The Payback Party
A culture of retaliation that originated in the Clinton era is at the heart of the rot that allowed Friday's debate debacle to occur.
I try to only write here when I believe I can say something that hasn’t already been said better by others.
Originally, due to this policy, I didn’t expect to write anything here at all about the debates.
What could possibly be left to say? There are only so many ways to talk about a disaster so self-evident that every post-debate roundtable commentary, from every political perspective, reached the same unanimous conclusion.
Whatever your politics may be, watching an old man flail on a debate stage where he clearly no longer belongs is troubling, purely on a human level. When that man is the leader of the free world, it’s troubling on a geopolitical level.
The Biden campaign calls this a matter of debate performance, holding to the “it was one bad night” line. Ordinary people see an ordinary truth: a man who is now in the “good days and bad days” phase of senescence does not belong in the Oval Office.
Debate post-mortems went rapidly from “how do we get Biden to withdraw?” to “we have no other choice but to continue” after the Biden family met at Camp David and apparently emerged convinced that propping up the old man’s corpse for a few more months is the only path forward for the United States.
Within 48 hours of the debate, a curious bifurcation had developed in Democrats’ reaction to Biden’s obvious cognitive decline:
Scores of retired or no longer active Democrats—former elected representatives, campaign advisers, Cabinet officials, and party reps—could easily see that Biden’s behavior at the debate, in combination with the administration’s reluctance to be seen in impromptu context, reflected serious age-related limitations in his mental faculties. They called for Biden’s withdrawal, and urged the Democrats to find another candidate to field.
Active Democrats in the House, Senate, and DNC itself have clammed up, said that Biden is “the only path forward,” and steadfastly refuse to admit that Biden’s debate performance indicated any deeper problem. Only Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has been willing to go on the record stating the obvious: Democrats are having conversations about whether Biden is still the best choice for November.
“Well, of course,” you just said to yourself, with an undertone of you dummy. “It’s obvious: if anyone currently part of the Democratic Party said a word against him, they’re cooked.”
It is obvious, isn’t it?
Beyond 2024: Retaliation Generation
People did not stop the debate, or the 2024 Biden candidacy, before it happened for the same reason that only former staffers, Cabinet members, and office holders will stop it now: they are afraid.
To violate the imposed consensus about the man in the photograph above is to incur the wrath of the party, to watch your career wither on the vine. And of course, whatever you do won’t change anything—they’ll do what they were planning to do, with or without you.
Ever since the Clinton administration, the Democrats have been run explicitly by a favor-granting machine no one has even denied for two decades. You become a candidate by doing favors for the right people.
Today, a candidate who fully three-quarters of Americans believe is not cognitively fit to lead (and who most of us, if we’re honest, realize is already not the one leading our country), can become the “only option” for a party whose name has become an ever-deepening source of irony.
There is no democracy in the Democratic Party, obviously (this is not a new observation). The rank-and-file don’t matter to the party’s activity (or they would have welcomed a primary challenge as a good warmup for an incumbent they genuinely believed was the best chance to win).
There is no meritocracy, either.
It is a patronage system, and retaliation culture runs all the way to the core. It is the anchor of the party—both in the sense that it has contributed to party stability, and that now, in uncharted waters, it could very well sink the ship.
Retaliation culture means stifling your actual views. It means looking straight ahead at your own next task.
You don’t try to prevent your colleague from falling on their face. You don’t even hold out a cushion to soften the blow. You maintain a stiff upper lip and look away from any humiliation, lest you be accused of contributing to it.
The Democrats have heard all weekend about how awful it is that they have not managed to groom any successor candidates for the presidency, even given a decade in which to swell the ranks of hopefuls. Those ranks, such as they are, now sit full of milquetoasts whose policy differences are microscopic, and whose vision statements could easily be shuffled among candidates and reassigned without anyone noticing or caring.
You will not see some new, visionary candidate emerge at this time. Not at an open convention, not at the supposedly wide-open 2028 primaries. They don’t exist, and can’t.
After all, what inspiring candidate could survive—let alone thrive—in this environment?
Forget personal integrity (everyone already knew the candidate selection process de-prioritizes that). But how about a basic vision, a mission to rally around? What about a candidate whose vision statements didn’t sound exactly like every other candidate in the race?
You won’t find that.
You cannot develop a new vision while everyone else is still looking through The Emperor’s New Rose-Tinted Glasses—which must be worn by everyone in the Democratic establishment in order that they see exactly what they are meant to see (for instance, that President Biden is “as sharp as a tack”).
You find the candidates uninspiring because they are, because it’s all they could ever be. Their problem, and Biden’s problem, are two symptoms of the same disease: workplace retaliation.
The Challenger Disaster
You probably only know Rep. Dean Phillips’s name if you’re from his district in Minnesota, or if you’re particularly concerned with election-year minutiae.
Phillips led a doomed, underfunded primary challenge against Biden. He started late last year and wrapped it up in early March. Phillips wasn’t against Biden, exactly—from a policy position, it’s hard to find much daylight between their views—and had nothing but good things to say about the man’s leadership.
But he also recognized that Biden’s age represented an area of increasing concerns for Americans, and that most people wanted there to be some Democratic alternative to a second Biden term.
Phillips stepped into the void, not really thinking he’d win, but steadfast in his belief that loyal Democratic voters deserved at least a chance to register that they would prefer a different candidate.
For his troubles, he has been chased out of politics altogether. Democrats told him they’d strongly fund a primary challenge in Phillips’s district, and in spite of strong approval ratings, Phillips chose to not seek re-election while sitting in the DNC crosshairs.
“Well, what did he expect?” a Democrat friend said. “He knew the risks.”
He did. Everyone did. We have watched the Senate fall into line seamlessly, with each Democratic Senator lining up to offer his or her own contribution to the litany of false equivalence and equivocation.
And we all know why. You know it and so do I: these people have pretty good jobs, all things considered. They make a decent salary and get a lot of time off. You get a job like that … well, you don’t want to lose it.
For what it’s worth, the DNC has not done anything particularly illegal by making threats to keep its candidates in line.
Workplace retaliation is not illegal (in most cases).
It can be, if you’re retaliated against for engaging in a protected activity (like taking a bathroom break or attending a union meeting). But most of the time, managers can tit-for-tat with the best of them and never face any legal consequences.
Legal consequences, of course, are not the only consequences there are. Legality is not a measure of morality, nor of effectiveness.
For instance, you can retaliate against the men and women of conscience who tell you that the course of action you are pursuing is dangerous. You can send those guys packing, and put on your most confident face as you count down to launch.
Sometimes, the consequences of a retaliation culture look like this:
Other times, they look like this:
Vaclav Havel wrote eloquently in The Power of the Powerless about one of the biggest flaws in retaliation culture: if you are one of the feared elites, your support can erode, sometimes dramatically, without you ever noticing.
Havel imagines a greengrocer who hangs pro-Communist signs in his window—not because he loves communism, but because he loves having a livelihood and feeding his children, and would prefer his windows remain unbroken. Seeing all the pro-Communist signs in the windows, the party apparatchiks are satisfied that the locals believe in the holy Marxist writ.
When trouble comes, though, it turns out that all those people who were hanging signs, who would “go along to get along,” will shove you out of the halls of power while whistling a merry tune, once the tide starts to turn.
The real question isn’t how this was allowed to happen.
It’s whether the Democrats at the top of the party apparatus realize how precariously close they are to the greengrocers taking the signs down, tired of the rituals of humiliation, tired of the fear of retaliation dominating their lives.
A real outsider candidate running in 2028 in the Democratic primary—someone who is not beholden to the Clintons and Obamas and Bidens, someone who is his own man with no fear of career reprisals for standing against the DNC’s hardening orthodoxy—could collapse the whole house of cards.
When that person does emerge, a dam will break: hundreds of Democrats who had been stifled will start to have actual conversations again, about policy differences and new visions.
Who? I have no idea. (Please not Taylor Swift.) But I do know that the next visionary, inspirational candidate won’t come from anywhere near the DNC patronage system.
Until they do, get used to low turnout and lower morale.