For the Biden Campaign and the Democratic Party, as for Trump Republicans, Democracy is Subordinate to Political Power and Party Unity
The Ascent of Biden Determinism
The most revealing thing about the debate for me was how it seems to have crystallized the absurd notion in the Democratic political establishment that only Joe Biden can defeat Donald Trump, and there is no Democratic alternative to Joe Biden.
Considering how the Biden White House, and its media allies have so rigorously sought to suppress, if not to censor, any and all concerns about his infirmity, it’s striking how casual Democrats are about actually winning a particular election, in which the existential fate of democracy in America is said to hang in the balance.
Never mind that the election is a referendum on democracy is bad messaging anyway. As Ruy Teixera argued on The Liberal Patriot, “No, Democracy is *Not* on the Ballot,” undecided voters in the vulnerable middle are not persuaded that Trump poses any exceptional threat to democracy. In a terrific assessment of polling data he writes,
… democracy does not appear to be the mega-salient issue the Biden campaign is envisioning. What makes the apparent drive to center the issue in the Biden campaign even less understandable is that the issue, as an issue, does not even cut very much in Biden’s direction unlike, say, abortion rights or health care. This is because preserving/defending democracy means different things to different voters; many voters don’t see the choice between Biden and Trump on the issue as blindingly obvious. They don’t, as the Democratic faithful would have it, believe Biden = democracy and Trump = fascism. Many see Trump as their paladin and view Biden and the Democrats as privileging the interests and preferences of their supporters, especially educated elites, in a distinctly non-democratic way.
Never mind also how the exhibition of Biden’s frailty after weeks of debate prep, was paraded for the whole world to see, at least counterbalancing, at most undercutting, whatever reservations people had about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.
To dogmatically insist that the mere suggestion of exploring options other than Biden automatically makes you a traitor to the Democratic Party shows that Bidenites can’t really care that much about democracy.
If Biden is the best they got, indeed as Biden himself would say, he’s the only one capable of beating Trump, and if you’re worried about his age, you’re wrong, maybe Biden himself matters, or what is the emerging cult of Biden, but saving our democracy can’t logically be the the topmost concern of Democratic elites.
Janan Ganesh in his signature bracing style explains the Democrats’ issues this way in the Financial Times, describing it as “liberal denialism,”
If fumbling the Biden succession were an isolated mistake, we might rue it, and draw no wider lesson. But it is of a piece with a pattern of behaviour on the Anglo-American left. Had the Democrats chosen a better candidate than Hillary Clinton in 2016, that close election would have tipped their way. Trump would now be filming The Apprentice season 23.
As for the Labour party in the UK, there are three counterfactuals that would have reduced the chances of Brexit: deposing Gordon Brown as leader before the 2010 election, which had the potential to avert a Conservative government; choosing the correct Miliband brother, who might have denied the Tories the outright majority in 2015 that led to the referendum; and rejecting Jeremy Corbyn for an unambiguous (and competent) Remainer.
This isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking on a historical scale. In each of these cases, it was plain at the time what had to be done. In each, the left found a way not to do it. At some point, this starts to look less like a series of mishaps than an underlying character flaw. It is a hard flaw to put a name to, but the essence of it is an aversion to conflict with like-minded people.
The test of seriousness in politics is an appetite to confront one’s own side. On that score, liberals are too absent, too often. Failing to say the obvious about Biden is just one example.
Here I am at pains to remind you how the Democratic Party deliberately cynically boosted the most MAGA candidates in the 2022 midterms, only so Democrats would have the most likely chance of trouncing them compared to more normal Republicans. Also we may remember that the Trump indictments were leveled during the Republican primaries specifically in the hope of effectively coronating Trump as the de facto Republican presidential nominee; because, since Biden already decided he was running, Trump would be the Republican he stood his best chance of defeating, or so the theory went…
Trump’s legal travails and the spectacle of his victimhood all but made it impossible for other Republicans to get the spotlight and make their cases against him. All the Republican primary debates took place in the shadow of Trump’s sensational arraignments in Florida and New York about which the candidates were bombarded with questions, turning the contests into litmus tests of loyalty to the former president.
