By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, March 08, 2024
So I have precisely 98 minutes to write this. I have no
topics in mind, so I’m going to cop out and write about the State of the Union
address, even though I hate the State of the Union address. If you think that’s
a waste of your time, I get it. I’ll talk to you next week. I won’t take
offense.
Of course, sometimes it’s fun to put a clock on someone
to do something pretty conventional. Give someone a box of Betty Crocker
12-minute brownie mix and ask them to bake some brownies. That’s not
interesting. Ask them to make those 12-minute brownies in seven minutes and
you’ve got something.
One of the problems with the written word is that it
can’t convey tone as effectively as the spoken word. I’d like to write a G-File in
the style
of Sen. Katie Britt, but I don’t know how to do it. I mean, I could include
bracketed directions like it was a movie script, but it wouldn’t be the same.
[Cue barely controlled rage] Just like America won’t be the same because of Joe
Biden’s refusal to provide real bracketed direction at the American
border.
[Switch to moist-eyed sorrow] But the written word just
doesn’t work that way [stifled sob].
So, I’ll just have to make do, pecking out word
things.
I’ve written a lot about how I don’t like the State of
the Union address. I’ve also written a lot about how I don’t like Woodrow
Wilson. I bring him up because he’s the one we have to thank for the spectacle
it’s become. In 1800, John Adams was the last president to give the address in
person until Wilson brought the custom back 113 years later.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Adams had a paranoid
and authoritarian streak. He used the Alien and Sedition Act to arrest critics
of his administration. Wilson used the Sedition Act of 1918 to arrest his
critics, too. Indeed, until Biden’s address, my main complaint against the SOTU
was that it’s too monarchical. From the sergeant-at-arms’ introduction onward,
the whole thing has a feeling of a monarch visiting Parliament to put it in its
place. The fact that Congress must invite the president to
appear gets lost because politics requires the invitation.
But it’s worth keeping in mind why that
invitation is necessary: Congress is superior to the executive branch. It’s the
first branch of government and it has—on paper—the most power. It is not
“coequal.” Indeed, the whole idea of “coequal” branches is a fiction invented
by the Nixon administration as a way to avoid being held accountable to
Congress and the courts. Congress can fire members of the other branches. It
sets their pay. It tells them what to do. That republican and democratic vision
gets washed away by the spectacle of the State of the Union address.
Anyway, that was my primary objection. But it’s now been
reduced to primarily a partisan infomercial. In some ways, it was inevitable.
The State of the Union address is one of those civic institutions that commands
attention. But because it commands attention in our modern attention economy,
politicians cannot resist bending it to their partisan interests.
This has been going on for a while, but last night’s
performance—by Biden, Democrats, and Republicans—crossed a Rubicon. This is a
bipartisan failure. Ronald Reagan introduced the schtick of having human props
in the gallery, a brilliant tactic used by presidents ever since. Another
modern watershed moment was when Rep. Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a joint
session in 2009 (the first address of a president’s term is technically not a
State of the Union address). Wilson raised his profile as well as tons of money
and off his stunt, which tells you why Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk
consider that kind of thing part of their business model. But Obama benefited
from it too. Everyone is a Baptist and a
bootlegger in modern American politics.
This is a good example of how changes in one part of our
political system have consequences in unanticipated places. When parties had
more control over their members, party leaders had tools to discipline such
antics. But their purse strings were cut by campaign finance reform and changes
in the media landscape made “going rogue” profitable for individual
politicians.
I’ll skip how the primary system is a big part of the
problem because you’ve heard me out on that plenty of
times. But suffice it to say that when base voters and small donors are the
only threats to incumbency, you create incentives to ignore rules of decorum
and basic civics and civility.
That’s why Biden’s direct
attack on the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade was
so galling. Biden is correct to think he has a problem with his base. He might
even have been shrewd in using the SOTU as an opportunity to shore up his
problems with the base.
But that’s sort of my point. The political incentives are
perverse everywhere you look. In an earlier era, a president would look for
other opportunities to pander to the base rather than use the State of the
Union address like it was a rally at SEIU headquarters. It’s a bit like Biden’s
unprecedented decision to walk the picket line with UAW workers. Lots of
presidents have wanted to curry favor with unions. But the president is
supposed to at least nominally be neutral in labor disputes, not least because
he appoints the members of the NLRB, which is supposed to be independent.
Anything that can be used for politics
gets used for politics now. Recall Donald Trump used the White House as a de
facto RNC
nominating convention in 2020.
I have my doubts about the shrewdness of Biden’s decision
to use the SOTU as a partisan platform. He may think that he can win the votes
from the middle by painting Trump as too extreme. Lord knows Trump can be
counted on to help with that messaging. And he may be right.
But that decision hinges on a bet about the electorate.
Obama made the same bet and it worked for him in 2008 and 2012. The days of
“pivoting” to the center may indeed be over. Just turn out the base and
demonize your opponent to the point where the middle votes for the lesser of
two evils. Trump world works on the same assumption, telling Haley voters and
other getable voters they’re not welcome unless they convert wholeheartedly to
MAGA. If they don’t convert, they’re the enemy now, too.
But Obama and Trump were different kinds of candidates.
Obama had, and Trump has, diehard supporters and reserves of low-propensity
voters to count on. Biden was supposed to be a reassuring middle-of-the-road
guy. I know Biden has “superfans” but there aren’t many of them. His majority
relied on two groups: 1) base voters who could hold their noses and vote for
Biden if it meant ousting Trump. I think he will still mostly get
them. 2) The “normals” who wanted … normalcy. Biden has steadfastly
refused to govern as if he was worried about these voters. He simply takes them
for granted. And by using the State of the Union the way he did he sends a
signal that the normals still have no obvious home.
This was an understated point of my Wednesday G-File.
There are a lot of voters out there who don’t want to live in a country where
politics is constantly framed as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil
and where the stakes are the survival of the country. Biden is betting that he
can win the majority of these voters by casting Trump as an existential threat
to democracy and all that. I get the argument. But the risk in Biden’s approach
is that people may conclude that fear-mongering hyper-partisanship is the new
normal for both parties. If that’s the case, a lot of voters might simply
choose Trump, for any number of reasons, including the fact that Trump is just
better suited to be an abnormal president in abnormal times. Or they
might just stay home, disgusted with the spectacle entirely.
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