Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a ‘Commentator’ post. These are ‘riffs’ on the news. I believe that there is a coherent political philosophy buried in here, but that’s not really the point: the point is to read widely and to think through the main ideas in the political discourse. At
, revisits To The Lighthouse.Best,
Sam
THE BIDEN PROBLEM
So, this is about as depressing a slate of stories as I can think of. The Democrats out of inertia and short-sightedness saddling themselves with Biden, Biden proving to be close to unelectable, support for Ukraine whittling away, and more and more of US infrastructure and military capability finding itself in the hands of a mercurial billionaire, of whom many things could be said but the most obvious is that he has a screw loose.
After the cozy, Barbenheimer summer of good feelings, the sense is of limping along to 2024, with everything hanging in the balance and with the odds very much tipping towards Trump.
In the spring, I wrote that Democratic candidates, for the good of everybody, had to challenge Biden. I’m a little tired of making this point, but I’m convinced that I was right. The scandal here is that Democratic challengers were lining up for a primary, and both Biden and the Democratic establishment heavy-handedly intervened to keep the field clear. This story hasn’t really been covered — I’m mostly reading between the lines on a few stray pieces, like Politico’s coverage of why Gavin Newsom decided not to run — but the tenor of the conversation comes through. “I’ve told everyone in the White House, from the Chief of Staff to the First Lady [I won’t run],” said Newsom — which means of course that everybody from the Chief of Staff to the First Lady was on his case.
Newsom had been the first to maneuver into position to challenge Biden, in what was expected to be a stampede. He was opportunistic, ambitious, exactly the sort of person to betray the head of his party, but — as a French phrase has it — “it’s a fine thing when one can’t trust one’s own traitors.” Newsom trimmed his sails to the situation following the midterms (and whatever behind-the-scenes pressure he was getting). The conventional wisdom was that, since the Dems had done less badly than expected, Biden could reap the credit; and the thing to do was to just lie low and follow the leader through 2024.
But that logic is running into a barrage of impossible-to-spin-away polling. A recent CNN poll shows that only 26% of voters think Biden has “the stamina and sharpness to effectively serve as president” (down from 44% in 2019) and that 67% of Democrats would prefer somebody else be nominated. Even The New York Times acknowledged the clear failure of the Democratic Party’s leadership to read the mood of the electorate. “The voters don’t want [Biden], and that’s in poll after poll after poll,” said James Carville, quoted in the piece.
Suddenly, mainstream outlets are scrambling to offer up some sort of alternative (Harper’s, for instance, quotes a prominent New Hampshire politico fantasizing about a ballot with some other names on it), but the window has passed. As Newsom — no Ted Kennedy — said, “The train has left the station. We’re all in. Stop talking.”
On his Substack, Andrew Sullivan has a coruscating piece on the Democrats’ latest act of self-sabotage. Calling for Biden to step down, he writes that what the Democrats need is a fresh narrative.
“‘But who else?’ the Democrats say. I don’t know. But that’s what primaries are for,” Sullivan writes. “A younger candidate would instantly reverse the age argument in the Democrats’ favor. The news cycles would be full of Dem debates, fights, campaigns and energy — and not dictated by the defensive torpor of a frail octogenarian, or the unending narrative of Trump against the corrupt elites.”
The trouble with Sullivan’s argument (appealing to Biden’s civic duty) is that it doesn’t contend with what a stacked deck the primary already is. I’m the only candidate (!), Biden would argue, so why should I step down?
The brave decisions would have had to happen about a year ago, and nobody on the Dem side had the courage to run or, even, to buck conventional thinking about the wisdom of sticking-with-incumbents-no-matter-what.
So here we are. The entire Democratic base is screaming for somebody, anybody, to take Biden’s place. In its great decorousness, The New York Times is able only to say: “Despite their efforts — and the president’s lack of a serious opponent within his party — [Democratic party leaders] have been unable to dispel voters’ concerns about Biden that center largely on his age and vitality.” And we sleepwalk into another election cycle where the Democratic establishment is speaking only to itself while the electorate becomes more radical, more aggrieved.
Even worse, Biden is no longer quite the safe, innocuous choice that he seemed to be both in 2020 and for the first years of his presidency. A number of stories, long relegated to ‘the fringe,’ have become thoroughly mainstreamized. Hunter Biden may well go to prison; it’s becoming increasingly preposterous to believe that Hunter and Joe’s business dealings were completely separate from one another’s. The 5th Circuit’s ruling that the Biden White House violated the First Amendment by “coercing” and “intimidating” tech companies to suppress Covid “misinformation” makes official what free speech advocates have known since 2021. (And it’s utterly laughable, by the way, that former Twitter Head of Truth and Safety Yoel Roth could this week argue in The New York Times that there was “nothing of interest in the Twitter Files” or, by extension, in ‘Twittergate’ — at the same time that federal judges are finding that the Biden administration was “not shy” in its requests for the suppression of posts it disliked.) And the recent bombshell whistleblower report that the CIA bribed its own employees to promote a zoonotic theory of the origin of Covid-19 offers vivid insight into the mendacity of the establishment in this era.
