Living in Interesting Times

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden attend an official arrival ceremony with NATO leaders and their spouses, Wednesday, July 10, 2024, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Erin Scott)

I was on vacation last week when the news started breaking. It began shortly before we left with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and continued through the week with the bizarre Republican convention and the nomination of J.D. Vance for vice president. I didn’t watch much of the convention, but it occurred to me that, not only does the choice of Vance mark a clear break between the old pre-Trump, conservative GOP and the current populist MAGA Republican Party, but it essentially puts two former Democrats at the top of the ticket. (Vance might not have been a registered Democrat, but he has strong Democrat ties and at least considered voting for Hillary in 2016.) Nice going, Republicans.

Midway through the week, I woke up to a flurry of messages on my phone from my company’s IT department as computer systems crashed around the country. We were mostly insulated from the ongoing technical disaster except that when we shifted from an Airbnb to a hotel, the hotel employees were unable to make key cards. We literally had to have an employee walk with us to the room and let us in with a special device every time we left and returned.

Thankfully, we weren’t flying home that day. Untold numbers of people were trying to use the airlines and that seems to have been yet another cascading disaster. Thousands of flights were canceled around the country, stranding travelers and disrupting plans. Some still aren’t at their destinations.

The funny thing (in a weird and curious sense anyway) is that normally we would have flown Delta since we live near Atlanta. This time, however, I bought tickets on Southwest because it was quite a bit cheaper. Southwest has had its share of meltdowns in the past, but this week the Texas airline’s antiquated computer systems seemed to work in its favor. On Sunday, as Delta passengers were still scrambling to get to their destinations, our Southwest flight was only 10 minutes late and that was due to a series of storms that moved across Dallas earlier in the day.

And speaking of Sunday, as we were heading to the airport, we got the news that President Biden had ended his reelection campaign. I had told my wife and son earlier that I thought he would drop out. The signs were there. Polls were declining, Democratic politicians were calling on him to quit, and donor money was drying up. I figured that it was just a matter of time, but when the end came, it came quickly.

After giving Biden the benefit of the doubt after his disastrous debate performance, I called on the president to step aside a couple of weeks ago. It took some time for him to see the light, but I applaud Biden for doing the right thing for the country, even if some coercion was necessary. I can’t imagine Trump bowing out no matter what the situation looked like for him, his party, or the country.

And I can’t imagine Republican officials taking the steps that were necessary to persuade Biden to drop out. I’ll give the Democratic leadership credit here as well. Twice. In 2020, Democrats united around Biden to freeze out Bernie Sanders, who would probably have lost to Trump. In 2024, they united to get Biden to step down as he was in the process of losing to Trump.

Democrats put their money where their mouths are when it comes to sounding the alarm on Trump. It would have been easier to let Biden go down in flames and preserve party unity than it would have to risk a Democratic civil war… if the stakes were not so high. Trump really is a very dangerous man who cannot be trusted with power and the desperate move to dump Biden reflects that understanding by Democrats (although I do have problems with their boosting of MAGA candidates in Republican primaries).

Imagine if Republican leaders in 2016 had been organized, strong, and courageous. If they had united to oppose Trump at the convention or after the Access Hollywood scandal, the past eight years would have been very different. Republicans might still have won the 2016 election, albeit with a conservative candidate who could have spearheaded a legitimately conservative agenda and who would have been competent to deal with the pandemic, Vladimir Putin’s aggression, and Chinese saber rattling.

And any Republican other than Trump would have probably won reelection in 2020 or would have triumphed over an incumbent Hillary Clinton. Any Republican other than Trump would not have led the party into the box canyon of falsely claiming the election was stolen, a lie that contributed to the 2022 midterm losses. With any candidate other than Trump, January 6 would not be a stain on the Republican Party’s honor and the GOP would not be a personality cult.

A few years ago, I pondered how recent history has unfolded. Without the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War, we would not have gotten Barack Obama, or at least not when we did. In 2008, Obama was a junior senator who was inexperienced in leadership and legislating. Without Obama, who broke the Republican Party and drove it crazy, we don’t get Trump, who is like Obama in more ways than either party wants to admit. Errors and bad choices are compounded and magnified in a graveyard spiral, to use an aviation term for a loss of control in which a pilot thinks he is flying straight and level in the clouds but is really turning in increasingly tight circles that will lead to a stall and crash unless corrected.

But enough about history. The current question is what comes next. It seems likely that the answer is Kamala Harris, but no one knows for sure.

I’ve thought many times in recent years that the current primary system is a failure. Candidate quality has declined since primaries became the method for choosing candidates and that should be no surprise since allowing partisans to choose nominees rewards partisanship. The classic “smoke-filled-room” method of choosing candidates may have been partisan but party bosses did a much better job of considering factors like electability, character, and sanity.

What we are about to see is a version of the old smoke-filled rooms. There won’t be a true choice by the party bosses since it is so late in the process, but what we are about to see is a modern version of a party boss convention. I think that the primary system that gave us Trump three times, Biden twice, and very nearly gave us Bernie Sanders is badly in need of reform and safety valves. That may be undemocratic (small “d”) but democracy without checks and balances is just a tyranny of the majority.

We are watching history being written as the Democrats pick a nominee, and let me just say that I’m tired of it.

There is supposedly an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” This may be about as authentic as mistranslated Chinese character tattoos that end up meaning something like “Ramen noodles” or “illiterate foreigner,” but I do second that emotion.

As a longtime history geek, I can remember as a college student in 1991 thinking that a war would be kind of cool and historic. What can I say? I was a dumb kid with no real concept of war. That kind of naive thinking probably explains a lot of wars and the people who sign up to fight them.

Fast-forward a few decades and I’ve seen quite enough history being made, thank you very much. We’ve seen a lot of history being written just in the past few weeks, months, and years, and one thing I’ve come to realize is that history is cool to read about but it isn’t always cool to experience first-hand. We know how the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II turned out, but it wasn’t obvious to people in the middle of them. And there was a lot of pain and sacrifice required to find that closure.

As I get older, I think I’ll be happier with a nice boring few decades. I’ve seen enough history to suit my tastes.

And I think that’s what this election is going to boil down to. I hope that Kamala Harris or whoever the ultimate Democratic nominee is makes the election about a return to normalcy and boredom. I don’t think that most Americans want a “Second American Revolution.” I don’t think they want to look at their phones every day afraid to see what new inanity Donald Trump has come up with or how Joe Biden misspoke last night. I think that most Americans just want to be left alone to live their lives. Americans want a government that functions smoothly and quietly.

Kamala Harris just needs to be sane, because sanity is not what is on display with the MAGA Republican Party. And I expect MAGA to become more unhinged (and probably racist) as Kamala moves to the forefront. I’ve already seen lots of discussions about how she is not a natural-born citizen because her parents were not US citizens. (Spoiler alert: This warmed-over birther conspiracy theory from the Obama days is false because Kamala was born in California. It doesn’t matter if her parents were citizens or not as long as they weren’t foreign diplomats or part of an invading army.)

I think the move to nudge Biden aside is a good one and interesting from a historical perspective. It will probably be a trivia question that most of us have direct memories of within a decade or so, but let’s vote to stop making things interesting.

Let’s get back to boring.