Joe Biden won’t concede, but neither will his critics. Something has to give

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“But those behind cried ‘Forward!’

And those before cried ‘Back!’ ”

- Macaulay

Joe Biden is not going. Hasn’t he said as much? “I am firmly committed to staying in this race,” he told congressional Democrats in his July 8 letter, “and to beating Donald Trump.” He has made up his mind. He cannot be dissuaded.

That is to say, he is going – he just doesn’t realize it yet. But it cannot be otherwise. A leader must have followers. It doesn’t matter whether, objectively, you can still do the job. If enough of them have decided you can’t do the job, you can’t do the job.

It is a ghastly business, though. In the pitiless world of politics, there is no more pitiable sight than the collective bludgeoning of a leader who will not go. There is nothing brave or honourable about it: It is the work of a frightened mob, and like all mobs they can be held at bay, for a time, until, sensing weakness, they descend upon the victim and finish him off.

But rarely has the conflict over a leader been so desperate, the two sides so dug in, each as firm as the other in the belief that they are in the right – and each entitled to their belief. Often these things turn on personal loyalties, overlooked ambitions, ancient grudges. But here there really is a fundamental question of principle at stake, on which it is possible for people of goodwill to have radically different positions.

You may laugh when I tell you what that fundamental question of principle is: Who can win the election? But in the present emergency, that is unanswerably the case. The consequences of letting Donald Trump back into the White House are so awful, so unthinkable – for the preservation of constitutional government under the rule of law; for the continuation of American democracy; for the defence of the free world – that for once the natural instinct of all political parties to equate their own interests with those of the public is entirely justified.

The Democrats simply must win this election. Every other concern – loyalty to a decent man with an admirable record; fear of humiliating him, or alienating one section of the party or another; ideological differences; even competency – must give way to one overriding criterion: Who has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump? If there is a better candidate than Mr. Biden, then Mr. Biden will have to go.

But is there? It is easy to point to Mr. Biden’s fading abilities, so visible in last month’s televised debate, to data showing most Americans think he is too old and infirm to hold the office, to his recent slide in the polls. But it is not a given that another candidate would do any better.

Polls showing this or that alternative would do better in theory may or may not prove accurate in the actual event. The political history of the United States is littered with candidates who looked good on paper, with all the right qualifications and an enviable record of success in state politics, who wilted under the scrutiny of a national campaign.

That risk is compounded by the extraordinary circumstances of the moment: the inevitable harm to party unity, and to the party’s standing with the public, arising from the forcible removal of the incumbent; the need to improvise some process for choosing another candidate to replace him, one that will be seen as credible and legitimate by the public, without opening still worse divisions within the party; the brief time that remains to introduce another candidate to the public, and for that candidate to learn the ropes, and to raise the money that such a campaign would require. Among others.

But if all that is unprecedented, so is the status quo. There has never been a candidate for president as old as Mr. Biden. More to the point, neither has there ever been a debate performance so unsettling. Americans thought they knew Mr. Biden. The realization, reinforced by much postdebate reporting, that they had been had – that insiders had growing worries about Mr. Biden’s cognitive state, which they had kept from the public – may prove fatal not only to Mr. Biden’s chances but the party’s.

Does Mr. Trump suffer from far greater mental incapacities – malignant narcissism, probable dementia, not to mention stone ignorance? Of course. That is not the issue. It’s all very well to demand that he stand down, or that the Republican Party force him out. But he won’t, and it is clear that neither will the party. Which only makes it all the more imperative that the Democratic Party field the strongest possible candidate against him. It is Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness that demands Democratic ruthlessness.

The issue, as I said off the top, is not whether Mr. Biden can still function as president – he’s done pretty well so far, even if he has lost a step, though it’s legitimate to ask what he will be like four years from now – but whether enough people believe he can. It is not, similarly, whether he can actually win the election that counts, but whether people in the party believe he can win. If enough of them become convinced he cannot, that is what will decide his fate.

