That Isn't Democracy Dying; It's The GOP
And if the Republican Party expires that won't trouble me much. Bonus: Who died and made Jamie Dimon king?
Abandon all hope, ye who read The Atlantic.
Among the happier consequences of Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket is that a campaign based largely on spreading panic about a second Donald Trump term gave way to a campaign based largely on demonstrating to voters why the Democrats have a better program than the Republicans. Doom porn wasn’t changing minds; Harris’s sunnier approach does. But The Atlantic didn’t get the memo. I’ve been critical of The Atlantic’s taste for hanging crepe before, but its current cover (see above) is so off the charts that when I first saw it on social media I thought it might be a parody. It isn’t.
For the record: I don’t think democracy will die if Trump is re-elected (though, yes, it will take a beating). The End is not Nigh. Well, let me qualify that. The End is not Nigh for democracy, but, like Liz Cheney, I think it probably is for the Republican Party. Not being a Republican myself, I consider this prospect with some equanimity. (In January I offered the friendly suggestion that conservatives re-start the Whig Party.) The question remains: What will be the final blow? In the New Republic, I consider as one possible candidate the House GOP’s determination to shut down the government one month before the election. You can read that here.
Just to show you that I, too, have a gloomy side, I posted a second piece today in the New Republic suggesting that the influence of Jamie Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, over the government is starting to rival that of his bank’s purple-nosed namesake, John Pierpont Morgan. The evidence is the ease with which Dimon batted back a very sensible Fed rule requiring big banks to carry 20 percent more capital reserves than they currently do. Since we will never let these banks fail, the consequences of insufficient capital reserves in a future crisis will fall on the U.S. taxpayer. Yet too big to fail is fast becoming too big to regulate. You can read that jeremiad here.
Andrew Yang's Forward Party apparently played a bit of a behind the scenes role in ensuring that Mitt Romney's recruit in the Utah Republican Senate primary beat out the MAGA alternatives. I'm sort of hoping Mitt will lead an exodus of anti-Trump Republicans to join Forward.
I do like the idea of a return of the Whig Party, though -- as I understand it, in political cartoons where Dems are donkeys and Repubs are elephants, the Whigs traditionally were owls, which are, frankly, much cooler than donkeys or elephants.