Democrats’ Disdain for Democracy

The coverup of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the resulting coronation, absent a primary vote, of Vice President Kamala Harris should make one thing clear to would-be Democratic voters: the party views you with disdain.

For years, Democratic leadership insisted to their voters that, despite what their lyin’ eyes may tell them, the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party was fit as a fiddle. His memory was fine. Perhaps he was a “super-ager.” In any case, he was going to be the party’s champion once again, no matter what.

As the 2024 presidential primary—nominally the apparatus by which a party’s voters select their candidate—approached, party leadership took pains to limit who could be on the ballot. The choice was preordained. Despite questions about Biden’s fitness for another campaign—to say nothing of four more years as the man with the nuclear codes—the party tried to engineer early voting among his delegates to cement his name on the top of the ticket, even as Biden was reportedly still deciding about his political future.

That was until a team of “super friends”—Democratic royalty, from Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer and Jim Clyburn—was assembled to tell Biden that his time was up. Alongside private entreaties and anonymous quotes, the effort to compel Biden to step aside was accomplished behind closed doors, far from the prying eyes of voters. The Daily Beast notes that the fatal message was “a definitive statement on behalf of the party.”

With Biden out of the way, the next logical step would have been a contested primary, where candidates made their case to the American people, and delegates from their states (at least theoretically responsive to the will of their people) would decide on a nominee at the Democratic National Convention. This would have been the democratic choice: giving the party’s voters a say on their nominee—rather than the party’s upper crust deciding for itself.

Instead, party leadership quickly closed ranks around Harris, a candidate with obvious electability issues and a policy track record radically more progressive than the average Democrat. No primary votes were cast for her but she was selected by acclamation by Democratic Party power brokers, whose 99% backing in the nominating roll call vote would make Hugo Chavez blush. The last time Democratic Party voters had the opportunity to choose Harris, they were uniform in the opposite direction. As a candidate in the 2020 primary, Harris couldn’t crack double-digit support in Iowa despite an all-hands-on-deck effort in the state, leading her to suspend her campaign months before the caucus began.

The move is emblematic of nearly every recent Democratic Party presidential nomination. The last meaningfully open presidential primary was in 2008, before the Obama re-elect, Hillary Clinton’s Harris-like coronation, and 2020’s anti-Bernie putsch. If Harris wins the presidency in 2024, it could be nearly a quarter-century between primaries where every day Democrats had a say in their presidential nominee.

What these events make clear is that, for all of its self-reverential talk of “defending democracy,” the Democratic Party in fact disdains democracy as the method by which leaders are selected. What lies beneath all the flowery prose is a cold condescension, a conviction that party leadership knows better than voters what they want, and, in any case, what voters will have.

Perhaps no issue illustrates the point better than immigration. Amid an unparalleled spike in illegal entries and a flood of “migrants” in U.S. cities, voters are begging for an alternative to the failed policies of the Biden-Harris administration. A recent CBS News poll found that 62% of voters (across both parties) would support the deportation of all new undocumented immigrants. Other polling, including from Axios and Fox News, indicated much the same: Americans of all political persuasions want the open borders policies that Biden and Harris embraced thrown out.

So, what has the Democratic Party done in response? They nominated the member of Biden’s administration most publicly associated with the border crisis, whom the New York Times described in 2021 as “in charge of the effort to stem migration from Central America”: Kamala Harris. Her own views are even more disconnected from the American public. As a candidate in 2020, she supported decriminalizing unlawful crossings.

This doubling-down on contentious issues is characteristic of the Biden administration’s approach, but it’s an electoral loser. As American Compass polling has shown, such an approach alienates voters, particularly independents, who “on polarizing policies…are 30 points closer to Republicans [than Democrats].”

Perhaps recognizing this problem, the Democrats and the Biden White House have sought to insulate themselves from the criticism by playing it safe, turning inward, and attempting to white-knuckle through the criticism. Biden hid from press engagements. Since being named his successor, Harris has done the same, failing to take live questions from the press for her first two-and-a-half weeks (and counting).

While this strategy may work, much as Biden’s hide-in-the-basement strategy in 2020 did, it denies voters any insight into what the candidate stands for or plans to do if elected. Regardless of the electoral outcome, a strategy that relies on denying voters the information they need to form an opinion about a candidate is hardly a resounding embrace of democracy.

And it’s particularly rich considering these same individuals have, for the better part of a decade, accused the Republican Party of precisely this antidemocratic stance since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator. From Handmaid’s Tale cosplayers to breathless op-eds, Democrats have insisted that Trump’s central aim was to subsume democracy as we knew it.

Instead, Trump, warts and all, smashed the same stultifying edifices visible among Democrats today that dominated the pre-2016 Republican Party. There’s a reason the “forgotten men and women of America” went from an afterthought to having the 2024 GOP party platform dedicated to them. Whatever else one thinks of the policy (or the man), the GOP has gotten more, not less, democratic.

Above all, democracy entails that political parties should aspire to be responsive to the wants and desires of the people. How Democrats and Republicans prioritize those wants and desires is a matter of political discretion. But the Democrats have made clear that they simply aren’t interested in the undertaking at all.