Only Killing Democracy Can Save Democrats

Daniel Greenfield | July 9, 2024

“Democracy begins with each of us,” Joe Biden, shadowed by two teleprompters and multiple off-stage handlers declared on the beaches of Normandy.

Biden wasn’t celebrating winning WWII so much as the end of the Democrat primaries a day earlier which had handed him Guam and the Virgin Islands. The artfully rigged primaries which had boosted South Carolina while banishing New Hampshire had made Biden the nominee.

All he had to do was get through a debate and a convention. How hard could that be?

Biden and his people loved the idea of democracy much more than the actuality of it. The party had suppressed Rep. Dean Philips, Biden’s one opponent, and No Labels, a group that had fought for ballot access to launch a bipartisan alternative ticket, while running on democracy.

“This MAGA threat is a threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions,” Biden had warned at a tribute to the late Sen. John McCain. At an earlier tribute to the late Sen. Harry Reid, he had preached that “protecting democracy requires vigilant stewardship.”

But now Biden’s own party is searching for ways to get rid of him. And the party’s best odds lie with supplanting the two democratically chosen candidates, Biden and Kamala Harris, with Gov. Gavin Newsom or some other last minute usurper who wasn’t chosen by anyone.

The Democrats have to kill democracy to save the Democratic Party.

Biden’s people are arguing that it would be undemocratic to remove the democratic choice of the voters, but there was little democratic about how he was chosen. When you’ve rigged an election once, why not also twice and then maybe a third time in the general election?

The elemental unpopularity of Joe Biden makes any straightforward victory unlikely. And now that, despite winning the primaries, he’s unprecedentedly struggling to retain even his party’s support before the convention, what are the odds that he’ll survive a national election?

But sometimes fortifying democracy means killing it once, twice and then three times.

Democrats define democracy as members of the Democrat Party winning elections. Joe Biden defined democracy as locking everyone else out of the Democrat Party’s democratic process. Now he faces the prospect of having the Democrat Party define democracy as doing whatever it takes to rid their party of a candidate who they are afraid will keep them from winning elections.

But that’s what happens when democracy is defined as a brand not a process.

Only Democrats can be trusted to safeguard democracy, they tell us, and so only Democrats can be allowed to win democratic elections lest democracy be lost. Protecting democracy requires setting it aside, like a cryogenically frozen head, for some future date. And sometimes democracy has to be protected from Democrat party voters and even party nominees.

Joe Biden, who spoke so often and so passionately about democracy, could become another of the victims of protecting democracy from those who might cost the Democrats an election.

Democracy as a brand sidelines the voters as a means, not an end. The Democrat voters did what they were told and chose Joe Biden as the party’s nominee. But if it turns out that the California, D.C. and NYC insiders who really control the party decide that the thing they had told the voters to do was not optimal for their chances, the will of the voters will be set aside.

Democracy may mean trans rights, BLM, social justice, free college, ceasefire, ban racist highways and being on the right side of whatever history it is this week, but the one thing it never means is that the voters are the ones in charge of the party or of the country.

There is no room for democracy in the Democrat Party. The ‘people power’ montages of women in hijabs, union members in hard hats and a few Unitarian old folks in Iowa no more reflect democracy than the film of cheering crowds in the Red Square made the USSR a democracy.

Power is not vested with the people but with the people in the small smoky room.

In all the arguments about whose party is it, does it belong to the Biden family whose allies control it, to the donors who paid for it or to the prominent columnists who have all rushed out some variation on the now classic “Joe Biden Must Step Down for the Good of the Nation” piece (by which they mean the good of the party and the nation can take a hike), no one thinks it belongs to the people. The people (Democrat edition) do what they’re told. Or else.

They recycle. They carpool. They give up their guns. They shower with confused members of the opposite sex. They cheer on the rioters burning down their cities. They vote for whoever they’re told and when they are told that was the wrong way to vote, they apologize and promise to do better next time. And they understand that they are not democracy’s lords, but its yeomen.

The revelation of Biden’s mental state at the debate matters less than the post-debate revelation that much of the party sees primaries as a party ritual, not a binding transfer of political power. Very little of the back and forth over whether Biden should stay or go revolves around the will of the party’s own voters, but which approach has the best odds of fooling the national voters.

A political party with so little regard for the will of its own voters cannot help but have even less regard for the will of the national voters. After years of outright lies about Biden’s condition, not a single White House or Democrat party official has apologized to the party’s voters, let alone the nation, which saw a confused elderly man agonizingly trying to mumble his memorized lines.

The lies had worked until now. The only debate within the party is over whether the lies have become unsustainable or can go on until Biden is back in office where it can all be sorted out.

Democracy to Democrats is lying to the people long enough to get them to do what they want.

There are all sorts of urgent crises that justify the lies. The oceans are rising. Systemic racism is killing everyone on the racist highways. Nonbinary students of Shakespeare as a black lesbian can’t afford to pay off their college loans. Putin is invading New Jersey. There hasn’t been a good Marvel movie since 2019. But where the lies end is with a shambling man on stage.

In the immortal words of Joe Biden, “there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by – just – it’s just – it’s just ridiculous.” At some point everyone has been lied to by everyone else. And out of that event horizon of lies, a president whom everyone declared was well, showed how unwell he was.

America traded monarchies where lunatics like King George III could remain in power for a system of elections in which the voters wouldn’t allow a madman to hold public office. But in the name of democracy, the Republic degenerated into a corrupt arrangement in which a man who couldn’t pass a DUI test has the legal authority to put his quavering finger on the nuclear button.

Now the only way for the Democrats to save themselves from democracy is to kill it again.