SUCCESSION

This week the American TV viewing public has watched the season finale of the HBO series Succession that, for four seasons, rendered a view of the excesses of modern-day capitalism in a story about generational succession at Waystar-Royco, a fictional family operated company in the global media business. Many elements of this show hinted at the generational transition issue our nation will have to address at the end of the first (and only?) term of the Biden administration. The patriarch in the TV series, Logan Roy, is about Biden’s age when he dies without having settled the matter of his succession. Is it coincidence that this TV series has run for four seasons, the same term as the Presidential tenure? And the series ends when Waystar’s media unit ATN prematurely declares the winner in a closely contested Presidential race in which a hapless member of the Roy tribe unsuccessfully contended.

As this drama played itself out, we witnessed in reality TV a rare moment of bi-partisanship in the governance of nation’s affairs when the President and the Speaker of the House worked out a compromise on the conditions for lifting the debt ceiling for the federal treasury and, more uniquely and importantly, got significant bi-partisan majorities in the House and the Senate to sign off on the deal and stave off a calamitous national default. The President, in a prime-time televised victory lap, presented the deal as just another bi-partisan policy success of his administration, in line with the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but this one was different. While his previous significant policy initiatives passed with full Democratic support and a few Republican defections, this measure was carried by majorities of both Democrats and Republicans in the House and in the Senate. What we have learned from this unique moment in American politics is that when it comes to asserting the full faith and credit of the Unites States, we still have a solid measure of unity in the Beltway. Another way of putting this is that when an existential American interest and value was at stake, majorities in both parties chose national interest over partisan preference. The question now is whether this lofty attitude adjustment can be carried over in the resolution of other items of existential national interest. Nothing more existential than the preservation of liberal democracy.

It should cause us to pause in a moment of disbelief: that we are living at a time where bedrock principles of American statecraft like the full faith and credit of the United States and the democratic underpinning of our public governance system are even put in question. And yet, it becomes clearer by the day that this is what the 2024 national election will be about. It should not be that way. In a better world we would have two indisputably democratic parties competing with diverging ideas about how to secure Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the future; how to reform our tax laws so that they make sure that everyone pays their fair share and that they generate enough revenue to cover the expense of a responsible government; how then to begin to whittle down the national debt that both parties have allowed to balloon to unsustainable proportion; how to stem the tide of gun killings; how to codify a common sense immigration policy that accommodates the needs of our economy, creates a path to lawful residency for the millions of undocumented aliens already residing and working in the country, and has a compassionately pragmatic and consistent approach to the embrace of refugees; and how to improve the American healthcare system in ways that brings the cost in line with similar systems in the rest of the free world and delivers outcomes that place the nation back on top of world rankings. Responsible political parties vying for the support of their constituents should compete with the best ideas they can come up with to address these challenges to America’s future. Unfortunately, the Republican Party chose not to present a platform for the 2020 election, and it looks doubtful that it will come up with one for the next succession battle. That is no way to serve a country!

There are more parallels between the succession scenarios in the HBO drama versus our political reality. In both instances there is no dearth of candidates for the top job and in both instances, it is unclear how they differentiate themselves from their competitors. In the succession battle for the White House the contest is likely not to be about any of the policy issues that for years have been begging for resolution, but instead be a referendum on democracy versus autocracy or, as David Brooks recently posited in a column in the New York Times, “a contest between an essentially moral vision and an essentially immoral one, a contest between decency and its opposite.” It has come to this, because the Republican Party has traded in a conservative agenda for identity politics to accommodate a populist imposter who has hijacked the party in 2016 and has held it hostage ever since. That party is well on its way to repeating the mistake of 2016 when so many contenders vied for the ticket that the imposter ran away with it because his opposition split the primary vote in too many meaningless pieces.

The one thing you cannot blame the imposter for is that he says one thing and does another. You can take him at his word, terrible as it is. His open admiration for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jing Pin, Viktor Orbán, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan and their modus operandi leave nothing to our imagination. He has openly spoken about ‘retribution’ for the people who stood in his way when he attempted to nullify his loss at the voting booth in 2020. And he has promised to pardon the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and other deviates who participated in the January 6 insurrection. America simply cannot afford a 2024 succession resulting in his return to the White House. Fooled once, shame on him; fooled twice shame on us.

P.S. this column gets published on the 79^th anniversary of D-Day when we commemorate the nation’s preparedness to fight for a free and democratic society in the Western world.