How — and why — the Democrats ignored the will of the people… again

See the wheels come off the Democratic machine as the party leader (who is also the current US president) displays to all the world his verbal and cognitive breakdown. See the party barons’ absurd race to circle the wagons with rationalizations as implausible as their praise for their boss’s historic “accomplishments.” See the media scramble to hide its complicity in the long-term cover-up of the president’s faltering tenure. See the same party barons who installed this mediocre two-time presidential loser in the White House — with no intention other than to block a popular insurgent from seizing the nomination — abruptly reverse field under pressure from their plutocratic donors and dump the doddering president in favor of a lackluster vice president who was picked solely for her gender, ethnicity and political cautiousness (her home state, California, isn’t even a swing state). See the barons and their media handmaidens trumpet a recently invisible politician as a dynamic leader who will excite the masses, despite her conspicuous failure to excite anyone in her first try at becoming president four years ago. See the possibility of an open convention with a modicum of democracy evaporate in a cloud of pixilated propaganda.

And then? I’ve never been among those who believe former president Donald Trump’s restoration is all that likely. His humiliation at the hands of Stormy Daniels at his trial for phony accounting and fraud should make even the most Trump-obsessed hysteric hesitate before making such a prediction. Yet there does appear to be a willingness by the Democratic Party leadership to lose the White House so as not to lose control of the nominating process. As a student of the political essayist Walter Karp, I’ve always subscribed to his dictum that political parties would rather lose elections with a reliable hack on the ballot than win with someone who might make trouble within the narrow confines of party patronage, boodle and logrolling.

Trouble that might extend into the greater populace, which might then be inspired to demand accountability and legislative action from its elected officials. Joe Biden was selected by party boss James Clyburn and others to stem the popular — thus disruptive — tide of two Bernie Sanders campaigns that nearly defeated the regular party choice, Hillary Clinton, in 2016, and then threatened to swamp the rest of the field in 2020 until Uncle Joe won the South Carolina primary. After Barack Obama and other bosses instructed three Biden rivals to drop out before Super Tuesday (and somebody persuaded Senator Elizabeth Warren to stay in to siphon votes away from Sanders), party discipline was restored and Biden could eventually, and preposterously, be recast as the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt. No Bernie bros to interfere with the distribution of pork or other legislative largesse aimed at Senator Joe Manchin, the salesmen of Lockheed Martin or the lobbyists of hedge-fund dominated Wall Street.

Once in office, the often-befuddled Biden proved himself more than adroit in his destruction of Sanders’s movement and everything the social democrat held dear. One example suffices: the decision by Biden, Manchin and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer not to push renewal in 2022 of the hugely effective expansion of the child income tax credit passed in 2021. A Sanders-inspired program that “helped cut child poverty nearly in half,” according to the New York Times, it was too generous for the party oligarchy, which suddenly became more concerned about the deficit and inflation than about hunger and poor children. Bernie was left out in the sweltering heat, as attested by an emblematic photo of the defeated crusader disconsolately seated on the Capitol steps on August 7, 2022, after Congress rejected a renewal of the expanded child tax credit. The real FDR was turning in his grave.

What accounts for the Democrats’ singular indifference to the popular will in an election year that official Washington incessantly claims is an existential choice between fascist autocracy and democracy? For that matter, what caused California governor Gavin Newsom to defend the president so ferociously in the wake of his debate fiasco — to call Biden “one of the most transformative presidents in our collective lifetime?” On the contrary, Biden’s right-of-center career has been devoted to preventing transformation — to defending the status quo within his party and promoting the interests of the big money (consider his tireless work on behalf of Delaware credit card companies) that has increasingly funded the Democrats since the Clinton administration. Newsom wants to be president and he knows the rules of the game: buck the party leadership and be cast out to sea (see the primary defeat of New York congressman Jamaal Bowman). Party loyalty counts for more than anything, since the party apparatus rigidly controls fundraising, slating and ballot access in all but the less-boss-ruled states, such as Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Oregon. If the emperor has no clothes, dress him in a costume and call it transformative. The party bosses might thank you for your service. Only the rarest breed of politician — Eugene McCarthy comes to mind — will risk his or her career for the good of the country.

As a practical political matter, Ohio senator Sherrod Brown or Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer would make more effective candidates against Trump than Kamala Harris. Brown doesn’t carry the Clintonian baggage of having supported the “free trade” deals that moved just enough former Democrats in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Trump to hand him an Electoral College victory. As an articulate swing state icon, Whitmer, although she wasn’t in office during the Clinton era, could credibly send a message to the alienated rust belt working class — still furious about losing so many factory jobs because of NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China — that the Democratic Party once again cares about the people it abandoned in the 1990s. But the right message to ordinary voters would be the wrong message to oligarchy and big finance — in effect a rebuke to the Clintons that would acknowledge that the entire neoliberal, deregulating turn of the party was a betrayal of its former core constituency of unionized industrial workers. So instead we get a politically correct candidate from big-tech, “woke” San Francisco, imposed on us with no questions asked. The party leadership is satisfied, since Harris — all the right boxes checked on the identity politics checklist — stands for nothing but Harris and will never rock the boat.

This doesn’t mean she can’t beat Trump. But it does mean that we still can’t beat the system.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.