In the wake of President Biden's subpar performance in the first and most important presidential debate on June 27th, top Democratic lawmakers, left-leaning newspapers, and major progressive donors are calling on him to step aside as his party's presidential candidate. Given the way American politics works, and the difficulties involved in running an effective campaign without robust institutional/elite support, these leftist grandees may well get their wish: Joe Biden, liberal stalwart, may be ground down by internal opposition and forced to accept (early? or late?) retirement.
The irony here is that all these leading voices of the Democratic Party establishment have been telling us for four long years that it is the people, not politicians and their hangers-on, who get to decide who runs this country, and the two parties that rule it at the people's behest. Their main line of attack against Donald Trump and “ultra MAGA” Republicans has been that to question or undermine an election is a sort of civic sacrilege – it is, for believers in democracy, an abomination that disqualifies the relevant “election denier(s)” from running for office or earning the public's trust.
In fact, these guardians of democracy have gone further. They have asserted, through their creatures in the justice system, that undermining an election is a criminal offense. It is a form of fraud, since all American elections are demonstrably bulletproof and all claims to the contrary are presumptively mendacious, and it is a violation of Americans' civil rights, since the right to vote apparently includes the right never to have one's vote, or any vote, called into question.
Lest we forget, Donald Trump is currently being prosecuted by the special counsel Jack Smith for the very crime of, in layman's terms, “election interference”. His election denial was so serious, according to Smith, that one of the charges against him can even carry the death penalty. And remember that Trump's alleged crimes against democracy consisted entirely of words, rather than any actions which meaningfully obstructed anyone's ability to cast or count a single vote. One has to wonder, therefore, whether any of these prominent Democrats who today call on Joe Biden to step aside, and thus for the nullification of the expressed, democratic will of the millions of Americans who voted for him to become (again) the Democratic Party nominee for president, are even vaguely aware of the heights of hypocrisy to which they have ascended.
Make no mistake – Joe Biden won, fair and square, in primary elections that no one has question the integrity of, 98.8% of all the delegates who will choose the Democratic Party's nominee for president in Chicago in August. For the progressive elites now to shove Biden aside would be a gross miscarriage, therefore, of democracy. It would lay bare for all to see how fundamentally undemocratic the “Democratic Party” is, and how it is ruled not by voters but by self-interested insiders and arrogant billionaires.
These lordly liberals would probably claim, in response, that, well, yes, the voters did choose Joe Biden, but look at the polls – now they, and we, are having second thoughts. No kidding! One could say the same thing, however, about Joe Biden's presidency writ large. If the American people now had the opportunity to undo their choice in November 2020, and remove Biden from office, they probably would. But they have no such choice, because elections have consequences, as the Dems love to remind us, and America, imperfectly but irrevocably, elected Joe Biden as its president in 2020. We're stuck with him for four long years, like it or not, unless he chooses to resign, or his cabinet of cronies decides to eject him for mental incapacity. No one, though, seriously suggests that, because of the public's distaste for Biden now, discernible in polls, the election that elevated him to the office in the first place can be, or should be, ignored. And yet that is precisely what leading Democrats are saying about the dozens of primaries that chose Biden as the 2024 nominee of his party. They want a “do-over”. They want to wave a magic wand and make another, better candidate appear – preferably not Kamala Harris – to rescue them from what is essentially a predicament of unpopularity.
Let us reflect on that. Joe Biden has not been medically diagnosed as suffering from dementia or any other condition except being a “healthy, robust 81-year-old”. His debate performance evinced signs of confusion and foot-in-mouth syndrome, true, but these are problems that have afflicted Biden for years, probably decades, and which the public was well aware of before it elected him president in 2020. These are not characteristics that are desirable in a president, to be sure, but there is no objective or clinical sense in which one can say that Joe Biden now is in a fundamentally different state of health or mental acuity than when he was elected or when he took office. If Biden's mental sharpness has suffered, it is by degrees, and none of this deterioration appeared to trouble either Democratic primary voters or Democratic opinion leaders in the least until his politically disastrous appearance in the June 27th debate. It is hard not to conclude, therefore, that Joe Biden's newly-discovered Achilles' heel is not his robotic gait or his blank stares or his senseless rambling – it's his low poll numbers, which threaten the Democratic Party's, and therefore the Democratic elites', grip on power. And that, apparently, is a cause that trumps mere democracy every time.
What is happening now in the Democratic Party is one of the greatest demonstrations of situational ethics that Americans have ever beheld. It is confirmation that the Democrats' hyperventilating about Donald Trump's “insurrectionary” and anti-democratic outrages was hollow from the start. It is a sign that the only kind of election that a Democrat wholeheartedly supports is the sort that goes his way – and even if it does go his way, he reserves the right to nullify it, moment to moment, and start over, perhaps graciously allowing the American people a small voice in the matter, until such time as they should vote correctly, and then all voting can cease.
The Democrats may well succeed in purging the party of its own presidential nominee and starting over with a fresh face, but, if they do, let no American forget the contempt in which this party holds the people, the voting process, and even its own avowed core principles. The hypocrisy, not to mention the incompetence, of the Democrats, ought to be disqualifying. Let's hope that We the People get to decide whether it is or it isn't.
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