Safetyism and the 2024 election

“My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” So spoke the nation’s first vice president. Of all the indignities that come with the office, the most insulting is being forced to stump for a beleaguered party mate in what was once safe territory. No one plays “Hail to the (Almost) Chief” as the 4,092nd most powerful leader in the free world — sandwiched between the prime minister of Nauru and the 2006 American League batting champion — enters the local rec center or middle school gymnasium. Everyone gathered in the room — a handful of supporters, the candidate, bored Secret Service agents, et cetera — recognizes the White House sent the B-Squad out of an abiding sense of guilt that its misgovernance has put the party’s future at risk. President Obama was forced to ship Joe Biden to Portland to salvage Oregon amid the 2014 red wave. Mike Pence was dispatched to Oklahoma in 2018. And so it was that Kamala Harris found herself at the Kentland Community Center in suburban Maryland while her boss mounted Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, France.

Biden’s tribute to the Army Rangers who stormed the beach on D-Day touched on the central themes of the Democratic Party’s campaign messaging. Just in case the talk of defending democracy from “aggression abroad and at home” proved too subtle, he added, “I simply refuse to believe that America’s greatness is a thing of the past.” His description of the peril faced by American soldiers went unnoticed.

“They had only thirty minutes — thirty minutes to eliminate the Nazi guns high on this cliff — guns that could halt the Allied invasion before it even began. But these were American Rangers. They were ready. They ran toward the cliffs, and mines planted by Field Marshall Romney, R-r-rommel,” Biden said.

It was the sort of slip that could be papered over with a few keystrokes (the White House transcript reads, “Field Marshal Rommeny — Rommel”) and a reliably incurious press corps. That is until the eighty-one-year-old wandered into the minefield of CNN studios in Atlanta three weeks later. In the course of ninety minutes, the American public learned Biden had spent so much time safeguarding freedom from the dark forces of cheap fakes and creeping fascism that he had allowed dementia to file an asylum petition inside the open border of his mind.

If the debate exposed Biden’s frailties, its aftermath exposed why party leaders had fought like hell to keep them under wraps. Donors and party powerbrokers have privately come around to the idea that President Biden does not have the mental acuity necessary to serve as commander-in-chief. That to run the feeble octogenarian back out onto the campaign or world stage is an invitation for aggression abroad and, even worse, at home. But with the primaries already over, the only option is to rely on the humility of Scranton Joe and Doctor Jill (EdD) and that their deeply divided base will coalesce behind whoever is plucked from their thin bench.

The dreamers among the consultant class float the names of perceived rising stars from their stock of governors: Gavin Newsom in California, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro over in Pennsylvania. But party leaders recognize the impossibility of such a scenario. They will be forced to settle with the safe choice. Voters may have sent the clear message that they do not much like Vice President Kamala Harris, but party leaders have been adamant on her historic stature and political talent. How could they explain to black, female and youth voters that their standard bearer must step aside for anyone? The road to ousting Biden from atop the ticket goes through Kamala and Kamala alone. Which may explain why party brass has retreated to the safe confines of anonymous backbiting to tepidly encourage Biden to abdicate.

Safetyism is the dominant ideology of modern American life. The bipartisan lockdown regimes that followed the arrival of Covid-19 from China — as well as the population’s acceptance of public health czars — made it clear that Americans have come to consider safety and comfort as “sacred values.” Its pervasiveness extends beyond your neighbor masking up alone in the car. We can see its influence at work in finance (Soukup), the academy (Marietta) and in family formation (Stepman). In all of those cases, an outsized concern for safety could spell doom: entrusting one’s nest egg to the free-riding passive funds could stymie innovation; a zeal for safe spaces begets academic stagnation and persecution; and avoiding the emotional risks of commitment brings with it collapsing birth rates and loneliness.

The consequences may be dire, but there is still plenty of time to right the ship. But the American people are living out the fruits of safetyism in the political realm in real time, as Spencer A. Klavan argues. Republican primary voters and party leaders opted to give MAGA one more spin, reasoning that the man who they believe had been cheated deserved another shot. Democrats, fearing the prospects of an unlikable moderate vice president as well as the champions of its progressive base, took a gamble on the dementia patient.

With the primary secured, Trump is now busy courting moderates, sating the base with jabs at drooling Joe and “cackling copilot Kamala Harris.” He has so far not bothered to acknowledge any other Democrat vying for the crown. Trump knows the messaging of Pointe du Hoc will no longer suffice; his opponents instead must settle for Vice President Harris’s address to the Kentland Community Center: “The right to be safe is a civil right.”

Teddy Roosevelt, echoing the sardonic self-deprecation of John Adams, worried privately that the vice presidency is not a “stepping stone to anything except oblivion.” Democrats can play it safe, but they may soon see his private fears borne out.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2024 World edition.