This Surprise Started With Another One: How Similar Trump & Biden Had Become
The public’s engagement with the 2024 presidential election has been one of the most cynical and checked-out in modern American history. Trump’s cynicism has been more obvious, for longer — he is attracting millions of disaffected Americans who believe our ideals of representative governance should be tossed aside. His attempts to refuse a peaceful transfer of power have attracted cynical people who have fully abandoned trust in the system itself. Trump’s cynicism is the chaotic, will-to-power kind — “the system isn’t for us, so we’ll remake it in our image, or destroy it.”

While we’re in this wild, historic moment of flux, it feels important to emphasize that this game is not just a gamble for who can win in November. This moment signifies something much deeper — a critical effort to revitalize American democracy. For the first time in many years, a key constituency of Americans are hopeful.

But Biden also fatally violated trust in the system. His cynicism emerged more slowly, as his team repeatedly refused to engage with the question of his cognitive fitness. The signs were there for months, from failing to proactively position his VP as his ready successor, to failing to encourage primary participation to engage and encourage his base. But it wasn’t obvious until the debate, when his disastrous performance revealed the plain truth of his condition to millions of Americans, and the aftermath, when he ensconced himself with advisors and refused to leave or engage on his condition in good faith. The message to the public became, loud and clear: I’m the only candidate to beat Trump, and it’s worth anything, even repeated violations of the will of the people, including my own base, to make that happen. The ends had come to fully justify the means.

It’s a wonderful surprise. But it’s only the first step to restoring our confidence and trust in our core principle as a nation: That a democratic system of governance can be used to build a better collective future.

Reclaim Hope In Our Democracy, In 3 Easy Steps
Just kidding. It won’t be easy! But it’s possible.

Millions of Americans just spent 4 weeks (for some: many more) feeling disaffected and hopeless about the possibility of a responsive election cycle. Democrats’ key aim must be to meaningfully bring these people back into the fold, and quickly. Time is short, so these gestures will need to be more intentional and overt.

Moving forward, how can leadership model this?

healthy democracy operates by several heuristics for social life that, until today, were totally absent from this presidential race. If we want a healthier range of possible ends in our democracy, whether we’re headed into an open convention, a Harris appointment, or some combination of both, we have to figure out a way to reclaim these civic heuristics as means along the way. We have to go all in on restoring trust with voters.

What can this look like in practice?

To defeat entrenched cynicism, we will need hope — anti-cynicism candidates, backed by an anti-cynicism party, promoted through an anti-cynicism process. We will need shared goals — stories about the future. We will need shared pathways — clear processes, and touchpoints for the public along the way. And we will need a sense of agency — the trust that leadership is listening, and responsive to us along the way.

We’ve needed that all along. And the Democrats just created an opportunity to

Biden Dropping Out Puts Us Back in a World Where Hope (& Agency) Has a Chance
What will happen next? Impossible to say (exciting, right? In a good way!). Regardless of path, right now Democratic leadership has opened up a new window for civic participation in our process. By doing this, they’ve taken an urgent first step to reconnecting our system of governance with the will of the people.

The way they manage this process can ensure civic agency and, with it, restore our trust in the process and hope for the nation itself. If done well, Dem leaders’ moves over the next four months can restore our confidence in a founding principle of our nation: That democracy is an agentic tool to realize a collective vision.

Both candidates participated in the production of cynicism. And in doing so, they both alienated a vital constituency of the American public: People who believe in democracy as a process — as the means itself toward a better end.

Psychologist C.R. Snyder describes hope as made up of three core components: Goals, pathways (how you get toward your goals), and agency (the belief you can actually participate in these pathways).