No, Democracy is *Not* on the Ballot

[m.knox]

No matter how much whining you hear from unhinged leftwing kooks. Mind you, this is from a lefty.

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/no-democracy-is-not-on-the-ballot

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Biden and his campaign are unduly influenced by what they believe should be true rather than what is true. They see Trump as an unspeakably evil man who is an existential threat to democracy and can’t imagine why that view wouldn’t be everybody’s and drive their vote inexorably toward Biden. But it isn’t and the sooner they realize that, the better their chances of actually beating the Bad Orange Man.

That means dropping the absurd Hitler/end of the Weimar Republic analogies and developing a more realistic model of the situation they’re in. David Leonhardt provides some helpful observations along these lines:

I’m reminded of the arguments of Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago. Zingales grew up in Italy, where a bombastic right-wing populist—Silvio Berlusconi—presaged Trump by becoming prime minister in 1994 and holding the job on and off for years…Shortly after Trump’s 2016 victory, Zingales wrote an Opinion essay in The Times outlining the political strategies that tend to fail when opposing a figure like Trump.

Berlusconi’s least-effective opponents focused on his personality and argued that he was beyond the pale of acceptable politics. This criticism made many Italian voters like him even more. They reasoned that if the elites who had done such a poor job running the country hated Berlusconi, maybe he was the solution after all.

Berlusconi’s most effective opponents, by contrast, treated him like an ordinary politician who would not improve their lives. “They focused on the issues, not on his character,” Zingales wrote.
Biden’s campaign sometimes makes arguments along these lines….So far, though, these messages tend to be less prominent than the arguments about democracy and the soul of America.

Just so. The Biden campaign desperately needs a new theory of the case. Otherwise, they really will be drawing to an inside straight and we could all suffer the consequences.