That is more or less where we are at. Mr. Biden is in an impossible position: Even to answer the question – are you senile? – is to concede it is an issue. The impression left by a flawless performance will last only until he makes some minor misstep, of a kind he has been making all his political life. Even if a majority of the party were content that he should remain, it only takes a determined minority – a senator here, a governor there, and then another and another, carefully sequenced to give the impression of a growing chorus – to make his candidacy untenable.

Mr. Biden has attempted to head this off by making his candidacy seem, instead, inevitable. Hence the “I’m staying” letter and similar statements. The strategy, as others have observed, is akin to deterrence theory. Implicit in his refusal to leave is a threat: If I go, so does the party. It will be so hard to remove him, and will leave so little time to recover, that the party will be destroyed in November. Ergo, leave him be.

This isn’t necessarily dishonourable. It may not be, as it has been portrayed, the stubbornness of a selfish old man. Mr. Biden may be sincerely convinced that he is the best candidate to defeat Mr. Trump. His determination to stay may simply be a reflection of the stakes.

But two can play at that game. His opponents are no less determined to remove him. And they give every indication of being willing to risk the very destruction of which Mr. Biden warns. Indeed, the party is already suffering for it.

Here is the problem for Mr. Biden. If his bluff had worked, and his critics in the party had quickly stood down, the party might have emerged relatively unscathed, redoubling the obligation on dissenters to get in line. But the longer the conflict has gone on, and the more damage it has inflicted, the more his critics may feel they have nothing to lose. At some point, the case for regicide becomes self-reinforcing, and irrefutable.

Hence the delicate language of the party’s leaders, anxious not to get out in front of any movement to depose him but unwilling to be left behind. “I’m for Joe,” repeats the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, without saying what “for Joe” means: for Joe … to do what? “It’s up to the President to decide if he’ll run,” says former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pointedly, after he’s already made clear his decision is to run.

Of course you know what’s going on here: His leadership is being put, in effect, to a vote of confidence. If enough members of the Democratic caucus, in the Senate and the House of Representatives, decide he has to go, he will have to go. Even a sitting president, it turns out, has relatively few levers he can pull to enforce his rule.

The congressional leaders are not answerable to him: They were elected by their respective caucuses. Democratic representatives and senators are likewise answerable to party members, in state and local primaries, not to the President. He can threaten them all, collectively, with the prospect of mutually assured destruction. But he cannot threaten them individually.

Contrast this with the situation facing the Prime Minister of Canada. Mr. Biden, for all his troubles, remains competitive, just three points behind Mr. Trump in the latest poll average. Justin Trudeau is 15 to 20 points back. Yet it is Mr. Biden, and not Mr. Trudeau, who is fighting for his political life.

That’s partly because of the differences in stakes: There is no similar existential threat in Canada to concentrate the mind. There is more of a case for Liberals to take the loss under Mr. Trudeau this election, and regroup to fight the next.

But it is also due to the structure of Canadian political parties, and of the Liberal Party in particular. There are none of the multiple independent power bases that exist in American political parties. All of the people who might conceivably challenge Mr. Trudeau are appointees of Mr. Trudeau, or otherwise depend on him for the continuation of their careers. Unless they all rush him at once, he can pick them off one by one.

You can see this in the hesitancy of Liberal MPs to give public voice to their private opinions of Mr. Trudeau. Be the first to put your head above the parapet, and bang, there goes your chance at a cabinet post, your committee seat, your opportunity to ask questions in the House, and ultimately your nomination. They owe him everything.

He, on the other hand, owes them nothing. He was not elected by them, but by a vast formless assembly of Liberal members and “supporters,” most of whom have not been seen since, in a vote held more than a decade ago. There are no “big beasts” in the modern Liberal Party, no senior party figures with the power or the stature to challenge the leader, no regional or ideological barons with followings of their own to which he must pay heed, not even the fundraisers whose opinions may in the end be most critical to Mr. Biden’s chances.

There is only the leader, at the very top, and the followers, thousands of feet below. There are no powerful intermediaries between them, no rungs on the ladder of accountability.

Hence the extraordinary spectacle we are witnessing today: of a presidential system behaving like a parliamentary system, and a parliamentary system that, in its current degraded state, looks more and more like a presidential system – a presidential system, as the late political scientist Peter Russell used to say, without the Congress!