Ben McKeown/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks at an event at Abbots Creek Community Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, January 18, 2024.
History has not been kind to the German Communist Party of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Post-1934 Communists have not been kind to it, either.
At the direction of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the world’s communist parties shifted their policy in the late ’20s, arguing that their chief enemy wasn’t rising fascism, but rather the social democratic parties of the moderate left. In Germany, this policy had its most disastrous consequences. As late as the German elections of November 1932, the Communists not only refused to form an alliance with the Social Democrats to oppose the rising Nazi Party, but campaigned against the SDs, sometimes violently, terming them “social fascists.” Two months later, Hitler became chancellor; almost immediately, both left parties were outlawed, their leaders and activists imprisoned, and a number of them later killed.
Until Stalin reconsidered the merits of this policy in 1935, communists worldwide viewed the rest of the left as their main enemy. Dorothy Healey, who led the not-quite-party-line Los Angeles chapter of the Communist Party from 1946 until 1968, whom I got to know as a fellow DSA member in the 1980s, once ruefully told me how California communists had opposed the gubernatorial campaign of lifelong socialist Upton Sinclair, who in 1934 had won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination on a social democratic platform, only to lose that November to the Republican nominee. “We said he was a social fascist,” Dorothy told me, shaking her head at the moral and political idiocy of that stance.
I bring up this malignant episode in history because I fear we’re seeing a return of it today. The presidential campaigns of leftists Cornel West and Jill Stein, the conspiracy-addled Robert Kennedy Jr., and, should No Labels anoint him, Joe Manchin, all effectively deny that a re-elected Donald Trump poses a fundamental threat to American democracy that isn’t remotely comparable to the presumed imperfections of a Biden second term. Yet resurrecting the “logic” that (mis)informed the communists of the early 1930s, they proclaim that Biden is every bit as insupportable as Trump. Should Trump win the election, historians will surely view them as just as dangerously deranged as the communists who focused their ire on social democrats rather than on Hitler.
But how will historians view the Democrats when they look back at 2024? If Trump wins, surely some of them will wonder how the Democrats put up such an apparently weak candidate to run against him. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on January 14, Biden’s approval rating hit a new low: 33 percent.
There are, I think, three chief obstacles that stand between Biden and re-election: the public’s perception of the economy, the public’s perception of immigration, and Biden’s own weaknesses as an advocate for his policies and his presidency. Of those three, I think the economy is the one where Biden might turn around at least some of the public’s sentiment. The venerable University of Michigan survey of consumer confidence shows that it has risen by 29 percent since November, the largest two-month gain since 1991.
The housing market, to be sure, remains profoundly out of whack, but the uptick in other measures of economic well-being gives Biden a window to argue that his stewardship of the economy bears no resemblance to the way Republicans characterize it, and to contrast his economic goals for a second term to Trump’s and the Republicans’.
If Trump wins, historians will wonder how the Democrats put up such an apparently weak candidate to run against him.
But Biden (and Democrats generally) are in an even deeper hole on immigration. In that same ABC/Post poll, Biden’s approval rating on “handling the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border” is just 18 percent. A Berkeley IGS poll of California’s voters released last week should be even more alarming. In the nation’s most liberal state, 65 percent of likely voters believe the borders are not secure against illegal entry, 49 percent consider unauthorized immigrants to be a “major burden to the country,” 29 percent a “minor burden,” and just 18 percent “not a burden.”
This isn’t white working-class backlash. California has the lowest percentage of white working-class residents of any state except Hawaii. (That’s the primary reason why the state is so left.) Pluralities of both Blacks and Latinos labeled unauthorized immigrants a major burden, as did a plurality of voters who said that if the election came down to Biden and Trump, they were undecided. While an overwhelming majority of registered Republicans (70 percent) said our asylum laws were too lenient, Democrats were all over the map (17 percent too lenient, 29 percent about right, 33 percent too restrictive, and 21 percent no opinion).
Facing numbers such as those, Biden has made clear he’s willing to support somewhat more restrictive asylum laws, which a bill likely to clear the Senate with bipartisan support will do. Egged on by Trump, House Republicans don’t appear inclined to go along, which would mean they, and Trump, could continue to lambaste Biden for the mess at the border. Whether Biden can thereby turn the tables on them for their opposition to altering border policy, though, gets us to his third problem: his ability to make a case for his policies and himself that actually resonates with a majority of voters.
This is the biggest question mark hovering over Biden’s prospects. Polls don’t tell us how many Americans even tune in to Biden any longer; the gap between the performance of the economy and their perception of the economy is one part the overhang of high costs of living and one part their dismissal and/or tuning out of whatever Biden or his advocates say.
The upcoming New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries don’t present a very good test of the level of Biden’s support. New Hampshire isn’t recognized by the Democratic National Committee as a real primary, so Biden isn’t even on the ballot there, and he has no serious intraparty opposition in South Carolina, or anyplace else. (Apologies to Dean Phillips.)
That said, Biden could still underperform in both, getting few write-ins in New Hampshire and low turnout in South Carolina. Neither of those outcomes would augur well for his prospects in November. Should he bomb, the best hope for the Democrats, and perhaps the only hope for blocking a Trump presidency, would be for a governor or two to enter the race—not to defeat Biden in forthcoming primaries (it’s too late to enter them, though in some, write-ins are still possible), but to compel him and his advocates to consider withdrawing from the race.
That may be the long shot of all long shots, but should Trump reoccupy the White House next January because Biden could not defeat him, future historians will probably be looking askance not just at the third-party presidential candidates who stood in Biden’s way, but also at the Democrats who, faced with the prospect of a neofascist president, chose not to run a stronger candidate than Biden, despite the ample warnings they’d received that, excellent president though he’d in many ways been, he was probably the Democrat least likely to defeat Donald Trump.
