Biden Staying in the Race Could Destroy the Democratic Party

The Urgency of Reconstructionism

Where We Are

President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last Thursday has made many Americans conclude that he needs to drop out of the race, but Biden becoming only the second president to resign the presidency will not solve this problem. The problem Biden and the Democratic Party faces derives from their lack of a political philosophy and in the absence of a philosophy we must now also question the purpose of the party.

Following Thursday’s debate both The New York Times’ Editorial Board and David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, published pieces saying that Biden needed to resign. Many other voices came to the same conclusion.

However, predictably, the political commentariat started to argue that Biden should stay in the race because despite his horrible debate, abysmal poll numbers, and diminished capacity due to being the oldest president in American history, it is easy to imagine that the Democrats could screw up the succession process and plunge the election into even further chaos.

David Frum of The Atlantic started his column with this exact argument.

The great operational question before us is not “Is Joe Biden too old?” The question is “Do you trust the delegates to the Democratic convention in Chicago to replace the present ticket with a supposedly more winning ticket without ripping their party apart in catastrophic ways?”

Essentially, the chaos that we know is better than the imagined chaos that we do not know.

According to reporting by The New York Times, Biden’s family and close advisors are also encouraging him to stay in the race. If he decides to stay in the race, he will confirm the opinion of the latter category of writers and prove that the Democrats have become little more than a vehicle for pursuing Biden’s political ambitions. It will have unmistakably become a party without a philosophy and this should make anyone question the purpose of the party.

Biden choosing to stay in the race is a hopeless strategy, and it would also equate to a strategy that has no desire to cultivate hope. Nothing about Biden makes Americans feel hopeful and we need this feeling more than ever as the specter of a second Donald Trump presidency looms over the horizon. Biden’s messaging for the rest of the campaign would consist of saying that no one in the Democratic Party would be better than Biden, but after Thursday’s performance, Biden’s campaign also can no longer argue that he is a strong candidate. All they can say is that despite being a bad candidate, they believe that he’s still better than Donald Trump or any alternative within the Democratic Party.

If Biden stays in the race, his strategy would be to double down on the lesser of two evils strategy. His strategy would proclaim that he is the lesser of two evils between himself and Trump, but also the lesser of two evils between himself and any other potential Democrat candidate such as Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. It would be a campaign of negation whose stated goal would be to defeat Trump, but would instead defeat and fracture the Democratic Party from within. Biden losing to Trump in November after undermining any of his potential successors would set the Democratic Party back for decades, and it might never recover.

How We Got Here

The Democratic Party has reached this point because since the 1960s it has tried to exist as a party led by individuals and not by a philosophy. The philosophy that has shaped the Democratic Party for the last 60 years came from the Civil Rights Movement that was led by Black Americans, but until Barack Obama’s presidency, a Black person had not led the Democratic Party. Until Obama’s presidency, the Democratic Party’s philosophy and its power existed as two separate entities, and in the absence of philosophy, the Democratic Party has relied upon charismatic, powerful (and white) individuals who can claim to be adjacent to the philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement.

President John F. Kennedy championed civil rights and so did Lyndon Johnson, but neither were the intellectual driving forces of the movement. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are both from the South and their appeal to Black voters helped them win the White House. None of these presidents are bad individuals, and comparatively, it would be fair to say that their presidencies had a better impact on American society than those of Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, but in the absence of a clear philosophy, these Democrat presidents become nothing more than just talented individuals who are adjacent to a philosophy.

These Democrat presidents, and by extension the Party, exist as allies of the Civil Rights Movement, but this is a strange scenario because allyship is basically a well-intended transaction because they are allies not because they have the same beliefs but because some of their interests overlap. The white Democrat allies have an overlapping interest in the philosophy that has shaped their party since the 1960s, but they often remain reluctant to fully embrace that philosophy and the people who created it. When the powerful interests of the Democratic Party no longer overlap with the philosophy that has shaped the party, the party will regress into being nothing more than a powerful political apparatus devoid of purpose and philosophy.

