Today Congressional Democrats met for a caucus meeting, and it was…complicated.
One lawmaker, interviewed while walking out, was asked if the caucus was on the same page about whether President Biden should remain the party’s standard-bearer in 2024. He responded that they weren’t even reading from the same book.
A small but growing number of Democratic lawmakers, along with many in the commentariat (and many voters who have registered their concerns about Biden’s age and health following the debate), have called on Biden to step aside. Others are whispering to each other and to the press but staying publicly uncommitted. A great many others are doubling down on their support for Biden, with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, for example, saying she wouldn’t contend for president even if Biden dropped out and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declaring that “he is in this race” and “the matter is closed.”
What everyone in this intra-party debate agrees on is the importance of defeating Donald Trump, the MAGA Republican Party, and their Project 2025 vision for authoritarianism in America. The disagreement is over how to get there.
With the situation still fluid and the argument still raging, we at The Ink wanted to break down three of the paths forward. They fall into three categories of the human response to a threat: fight, flight, or freeze.
Some of them give American democracy more of a future than others.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We need your help to keep going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
Today we’re offering new paid subscribers a special discount of 20 percent. Join us now to lock in this lower price forever.
Fight
If Biden wants to come back from this difficult moment, and believes, along with his advisers and doctors and family, that he can, and he has the party behind him, then he would have to come back effervescing. He would have to return, and then remain, twice as vigorous, twice as alive, as any president living or dead.
The Biden who comes back, who gets back up, as he loves to say, would of course be familiar to the country he has served for so long, but he would also be, in many ways, unrecognizable.
He would show real fight. When the Supreme Court threatened the rule of law in this country, he wouldn’t wait to make a statement, and when he spoke, it would be for the ages. He would not tsk-tsk in the familiar Democratic Party way; he would roar like a lion. He would wage a political war on a Court that is suffocating the republic. He would pledge to expand the Supreme Court if voters gave him the mandate — and the majority in Congress.
Got-back-up Biden would be so bold that people wouldn’t know what hit him. He would finally propose a real second-term agenda where saving democracy is the heavy apps but there is a full dinner afterward. He would borrow the most popular and attractive ideas that have percolated in various parts of his broad coalition and propose them all: a universal basic income; Medicare for All (or, at a minimum, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s proposal for Medicare for All Who Want It); a wealth tax to finance universal free public college and childcare, with thanks to Senator Elizabeth Warren; the total elimination of federal student debt; climate policies to save the world and support people through the upheavals of the transition to a sustainable economy; the bulk purchasing by the federal government of medical debt; a care economy agenda of paid leave and maternity leave and real support for families and caregivers, paid and unpaid; the codification of Roe v. Wade in law; the elimination of the filibuster; fearless gun control measures; tangible democracy reforms on voting rights and gerrymandering and experimentation with new ideas like ranked-choice voting; and a new deal for housing in America that makes the American dream of homeownership no longer seen a mirage and a cruel joke.
A Biden who is able and chooses to double down would dazzle us with so many plans, so much immediate and medium- and long-range help for American families, so much progress that makes our todays feel like a meaningful reprieve from our yesterdays, that we might even forget his age. After all, people don’t care about a number; they care about vigor — because what they want to be able to count on is the strength of a person who can help them in spite of the odds.
Biden cannot alter his date of birth. But he could, if he is able, come back from the brink with a vigor that blows minds. A vigor that breaks from the tepidness and incrementalism and risk aversion and hyper-caution that have defined the Democratic Party in the modern era. The experience of being a Democrat in this country all too often is feeling that people who represent you and share your values bring slide rules to world wars. Got-back-up Biden, grateful for his renewal, would come equipped.
And got-back-up Biden would be everywhere. No one would accuse him of hiding, of waiting too long, of ducking interviews, of avoiding crucial moments. He would put that criticism, rather than himself, to pasture. Because he would be omnipresent in the culture. He would be in rapid-reaction videos. He would give resounding speeches with lines that your unborn descendants will quote from by memory. He would no longer need to be goaded to command attention. He would accept that making the narrative is a primary responsibility of the presidency. He would do two-hour-long news conferences that make journalists want to go home. He would not speak in the familiar Democratic Party jargon of facts and figures and policies and laws. He would paint a riveting vision of a beautiful tomorrow, and then tell us how we get there.
When grave things happened — as they seem to with near-daily frequency these days as the decades-long sowing by the extreme right occasions a terrifying amount of reaping — people would no longer be left feeling defenseless, as they have so often in this era. They would be bowled over by the frequency and fervency of the president’s actions. They would know that someone takes this as seriously as they do, and they wouldn’t just feel it in a cerebral way. They would know in their gut that someone has their back. They would never again ask where their leader is.
The best way to reassure people that you’re not fading into the sunset isn’t to tell them or plant newspaper leaks. It’s to show them, to the point of their wishing you’d slow down.
Flight
Were he to read the above, President Biden might think: “Yeah, I can do that. And, yeah, I want to do that. I want to go big.”
But he might also, and quite reasonably, say: “You know, that sounds like a lot for where I am in life right now.”
In the fight-or-flight language of psychology, “flight” can have a negative ring. But sometimes flight keeps everyone alive.
If the president decides that a roaring, rocking, fount-of-energy, more-plans-than-you-can-shake-a-stick-at, twice-as-alive re-election campaign and second term are not what the fates intended, despite his intentions and desire to serve and promises to his late son and other relatives and the nation, there is no shame in it. He would not be saying he didn’t have any life left. He would simply be saying that people deserve a level of action that he deserves to no longer have to muster.
