The best-case scenario for President Joe Biden is four more years in office. That by itself won't be enough to save democracy in the United States. This isn't some hyper partisan position, but the opinion of one of a dwindling number of independent voters.
I am one of those voters. I am a college-educated Midwesterner, who has lived in three major coastal cities as an adult. I do not work in politics or the news media. I am a small business owner, and my tax bracket gets hit hard no matter who is in office. I am also a Jewish American.
But who I am specifically does not matter. What should matter to the Biden campaign is that I am a registered and committed independent; a contingent which the media eschews to cover, and our two major political parties have failed to represent most profoundly.
I have voted for both Republican and Democratic candidates. I sincerely believe that adhering to a particular political party is either small minded, or represents something darker: a need to affix ourselves to dogma, trading independent thought for power and belonging.
I also understand the potential threat that Biden perceives to democracy when it comes to former President Donald Trump. If it walks and talks like a dictator, it probably is ... not so great for our democracy. More frighteningly, I do not believe the Trumpian threat to democracy was the brainchild of Donald Trump himself. It was most likely the result of both proactive and reactive threats to our democracy: kingmakers and strategists outside the realm of public view, and a growing number of Americans who feel silenced, ostracized, "outside of," and therefore ambivalent to our American democratic system.
Even knowing all this, I grapple with the option of voting for Donald Trump in November. I waver daily on my thoughts around which threat to our democracy—and to my personal safety—will manifest itself more rapidly. If Monday I am committed to voting for Biden, by Wednesday I am again considering voting for his opponent.
This weighs heavily on my mind: the Democratic party has done more, perhaps, in the last four decades to damage democracy than Trump's populist GOP has yet to accomplish.
Since the 1960s, liberalism's hold on university campuses has been so strong, universal, and all-encompassing as to be nearly total. One of the two major American political parties has been shut out of the academic sphere. At my own alma mater, more than 80 percent of faculty identify as liberal—less than 1.5 percent identify as conservative.
In the media, liberal bias is virtually undeniable—specious (liberal) arguments to the contrary. A few numbers:
- A 2020 survey of 13,000 journalists by The Washington Post found that 78 percent of them openly identify with a political party; of those, 80 percent are liberal.
- A 2022 Pew Research study found 55 percent of journalists do not believe both sides of an issue deserve equal coverage—while 76 percent of Americans do believe both sides of an issue deserve equal coverage.
- It is not surprising then that, according to another Pew Research study, from 2016 to 2021 Republicans with "at least some trust in the news media" plummeted from 70 percent to 35 percent.
Consumers are more liberal minded—by the dictionary definition of the word—than those we entrust to deliver unbiased information. And it's important to remember that trust does not spontaneously evaporate—the onus is on the news media as a critical part of our democracy to keep to their end of the bargain; our delivery platforms must also be democratic, or rather representative, in nature.
Lastly, let's talk about a world I have personally been a part of (in a cog capacity)—the world of "Big Tech." While the leaders of tech companies take money from conservative sources, they employ and arguably weaponize liberalism, specifically progressivism, as a means of uniting (and controlling) their workforces, comprised largely of impressionable young people. One need only refer to CNBC's 2020 exposé on the political donations from employees of major social media and digital entertainment platforms to sniff out the risk of political homogeneity by those writing the code that dictates what users watch and read online:
- 98 percent of Netflix employee political donations went to Democrats in 2020.
- 88 percent of Alphabet employee political donations went to Democrats in 2020.
- 84 percent of Apple employee political donations went to Democrats in 2020.
- 77 percent of Facebook employee political donations went to Democrats in 2020.
Again, I'll remind you, I am not a Republican. I mailed my ballot in early for Biden in 2020 while living in San Francisco, just in case COVID kept me from the polls. That's while knowing he'd win by a landslide in that liberal bubble.
But, Mr. President, and angry partisan readers, let me ask you—is a political system in which the predominant modes of information transmission (academia, news media, digital media) reflect an 80/20 human bias toward one political party truly a democracy? I think not.
I suspect President Biden is also aware, after his long career in politics, that radical forces threaten to commandeer his own party – a moderate Democrat is just about as difficult to find these days as a moderate Republican, thanks in large part to insidious forces reshaping the progressive caucus. Even if President Biden can't cop to this, he must agree that the solution to saving American democracy cannot rest on the shoulders of one party alone – the mere notion is antithetical to democracy.
Which brings me back to my point: four more years of a Democratic Biden presidency will not save American democracy. In four more years Biden may manage to tamper the radical forces infecting the Democratic party – the forces that are leading young American progressives to openly laud terrorist organizations like Hamas, to recast Osama bin Laden as a sympathetic figure, to target and harass the family of Biden's own Secretary of State.
But, even if he manages this, how will Biden dethrone Trumpism in the Republican party? How will his presidency help moderate Republicans regain ground that seems to be forever lost to Trump and his would-be successors?
What's more, there are growing calls for Biden to take a battery of neurological tests, yet there is no viable alternative to his candidacy being proposed. What does this say about the dangerous power vacuum on the left when Biden does finally choose to retire from the public sphere?
The good news is that this everyday American voter believes Biden has an opportunity to save American democracy. And it is possible that enough of us weathered and weary independents believe it, too, to make the difference in November.
Respectfully, this is what the president needs to do:
- Ask Vice President Kamala Harris to resign
- Choose a moderate Republican running mate
- Run on a mixed ticket (or rather, an independent ticket as both parties will likely disown both candidates) comprised of a moderate Democrat (Biden) and a moderate Republican
If you're one for Biblical analogies, it only takes two of a kind (moderates) to repopulate the world (US democracy) after the flood (of partisan radicalism).
If Biden does this, he may be reviled by his party in his lifetime—but his legacy will be in steering American democracy away from the precipice, and onto the firm ground of moderation. It is the only way.
Jillian Kushner runs a marketing consultancy for tech companies. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a BA in history and literature.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