In the absence of a philosophy, America’s white liberal presidents easily devolve into increasingly weaker and weaker leaders because the pressure and power of the presidency pushes them away from the philosophy created by Black Americans that propelled them to the White House. Outside of Obama, Clinton is the only Democrat president to win re-election since the political shift of the 1960s, and one can argue that he might not have won either of his elections if it was not for the influence of third-party candidate Ross Perot who siphoned votes from the Republicans. (Theoretically, Kennedy might have won re-election if he was not assassinated, but we will never know.)

Obama changed the dynamics of the Democratic Party by being a candidate that was more than merely adjacent to the philosophy of the Black community, but the party failed to recognize it then and they are failing to recognize it now.

Despite being practically everything you would want in an American politician, he was much more than a talented individual. Obama was the manifestation of the philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement. A philosophy of equality and abolishing Jim Crow should result in a Black American becoming president. He was America’s first leftist philosopher-president, yet the left and the Democratic Party could not see it. They failed to understand this new reality to such a dramatic extent that they never even cared to name this philosophy or movement. At best, they simply named things after Obama. His diverse coalition of voters that won two presidential elections became the “Obama coalition” and the Democrats still struggle to imagine how it could be held together without Obama. This is how you think in the absence of a philosophy.

I call the philosophy and movement that culminated with Obama “Reconstructionism” because ever since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Black Americans have drawn inspiration from the progress of that era and we have worked to create another Reconstruction. The progress of the 1960s would not have been possible without the progress of the 1860s and 1870s. However, Reconstruction only lasted for 12 years and the first four were undermined by President Andrew Johnson, so the goal of Reconstructionism cannot be to have another eight or 12 years of progress, but to make Reconstructionism and the ideals and philosophy of Reconstruction the new American norm.

Whenever Black Americans have had a voice in American life, especially in politics and the law, Reconstructionism has been the philosophy of the American left. According to my theory of the American Cycle, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was our second abolitionist movement because Americans wanted to abolish Jim Crow so that we could create a second Reconstruction, which was Obama’s presidency. We worked to abolish the bad so that we could reconstruct America into something good. Since the fall of Reconstruction in 1877, the American left, when it has included people of color, has tried to re-create Reconstruction but we have paradoxically been unaware of this goal despite trying to achieve it.

When we accomplished our goal via Obama’s presidency, we remained unaware of our accomplishment and our continued lack of awareness is destroying the American left from within.

Back to Where We Are

In 2020, Biden won the presidency because he was Obama’s vice president. He was a white politician who was adjacent to the philosophy of Reconstructionism. He won the presidency because of his friendship with Obama. He won the South Carolina primary because of his connection to Obama. His friendship and professed brotherhood with Obama made American voters believe that he could be more than merely adjacent and could serve as a continuation of Reconstructionism. Instead, Biden now appears more and more removed from Obama or any type of guiding philosophy, and this is why the American left has lost faith in him.

Every other day news comes out claiming that the Obama-Biden relationship has fractured significantly, and the post-debate fallout will only pull them further and further apart. There are rumors that the Obamas think Biden should drop out. Obama’s and Biden’s interests appear to no longer overlap.

Biden won because of his connection to Obama, and therefore Reconstructionism, but if that connection is lost there will be very little reason to support him in November. His presidency has shown the American public that he is merely a continuation of the pre-Obama status quo that progressive Americans had hoped we had left behind and not the Reconstructionist future we hoped to create.

Biden does not see it this way. He believes that he won because he was the best candidate. He believes that he is the special, magical liberal individual who can save the day. He beat Trump the first time, so he will conclude that he will beat him the second time. This is wishful and delusional thinking.

This is how rugged, individualism conditions Americans how to think. This is how you think in the absence of a philosophy. This is how you think in the absence of a love of wisdom. The messaging has shifted from “Yes, We Can” to “Yes, I Can,” and no one outside of Biden’s inner circle believes he can.

By staying in the race, Biden could destroy the Democratic Party, Obama’s legacy, and hand Trump victory on a silver platter.

The only way to fix this crisis is by embracing the philosophy that we have always had, but have never known.