The Strategic Failure of 2024 Was Written in 2021
President Biden bet everything on the innate goodness of the American people. We should learn from his mistake.
1. Two Paths in the Wood
At the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency he had a choice.
(1) Biden could treat the Trump years as a dire warning about the American constitutional order and focus his agenda on Trump-proofing our democracy.
This approach would have meant:
Immediately and aggressively pursuing accountability for Donald Trump’s insurrection.
Pushing expansive voting rights protections alongside Electoral College reforms.
Aggressively attacking the oligarch class.1
Making the District of Columbia, and possibly Puerto Rico, states.
Expanding the Supreme Court.
It would have been a radical and divisive path. It would have made Biden tremendously unpopular; not all of it could have been accomplished. This approach would have created intra-party fights and large-scale Democratic losses in 2022. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would have left the party. Democrats would have had to nuke the filibuster and eventually reap the fallout from that decision. Had Biden taken this ruthless approach, it almost certainly would have resulted in Democratic defeat this week and unified Republican control of the government beginning in 2025.
But some of those structural changes would have gotten through.
Maybe we’d have four more Democratic senators. Maybe AWS would have have been severed from the main body of Amazon. Maybe Starlink wouldn’t have a stranglehold on our national security planning. Maybe there’d be a 7–6 liberal majority on the Supreme Court.
Maybe Donald Trump would have been in prison instead of headed to the White House.
Biden’s other option was: (2) Treat the Trump years as an aberration and govern as if it was 2015.
The logic of this position was strong:
Governing in a bipartisan manner was the best way to strengthen the non-Trump elements of the Republican party.
By not aggressively pursuing Trump, Biden avoided turning him into a martyr.
The best way to take down the national temperature was by being calm and carrying on.
Fake-it-till-you-make-it is a real phenomenon. By pretending that everything was normal, perhaps political norms would return.
From the vantage point of January 2021, the path of normalcy was going to be arduous and require a great deal of leadership and political skill from both Biden and Nancy Pelosi. But also: It offered the chance to pass meaningful legislation that would improve the lives of real people.
And if Biden pulled it off, then maybe Democrats could do well in 2022 and hold the White House in 2024.
But even more importantly: Maybe Biden’s normalcy would be contagious. The fever of Trumpism might break and America’s authoritarian moment might pass—so that even if Republicans won in 2024, the party would have returned to health by then.
Obviously, Biden chose the second path.
And to his credit, he executed it almost to perfection. Biden worked with Republicans to pass a number of major bipartisan bills, many of them designed to specifically benefit the real-world circumstances of working-class, red-state Republicans.
The policy side of the Biden administration was more successful that anyone had any right to hope for.
But his larger political project—ending the authoritarian threat—failed utterly and completely.
Democrats got the political wipeout of the first option—all the way down to Manchin and Sinema leaving the party in a huff—but without any of the structural Trump-proofing of the system.
And while Biden’s legislative agenda made life better for working-class people in Republican states, it did absolutely nothing to lower their temperature. Republican voters remained as conspiratorial in their outlook and toxic in their desires as they had been on the morning of January 6, 2021. The only difference is that the Biden administration made them fat and happy, with more jobs and rising wages, so that they could conjure imaginary problems instead of having to deal with real ones.2
Biden’s choice turned out to be a mistake. It was a tactical success—he accomplished nearly everything he set out to do in pursuit of that second path—but a strategic failure. The entire enterprise was doomed because it fundamentally misunderstood both (a) the nature of the American people and (b) how far down the path to authoritarianism our institutions had already marched.
Now maybe these facts were unknowable in January 2021 and it’s unfair to fault Biden for making the wrong call. But it’s not like no one was having these discussions. If you go back to the Secret pods from that period, Sarah and I talked about these two paths a lot. At the time, Sarah was firmly in Path #2 camp. But while I was open to Path #1—the radical path, which assumed the worst about the American people—even I wasn’t convinced that it was the correct choice.
It was a hard call; a judgment call. And I remember saying at the time that I was glad I wasn’t the one who had to make it.
Some decisions are just too big.
I have a great deal of both sympathy and admiration for Joe Biden. You know this. As a matter of X’s and O’s, he was one of the best presidents of the modern era. He beat Donald Trump, took on a difficult job, and executed his vision. He handled the various crises that fate presented him with skill. And then he stepped aside when the country needed him to.
He’s a good man and I’m grateful to him for his service.
But he failed the primary mission of his presidency. The reason he failed is because he made the wrong strategic call at the outset. And he made the wrong call because he couldn’t see America clearly and didn’t understand the reality of our position.
The point of this discussion is not to cast blame. It’s to make sure that everyone sees America clearly and understands the reality of our position going forward.
In a funny way, it was JD Vance, and not Joe Biden, who understood what was happening.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
This diagnosis is correct. The remaining rump of Americans who are committed to liberalism, the Constitution, and the rule of law had better embrace it.
Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.
We ought not repeat his mistake.
2. Crony Capitalism
Well this is interesting: