengths proved his undoing]

In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too early. Campaigns are marathons measured by changes in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee reveled in what felt like a three-week winning streak, dating back to the debate, in which the daily churn of insider gossip focused ever more on Democratic fatalism and Trump’s seeming inevitability. No Republican I spoke with could remember a longer stretch of uninterrupted forward propulsion. And with Biden appearing to dig in, they left Milwaukee believing that this run of luck might never end.

The president’s abrupt exit dashed any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.

Given the historic volatility of this campaign—Trump survived an assassination attempt just last weekend—there’s no guarantee that Harris will ultimately succeed Biden atop the ticket. The Trump campaign certainly believes she will—understandably so, given the rapid consolidation of Democratic officials around her following Biden’s announcement—and blasted out a statement Sunday afternoon that tied Harris to her unpopular boss. “Kamala Harris is just as much of [a] joke as Biden is,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement. “Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”

This is the essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people. “We’ve talked about strength versus weakness, success versus failure,” LaCivita told me before the convention, summarizing the campaign’s strategic vision for the race. “The great thing about that messaging is that it’s not just unique to Joe Biden.”

But messaging is a secondary concern for Democrats. What they need first is a messenger.

It’s true that Harris will struggle to shed some policy-related criticisms; her appointment early in her vice presidency to handle the southern border, in fact, could make her even more vulnerable to immigration-related attacks than Biden was. It’s also true, however, that policy criticisms aren’t what made Biden unelectable in the eyes of most Americans. In an evenly divided and exceedingly polarized nation, Biden lost ground—with his party’s base as well as with independents—because he was perceived to be too old and infirm to serve another four years in office.

Harris is neither of those things. At 59 years old, she is two decades younger than Trump and will have no trouble keeping up with him on the campaign trail or the debate stage. She is also a former prosecutor who, if anything, is known for being too tough on crime. (Trump allies told me they plan to assault her left flank with accusations of Harris over-incarcerating young men of color when she was California’s attorney general.) At the very least, Trump’s lieutenants realize, Harris’s promotion will provide a desperately needed jolt to Democrats nationwide in the form of fundraising, volunteerism, and enthusiasm. Whatever her flaws as a politician—Harris ran a dreadful primary campaign for president in 2020, marked by organizational infighting and awkward sound bites—she does not possess the one flaw that proved insurmountable for Biden.

[Read: Trump versus the coconut-pilled]

Trump’s campaign insists that nothing has changed. Wiles and LaCivita are telling their team that given the obstacles Trump has already overcome—prosecutions, a conviction, an assassination attempt that nearly killed him—a new nominee for the Democrats is just another log on the 2024 inferno.

But they know it’s more than that. They know that from the moment they partnered with Trump, everything they intended for this campaign—the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the ground game, the mail pieces, the digital engagement, the social-media maneuvers—was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.

The mentality of this Trump campaign, LaCivita once told me, is to spend every day on offense. The team wants to shape the pace and substance of every news cycle and force Democrats to react, ensuring that key battles are fought on the GOP’s chosen terrain. It worked so well that Biden was ruined before his party’s convention. Now the Trump operation is vowing to destroy Harris—if in fact she becomes the nominee—in much the same way.

And yet, for a campaign that went to bed Saturday believing it would dictate the terms of the election every day until November 5, Sunday brought an unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the narrative of 2024.

Biden’s Greatest Strengths Proved His Undoing. The Atlantic - Politics by Franklin Foer

Jul 22, 2024 at 5:30 AM//keep unread//hide

For the past few weeks, Joe Biden has cut a deeply unattractive figure. Unable to escape a lifetime of resentments and mired in self-pity, he has stubbornly bucked his party’s elite. It has been exceedingly difficult to view Biden as anything other than an old man, wildly out of sync with his times.

But the same qualities that have served him so terribly as a candidate were also responsible for his policy successes. Right now, most Democrats can see Biden only as a millstone, but history will remember him as one of the most effective presidents of his era. His fingerprints will be all over the American future.

When Biden came to office, pundits liked to cast him as a placeholder—a well-meaning grandpa who would help restore the country’s equilibrium in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s madness. In Biden’s mind, that was just the members of the elite dismissing him, as they always did. Their underestimation stoked his determination to prove himself as one of history’s great men. He privately boasted that his performance would make him worthy of the presidential pantheon that included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

With a one-vote majority in the Senate, he audaciously set out to test the limits of what he could accomplish. The American Rescue Plan, passed in the first months of his presidency, pushed social policy in novel directions. It transferred money directly into bank accounts through the child tax credit, the closest the federal government has come to experimenting with universal basic income. For a brief, glorious moment, the legislation helped cut childhood poverty in half.

But the American Rescue Plan was just the early harvest of an exceptionally verdant legislative season. At a moment when Democrats described moderate Republicans as useless toadies, Biden wooed them—and cobbled together bipartisan majorities to pass an infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act. Like Biden, these bills were dismissed as unexciting. But Biden was trying to restore the American state to its postwar glories. Harkening back to Cold War investments in science, the CHIPS bill spends significant cash on research and development, and the infrastructure bill renovates the transit systems, byways of economic competitiveness.

His signature accomplishment was the Inflation Reduction Act, a dreadfully unexciting name for a hugely significant bill. With its subsidies for clean energy, it will be remembered as the first massive American effort to contain climate change. And perhaps just as significantly, it will be remembered as the moment when the nation reembraced industrial policy. That is, the state began using its resources to guarantee the international dominance of American firms in electric vehicles and alternative energies, the industries of the future.

