Democrats are starting to act *a lot* like Republicans

A conversation with Damon Linker about the debate (and its aftermath)

Damon Linker is my gut check.

When I am questioning how I feel about an issue — or the broader movements of the two political parties or the public — I reach out to Damon, who writes the terrific “Notes from the Middleground” Substack.

No one is a clearer thinker about the state of politics than Damon. He is fearless. He is thoughtful. And he is honest as hell.

In response to the wild past 8 days in politics — and the “how dare you!” reaction that many on the left have taken to the media’s coverage of post-debate Joe Biden — I reached out to Damon to talk.

We emailed back and forth over the course of a few days late this week — about Biden, liberals and what the media’s job really is in these moments.

I decided to publish that email exchange because I think it shines a light on not just where we are but why we are the way we are.

Our full conversation — edited only for my occasional typo! — is below. This post is free because I think it’s important that as many people see it, read it and share it as possible.

If you value these sorts of thoughtful conversations, I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. It’s $6 a month or $60 for the year.

Damon,

I have been amazed — maybe naively — at the amount of blowback there has been from the left at mainstream media types (and even us Substackers) who said, after last week’s debate, that it was a total and complete disaster for Joe Biden.

To me, anyone with eyes and ears could see that — you don’t need years of experience covering politics or an advanced poli-sci degree. He looked lost.  You couldn’t understand what he was saying at times. He muttered. He failed to deliver easy hits on Donald Trump — like on abortion and the 34(!) felony convictions the former president has wracked up.

To deny that Biden was bad — like, historically bad — seemed to me to deny the obvious.

But it went further than that. Within 24 hours, Biden’s debate performance had been turned into a liberal talking point: How could the media STILL be talking about it? Why didn’t we return the focus to Trump? Were we purposely trying to help the former president???

(Sidebar: Having worked in big mainstream media organizations before, I always laugh at this conspiracy theory that the media gets together and plots out their preferred narrative. Like, we just aren’t that organized!)

The narrative the left appears to want is that EVERYTHING IS FINE with Biden and how dare we ask if everything is ok because, um, Trump.

Am I the only one confounded by this response? It seems totally clear to me the Biden debate performance — given the issues in the electorate about his age — is a HUGE story and should be covered like one.  Am I missing something?

Chris

Chris,

We are definitely on the same page here — though I’ll actually blast past you in angry incredulity. Biden wasn’t just bad in the June 27 debate. This wasn’t George H.W. Bush looking at his watch in his 1992 debate with Bill Clinton. This wasn’t Barack Obama coming off as irritable and condescending in his 2012 debate with Mitt Romney. Or even Donald Trump’s unhinged and unrelenting hostility to Biden in the first debate of 2020.

What happened a little over a week ago was unlike anything I’ve ever seen: A sitting president sounding like he could barely string words together into coherent sentences. The commander-in-chief often spouting nonsense that can only be described as gibberish. An 81-year-old man who’s been plagued by concerns about his age utterly incapable of meeting Trump’s absurdly exaggerated half-truths and flat-out lies with any kind of effective rebuttal. He seemed confused, bewildered, and overmatched for pretty much the entire event. Trump’s most effective line of the night came when he was asked about something Biden had just stumbled over incoherently and replied with, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” No one watching the debate could have disagreed with that assessment. 

That is indeed enormous news. But it wasn’t just that. It was news that massively confirmed something that conservative partisans, middle-of-the-road pundits like you and me, and an overwhelming majority of American voters have been thinking, talking, and worrying about for much of Biden’s presidency— namely, his capacity to do the job of president, in the present, as well as on into another four-year term. These are concerns that the Biden administration has unequivocally dismissed every single time they have emerged. And many mainstream journalists basically took the administration’s word for it. Yes, they’d write second-order stories about the story — about how all these people are worried about Biden’s age — but they didn’t really dig into the story itself. I’ll leave the reasons for this failing aside for the moment, because I want to make the point that this was clearly a journalistic failure that a lot of news organizations have decided they need to compensate for to some extent.

But there’s also something else going on: Since the evening of June 27, the Biden administration, many leading Democrats, and a swarm of the party’s online advocates have responded in the way you described, by attacking those rightly treating this as a massive story — and in terms that sound as cynical and contemptuous of truth as anything you’ll hear from a Trumpist Republican. We’re “bedwetters.” We’re indulging in “bad politics.” We don’t realize that the right way to respond to something like the June 27 debate is to admit Biden did poorly, wave away any broader concerns, and change the subject, moving on like nothing important happened. 

