I Am Sorry But Joe Biden Crushed It in Michigan
Also: Epistemic certainty and the liberal order.
1. Dean Phillips
The story of the Democratic primary in Michigan was supposed to be how a beleaguered Joe Biden was staggered by a wave of angry Arab/Muslim/Palestinian Democrats who chose to vote “Uncommitted” as a show of their displeasure with the president.
This is going to shock you but . . . the media got the story it wanted!
Some headlines from this morning:
That sounds pretty bad! Like Biden has been faced with a challenge and Democratic voters are expressing their reservations with him!
Remember the Obama 2012 campaign? Quick: Name one of his primary challengers. Now tell me how much money his challengers spent—collectively—against Obama in the primaries. And tell me what the big anti-Obama movement in the 2012 Democratic primaries was about.
Now here are some results to chew on:
So Biden 2024 is running—New Hampshire excepted—fairly close to Obama 2012.
But let’s talk about that New Hampshire result: Biden didn’t spend any time in the state. Dean Phillips dropped close to $5 million into the primary. And Biden’s name wasn’t on the ballot.
That’s right: Biden got to 63.8 percent as a write-in.
In Michigan there was a concerted, organized effort to get Democrats to vote “uncommitted” as a protest against Biden. This effort resulted in 13.3 percent of the vote for “uncommitted.”
In 2012, with no organized movement and no dissatisfaction with Obama, 10.69 percent of Michigan Democrats voted for “uncommitted.”
So a jump from 10.69 percent uncommitted to 13.3 percent uncommitted is a “notable showing”?
People think these results are somehow indicative of weakness?
Let me tell you what electoral weakness looks like:
There were two other Democratic names on the ballot in Michigan: Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.
Williamson dropped out of the race three weeks ago.
And yet, she beat Dean Phillips.
That is what a vote of no confidence in a campaign looks like.
One last thing, because I can see the headlines writing themselves over the next few weeks: Here are some primary vote percentages Obama received in 2012:
So two questions:
(1) Can you imagine the level of freak-out if Biden gets 57 percent in Oklahoma next week? Because I cannot.
(2) Can you name either of the two candidates in 2012 who combined to take 32 percent of the vote from Obama in the 2012 Oklahoma primary?1
Stop freaking out. Biden is as strong as you’d expect an incumbent president to be. The primaries are not showing any exceptional or out-of-the-ordinary weaknesses for him.
Just don’t tell that to the rest of the media.
Look: I am the guy who walks into a room and immediately looks up to see if a piano is about to drop on my head. Doom is my stock-in-trade and my default setting is to see the ways the world can go wrong.
But I’m also a data guy and I hate it when people get captured by their narratives. And right now there is a narrative in media world that Biden is exceptionally weak.
This narrative has some basis in reality: Biden’s poll numbers are not where they should be based on objective economic measures. If the election were held tomorrow, Biden would almost certainly lose.
However, the extent to which media outlets have latched onto the general idea of Biden’s weakness and used it as the lens through which to view every event is crazy. Actually, it’s worse than crazy: It’s misleading.
We don’t do that around here. We take reality as it is. We don’t do happy talk. But we also make damn sure that we’re not hostages to narrative, or blinded by both-sides-ism. This is what media can be. It’s what media should be.
If you’re not a member yet, I hope you’ll join us.
2. Dead Reckoning
Damon Linker has the most thoughtful meditation I’ve read on Aaron Bushnell, the airman who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy this weekend. But before we get to that, I want to put in front of you Linker’s definition of small-l liberalism:
I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.
That’s as good a description as you’ll find of America’s current confrontation with populism. We are at a moment of crisis precisely because the populist-nationalist project has moved outside of political institutions and embraced the asymmetric modes we discussed last week.
Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:
Bushnell could have written an op-ed. He could have joined, organized, or led a march and delivered a speech. He could have built up a loud social-media presence and used it to accuse the United States of complicity in genocide and publicize the accusation. He could have leveraged his position in the Air Force to draw added attention to his dissent from Biden administration policy in the Middle East. He could even have embraced terrorism and sought to gain entry to the Israeli embassy with a weapon or explosive (an act that likely would have harmed his cause, generating sympathy for the Israeli government and its war on Hamas in Gaza).
But Bushnell didn’t do any of these things. . . .
And then, like a small number of other intensely committed individuals down through the decades, he doused himself in a flammable liquid and set himself ablaze, opting to sacrifice his own life in a public act of excruciating self-torture, without doing anything at all to harm anyone but himself, in order to draw attention to what he considered an ongoing, intolerable injustice.
But Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.
Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:
[Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.
What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.
This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.
Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.
Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.
And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.
The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.
The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.
The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.
The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.
And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.