The takeaway is that all this time Democrats have manifestly shown themselves to care more about winning races than all these supposed threats to democracy. Otherwise they wouldn’t be boosting January 6th rioter and neoconfederate Doug Mastriano, Blake Masters, or Kari Lake, and other “election deniers.” They have successfully relied on the commonsense of independents, playing it against the insanity of the Republican base, to help them secure their own party’s advantage over and over. I must add though, to give credit where it’s due, this was sound political strategy, and the fringe primary-voter Republicans in thrall to MAGA lunacy have done nothing to help the Republican Party win Senate seats or nominate electable candidates. It’s just a shockingly disingenuous betrayal of the public trust if you simultaneously brand your party, and laud its reputation, as the Party of Democracy.
But to continue, before the debate as a part of their next cynical scheme, the Democrats assumed they could rely on a majority of independent voters in battleground states not to vote for a convicted felon. Getting a conviction for political purposes is why Trump was indicted.
Now, however, the Democrats great game might be coming apart. After Thursday night’s debate, where Biden’s horrible decline was made abysmally plain before an audience of 50 million Americans, because it cannot be denied anymore, independents can no longer be relied on to vote for Biden anyway, even if Trump is a convicted felon and/or a threat to democracy. They know assuredly by now they are being manipulated by self-dealing Democratic interests, who only care about the aggrandizement of their own political class. Now the better bet is that independents will turn for Trump if only because they are understandably tired of being lied to and used.
Never mind that the conviction that made Trump a big bad felon was an odiously partisan prosecution attesting ridiculously that hush money paid to a pornstar, misfiled as legal expenses, was a campaign finance crime that also somehow —it was never explained—constituted unlawful interference in, with the hopes of influencing, a federal election, a charge that it was not even in the Manhattan DA’s jurisdiction to prosecute.
At some point, and quite likely it was on Thursday evening, critical swing voters who would otherwise be willing to vote Democrat are going to get tired of the Democratic party’s games, however much they disdain Trump. I disdain Trump to the marrow, and I’m outraged by Democratic mendaciousness equally.
Insurrectionist, would-be emperor and madman, or, utterly senile old man who couldn’t be trusted to travel anywhere by himself, let alone do another four year term?
As I have already said, I am not voting in this election. But if I had to choose between Trump or Biden, it wouldn’t be easy. And I don’t know whom I would pick. Thankfully however I don’t have to choose, and I’m proud of my decision not to vote for one guy who incited a violent mob to stop and possibly overturn the results of an election, and another guy who’s doing everything he can to serve up Israel to Iran on a silver platter.
If the Democrats really cared about democracy or even wanted a better chance of winning this election with what they allege to be existentially high stakes, they might be willing to reconsider saddling potential voters with Biden, who’s been showing signs of dementia since before 2020. Or at least thinking about reconsidering which raises the question: why aren’t party elites begging him to step down, or threatening to resign over his candidacy? Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and the Clintons have all doubled down on endorsing him since the debate.
It may be that besides Kamala Harris, who’s more unpopular than Biden, they don’t have a lot of options. Newsome is synonymous with San Francisco, crack addiction, and tent cities. Gretchen Whitmer is a woman. Hillary Clinton is persona non grata with much of the country, and she already lost to Trump. That all may be. And it may be that to replace Biden at this stage, four months until November, would be a bait and switch that risks provoking more of swing voters’ contempt.
But the complacency—the facade of unruffled confidence—that the Biden campaign, Democratic elites and the rest of his allies are showing in the aftermath of his debate performance, is staggering. Obama said he had a “bad debate, and I had my share of those.” During the debate a Biden official sought to float the nonsense that he had a head cold. Some advisors are complaining that the two weeks they spent prepping him was too long.
With “our democracy” on the ballot, it shouldn’t be unreasonable, let alone a betrayal of party principles, to consult other options. It doesn’t make you a bad Democrat, or maybe it does, but it shouldn’t. It’s the baseline standard of seriousness you ought to have if you really want and intend to beat Donald Trump; that is if, as you say, the prospect of his reelection foretells the end of the American experiment.
— Jay