Pretend it was no big deal, and it will be no big deal.

I’m sorry, but I’m a proud card-carrying member of the reality-based community, so that won’t fly with me at all. I will not, ever, take part in a propaganda campaign — not because I’m holier than anyone, but because I know it will fail and only undermine my own trustworthiness as a political analyst. When people talk for years about Biden’s diminished capacity and then he demonstrates it beyond a shadow of a doubt on a national stage, you can’t respond by saying, “No big deal, let’s just move on and forget about it.” If you do that, all you’ll accomplish is torching what remains of your own credibility. 

Damon

Damon,

I want to dig deeper into the outrage — and I don’t think that’s too strong a word — that I saw directed at the media for covering the disastrous performance of Biden (and the obvious questions it re-raised about his ability to do the job not just for four more months but for four more years).

There seemed to be a sense of actual betrayal from the left. How could you do this to us???

The only way to understand that reaction — at least for me — is that these folks have no real understanding of what the media is supposed to be and do. I have repeatedly reminded my commenters that I am a journalist, not an activist. And yet, people react as though our job in the media is to prop Biden up — even if it’s clear that there are deep issues with his candidacy,

The explanation is that Trump lies. And he’s a convicted felon.

But don’t we teach our kids that two wrongs don't make a right?

What, to your mind, explains the expectation from the left that we have to be on their “team”?

Chris

Chris,

In a way, I think your question answers itself: Both parties have fallen prey to tribalism. Now, I don’t want to be accused of the dreaded “both sides” syndrome, where a pundit stands back from the political fray and pronounces that “the problem” is both parties equally. I do think Republicans have lunged into tribalism with an abandon that is only rarely matched by the Democrats, at least in the sense that lots of Democrats will express ambivalence about it, whereas when Republicans do the same they soon get hounded out of the party altogether. 

But this distinction is dissolving, and this whole episode surrounding the debate and its aftermath has revealed that plenty of Dems are slouching toward tribalism along with the GOP, with little holding them back. 

To be a political tribalist isn’t to think, “I don’t care about the truth, I just care about winning.” It’s to think, “My party has a lock on the truth. What it says, what it does to win, what it says about itself and the other tribe, is just the unadulterated truth. To disagree with me is to be one of them. It’s to believe their lies instead of the objective truth my side alone grasps and champions.”

You saw some of this among center-left pundits during the George W. Bush administration, when there was a debate about Bush relying on his “gut” and “truthiness” to make decisions, whereas his Democratic critics were free of ideology and just relying on a dispassionate scientific analysis of the world, as if empiricism was a brand stamped with a donkey. Barack Obama sometimes came off that way, too, like he had a lock on the truth and those who disagreed with him were either ignorant or operating in transparent bad faith while clinging atavistically to their guns and religion. 

Trump’s diabolical genius was to turn resentment on the right about such imperious condescension into a proud and angry political movement that would rally around a contrary partisan “truth” that blended facts with wild exaggeration and sometimes outright fantasy. This was always dangerous, but it became truly ominous in its implications in the two months following the 2020 election, when Trump promulgated the lie about a stolen election that ultimately sparked the insurrectionary riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

During the Trump administration, you saw some of this epistemic tribalism emerge among “Resistance” Democrats in the form of yard signs proclaiming those who live there “Believe in Science,” implying that the Trump voter down the street thinks the earth is flat. This grassroots tribalism got a massive burst of energy as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Republican distrust of government blossomed into a million-and-one conspiracies (even with Trump in the White House). In response, many Democrats became explicit defenders of whatever public-health authorities said, even when they blatantly contradicted each other or what they had proclaimed just a week or two in the past. 

Meanwhile, a certain strand of elite partisan liberalism has long blamed the electoral struggles of the left on media bias in favor of the right. The claim is that conservatives attack the media, accusing it of liberal bias, and the mainstream media responds by going easy on the right and inflating bad stories about the left in order to demonstrate their even-handedness. The right “works the refs,” in other words — as in the “referees,” like an enraged baseball manager who goes out to the home plate umpire to dispute a call and kicks dirt on his shoes in the hopes of getting the call reversed. 

