Senior Democrats, led by the Biden administration, have for years broadcast endless confidence in their party’s ability to achieve the by now virtually impossible task of keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Some of those same people have now reportedly resigned themselves to Donald Trump’s reelection, which should cast some doubt on the first claim.
The Biden administration, many contend, has accomplished more than any president since Lyndon Johnson, raking up wins like the Inflation Reduction Act and historically low levels of unemployment. That shouldn’t be seen as a case for the Democratic Party and its political project so much as a depressing reflection on just how little that party has done in recent decades. The Democratic Party doesn’t have an overarching political project. The Democratic Party also doesn’t really exist as such. It’s a loose collection of parts: the candidates themselves, including sitting elected officials; institutions that exist mainly to fundraise for candidates; and the people who work for those candidates, all supported by a hodgepodge of unions, nonprofit organizations, and pundits.
Ideally the mission that ostensibly unites all those disparate elements under the banner of the Democratic Party—winning—would incentivize Democrats to create a policy agenda that gets people excited to vote for them, and then to actually implement it. Ideally, too, this policy agenda would include something to deal with reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But the last few weeks suggest Democrats aren’t actually all that interested in winning.
Beating Donald Trump and his newly announced vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is much easier than rapidly replacing the energetic basis of the global economy, or even just the country. Trump is a repugnant asshole who oversaw the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. J.D. Vance is the freakish, hateful creation of Yale Law School and Peter Thiel, who—at his most charming—sounds like a TED Talk about why the Third Reich made some good points. They both speak openly about wanting to end democracy, insofar as we have one, and carry out policies that would make life worse for most people, doing the bidding of billionaires.
Besting Trump and Vance, though—a precondition to making any meaningful progress toward decarbonizing the United States—would require running someone against them who can speak cogently. Biden cannot. Instead, he seems maniacally committed to using whatever cognitive capacities he’s got left to show the “elites” pressing him to step aside who’s boss. As Biden recently told ABC’s George Stephanopoulous about his diminishing prospects in November, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
The most influential voices within the Democratic Party have publicly fallen in line behind his position that we should let Joe give it another go. That’s probably partly due to the West Wing liberalism that prevails among party “leaders,” superseding any actual ideological commitments regarding how the country should be governed: Get enough smart and well-intentioned people into positions of power, and they’ll figure out solutions to the issue of the week. More than any particular vision for the future of the country—or keeping Trump out of office—Biden and his closest advisers seem invested mainly in the idea that they are precisely the right smart people for the job, however little chance they stand of actually winning.
There is no Democratic Party deep state–style establishment waiting for the right moment to step in and choose the best candidate for the job. While they’ve routinely meddled in undermining progressives, the closest party leaders ever got to grand strategy was intervening to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the presidential primary in 2020. Despite Biden’s obvious faults, senior party members have let him continue on, demonizing critics. Whatever combination of hero worship, donor demands, learned helplessness, or garden-variety intransigence is motivating that, the outcome is the same: There are no adults in the room.
Despite claims to the contrary, the same is true on climate. Captains of industry and the Democrats they donate to have for decades assured the public that they can get the job done, promising some new silver bullet technological solution, tax, or subsidy scheme that’ll turn it all around and finally put the country and the world on the path to net-zero. That hasn’t happened. For the last 12 months, the planet has been 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer. No one is coming to save us, and the top Democrats who’ve insisted that they will don’t seem particularly alarmed about how much worse things are getting. They can’t even keep themselves in power.
