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Claire Berlinski, who currently lives in Paris, is a journalist, a policy analyst with a Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University, and the author of numerous books, including suspense novels.
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First, a word of appreciation for President Joe Biden’s decision. It’s easy to say that he had no choice: He was forced out. But you can only say this in retrospect. He did have a choice. He could have taken the whole country down with him, and I very much feared that he would. Donald Trump, after all, is clearly prepared to do just that.
But I have a thought or two for those around him who concealed his infirmity. Doing so was outrageously irresponsible, though I don’t believe it was a conscious decision. I can’t imagine his circle of advisers sitting down with one another, saying, out loud, “He’s too ill to do this. He’s getting worse rapidly. But let’s pretend otherwise.”
There’s a lesson to draw from this, if my theory is correct: More should be done to mitigate the dangerous tendency toward groupthink in the White House. It has plagued one administration after the other.
Groupthink
The psychologist Irving Janis published Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes in 1982, focusing on episodes like the Bay of Pigs. What he wrote was taken very seriously by managers of corporations, but the ideas never were taken to heart, as far as I know, in the institution of the presidency itself.
The White House seems to organize itself in such a way that its guiding assumptions fail to receive a sufficiently rigorous challenge. This can lead to irrational and dysfunctional decision-making. When we review the decisions that transformed “Vietnam” and “Iraq” into synonyms for “catastrophe,” we see that something prevented the people around the president from raising obvious objections.
I assume this happens because everyone in the White House is awed by the presidency and desperately eager to please the president. Also the group around the president feels besieged — by the press, Congress, the public, and foreign rivals — and when everyone on the outside is an enemy psychologically speaking, it gives rise to an acute desire to maintain harmony within the group.
Janis described three conditions that lead to groupthink: high group cohesiveness, such that members of the group prize maintaining friendly relationships; structural flaws in the decision-making process (for example, telling the group what the leader thinks before soliciting its views); and “highly stressful external events.”
Janis had suggestions for countermanding these tendencies. For example, he advised leaders to absent themselves from group meetings to avoid influencing the outcome. An organization should set up independent groups to work on the same problem. It should bring in outside experts. And it should always assign a member of the group to play the role of devil’s advocate.
Taking this advice should be mandatory in every White House.
Kamala’s Weakness
Democrats: Listen to me. You do not have this in the bag. Not by any stretch of the imagination. You are at grave risk of falling victim to groupthink again.
What’s more, you can’t afford to win this in a squeaker. Did you see the way Trump reacted to being shot in the face? If you think he’ll meekly accept defeat and shuffle away to spend the rest of his life in jail, you’re very mistaken. If he loses, he will violently contest the outcome of the election. He will do this even if you win an overwhelming, landslide victory. But should you win an overwhelming, landslide victory, you will have a much better shot at putting down the inevitable violent insurrection. If it ends up as a narrow victory, or if it’s not entirely clear who won, we are in deep trouble. That’s a straight shot to civil war.
You must win an overwhelming victory. That means putting aside all of your policy preferences and ridding yourself of everything that makes Americans dislike you.
This, in turn, means accepting something you’ve never shown any ability to accept: To wit, you must grasp that Trump’s criticism of your party has been successful because it is often correct.
You are, indeed, out-of-touch elites who are prone to espousing policies that infuriate Americans. You speak in a way that drives them nuts. Your inability to read the room is a source of wonderment to me and the rest of the world.
These are problems that barely rank, compared to the alternative.
But it is a fact that many Americans just can’t see the problem with Trump — yet they do see the problem with you. I don’t know why.
The problem with Trump seems pretty damned obvious to me. In fact, I’ve never seen someone more obviously and dangerously off his rocker in my entire life. But just accept it: Many people just don’t see it. And you need at least some of those people to vote for you.
You’re now convincing yourself — I can see you doing it — that Biden would have been an extremely popular president but for his age and infirmity. You’re telling yourself that the economy has been terrific, that he passed more legislation than anyone imagined possible, and he wasn’t Trump: Why wouldn’t people love an administration like that?
But if you’re telling yourself that the only reason the electorate rejected Biden was his age — and the only reason it might reject Kamala is her race and her gender — you’re not grasping what you need to grasp to win.
Kamala is not nearly as silly as people think. But she has already proven that she readily falls victim to groupthink.
Everything is now riding on her. It isn’t just the future of the United States, either. It’s the future of the world. Her instinct will be to surround herself with people she trusts — people, that is, who will share her cognitive blind spots, and who will be reluctant to tell her the truth.
She can’t do that. It’s fatal.
Kamala, Stop Cackling
Kamala — if I may — here’s what you need to do.
First, you must believe what you’ve been saying. This is the most important election in our modern history, and perhaps in our history, period. You must behave as if this is true. The “existential threat to our democracy” slogan is not just a DNC talking point. It’s true. Trump has already so profoundly degraded our culture and our institutions that if we’re subjected to another four years of him, we’ll be transformed into something unrecognizable — something not one of us could be proud of.