The power of this interpretation is that it’s an unfalsifiable claim that super-charges tribalism on the left. If Trump is doing well in the polls, it must be because “the media” is failing in its job of focusing relentlessly on Trump’s awfulness and instead trying to demonstrate its fake fairness by matching damaging stories about Trump with damaging stories about Biden. If “the media” would only do its job of repeating over and over that Trump is Uniformly Terrible and Biden is Basically Good, the former would be losing and latter would be way ahead. Again, this is unfalsifiable: it’s an all-purpose way of deflecting blame from the Democratic Party and the left in favor of a failure of “the refs.” 

Thanks to social media, this outlook has spread like wildfire. This line of argument emerged from the writings of media critic Eric Alderman and Rick Perlstein’s highly tendentious histories of the modern Republican Party. It’s been popularized by the “New York Times Pitchbot” Twitter account run by “Doug J. Balloon," along with lots of copycats. 

I’m afraid that this outlook has now become a kind of center-left conventional wisdom, and it’s clearly infected key players in the Biden White House, intensifying the longstanding tendency among floundering administrations to blame their failures on a hostile press. As I said, the problem with this account of things is that it enhances tribalism, convincing highly engaged members of the Democratic Party that nothing that happens is its own fault, and that people who favor Donald Trump are unreachable morons who should be denounced for their bigotry or fascist sympathies rather than courted as potential Democratic voters. 

In more concrete terms, this outlook gets us the spectacle of the past six months or so, when every story about a poll showing broad-based concerns about Biden’s age was treated as a betrayal of the team that told us nothing of any value about reality. It also gives us the post-debate denunciations of the media from the left: If only the media stopped talking about how bad the debate was, everything would be fine. If only the media pivoted after a couple of hours to, “Sure, Biden had a bad debate, but whatabout Trump’s felony convictions?!” If only the media had done this, that, or the other thing, Trump would be down by 10 points and Biden would be on his way to victory, as he should be.

Damon

Damon,

I want to pick at a thread you mentioned at the end there: The media coverage of Biden’s age BEFORE the debate last week.

I wrote regularly about the fact that polling consistently showed that a LARGE majority of the public — including, in some surveys, a majority of Democrats! —  said that Biden was too old to be president and worried that he was not competent enough to do the job.

And time and again I was told — by the White House, by Democratic readers etc. — that I was part of the problem: That Biden was old, sure, but that he was vigorous as hell and outworked even his youngest and spryest of aides.  Hell, do you remember the outrage by the White House and the online left when the Wall Street Journal published a story a month or two ago about Biden’s mental slippage behind the scenes?  Lots and lots of people — including, I am sorry to say, plenty of “mainstream” reporters — insisted that the story was total bullshit and that it was deeply irresponsible that the Journal published it. They said it was Rupert Murdoch pushing his agenda!

It’s clear now that we were ALL, at best, deceived by the those assertions and, at worst, outright lied to.  Reporting that has come out since the debate makes clear that the Journal piece was spot on — that Biden has been showing signs of mental and physical deterioration for months now.

What I don’t get: Why doesn’t that make the left mad? Like, if beating Trump is indeed existentially important to maintaining democracy, then why is it ok that the people in a position to know about Biden’s real condition covered it up?  Like, why blame the media for reporting on the situation? Why not blame the people who clearly knew that Biden was in decline and not only sought to keep it out of the public eye but also shamed anyone who tried to report or comment on it?

Aren’t they the real problem here? If you believe Trump is a direct threat to democracy aren’t the people who willfully allowed Biden, in a diminished state, to walk to the nomination the ones who should be receiving the ire of the left??

Chris

Chris, 

Well, I certainly think those are the right people to be angry at! In fact, I’m pretty angry at them myself (as I noted in my initial response to you). As for why so few Democratic partisans are directing anger at them, I have to assume it has to do with something I wrote in a February 2024 piece for The Atlantic, making the case for Biden to step aside, in large part because of his advanced age and how it would weigh down his campaign for re-election against Trump. I wrote there about how severe risk-aversion permeates the Democratic Party and blends in a subterranean psychological way with extreme arrogance. Democrats tend to think: We need to stick with Biden; if we have an open primary, the party will tear itself apart and will lose to Trump. But once they stake out that position, they immediately pivot to: And why be so worried anyway? Trump is a losing loser who is always losing and is bound to lose again. Why are you being such a bedwetter? 

