Biden-Cheney, Harris-Romney or Klobuchar-Cheney in 2024?
As I’ve noted before, one reason I pay very close attention to the IsraeliPalestinian arena is that a lot of trends get perfected there first and then go global — airline hijacking, suicide bombing, building a wall, the challenges of pluralism and lots more. It’s off-Broadway to Broadway, so what’s playing there these days that might be a harbinger for politics in the U.S.?
Answer: It’s the most diverse national unity government in Israel’s history, one that stretches from Jewish settlers on the right all the way to an Israeli-Arab Islamist party and super-liberals on the left. Most important, it’s holding together, getting stuff done and muting the hyperpolarization that was making Israel ungovernable.
Is that what America needs in 2024 — a ticket of Joe Biden and Liz Cheney? Or Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski, or Kamala Harris and Mitt Romney, or Stacey Abrams and Liz Cheney, or Amy Klobuchar and Liz Cheney? Or any other such combination. Before you start to shout me down, hear me out.
In June, after an utterly wild period in which Israel held four national elections over two years and kept failing to produce a stable governing majority, the lambs there actually lay down with the lions.
Key Israeli politicians swallowed their pride, softened policy edges and came together for a fouryear national unity government. And for the first time, an Israeli-Arab party, the Islamist organization Raam, played a vital role in cementing an Israeli coalition.
What forced everyone’s hand? A broad agreement that Israeli politics was being held hostage by then-Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who resisted putting together any government that he would not lead, apparently because, if he didn’t lead, he could lose his chance at some kind of immunity from prosecution on multiple corruption charges that could lead to prison. Sound familiar? Netanyahu was just a smarter Donald Trump, constantly delegitimizing the mainstream media and the Israeli justice system and vigorously exploiting social/religious/ ethnic fault lines to divide and rule.
Could this play come to Broadway? I asked Steven Levitsky, a political scientist and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” after he presented some similar ideas last week to my colleague David Leonhardt.
America is facing an existential moment, Levitsky told me, noting that the Republican Party has shown that it isn’t committed any longer to playing by democratic rules, leaving the United States uniquely threatened among Western democracies.
That all means two things, he continued. First, this Trump-cult version of the GOP must never be able to retake the White House. Since Trump has made embracing the Big Lie — that the 2020 election was a fraud — a prerequisite for being in the Trump GOP, his entire Cabinet most likely would be people who denied, or worked to overturn, Biden’s election victory. There is no reason to believe they would cede power the next time.
The best way to counter that is by creating a broad national unity vehicle that enables more Republicans to leave the Trump cult.
That is what civicminded Israeli elites did when they created a broad national unity coalition whose main mission was to make the basic functions of government work again and safeguard the integrity of Israel’s democracy.
Such a vehicle in America, said Levitsky, should “be able to shave a small but decisive fraction of Republican votes away from Trump.” In a tight race, it would take only 5-10% of Republicans leaving Trump to assure victory.
This is the democratic way of defeating a threat to democracy. Not doing it is how democracies die. I am quite aware that it is highly unlikely; there is no modern precedent for such a cross-party ticket. And yet, I still think it is worth raising. There is no precedent for how close we’re coming to an unraveling of our democracy, either.