That’s the most surprising part of the Biden presidency. He broke with the economic paradigm that dominated policy in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Whereas those presidents choked when delivering the praise for unions that party politics demanded, Biden walked the picket line and lent presidential prestige to the movement. He reversed several generations of indifference to the problem of monopoly and installed regulators who went after Big Tech ferociously.

His supreme self-confidence allowed him to buck the conventional wisdom of foreign-policy mandarins. Both Barack Obama and Trump wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, but only Biden had the courage to actually follow through on that decision—although his chaotic execution of a move that voters overwhelmingly supported eroded confidence in his presidency. A devoted believer in old-fashioned transatlanticism, he plowed money and arms into the defense of Ukraine, as if the future of Europe depended on it. These were bold decisions that a president with lesser experience—and a lesser sense of his own acumen—wouldn’t have had the gumption to make.

Biden hates abstraction and pretension. But in his best moments, he could think like a grand strategist. I once heard him extemporaneously describe everything he had done to counter China, and it was impressive to behold. He deepened America’s entanglement with Australia. He helped mend the long rift between Japan and South Korea, so that they could focus on the shared threat they now faced. He successfully schmoozed Narendra Modi, so that India shifted toward the American sphere of influence. Without receiving much credit, he actually managed the pivot to Asia that Obama first promised.

Over the course of Biden’s term, when the press dismissed him as a failure, he kept pushing forward. He never shifted blame onto his aides—and never fired them to cover his own mistakes. He pushed ambitiously, even though he often did so at the risk of his own humiliation.

Before his age became the source of his political demise, it supplied him with wisdom. Before his stubbornness inured him to the inevitable, it carried him to unlikely triumphs. His response to criticism was to always double down on himself.

By running for reelection, despite his advanced age, he was falling back on these very tendencies, disastrously so. Desperately in search of the credit he believed that the world had unfairly denied him, he couldn’t relinquish power. He kept insisting on his own indispensability. By shunning the elites calling for him to drop out, he was also shunning common sense.

But in the end, he has finally relinquished the job he spent his life pursuing. It is evidence that Biden still possesses a politician’s most essential skill, the ability to count noses.

The Trump Campaign Has Peaked Too Soon. The Atlantic - Politics by Elliot Ackerman

Jul 21, 2024 at 8:54 PM//keep unread//hide

With the end of their convention, the Republican Party and Donald Trump have reached what in military theory is called the “culminating point.” “The culminating point of victory,” according to the Modern War Institute at West Point, “is the threshold when military advantages peak and then rapidly turn into disadvantages.”

As an infantryman, I was taught that the culminating point is a paradox; it’s a moment of maximum vulnerability at a time when you believe you are at maximum strength. Let’s say your platoon has just taken a hill. Exhausted and jubilant, you’ve achieved your objective. Your troops have sent the defeated enemy fleeing down its reverse slope. You stand triumphant atop that hill. Psychologically, you’re vulnerable to believing two things: that your victory is complete and that your enemy no longer poses a meaningful threat. The temptation then becomes to destroy the last of your enemy, to take more ground. If you do this, if you don’t recognize your culminating point, if you try to remain on the offensive too long instead of setting up a good defense, you become dangerously exposed to a counterattack by a regrouped enemy.

Republicans in Milwaukee this week were jubilant and a little exhausted. They’d taken the hill on their way to the White House. The photo of Trump in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt calls to mind the most memorable image of a hill-taking in American history, the photo of Marines on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima: people’s positioning in the frame, the diagonal left-to-right composition, the flag.

Following the attempt on his life, Trump posted on Truth Social about uniting the country. By striking a conciliatory and unifying tone, Trump seemed to recognize that he’d reached a culminating point, and that now was the time to consolidate gains and reach out to a wider swath of voters. But his selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate and his combative remarks when accepting his presidential nomination make clear that he will remain on the attack. This renders him vulnerable.

The Republicans may have peaked four months too soon. The Democrats’ best hope for victory is to regroup and vigorously exploit this vulnerability.

The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, coined the term culminating point in his treatise, On War. “If one were to go beyond that point, it would not merely be a useless effort which could not add to success,” he wrote. “It would in fact be a damaging one, which would lead to a reaction; and experience goes to show that such reactions usually have completely disproportionate effects.” History is littered with examples of victorious generals who disastrously overextended themselves once they had reached their culminating point. General Douglas MacArthur’s advance toward the Yalu River, which brought China into the Korean War and led to the encirclement of his army, is considered a classic example. Conversely, President George H. W. Bush’s decision at the end of the Gulf War not to pursue Saddam Hussein’s army into Iraq is a textbook example of a leader who understood that he’d reached his culminating point and needed to show forbearance.

To win, Democrats must regroup and counterattack. It seems more and more likely that President Joe Biden will suspend his campaign in the days ahead. If he does, Democrats must return to the first principles of this race: Americans have always wanted a choice other than Biden or Trump. Democrats must provide them with that choice in order to win. An open convention that is well run, with a process that’s perceived as fair, and that produces a fresh ticket, exploits this key Republican vulnerability.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago is a month away. Several short campaigns followed by an open convention have the potential to reshape the race, to capture the nation’s attention and imagination. Upending the party’s presidential nominating process is a fraught prospect, but for Democrats, these are desperate times, and if they want to win, desperate measures are required. Vice President Kamala Harris likely would and should be considered, but she must compete. The Democrats have a deep bench of leadership. An open convention would showcase the next generation. That ticket would be forged in an unprecedented fire.

Will it work?

Maybe.

It is, of course, a huge gamble, a roll of the dice. But in politics, as in war, every attack is a roll of the iron dice.