With some of these stories (e.g. Hunter Biden’s business dealings), it’s sort of possible to see the bottom of the pool; with others it’s not. As an electability issue, these sorts of stories are more and more sticking to Biden. He no longer seems like the big-hearted, middle-class guy who “cares about people like you,” in the language of the CNN poll. Now, he seems shabby, territorial, coercive to those voters who even are invested enough to think beyond his age and “sharpness.”
As Sullivan writes, “Trump’s ability to survive and actually thrive these past three years is staggering. It’s part of a political genius his enemies continue to under-estimate.” The Democrats’ answer has basically been to try to seal off public discourse — to quiet dissent; to pretend that the Kennedy/Williamson primary challenges to Biden don’t exist; to hope that nobody sees videos of Biden clearly suffering the effects of age. This strategy, of making themselves the sole source of legitimacy and deeming everything else fringe, sort of worked in 2020 and 2022. Sooner or later, time is going to run out on it — and, probably, at the worst possible moment, in 2024. Time for the Democrats, as Sullivan writes, to move forward instead of backward; to “chart some kind of future that feels better”; to believe, once again, in free debate, wide-open elections, the democratic process.
STAND FAST IN UKRAINE
The inertia of the Democratic Party is so troubling given the almost unimaginable stakes of the 2024 election. Trump’s vindictive assault on democratic institutions is its own set of concerns. Very obviously, a Trump victory in 2024 means the end of U.S. support for Ukraine (he has said that he would end the war in one day), and that means that Putin’s great military strategy is just to wait for the election results.
We’re obviously getting into a very difficult period where, as Thomas Friedman writes in a sober analysis in The New York Times, “some wrenching geopolitical dilemmas await us.”
To be clear, none of the hawks have any great ideas for how to proceed — nor do they pretend to. The conflict has ground down into a bruising war of attrition, and Russia has the advantage of holding onto a defensive line. Putin clearly believes that time favors him — internal opposition to his war is negligible; and it’s not his country that’s being destroyed. Foreign Affairs Magazine offers a grim, straightforward analysis of Putin’s idea of statecraft:
In 2015, after the worst of the fighting in eastern Ukraine ended after a flawed cease-fire deal, the cardinal error of the West was to lose interest. Somehow the crisis was supposed to take care of itself. From this, Putin learned what he took to be an essential truth about the fickleness of Western leaders.
The task, then, for those who care about Ukraine, and believe its cause to be just, is to hold the line, to continue to advocate for Western support even in the absence of sterling battlefield victories, even as apathy increases. At the moment that mostly involves giving ourselves pep talks, reminding ourselves that the cause really matters.
Timothy Snyder and Friedman, both writing from Ukraine, offer a sort of half-hearted belligerence. Friedman advocates for the U.S. to step up its armaments deliveries to Ukraine. “I’m talking the kitchen sink,” he writes. Snyder encourages Ukraine to more aggressively take the war to Russian soil. “Ukraine is deploying its own long-range strike capability to destroy airplanes and logistics in Russian territory, which is a necessary condition for winning the war,” he writes.
Neither seems particularly convinced by their own tough talk. Foreign Affairs’ advice that “political leaders in the United States and Europe should do what they can to entrench financial and military assistance to Ukraine in long-term budgetary cycles, making the aid more difficult for future officials to unwind” may be more apposite for what the shape of U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine actually looks like.
In terms of the stakes of the war, Friedman allows himself to indulge in a bit of a Syriana-ish fantasy about expanding U.S. geopolitical influence. “Ukraine is a game-changing country for the West,” he writes. “Its integration into the European Union and NATO someday would constitute a power shift that could rival the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification.”
Snyder has a more realistic sense of the meaning of the war. “[Ukraine has] performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny percentage of NATO military budgets and zero losses from NATO members,” he writes. In order words, Ukraine — without the benefit of any formal NATO or Western protections — has become NATO and the West. It’s still a Ukrainian war. The West retains its relatively modest obligation to support and supply Ukraine. That’s been an easy role to fulfill so far; it’s no less important as it becomes more challenging.
More than any specific programme of support for Ukraine (fighter jets, etc), what’s required in the West as “the painful trade-offs” become apparent is a shift in mentality. The West embarked on its support of Ukraine in 2022 hoping either for victory or a restoration of the international order. The reality is a little more grim than that. Putin’s Russia is a tough, intractable opponent. Russia and China have in the last years moved inexorably away from the Atlanticist-led international coalition. It was a nice decades-long dream to think that the Cold War was over and a more harmonious sort of international politics could prevail, but it was a dream. We’re back into an era of wrenching geopolitical dilemmas, of zero-sum politics, with, in many cases, no happy endings. Putin understands this. We need to as well.