What I think this reveals, among other things, is that Democrats grasp intuitively that, as certain political scientists have argued, the Democratic Party is a party of groups that isn’t really united around an ideology. You’ve got Bernie Sanders socialists and left-wing activists waving Palestinian flags on one side of the party and Michael Bloomberg and his suburban admirers on the right. You’ve got moderate black and Hispanic voters and super-progressive white voters. You’ve got Ph.D.s from Brooklyn along with blue-collar factory workers from the Midwest and service workers in cities and suburbs all over the country. It’s a diverse group, and highly engaged Democrats clearly fear that it may be too unwieldy to hold together. Biden managed it, but could anyone else? If Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, lots of the party's more conservative voters might stay home. But if she’s denied the nomination, black voters, and especially black women, will be insulted and refuse to show up on Election Day. Move too far left, and you lose the suburbs. Move too far toward Bloomberg and you lose the left. Etc.

Amidst all of these, there is one fact everyone can agree on: Biden won! He beat Trump! By 7 million votes! That makes Biden the One Man Who Can Hold It All Together and Beat Trump Yet Again. To turn on him is to set in motion a destabilizing dynamic that will tear the party apart. With Biden, all things are possible. Without Biden, we’re screwed. 

This is obviously an overly schematic way of talking about all of this, but I think it highlights a broad truth about how lots of Democrats intuitively think about the situation facing the party and the country. And it doesn’t leave any room for self-criticism. It demands unwavering loyalty to Biden — and unhinged fury at anyone who would weaken him. 

It also makes the Democratic and Republican Parties pretty formally similar. Both are terrified by what it would mean for the other party to win. Yet both can also only manage a narrow victory. (Even Biden’s impressive 7-million-vote win in 2020 was extremely narrow in the Electoral College.) That combination of enormously high stakes with very narrow margins produces desperation, tribalism, paranoia, and severe hostility to anyone who might weaken the team. The result? Kill the messengers. 

Damon

Damon,

This makes good sense to me. And even makes me feel better!

One last question: Is there a “normal” that we can get back to? I have been aware of the increased tribalism of Republicans for a while now (if Trump says it, it must be true/right/good) but I was totally struck by the tribal reaction of Democrats to Biden’s debate performance.  You’ve thought and written a lot about this.  Are we headed toward a pure tribal political process where voters don't engage on what they are seeing or hearing but rather just line up behind whatever the party tells them to see and think?

And with the efforts — by both parties but more so Republicans — to discredit the mainstream media, can w ever get back to the point where people can agree on the idea a neutral(ish) arbiter and objective capital “F” Facts?

Chris

Chris,

I wish I knew the answer to that. I do think and write about it a lot, but I’m just not sure. On one level, I think the tribalism is driven precisely by the narrowness (and depth) of the divide between the parties. If we could achieve an actual realignment in the parties’ electoral coalitions, so that 55 or even 60 percent victories became possible again, that might drain the fire of tribalism. You’d have one firm majority party and another firmly in the minority. That would incentivize the first to craft policies and rhetoric that defined the moment for most Americans, while also incentivizing the minority party to change significantly to become more competitive. As it is, both wins and losses are now so narrow that each party can come back from a defeat convinced that nothing fundamental needs to change. Just tactics, which usually amount to better base mobilization and even more demonization of the other party. 

So as long as we’re stuck with 51-49 elections, I don’t see this changing.

Then there’s the second-order dimension of it, which may be a function of social media and the supercomputers we all carry around in our pockets now. I suspect that’s driving a lot of the populism that’s transforming politics around the world over the past decade or so. People are exposed to much more news than ever before, but it’s fragmented news often spun in an ideological direction. Then people who are similarly activated by this are able to network with others who see the world similarly, all over the country and even the world. If this structural factor is the main causal variable in why our politics has become so tribal, then there might not be much we can do to change it — beyond eliminating social media and smart phones. Which I don’t think would be very popular. Maybe that will be the topic of Jonathan Haidt’s next book, and then we’ll have a shot at advancing a new form of technological prohibition. (Just kidding. Mostly.)

Damon