The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.
3. Graphic Design Is My Passion
The LA Clippers have done a full brand-lift and I am HERE for it. ESPN gave us a few thousand words on the design process:
The color scheme is mostly classic Clippers, though with a new emphasis on navy blue. The ship is the centerpiece. There might be some snark about its semblance to a swimming shark, but the team is probably OK with that. The Clippers wanted the ship to look menacing -- as if it were coming straight at you, officials said.
The ship also helped the team preempt any potential copyright claims from Major League Baseball's Seattle Mariners, who have used compass imagery on their art, per league sources.
The outer edges of the ship's sails curve, mimicking actual sails in the wind. The font is inspired by the typeface often used on the hulls of gray naval vessels, the team said.
The two colored rings on the global logo -- red on the outside, powder blue on the inside -- offer nice touches of color. . . .
The team is particularly excited about that scripted "LA", with the "A" sitting perched atop the horizontal part of the "L." They are hoping that structure -- the "A" atop and within the "L" -- is distinct enough from the Los Angeles Dodgers' uber-famous "LA" logo, which has the two letters intersecting.
"It will make for a phenomenal hat," Zucker said. "In 20 years, people will look back and this will be iconic for the Clippers." That logo is on the waistband of the team's association and icon jerseys.
The real masterstroke might end up being the stylized "C" partial logo, which meshes two nautical images: a compass that also resembles a loop hook around which a sailor might knot a rope.
Anti-abortion activist Randall Terry got 18 percent of the Democratic vote (for reals) while some guy named Jim Rogers picked up 14 percent.
"The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other."
This is the money shot in today's Triad for me because epistemic certainty is the starting point on the path toward autocracy--though it doesn't always progress past the starting point. It's why simple people looking for simple explanations about complex issues are often the people who fall into these movements. They easily fall into epistemic certainty because they can only deal with binary choices around complex topics and need a scapegoat or oppressor to blame. And once they have the scapegoat/oppressor in mind ("elites," immigrants, liberals, Jews, etc.), they fall right in line with the side who opposes the scapegoat/oppressor. Know who really likes to commit to epistemic certainty? The White Christian Nationalism (WCN) movement within MAGA.
There's kind of a psychological order of operations in moving a group of peoples toward autocracy--whether from the left (communism) or the right (fascism)--and it starts with epistemic certainty about your side being the good guys and the other side being the bad guys, often accompanied by layering religious virtue from an unquestionable authority onto their side ("god is for us"). It then moves to dehumanizing the other side, becoming uncooperative with them, segregating the other side from the rest of the populace, taking over institutions--particularly the security services that enforce laws, committing stochastic violence against the other side once they're segregated from the rest and the security services are controlled, and eventually either forcing the other side to mass-migrate or slaughtering them wholesale if they refuse.
When viewing where MAGA is on this scale of progression, they're already dehumanizing liberals, they've already invoked their side as the side that "god" (an unquestionable authority) is on, they're already being uncooperative with liberals within state/federal institutions, they're already planning to take over security-based institutions ("constitutional sheriffs," Schedule F/Project 2025 purges, etc.), and they're occasionally committing stochastic violence against liberals/minorities (Charlottesville, Buffalo, Charleston AME, El Paso Walmart, Tree of Life, J6th, etc.). I guess the question is how far down the progression scale they end up, which is partly a factor of how strong our institutions end up being in the short run and partly a factor of how much society willfully tolerates MAGA's extremism in political elections via popular support at the ballot box.
2 quick questions and 1 quick thought:
Question 1: As a Michigander, I can confirm that the vocal "Uncommitted" parties are hyper localized to places like Dearborn (where there is a massive Arab and Muslim population) and campuses (University of Michigan in Ann Arbor). In my area, we didn't see or hear any of that, and I'm in a pretty purple area. I don't see the "Uncommitted" vote gaining steam because of that unique hyperconcentration. Could we see this dwindle out as the net goes wider towards Super Tuesday?
Question 2: How much of the Uncommitted, "Is Biden Weak" dialogue because the media needs something to talk about? Tapper on CNN last night seemed to be clamping down on some of the rhetoric, but to be honest, I think they're bored. This is a talking point, no matter how small.
Comment 1: As I helped yesterday with the Michigan Primary Election as an Election Official, I was reminded how normal some people can be. I don't care what they vote. But I only had one or two arguments with votes who didn't understand why there were 2 ballots (because it was a primary election), and one that wanted to question how we could ensure the Republican ballots wouldn't "go missing." There's crazy out there, and we'll definitely see it in November. But I think most people want to quietly do their civic duty. And it warmed the dark cockles of my cynical heart that our team got a few "thank you for helping out's" from voters.