THE MUSK PROBLEM
I truly cherish every second that I spend not thinking about Elon Musk. I’m not on Twitter, have no interest in any of Musk’s products, but Musk has become inescapable, and at the moment there’s a deluge of stories about him. Walter Isaacson has his new biography out on Musk; and, more adversarially, Ronan Farrow has a piece out called “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule.”
The real point is that Musk is not just a very-rich-person and not just a very-rich-person-with-influence; he has become a sort of one-man, second-string state. Farrow writes:
In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded.
Or, as Jill Lepore, in a really apocalyptic mood, puts it:
Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply.
What comes to mind most obviously is the kleptocratic period of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the ‘90s — the state losing control over its infrastructure and private businessmen swooping in. Being only slightly hyperbolic, a similar set of developments occurred (more quietly) in the U.S. over roughly the same period. Between a libertarian-minded market ethos and a collapse of antitrust protections, the U.S. state simply lost interest in governing. Decades of privatization led, ultimately, to a vacuum, in which an unusually determined oligarch like Musk could simply gobble up a wide swathe of what was supposed to be the public sector. Even allowing for exaggeration, the quotes Farrow digs up by and about Musk are breathtaking in their audacity. Asked if he had more power than the U.S. government, Musk replies, “In some ways.” And Reid Hoffman, a longtime partner of Musk, tells Farrow, that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: l’état, c’est moi.”
Farrow’s piece offers a series of unnerving instances of the U.S. government’s subservience in appealing to Musk. SpaceX has made itself an essential purveyor of services to NASA. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket,” a former NASA administrator tells Farrow. Musk’s Starlink satellite communications system has become “the essential backbone of communications on the battlefield” in Ukraine — and a tremendous liability given Musk’s personal sympathies towards Putin. Farrow quotes a senior defense official as saying: “On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see ‘the entire war unfolding’ through a map of Starlink activity. This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ and we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’” This state of affairs reached a head in a disputed moment in 2022 in which Starlink suddenly cut out in the midst of a Ukrainian offensive, leading to “chaos” on the battlefield and putting the U.S. Defense Department in the position of supplicant calling Musk and begging him to extend services. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told Farrow. “That sucks.”
The gist of much of the current coverage of Musk is that there’s just something off about him. And the commentary has a way of striking haphazardly at him. Read Lepore’s intemperate New Yorker piece on him and Musk is accused of being: a misogynist; a bad father; a poor namer of children; unfunny; an apartheid sympathizer; a closet racist; a transphobe; a Covid denier; a mean boss; and, the clincher for Lepore, a willful misreader of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Farrow makes a great deal out of Musk’s sudden interest in politics. “There was nothing political about him ever,” an associate told Farrow. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.” Which feels to me like one accusation too many — like it’s a shock that a middle-aged guy is interested in politics?
Personally, I agree with Musk on some political points (disagree with him probably on most), don’t mind that he has injected himself into the political discourse. It’s not that he’s a “supervillain,” as Lepore puts it. He clearly is a bit loco — his children are, after all, named things like X AE A-XII and Techno Mechanicus; his vision for the future is constantly ideas like robot taxis without steering wheels or mirrors that would free us from the “drudgery of driving” (but don’t we like to drive?); and his relentless Mars obsession is “kind of bizarre thinking,” as Bill Gates delicately put it — but that’s not what matters. Billionaires are supposed to be eccentric, and they’re allowed to have political opinions. The issue is about maintaining a firewall between the public sector and the potentates of the market. That’s what’s broken down decisively over the past decades. That’s what needs to be restored. It starts with a government that believes in itself. Which is not on offer, unfortunately, from anybody currently close to power.
What will the future hold for us? I am more and more discouraged, worried that the loss of democracy is now a real possibility as debate degrades and debases. On that point, I would only argue that that is one aspect of Biden's tenure that cannot be criticized. You have here an essay to consider deeply and I look forward to comments on it ... Thank you so for the mention of my essay on Woolf's _To the Lighthouse_.
On that point, I do wonder what all the politicians and commentators, and whatever Musk might be or become and all that you mention are reading. Sullivan and Friedman we know are deep readers. My point may be off center but I firmly believe that literature deepens our minds and opens our hearts ... As one example: No matter what Obama did or didn't achieve, his reading always revealed the man's foundation in thought ... I don't see that in Trump in any way whatsoever--and that perhaps defines the difference of the two prospective candidates for me. One reads Seamus Heaney for sure. The other only his own self-absorption ...
The Biden issue is also driving me nuts along the same line of thought you lay out here. How is it even possible that the entire party's leadership refuses to understand the enormity of the risk they're taking by just lining up behind Biden's candidacy against the highest possible stakes imaginable--losing this election isn't just an existential threat to the country but specifically to their party; they could find themselves effectively barred from power. So even in the selfish sense of safeguarding their own interests and patronage networks, it's the height of foolishness to stay the course. It intensifies the sense that the party is weak and intimidated, which is precisely the opposite of what they need to communicate right now.