Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin with Tressie McMillan Cottom of The New York Times and her report on the state of American democracy this past week as she was traveling in the country from which democracy gets its name.
When the Supreme Court decision was announced I had moved on to Greece. Again, it felt like a portentous place to be as the United States moved closer to an autocracy than it has been since perhaps Reconstruction. Greece prides itself as the birthplace of deliberative democracy. As you walk through the ancient ruins, the biggest ideas to transform human society don’t look very big. The buildings where they were debated are crumbling. Modern development dwarfs what were once massive structures to Western ideology. Despite standing for more than 2,000 years, these relics of early democracy feel fragile.
Americans don’t build monuments as well made as the ancient Greeks built. The idea has always been that our democratic ideas are the real monuments. The statues and artifice of political memory should never be stronger than those ideas. Sometimes we have made our monuments cheaply, as if to say that having perfected the means of democracy — if not its platonic ideal — we don’t need to bother with strong foundations and materials. [...]
However poorly Biden performed at that debate (and he was embarrassing), debates are theater. However ill equipped the Democratic Party is to provide an heir apparent — and they are embarrassingly unprepared for this predictable eventuality — their dysfunction is not the clear and present danger. The Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity is a harbinger of not just the court’s growing power but of Democrats’ inability to mount a populist defense. This conservative bloc on the court reflects years of undemocratic political maneuvering, from Mitch McConnell stealing a seat to the political activism of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas. Their decisions are not only codifying minority interests, they are a show of strength for a Republican Party that has no intention of ever ceding power to majority will again.
Paul Waldman at MSNBC gives some reasons why Vice President Kamala Harris might be a far more formidable presidential candidate now than she was previously in the 2020 Democratic primary should she be asked to step into the presidential race.
Memories of that failed bid hover over Harris as Democrats consider the possibility that Biden will abandon his attempt at re-election, leaving her the logical nominee of their party. Is she a strong enough campaigner to win a general election? Could she unite the party and win over independent voters? Would she be able to overcome the inevitable torrent of racism and misogyny headed her way? [...]
Let’s dispense with one question right away: If Biden does decide to step aside, Harris will be the party’s nominee. That’s due not to any ballot requirement (the party hasn’t yet named Biden as its nominee), but to political reality. Harris is the vice president and heir apparent. Skipping over her would be taken as an insult to Black women, one of the party’s most important constituencies. Because she and Biden share a campaign committee, she would have unfettered access to his campaign funds. Other potential candidates, including Govs. Gavin Newsom (California), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan) and Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), are smart enough to know that an effort to elbow her out of the way would most likely fail and damage their future ambitions.
So why might Harris be a stronger candidate than people give her credit for?
First, the fact that she ran and lost before tells us very little; plenty of politicians have run, lost and done better when they ran again. Biden himself ran two abysmal presidential campaigns, in 1988 and 2008, before his 2020 victory. George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon all became president after losing. Their successful races were as much about being in the right place at the right time as learning from their mistakes.
Timothy Snyder writes at his “Thinking About...” Substack that there remains a few lessons that Americans can and should learn from the history of Germany, specifically in the years 1932—1933.
Those who wish to preserve the American constitutional republic should also recall the past. A good start would be just to recall the five basic political lessons of 1933.
1. Voting matters. Hitler came to power after an election which enabled his appointment as head of government. It is much easier for fascists to begin from within than to begin from without. Hitler’s earlier coup attempt failed. But once he had legitimate power, inside the system as chancellor (prime minister), he could manipulate it from within. In the American system, “voting” means not just going to the polls yourself, but making donations, phone-banking, and knocking on doors. We are still, happily, at the stage when unglamorous actions can make the difference.
2. Coalitions are necessary. In 1932, in the crucial German election, the far left and the center left were separated. The reasons for this were very specific: Stalin ordered the German communists to oppose the German social democrats, thereby helping Hitler to power. To be sure, the American political spectrum is very different, as are the times. Yet the general lesson does suggest itself: the left has to hold together with the the center-left, and their energies have to be directed at the goal rather than at each other.
3. Conservatives should be conservative. Which way the center-right turns can be decisive. In Germany in 1932, conservatives enabled the counter-revolution. They did not see Hitler and his Nazis as something different from themselves. They imagined, somehow, that Hitler would preserve the system rather revolutionize it. They were wrong, and some of them paid for the mistake with their lives. As in American today, the German “old right” was less numerous than the “new right,” the fascists. But how the traditionalist center-right acts can very well make the difference.
Paul Kirby of BBC News reports on the second round of French snap elections as the far right seeks to take control of the France’s National Assembly.
This is the first time the anti-immigration National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella has had a realistic chance of running the government and taking outright control of the National Assembly.
But after the RN’s first-round victory in snap parliamentary elections last Sunday, hundreds of rival candidates dropped out to give others a better chance of defeating the far right.
Voting began in mainland France at 08:00 (06:00 GMT) and the first exit polls will be released 12 hours later.
Whatever the result, it is difficult to see President Emmanuel Macron coming out of this well.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic describes how British Prime Minister Keir Starmer defeated populism on both the far right and the far left.
...In a year when millions of Americans are preparing to vote for a serial liar who offers his voters “retribution,” and only days after French voters flocked to both far-right and far-left extremes, the British have just elected an unflashy, unpretentious, hypercautious Labour Party led by a gray-haired prime minister whose manifesto talks about economic growth, energy, crime, education, and making the National Health Service “fit for the future.” The party won without generating huge enthusiasm. Turnout was low, Starmer’s popularity is lukewarm, and many votes went to small parties, including both a far left and a far right that are certainly not beaten for good.
But Starmer’s campaign was not designed to create enthusiasm. Instead, Labour sought to persuade just enough people to give it a chance. This is a shift not only from the Corbyn years, but also from the style of previous Labour governments. Starmer clearly differs from the departing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, a wealthy former hedge-fund manager, but he is also very unlike his most famous Labour predecessor. In 1997, Tony Blair brought Labour from the far left to the center by oozing charisma and courting the British middle class. Blair rebranded his party as New Labour, gave moving speeches, and unleashed a kind of public-relations hysteria that felt fresh at the time. I covered that campaign for a British newspaper, and once interviewed Blair on his campaign bus. Two other journalists were sitting with him as well. We all had different agendas, and there was a surreal, breathless quality to our questioning, as I summarized it later on: “What is your favourite book / will you join the common currency / what do you do in your free time / don’t you think Helmut Kohl is going to eat you alive, Mr Blair?”
Finally, Patrick Wintour of the Guardian profiles the new Iranian president, reformist Masoud Pezeshkian.
A former heart surgeon and health minister, he came across in the many presidential TV debates as a man of great personal integrity and humility, desperate to bring the country together after it had been divided domestically and abroad.
In the end, it will only be his opponents’ fear of his continued popularity that will help Pezeshkian wield influence in the warren that is Iran’s notoriously multi-level and factional politics.
It is an uphill task since, although the turnout in the runoff was higher than in the first round, it is the second lowest in Iranian presidential campaigns, showing many Iranians remain sceptical about politicians. [...]
Although he has a sharp tongue when he lashes out against corruption and the merchants of sanctions, his overall demeanour is suited to the role of a cooperator, often saying he will defer to experts on how to solve the country’s economic problems. He often left some of the sharpest attacks on his “Taliban opponents” to be made by his supporters.
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