In his Washington Post opinion piece today, “As Democrats dither, Biden bleeds out”, Dana Milbank not only invokes the graphic bleeding out image in his title but uses the phrase two times it in his essay:
Democrats can’t counter the slander or sell the (broadly popular) plan, because they haven’t finalized the details. And as Democrats dither, Biden is bleeding out; his support has dropped into the low 40s.
and
But until Biden can pin down Manchin, the bleeding will continue.
Apropos of Milbank's title, his OpEd is an example of the “if it bleeds it leads” saying about news coverage. He also brings up the Gestapo:
But while Democrats squabble over relatively minor differences in how much to spend over how long a time, Republicans have again gone demagogic, raising phony threats about socialism, trillions of dollars of additional debt and a Gestapo-like IRS. (Some of their agents do carry guns.)
Polls results are as fickle as many people are. At best they are a snapshot of a moment in time. For example the title of this Sept. 6, 2021 Newsweek article is “Donald Trump Beats Joe Biden in 2024 Election Poll,”
A new poll has placed former President Donald Trump as the favorite to win the 2024 U.S. election, slightly edging Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.
A national Emerson College Poll found that if the two men were to go head-to-head in 2024, Trump would be slightly favored with 47 percent against Biden's 46 percent.
Biden has split job approval among registered voters, the poll found. It said that around 47 percent disapprove and 46 percent approve of the work he is doing as president. The other 7 percent were undecided.
PolitiZoom, even though their title is Emerson Poll Has Trump Beating Biden In 2024, they correctly remind us the following in their first paragraph:
Before you have heart palpitations and keel over, the poll cited herein shows Donald Trump at 47% of the vote to Joe Biden’s 46% and as you well know, that is a statistical tie. Anything within 3.5% is considered within the margin of error, so 47 to 46 is a statistical tie.
Biden's dip in the polls doesn't mean he’s a goner, far from it. He faces challenges of course but ultimately what he has to do to win back favor among the electorate, whether measured in polls or not, is to stay the course. Those who think he is niave and not only does’t appreciate the risks to democracy posed by Trump and his enablers but isn’t politically savvy enough to anticipate contingencies and develop long range game plans to effective deal with them are underestimating him.
I am tired of misleading clickbait headlines. I am tired of apocalyptic predictions about the demise of our democracy and the fall of President Biden. (I wrote about this yesterday). Using a phrase that means literally to lose or cause to lose all or almost all of the blood from the body and is sometime used on TV crime shows to mean that a character is in imminent danger of death is over the top.
I agree that it is vital to sound a balanced clarion call about our democracy being at risk the way the co-author of “How Democracy Dies” does in the Salon interview below:
Republicans would "rather end democracy" than turn away from Trump, says Harvard professor — Co-author of "How Democracies Die" says the GOP is ready to seize power. But they might not be able to keep it
Quotes from co-author of “How Democracies Die” Steve Levitsky:
We wrote the book because we started to see, yeah, well, we might break our democracy. And even though at the time we may have only seen the risk level as a five or a six, we thought it was worth trying to raise the level of awareness, which I think we've done. Americans are much more worried than they were five, six, seven years ago, but I think you're right. We in the media, most Americans and most in the establishment and even the Democratic Party, even the Biden administration, doesn't quite have the level of urgency that we need to have.
Note how Levitsky avoids hyperbole. Above he says “doesn’t have quite the level of urgency” emphasis on the word “quite” and below how he eschews the use of the term “fascist”.
I've always personally resisted the "fascist" label. I think it gets thrown about for right-wingers we don't like way too much. I think the label is growing more defensible now than a couple of years ago. But I think it's more straightforward and more defensible to say that this is now clearly an openly authoritarian party.
He doesn’t engage in the doom and gloom predictions some authors like Michael Gerson have done (see my previous diary for summary of Gerson’s OpEd) or the Editorial Board of The New York Times did (read summary of “Did we come close to a constitutional crisis on Jan. 6th. It depends on whom you ask...”) The say that:
The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself.
This is based on the farfetched notion that a six point plan to steal the election concocted by attorney John Eastman who The NY Times describes as follows could actually work flawlessly:
John Eastman’s path from little-known academic to one of the most influential voices in Donald J. Trump’s ear in the final days of his presidency began in mid-2019 on Mr. Trump’s favorite platform: television.
Mr. Trump, who had never met Mr. Eastman, saw him on the Fox News talk show of the far-right commentator Mark Levin railing against the Russia investigation. Within two months, Mr. Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hourlong meeting.
As I wrote in yesterday’s diary I think progressives and anti-Trump journalists and pundits are right to sound the alarm about the prospect of Trump becoming president again, and also about state legislators passing laws to disenfranchise voters likely vote for Democrats. I do not believe that the death of democracy is imminent at this moment. Democracy is under assault. Authoritarian rule, or worse, if Trump ends up being reelected is the worst case. I don’t think, as Fiona Hill said “democracy is done if Trump is reelected” but I do think the country would be plunged into turmoil because if he did win it would likely be because of a victory in. the Electoral College and that he would lose the popular vote yet again quite possible by more than he lost it (2.9 million) to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Bluntly stating that democracy is done, absolutely positively done, finished, caput, if Trump is reelected is hyperbole. I’d say democracy as we cherish it or as we knew it is done. Democracy will, without a doubt, be in peril if he is reelected. Democracy will be eroded. The rule of the majority will be subsumed under the rule of a minority who cheated their way into power especially if the GOP controls Congress. Add to that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and we’ll see MAGA policies enshrined in law even when the majority of American oppose them. With Trump’s America First isolationism we will no longer be welcomed by other democratic countries as a partner, let alone as their leader.
Do we face a crisis for democracy? The answer is yes. However democracy as a patient is not terminal. In the worst case a major battle to save it will ensue.
I think we have to avoid the boy who cried wolf situation. The wolf pack is circling but they have yet to eat any sheep. In fact they have proved remarkably inept in trying to promote The Big Lie. (See “Trump’s Fraud Claims Died in Court, but the Myth of Stolen Elections Lives On — For years, Republicans have used the specter of cheating as a reason to impose barriers to ballot access. A definitive debunking of claims of wrongdoing in 2020 has not changed that message.” NY Times subscription)
To paraphrase the saying, the howls of the Trump wolves are worse than their bites.
Ultimately the Republicans will lose because the majority of the country does not want an autocracy whether ruled by Trump or other far right Republicans. It could take more election cycles but eventually demographic changes will catch up with the Republicans.
A personal note on my hyperbolic past:
During my student radical days in the height of the anti-Vietnam movement I dramatically invoked the imagery of jackbooted SS troops storming the university saying that we dare not pretend the footsteps we hear outside our doors are nothing to worry about in a speech to the student body of my Social Work Department (author’s 1969/70 student ID). This was when I urged us to vote to go on strike after the Kent State shooting. We were the second department at Michigan State to do so. (Read about protests at MSU.)
I’m somewhere in this photo: