Politics in the United States is never what you think it is going to be. It is a system put together out of the remnants of half a dozen yard sales. It is made up of completely weird compromises between two positions, each plausible, but not acceptable for some reason. Oddly, it turns out that it fits us pretty well.

We seem to have been able to survive the maldistribution of electoral votes. There are active urban majorities and the rural minorities serve as a kind of cultural safety net.

So far, we have been able to survive the ideological integrity of our major political parties. Who would have thought it? The balance of each party—largely demographic—came at the cost of unconscionable compromises within each party. Our liberals sacrificed their principles to show our good faith to our conservatives and thereby keep our party electorally competitive. And so did yours.

But the parties traded their junior partners like NFL teams trading draft picks and we came up with parties that had ideological integrity; coherence. At least for a little while. A bunch of liberal (ish) Democrats over here; a bunch of conservative (ish) Republicans over there. A small crowd of Undecideds and None-of-the-Aboves in the middle.

But the party system that amazed us all by being strong enough to want very different things so long as all the wants were positive, turned out not to be strong enough to contain hatred. When no goal my party has is as strong as my wish to see the other party destroyed, we have reached the outer limits of our fabled political resiliency.

Robert Reich has captured this in his retelling of an old Russian story. Two peasants had been neighbors and poor for a long time. Then one had a stroke of good fortune and was able to buy a cow. A whole new economic future awaited him. The other neighbor prayed urgently to God to save him and meet his needs and God appeared and said He would do whatever the poor peasant asked. The peasant’s choice? “I want my neighbor’s cow to die.”

As a kind of democracy—imperiled, but not yet disowned—we stand at a point where we must ask for what we truly want. We have luxuriated for so long now in what we do not want that it will be a strenuous test.

It is sobering to remember that one of Hitler’s best used tools was reviling the liberal democratic government of Germany. In the early years, when Hitler could not credibly promise the volk of Germany anything to make their lives better, he offered them hatred of the Weimar Republic and he offered himself as the personification of their hatred. Had the Germans of the 1930’s kept the strength to bend their efforts toward what they wanted Germany to be, their future would have been much different from what it actually became.

And I think that can be said now of us. Whatever work and sacrifice we are called on to endure, if it is in order that we may achieve something we truly desire rather than simply to vent our hatred on those who want something else, I think we can achieve it.

President Biden announced today that he was going to “step down” as a candidate for the presidency in the 2024 elections. He named Vice President Kamala Harris as his choice for candidate of the Democratic party. We’ll see. The Democratic party should choose who its candidate will be, however much they love Joe Biden. And however fully he has earned their love, he has not earned their voice. Only one of the candidates for president has openly said that he, alone, is the voice of the whole party. It is not Joe Biden.

I hope the Democratic party chooses Kamala Harris as their nominee. I hope just as ardently that they do not cede this decision to their elder statesman as his price for having stepped down. That is too high a price.

The quadrennial yard sale will pick up its signs any hour now. Many things will go back to normal. The U. S. political system, cobbled together out of historical scraps, will have another chance to work.

We should know soon.