On being “comfortable with uncertainty”

July 12, 2024

Democrats are living through a period of unprecedented uncertainty, especially those who (like me) believe Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee for president. In the face of such uncertainty, how do we continue the work of advancing democracy and opposing the festering fascism in the Republican Party?

One way to answer that question is to assume the counterfactual, i.e., that Joe Biden is not the nominee, and ask, “What would we do differently in that scenario?” Answer: Nothing. We would continue to do everything we are doing now.

So, if our world were turned upside down but we would continue our efforts without change, the uncertainty of this moment is an emotional phenomenon that should not serve as an obstacle to action. We have 116 days left until the election. We cannot allow the uncertainty created by the effort to replace Joe Biden to distract or detain us.

Of course, the anxiety and stress created by uncertainty are real emotions that cannot be ignored. We should recognize that such feelings are widely shared and completely understandable. They are natural reactions to uncertainty. See generally, Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty (Shambhala Publications, 2003).

However, because our actions would not change regardless of the party’s nominee, the best thing we can do is to continue efforts to elect Democrats up and down the ballot, including Joe Biden. We have precious little time to convince the American people not to elect Trump to a second term. Every day we lose is lost forever. So, let’s keep our heads down and continue our work with the same sense of purpose and urgency that has carried us this far.

Grassroots organizations have admirably focused on continuing their efforts to get out the vote and register new voters. Today I received enthusiastic, forward-looking, “keep our heads down” newsletters from Field Team Six (“Let us use this trauma to do the work we know we must do, each in our own way”) and SPAN (“While we may not have a collective answer to the top of our ticket, we MUST build the infrastructure to elect Democrats from the top of the ticket down.”)

This period of uncertainty is frustrating. We want it to end. President Biden has tried to call the question by telling members of Congress that aspiring candidates are free to challenge him at the convention. However, the pace of “insider” leaks to the press accelerated on Thursday, with the NY Times claiming that close advisors in the White House and the campaign are preparing to “deliver a message” to President Biden.

If true, it suggests that the “close advisors” are duplicitous cowards. They are (apparently) unwilling to speak to President Biden directly, so they are leaking to the NYTimes as a way of avoiding a candid conversation with their boss—to whom they owe a duty of candor on behalf of the American people.

Despite a commanding performance at a press conference after the NATO leaders’ meeting (discussed below), the congressional defections continue, and the whisper campaign grows. Can President Biden survive the effort? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that he won’t survive if those who believe in him surrender from exhaustion and despair. We must be comfortable with uncertainty; we cannot let it consume us.

We want answers—now. We may not get them. As Teilhard de Chardin wrote,

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something

unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability—

and that it may take a very long time.

We have work to do, and our time is short. We are experiencing a period of uncertainty and instability, but those conditions are not excuses to cease work. Rather, they are part of the status quo and a natural part of progress. We should accept that fact and return to the challenging and urgent work of defending democracy.

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Where things stand

On Thursday, President Biden took questions after the meeting of NATO leaders. Rather than having me describe the press conference, I will point to commentary and resources by others.

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First, Lawrence O’Donnell provided extensive clips of the press conference. Watch O’Donnell’s 60-minute program, especially if your view of Joe Biden changed because of the debate. As of the publication time of this newsletter, I do not have a link to the Lawrence O’Donnell show. I will pin it to the top of the Comments section as soon as it becomes available. (Here is audio only: The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell - July 11 | Audio Only - YouTube. Still looking for video version.)

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Second, Brian Stelter has been a harsh critic of Joe Biden since the debate. Here is his comment immediately after the post-NATO press conference:

Millions of Democratic voters watched Biden's press conference, and now some of them are wondering, “Why are the chattering classes trying to force this man out of office?”

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Third, read Lucian Truscott’s analysis of the debate—which includes details and commentary not being reported in the mainstream media. Although Truscott does not always write about politics, when he does, he is head and shoulders above the NYTimes. (I mean that as high praise, despite my low opinion of the NYTimes.) See Lucian K. Truscott, IV, There was an orange elephant in the room tonight (substack.com).

If you do not already follow Lucian Truscott, I highly recommend that you do!

Truscott writes,

[T]here was his nearly 10-minute answer about the intricacies of the U.S., NATO, and Pacific nations relationships with China; there was his command of information about NATO, which after all was the ostensible subject of the conference that just ended; there was his answer about Gaza, the Palestinians, and Israel, when he made one of his strongest condemnations of Israel’s “war cabinet;” and there was his quite detailed answer about discussions with NATO nations about increasing each nation’s capacity to produce its own military hardware and munitions. [¶]

This was the Joe Biden everyone who has paid attention to American politics for the last several decades remembers.  It was the Joe Biden who turned people’s heads when he gave his most recent State of the Union address to Congress.  And it was Joe Biden without a teleprompter, speaking off the cuff, answering questions from a press that was, if not clearly hostile, at least dubious about Biden as president and candidate.

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Finally, I commend to your attention the superb analysis of Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo in his daily newsletter, Back Channel, which is a “members only” benefit to subscribing to Talking Points Memo. (I am a Prime Member of Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall allows his “members only” newsletter to be shared. For my money, Josh Marshall is the most insightful political commentator in the print media.) See Talking Points Memo, Gut Checks and Decisions. I strongly urge you to read the entire article.

Josh Marshall gives a terrific summary of where things stand with the effort to replace Biden. The data will surprise you. Marshall writes, in part,

There are two additional points I want to note. They may seem contradictory and they are at least in tension. But I think they’re both true.