In the Jewish tradition, during Passover time you’ll hear the song “Dayenu,” with its refrain “It would have been enough.” Even if Biden can’t make it to the finish line he imagined for himself, it would have been enough. To choose to serve the public for so long is a rare human quality. To choose to let go for the sake of that public — these days, it is completely unheard of. When George Washington did it some time back, it was the de facto birth of the republic, making actual the de jure promises of the Constitution. Leaving could also be a great vote of confidence in generations to come.
But I suspect that Biden will not leave because of shaming or cornering. He must be given what has been called “the golden gate of retreat.” If leaving is to be, ultimately, his choice, he must be given a way of choosing it that does not feel like a humiliation. Some of those arguing for him to do so could benefit from greater empathy and strategy.
Freeze
The third option is the one that must not be on the table.
It is to freeze in the face of these threats: the threat of the present doubts about his age and health and capacity, the threat of the return to power of a fascistic and now better-prepared Trump, the threat to American democracy and the rule of law.
In the current situation, to take the path of freezing means to stay in the campaign, stay in office, but with a trickling level of presence and energy and swagger and vision that the country simply cannot afford today.
The freeze scenario is neither going big nor going home. It is staying in and going small.
It is refusing to cast aside the muted, take-the-high-road, overcautious ethos of the Democratic Party. It is refusing to respond to the Supreme Court’s recent rulings by using every power you have to help people, the court cases you might face be damned. It is refusing to take communication seriously as central to the job of being president. It is refusing to shake things up. It is refusing to use your power, every ounce of your power, relentlessly. It is refusing to alienate the moderates by delivering real change people can feel in their everyday lives. It is refusing to recognize that you’re in a war for democracy and refusing to act like it.
There may be a way forward for America, however choppy, in the first, “fight” scenario. There may be a way forward in the “flight” scenario, as chaotic as it may be.
The only truly unfathomable — even catastrophic — outcome would be to insist on staying at the helm of a republic in existential danger and not being an absolute volcano of energy and strength and charisma and oratory and real action in its defense.
Go big and make people forget your age, or go home and savor the rest that you have earned. What middle path is there?
Finally, there is not only the question of what is to be done but also how to go about doing it. People will long judge not only what answer Biden and his staff and party came to, but also the values and integrity they brought to the work of deciding.
In the 2024 election, Biden and the Democratic Party are up against a fascist cult. What is vital is to go about this grappling and choosing about Biden’s future in ways that draw contrast with that cult. There is always a risk of mimicking your foes.
First, the Trump cult is built on lies. Therefore, the Democrats must demonstrate, whatever they decide, a commitment to the truth. Be more transparent than the law requires. Level with people about what is going on. Share struggles. Trust voters with facts.
Second, the Trump cult is built on gaslighting. Therefore, Biden and his team must steadfastly refuse to condescend to people about what they are seeing with their own eyes — a sight that often resonates with experiences they have had up close with family members they love and have cared for. The decision to stay or go is one thing, and it is Biden’s decision. But when people feel like what they know they saw is pretended away, they become very angry, and they are left with the feeling that manipulation is all we can expect from political leaders of every stripe. It is a very lonely, dispiriting, life-sapping feeling.
Third, the Trump cult, being a cult, is based on blind loyalty and a total absence of internal dissent. Therefore, the Democrats, as they earnestly wrestle with this decision, should do so in a distinctly non-cult-like way. Embrace contention. People are not trying to be cretins here. They are struggling with hard questions. Give people grace. Give the president a face-saving way out if he needs one. Give donors and political observers who are concerned the benefit of the doubt that they are speaking from honest worry for the country, even if their proposed solution isn’t yours.
Fourth, the Trump cult is based on attacking the media. Therefore, the Democrats should decide whatever they decide while respecting the role, indeed the duty, of a free press to ask hard questions that are on voters’ minds. The press is never the enemy.
Finally, the Trump cult is built on the idea of one man’s importance over an entire country’s. Therefore, Biden and his party must demonstrate that their lodestar in going through this moment is putting the country ahead of party and certainly ahead of any individual party member. That they are not motivated by inertia or custom or deference to power or ideas about whose turn it may be. They must show that the only thing Democrats care about is what happens to the country, and that, as a party, they are willing to do anything for the country’s sake, whether that means rallying around a leader or daring an open convention.
It has been a grim few weeks for Democrats and for America’s pro-democracy majority more generally. The Supreme Court has delivered multiple earth-shattering reminders that the right-wing vision to sack democracy in favor of constitutional-ish oligarchy is being consummated. The first presidential debate of 2024 shook people to their core. The right-wing Project 2025 is afloat, Trump’s a blueprint for dictatorship.
But when human freedom gets knocked down, it gets back up. It may be one of us who stands at the helm, or another. But there is a way forward from this moment. Maybe it’s a changing of the guard. Maybe it’s a president who returns from a brush with political death and commits to so irrepressibly, boldly, palpably deliver for people that they copy his breakfast order.
Sunset comes for all of us in the end. Sometimes it comes for republics, too. The difference is that the latter kind of sunset is a choice.
Your support makes The Ink possible. We’d be honored if you’d become a paid subscriber. When you do, you’ll get access each week to our regular posts and our interviews with the most thoughtful people out there — and you’ll be able to join the conversation in our comments section.
Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images
This post was originally published on The.Ink.