The behavior of the Supreme Court and Justice Aileen Cannon are signs we’re at the midpoint of the process of authoritarian capture, not the beginning. By 2028, Trump and his family will be burrowed in so deep that we’ll never get rid of them.
Consider the way they’ve threatened to sue the states that put anyone but Biden on the ballot. By 2028, they’ll have enough of the judiciary in their hands that they will succeed in keeping the names of anyone who might threaten their power off the ballot. Don’t believe it? How much of what’s happened so far would you have believed? I’ve seen every bit of this before. I watched the whole thing take place in Turkey, beginning to end. Never, ever, underestimate men like him.
Trump has already transformed the United States in terrible ways. We are already an anocracy. It will take us years to recover. What’s happening to us now is exactly what it looks like when a democracy is transformed into an autocracy. People think it looks like something out of Der Untergang. It doesn’t. In the year 2024, it looks like this.
If you’re in any way unclear what that means, I’ve got a guide for you.
Please read that guide, too, because you need to be able to explain this to the electorate. It’s just not good enough to say, “Our democracy is at risk.” That’s already become a cliché, and like all clichés, it is irritating.
You need to be able to explain to the electorate that we are undergoing a known, specific process. It is a process that has been seen in recent decades throughout the world. It has been studied. We know a lot about it. You must be able to explain that this process has specific stages. You must be able to discuss other countries where this has happened. It will be up to you to explain all of this, because our media has largely failed to do so. You must be able to explain, too, where this leads. You must also be able to explain why that is undesirable.
To be clear, it is not, in fact, our democracy that’s at risk. I know what you mean by that, but the shorthand is confusing. You must explain that no, you don’t mean that we will no longer have elections. We probably will. But they will be denuded of everything that makes elections meaningful.
You must communicate all of this clearly, without resorting to slogans and cliches that irritate rather than inform. Doing so is your first responsibility: You must explain all of this in the way Joe Biden never once managed to do.
For years, the bully pulpit has either been unoccupied or occupied by Donald Trump. Americans haven’t heard one single politician make the case against him competently. You’ve all been so hopeless that you’ve even managed to make the perfect truth — democracy is at stake — sound like a lie.
So if you mean to win, your days of the cliché are over. You must speak to Americans in a way that will shock them to their roots, because no one has spoken to them this way in generations: You must speak to them as if they’re adults.
Our politicians sound like phonies because they speak down to Americans, whom they believe to be extremely stupid. They have come to believe that the only way to speak to them is by means of short slogans — focus-grouped and polled, then repeated endlessly. This view of the electorate has been confirmed by Donald Trump’s success. If voters want stupid, you’ve clearly been thinking, we’d better give it to them, good and dumb.
Yes, many voters are stupid and childish. But they can nonetheless sense that you have two personalities: your real one, and the one you use when you’re speaking to them or your toddlers. So speak to them as if they’re the voters they ought to be: intelligent citizens who can handle the truth. People have a way of rising to the occasion when they sense that someone holds them to a higher standard.
That’s the first thing you must be able to communicate — that our ability to have meaningful elections really is at risk if Donald Trump wins.
The second thing you must explain is why the ramifications of a Trump presidency would be unimaginably grave: The world, too, is at risk. You must be the first president in decades who takes the time to explain American foreign policy to the Americans who pay for it. You cannot continue to allow lies like those that emerged from those repulsive Putin puppets at the Republican convention — Tucker Carlson, the lamentable David Sacks, the odious JD Vance — to go unanswered.
Ignore anyone who tells you that voters don’t care about foreign policy. If you explain the stakes to them as you must, they will.
Do this in a serious, adult way. No soundbites. No cackling. Roosevelt was the master of this. Listen to him:
This is the tone you should aim for. If you respect the electorate enough to speak to them this way, it will respect you in turn.
Can you do it? You might be able to. I knew of you back when you were a terrifying prosecutor. I’ve seen you in the Senate. Back when you weren’t trying to win popularity contests. You’re not vapid and foolish. You’ve just been pretending to be.
Knock that off.
A National Unity Ticket
Now is not the time to worry about your pet policy preferences. You must form a coalition of every force in America that’s horrified by the prospect of Trump returning to office. This means signaling, right away, that you’ll be running way, way, way to your natural right.
Consider what just happened in France. People who could barely stand to be in the same room with each other united under a single banner to keep the National Front out of power. It worked. You need to do the same thing.
But our electoral system works differently and our political demographics aren’t the same. You can’t do this by uniting only the forces of the left, because that doesn’t add up to enough people to win an election.
You already have the support of your left flank. You don’t need to worry about them. (What are they going to do? Vote for Trump?) You’ve got California sewn up. What you need to worry about are the swing voters in the Rust Belt. They’re going to decide our fate.
In The New York Times last month, Aaron Sorkin suggested that Democrats nominate Mitt Romney. That’s a nonstarter, but the underlying idea isn’t wrong. You need to announce that you’ll put Republicans in your Cabinet.
You should aim for securing the enthusiastic endorsement of all of the former members of Trump’s Cabinet (except for the handful of lifers who haven’t yet broken from him and denounced him as an idiot and a menace.) You especially need the endorsement — and the support on the campaign trail — of former Trump officials with national security responsibilities. You want John Bolton and Jim Mattis out stumping for you.
If you genuinely believe that democracy is on the ballot — and you damned well should — then prove it by saying whatever you need to say, promising whatever you need to promise, and doing whatever it takes to get all of the following people on the stage of the Democratic National Convention. You need them all standing by you and telling Americans that they’re endorsing you, despite your differences, because putting Trump back in office is just too damned dangerous — and they would know: John Bolton, Jim Mattis, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mark Milley, Ty Cobb, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Chris Christie, Stephanie Grisham, Sarah Matthews, Mick Mulvaney, Bill Barr, and extend the list as appropriate. Every Republican who endorses you is worth 10 Democratic endorsements when it comes to those swing voters.
A huge pool of disaffected Republicans are yours for the taking. They’re the ones who vainly placed their hopes in Nikki Haley. (She will feel quite foolish when all of her former colleagues endorse you.) These disaffected Republicans are now looking at you and wondering if they could bring themselves to pull the lever for you. You have to convince them that the answer is, “Yes.”
Chris Christie says the White House never called him to ask for his endorsement. That’s nuts. You need to be on the phone with him and all the rest of them, not only asking for their endorsement, but willing to make a deal. What position do they want in your Cabinet? What promise do they need you to make? Give it to them. (Make an especially handsome offer to Liz Cheney. She’d be an especially fine asset to your Cabinet.)
If you get all of those people on your side, you’ll win with safe margins. Doing so is the only way to defeat Trumpism, and until it’s defeated, permanently, it’s pointless to talk about policy. He will continue to blackmail us until we make it clear that neither he nor anyone like him will ever succeed. That may take many electoral cycles, by the way, because once that genie gets a taste of life outside the bottle, it rarely wants to go back.
Next, you need to find an actual swing voter from the Rust Belt — some disgruntled white guy who can’t stand Trump, but finds you deeply suspicious and painfully woke (which you are). You need to make him a senior policy adviser. You need him to sit in on every meeting between now and the election and be your devil’s advocate.
You desperately need someone like him in your inner circle. You’ve surrounded yourself with people who truly think it’s a good idea to say things like, “My name is Kamala Harris and my pronouns are ‘she/her.’” You need someone who will discourage you from doing things like that in no uncertain terms.
Say it after me. This must be your mantra from now on:
“I don’t need to shore up my left. I need to shore up my right.”
Banish Every Hint of Wokeness
If you won’t do that, then please, just trust me on this. Democrats just don’t seem to grasp how much the ideology emerging from our elite universities infuriates Americans and how much it harms them, electorally, to be even tangentially associated with it.
This is your biggest weakness. You’re not in California anymore. You cannot sound like anything that might have emerged from a faculty lounge. Don’t talk about “equity.” You’re going to be attacked — rightly — for every trace of far-left lunacy that’s permeated our institutions, and particularly the federal government. In fact, if it weren’t for the far greater lunacy on the right, no one would ever vote for you. So don’t talk about antiracism, microaggressions, social-emotional learning, or DEI. Don’t refer to people as folx. Don’t refer to people as BIPOC. Don’t talk about environmental justice. And don’t even mention transgenderism.
Get yourself a disgruntled white guy from the Rust Belt. Run everything you say past him. If he tells you it sounds woke, don’t say it. Not even if you believe it to be true. Remember: Our democracy is at stake. You are creating an anti-Trump alliance, not a pro-Kamala alliance. If you’re as much of a patriot as your boss, you’ll sacrifice the wokeness — especially since you never actually believed in it. It’s been a huge miscalculation, on your part, to think that adopting it would help you. It’s done the very opposite.
Remember: Do not surround yourself with people just like you. Surround yourself with people who are just like the people whose votes you need. Surround yourself with young, mostly white guys in Pennsylvania and Michigan. If they don’t learn to like you, democracy dies.
Remember: It isn’t about advancing your policy agenda. No one cares about your policy agenda. It is about defeating Donald Trump. We can talk about your policy agenda after he’s been banished and we all feel confident that we’re not careening toward civil war.
If you need any more help, just give me a call. There’s more good advice where this came from. And I’m happy to share it with you. I want you to succeed.
After all: Our democracy really is at stake.
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Published with the permission of Claire Berlinski. A version of this piece originally appeared at The Cosmopolitan Globalist.