One is a new poll that came out today. It’s from ABC and the Washington Post. In head-to-head match ups it shows Biden and Trump tied and Harris actually up over Trump by two points. This is only one poll of course. But I don’t think it’s greatly different from other polls over the last several days. An Emerson poll, never especially favorable to Biden, shows the two tied. A Bendixen/Amandi poll shows Biden down one, Harris up one. A handful of other polls show Biden down two or three points.

I think these polls show a few things. One is that there’s a good chance that the run of bad polls last weekend was significantly impacted by response bias. (Dems too depressed and catatonic to answer pollsters, thus showing a “false” or at least ephemeral shift.) The race actually remains fairly static notwithstanding the truly unprecedented events of the last two weeks. The idea that the bottom is falling out for Democrats just isn’t borne out by the polls.

My mantra has been—and remains—“Ignore the polls.” But for those of you who have abandoned Biden because of the alleged collapse in the polls after the debate, Marshall makes a strong point that the race has remained static after the debate. As Marshall notes, that is not necessarily a good fact for Biden. Still, it is a description of the race that is flatly contrary to the relentlessly negative narrative being peddled by the media.

How do we reconcile the debate performance and Biden’s NATO press conference? See Concluding Thoughts.

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Concluding Thoughts

In correspondence with readers over the last two weeks

, I have heard hundreds of times, “But I saw it with my own eyes,” referring to the debate as a reason for abandoning Biden. I wonder how many of those readers watched Thursday’s NATO press conference “with their own eyes” and were puzzled by the two dramatically different versions of Joe Biden. What explains the difference?

Here is my thought: As explained by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, most people employ mental “shortcuts” to deal with a complex world. Those shortcuts (a.ka., “rules of thumb” or “heuristics”) serve us well, most of the time. But those shortcuts also lead to cognitive biases—misperceptions—in some situations.

For example, people are bad at intuiting probability and frequency. Why? Because their brains employ a “shortcut” known as the “availability heuristic.” If you see a hundred red-haired people walking down the street in New York City the first time you visit Manhattan, your brain will incorrectly overestimate the number of red-haired people in New York City.

In that situation, your perception of reality is biased by a statistical fluke in which there were more redheads “available” for observation than the actual percentage of redheads in NYC. If someone tries to convince you that New York has no more redheads on a percentage basis than the rest of the US, you are likely to reply, “But I saw it with my own eyes.”

In that simple example, two things are true: You saw it with your own eyes, and your brain drew an incorrect conclusion about the true facts based on the limited sample you witnessed on your first day in Manhattan.

So, too, with the watching the debate. You saw it with your own eyes and, therefore (understandably) overweighted your personal perception of a sample of one event. Most people who watched the debate did not watch Joe Biden at the G-7 meeting the week before or at the half-dozen unscripted campaign events following the debate. Nor have they seen Joe Biden in cabinet meetings, daily presential briefings, daily events at the White House, donor meetings, phone calls with world leaders, and social events.

Everything mentioned above is relevant to an assessment of Joe Biden, but the media ignores most of those events. Accordingly, they are ascribed zero weight in most people’s personal assessment of Joe Biden’s fitness—because those events aren’t “available” for consideration. People understandably—but incorrectly—overweight what “I saw with my own eyes” because they fail to include and assess information that is not available to them.

In truth, the Joe Biden at the NATO press conference is the Joe Biden who occupies the presidency. The press conference surprised many because it contradicted a single observed data point, even though the NATO conference was consistent with hundreds of non-eyewitness data points that are not available to the general public (because the press does not cover them).

So, if you are experiencing cognitive dissonance in attempting to reconcile the two appearances by Biden, that discomfort suggests that one of the data points is not representative of Joe Biden’s fitness but is being overweighted by a cognitive bias.

Does the above explanation make a difference? I hope it does, but I fear it will not. Most politicians are driven by a single motive—holding on to personal power. Those politicians who have abandoned Biden include many of the most vulnerable congressional Democrats.

I do not know whether my explanation is correct, but I hope that it has given pause to everyone who witnessed one event—the debate—and concluded that is sufficient to abandon Joe Biden. One explanation is that Joe Biden is mentally unfit to be president. Another is that we are making an incorrect judgment based on a small sample, which leads us to overweight what we “saw with our own eyes.”

Even if forcing Biden to withdraw is the right outcome, and I do not believe it is, we should not mislead ourselves into believing that switching candidates will be invigorating, exciting, or easy. Nicole Wallace said Thursday night that the “dam would break” on Friday in terms of congressional defections. If so, I hope those members of Congress will own the chaos that may ensue.

In the words of Josh Marshall,

I don’t think we quite realize the scale of the shock to the system of this switch actually occurring. And here I don’t mean “shock” in the sense of something necessarily bad for Democrats. Imagine our political world right now as a snow globe and someone is about to give it 20 good shakes. [¶]

A whole massive part of the structure of the campaign will simply disappear. A big new part of the campaign will be Harris and her personal story. Each new engagement, the conventions, a possible new debate, will turn on totally new dynamics.

The outcomes of these unknowns will compound together to produce new unknowns. My point is simple: as much as we think this is a big deal, I don’t think we really realize how big a deal and how many unknowns it unleashes. Positive and negative.

To those grassroots volunteers who are the heartbeat of the Democratic party, I say, “Stay the course, be comfortable with the uncertainty that will beset us, and continue the hard work of defending democracy that will remain unchanged no matter what the future holds.”

That is the only path to victory, and we must take it. The good news is that we are already on that path with millions of like-minded Democrats who aren’t giving up or going away.

Thanks for listening. Stay strong!

Talk to you tomorrow!

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Post-script:

I spent another night under the stars with astrophotography to help put the day’s turmoil into perspective. The image below is the Lagoon Nebula (M8). I used a Celestron Origin and took a two-hour exposure. It brought me calm and perspective. I hope it does the same for you: